You going with the multiverse theory on this one? Each fiction is just a branching off the river of time? This poses a very interesting thought, we may very well be characters in someone else's fiction. Thinking like that kind of opens some doors, have a crush on someone? Might as well ask them out, your writer may very well be setting up his story for you and your crush to live happily ever after.
Not to say that fictional worlds are as real as ours, but our "real world" is totally just a fiction we tell ourselves based on interpretations of stimuli. I mean, like your example of London being incomplete, our individual knowledge of our own world can't possibly be complete. This is why people have misunderstandings-- conflicting fictional accounts of real events.
+Punk Patriot there's a theory that states that you can have nesting fictionalities, such as a play within a play, or a play within our universe, if it is really true that our universe is fictional.
I think it's interesting that there are things that exist in our real, tangible world that have no context. For instance, the word "teleportation". It's a real word, it's in the dictionary, it exists. And yet, there's nothing in our world that adheres to its definition.
Michael Simek Haha, I was waiting for somebody to catch me on this. I considered putting "quantum mechanics aside" as a disclaimer, but decided to forgo the warning because I was speaking in a general term. Still, the basic premise can be applied to a multitude of real words, such unicorns or dragons or telekinesis, in that they do not exist in any sense of "our reality" and yet they do.
I actually wrote about this in my thesis! Specifically whether Shakespeare's London is "London" or even if it is the same "London" across different plays. Basically, no, it's a character. It is temporally fixed in a way that no "real" landscape can be, and it directly interacts with the human characters in such a way that provides another avenue of agency for the author. There could of course be arguments made for London being the real London, but I think it is the same question as whether or not "real" people in biopics are the people themselves. No, no matter how faithful to the original real human as the script is, the person still becomes a character, if only because once placed in a fictionalized narrative, all actions take on plot necessary cause-and-effect status which real life most certainly lacks. Setting in fiction acts upon the fiction and is therefore not "real." Unless fictionally agency is "real" which is a really cool concept which I am now reading about in post-humanist theory, but I am not 100% sold on yet... so, TBC.
I love how no matter how hard we think about possible answers, we all continue to struggle with the seemingly opposing questions of "What is Real?" and "What is Fiction?". Say, do you think that if we came up with a definitive answer for one, we would by extension be able to find a definitive answer for the other?
There is an old philosophical idea that humans can only know two things with absolute certainty: How we feel, and how things seem to us. E.g to a blind person, everything seems dark and that is as real as when a sighted person sees light. So maybe that's true reality?
Everything we imagine and remember isn't exactly true. Even as an LA native, the LA I imagine is not a perfect truth of it, but rather my impression and interpretation of what I know about LA. Usually we use these fictional representations to link to something in reality. Fiction is, then, assembling these ideas and representations into something that isn't directly based in reality.
I've always liked to believe in the Multiverse, and that there is a universe in which every possible course of events imaginable has happened. By that logic, every work of fiction we HAS to be true somewhere in the multiverse, and maybe a writer in one of those other universes has written a story that exactly matches a true event in this universe. It's possible
As someone who writes fiction I would say that fiction is real but if it's a different 'world' that, at least in terms of books, that people have different images, different experiences in life, memories and bias and pre-conceived notions that it builds a different world despite being born from the same work. When books become films, there is a huge focus on who the cast is going to be, who will represent the important characters. I think this is in some way, making the fictional world more real to people, so many have their own ideas or desire to see different actors/actresses or to have the world shown in a certain way. As a writer, fiction is very much a huge part of my experience of life as it is now, it takes a lot of my thoughts and energy and is a core aspect to my life and my identity. So is the fictional world that I AS A WRITER imagined, the REAL world as opposed to the READER'S world they thought up? So is fiction real? Or are there multi-verses of the same world?
When I wrote my novel, I always saw it as a Studio Ghibli film, in the way of 2D hand-drawn art style and drawing. Someone may see my characters as looking as people in the 3D world but to me, they're essentially cartoons. Is one more true than the other? That's why I mentioned 'multi-verses'. Great video as always, great ideas as always, keep it coming.
