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   tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Sunday, 01-Dec-2024 12:11:42 JST tinydoctor

   Here's something I found on my drive. Not sure when I wrote it, or whether or not I've posted any of it. Thread: Many of the things we usually consider and treat reflexively as real and concrete, are, in fact, abstract fictions. Things like god, corporations, money, nations, human rights, and justice have no existence outside of human imagination.

   #talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten

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     tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Sunday, 01-Dec-2024 12:12:29 JST tinydoctor

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     That we build institutions and infrastructure, churches and stadiums, roads and walls, weapons and armies to express collective fictions that exist by mutual agreement does not make our abstractions real. Micheangelo's Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel does not make the abstraction of Catholic eschatology real, either.

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     tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Sunday, 01-Dec-2024 12:14:23 JST tinydoctor

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     Long ago I proposed a probably silly the theory that Neanderthals may have died out and Homo sapiens lived on as a species because the Neanderthals were realists and Homo sapiens--humans--were and are superior fabulists. Sapien language allowed our ancestors to create a fictive environment which affected increasingly massive changes in the real physical environment. But human imagination trumps the real only to a certain extent, because it is a subset, an epiphenomenon of the real, ding an sich.

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     tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Sunday, 01-Dec-2024 12:15:43 JST tinydoctor

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     Language, sapien language, is a tool like any other animal language; the fictive capacity of sapien language may have been a tool of war, a weapon, that enabled human groups to commit not only organized murder but genocide against other human species. Human myths, collective fictions, have a strong tendency to, or perhaps inevitably, become weaponized.

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     tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Sunday, 01-Dec-2024 12:16:40 JST tinydoctor

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     Human fiction is vital to large scale externalizations of real costs in the biosphere (such as pumping wastes and poisons into the atmosphere and oceans).
     Human reason is specialized form of story-telling, and thus suspect, like all human fiction. Telling stories is easy, the natural form of information processing and storage in human language.  Making a story an effective myth that people believe, or believe in believing as compulsory fiction, is more difficult.

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     tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Sunday, 01-Dec-2024 12:17:36 JST tinydoctor

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     Dense imagery, cascades of imagery, is a corrective, an antidote, to the dominance of narrative, the inherent flaws of narrative thinking. Perhaps this is what Werner Herzog is getting at when he bemoans the lack, and the danger of the lack, of "adequate imagery."

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     tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Sunday, 01-Dec-2024 12:17:58 JST tinydoctor

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     We tend to be unaware--blind--to our cognitive limits; human culture, though capable of rapid change not directly tied to biological limits and not behaving in accord with biological limits--in effect blind to those limits--is nevertheless bounded in form and action in the sorts of recurrent changes dictated by biological and physical limits. The arc of the amoral universe is long, but it bends toward entropy.

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     tinydoctor (tinydoctor@mstdn.social)'s status on Sunday, 01-Dec-2024 12:19:15 JST tinydoctor

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     When we become "masters of creation" we become the destroyers, not of creation, but of infrastructures of narrative in which we believe we thrive and count on to survive.

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