In a way it's a huge compliment to have others interpret your work, even if it's not exactly what you envisioned. Think of Hamlet. Here's a character that's been around for 400 years, yet every year there are more of them, they all try to show something unique through the role, and most people have a favorite interpretation. And, once in a while, you see one that's a revelation even though you may know the play back to front. And for all the deifying of Shakespeare, he wanted to write popular plays, so I think he'd be happy every time someone bought a ticket to see one. But, putting aside what others think, most of my favorite films or literary works are the ones I can revisit at different times in my own life and find something new in. A new way of seeing. The work hasn't changed, I have. I'm older, have more experiences, can notice something new because I'm familiar with the plot, etc. And I love learning something new from another person's perspective. They may have noticed something I didn't, and my experience becomes richer as a result. Unless you are dealing with propaganda or non-fiction, great fiction invites engagement and interpretation. The goal, even in fantasy or sci-fi, is to try to hit those notes that resonate within people based on our common experiences of life. I'm positive that Orson Welles would be tickled that people are still talking about a radio broadcast he threw together in just over a week. It wasn't just the brilliant manner in which he adapted and presented the material and used the medium, but also his timing. Hitler was taking over Europe and Japan was expanding into China and the Pacific. The nation was expecting invasion, and they were expecting to learn about it over the radio. So, from a writer's perspective, as attached as we become to our creations, if people become engaged enough in what we've created to talk about, interpret, act out, argue over, even parody, the better. It means we've done something right.
I rewatched The Truman Show today and there are some interesting quotes on reality in it. In the beginning Christof, the director, says "While the world he inhabits is, in some respects, counterfeit, there's nothing fake about Truman himself." Later, he says "We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented." The way we relate to fiction is real, our emotions are real. Even if we know that the fictional world is fake, it can still resonate with us and touch our hearts. The way we perceive fiction depends on our view of reality, and has a lot to do with our upbringing.
Fiction is just multiple elements of non-fiction put together. For example, take the unicorn, while it doesn't exist in real life, the horse in which it's based off of does. Now take the narwhal's tusk, put it on the horse's head, and behold, you now have a more accurate representation of a unicorn.
but can't fiction also consist of something that is not non-fiction? that is purely imagined? like the adamantium metal in x-men. sure it is like non-fiction metal, but it is unbreakable whatsoever, which is fictional
quoabell But when you imagine/describe the adamantium you'd have to say things like it's 10x as hard as titanium or, it's as light as carbon fibre (or whatever I really don't know). So you're relating it back to non-fictional things to make it so you can picture it in it's fictional setting.
quoabell Perhaps fiction arises not from the combination of things that do exist in ways they don't, rather it is reality "extended" beyond itself. Horses are real, however a horse with the addition of a horn, is not. We add the fictional "extension" of the horn onto the non-fictional horse.
quoabell Again, based in reality. In this case it's metal that is real. The fiction is in it's properties of being unbreakable. Anything you can create in your mind is in some way based on real things.
I usually love this channel and the videos posted as I consider myself a very deep and philosophical thinker, but ideas such as these make me role my eyes. It's always important when thinking deeply about things to zoom out every now and then and come back to reality. I write a fictional story on a piece of paper and that's all it is; words on a paper describing something that doesn't exist as anything but a story. You can argue that the things in that story exist in some way or that they are real in some alternate universe, but like many ridiculous things, you can only say that because it can't be proven wrong. This type of thinking can often be pointless and time wasting as literally anything is possible because we can't actually prove anything, so ideas like this are not profound, they are cheap.
We can't prove these thing true yet, but physics does tackle this type of concept (they call it the anthropic principle). It may theoretically be possible to travel to an alternate universe and see the worlds referenced in fiction. Even if true though, it's most likely just chance that a possible world out there resembles one of our fictions, but you never know. Maybe some writers actually see into other worlds :) It's a fun fiction to play with anyway.
Why pointless and time wasting? We may not be that far off from proving that another universe or many exist. If they do exist well could our fiction be fact there? On the other hand you are right in that we can't prove anything, but this type of thinking still creates thousands, if not millions, of people from thinking critically, creating synapses in our brains, and raising the average intelligence across the world.... Thank you Mike and everyone else for making me and everyone else smarter on a regular basis.
I both agree and disagree with you here. I do not think that reality is subjective, and the "anything that cannot be dis-proven" argument is silly to me. I prefer Ockham's razor myself. However, dismissing this discussion as "cheap" is rather unfair. There are many people on this very thread that disagree with you, and you have just dismissed them. Dismissing the argument dismisses the people that disagree with you. Someone will always be wrong or just uninformed. Take the opportunity to share your thoughts and perhaps see those of others, and if you still consider a discussion beneath you, just avoid it. That is always better than insulting those that do not see things your way.
What about fanfiction, though? If we go with the mentality that fiction is a reality to some degree, then does that mean that all that fanfiction where Harry and Voldemort are having passionate sex are, in a sense, also a reality? Because that leads to some horrifying possibilities.
I agree that fanfiction is, in a way, a reality same as the original work. However, its more of a sub-reality within the reality of the thing being written about. A part of it, yet not IT in any way.
Jessica Lakis You think I would change the very fabric of reality in clear violation of the universal declaration of kitten rights for a mere pizza? Are you bringing cocktails as well?
You drive a hard bargain, sir. By the way, have you ever watched an old series called The Day the Universe Changed, by James Burke? He takes a devilishly irreverent look at how what we think about the way the world works has changed over time and how that has influenced the world we live in. It's on RUclips and worth a watch.
This is now my favorite episode! I have been saying for years that every time a story is told, it becomes real. I'm so glad that I now have some specific subjects to read up on this idea.
Not necessarily, science fiction itself doesn't shape the future, it's just fairly good at predicting it. However, people tend to ignore the wrong predictions and pay attention to the correct predictions. A lot of Nostradamus' haven't come true yet and probably never will
The way i think of fiction leading towards our own future is that, it seems that human creativity is somewhat limited and people tend to have similar ideas at times and as knowledge and technology advances it gives people the possibilities to create the things that were thought of in the past as fictional.
What i was leading toward is that fiction doesn't become real on its own but as we advance we become capable of creating our previously fictional ideas.
Jackie Rose if thats the case if magic is explained in a fictional world, then it would no longer be magic. then it would be science. Also that could mean that all science is magic simply because we only get it to a point.
As a fiction writer, it's important to my work for me to make a constant distinction between 'realistic' and 'believable'. To the layperson, these terms seem almost interchangeable, but when writing fiction they mean two very very different things. Realism is about representing things as they are in our world, while believability is about representing things as they would be in the world of the story. Believability is the foundation of verisimilitude. The intuitive part of this is that not everything must be realistic to be believable. If we construct our story world to suit it, we can make almost anything believable. The less intuitive corollary to this is that not everything realistic is believable (this is often tough for my first-year creative writing students to get a handle on). Just because something is real, or really could happen, in our world doesn't mean that it makes sense in a story. We still must craft our world carefully to make even realistic things come off as believable. This is why, for example, most historical fiction is so 'inaccurate'. For most of the general audience, realistic history is tough to relate to, and it's easier for the writer to use the fictional constructs people already believe, than to create a world in which the real history becomes relatable or believable.
If you want to talk about the fictional nature of War of the Worlds, how about the fictional nature of Tom Cruise; specifically, the version of Tom Cruise that you see in movies. Tom is a whopping 5-feet-7-inches tall, but every movie he's in goes to great lengths to cast him next to short people or otherwise manipulate camera angles and poses to portray him as taller because that's the image expected of a larger-than-life action hero in our society. I assume he has it built into his contracts... But as a consequence of this, if you are a fan of action-movie Tom Cruise, then you meet him in actual-sized-person, are you really meeting the object of your fandom? Search for College Humor and Tom Cruise height if you want some great visual examples of this.
I while watching this episode I remembered a sentence from one popular online game reviewer "We are a society so immersed in escapism, that we find mundanity in things that never existed". And I realized that it is true. I've seen heated arguments on message boards about dragons from Game of Thrones and The Hobbit. Some people stated, that, technically, they should not qualify as dragons, because the have only two legs and wings, and as such, they should be considered wyverns. I was amazed how heated and specific the argument was. Dragons do not exist, yet there are people with so strong idea of what a dragon is, they will fight against faulty depictions. And, actually, I don't know if we may say that dragons are less real than, say jerboas. After all, ask yourself or anyone around you, if you have a stronger idea of what a jerboa is, than what a dragon is?
I'm a fan of the quantum theory, that anything that can exist does simultaneously. This plays with the fun of creation that - yes, this might exist as fiction here, but there's a sliver of possibility that somewhere, out there, something awesome happened. Like that George Lucas was awesome for capturing the original Star Wars - and that some where out there an orphaned moisture farmer destroyed a space station that wasn't a moon. And that same Lucas could get some quantum criminal action for the foisting Jar Jar Binks on some parallel universe.
This reminds me of the idea of paper towns. When a map company wants to make sure their maps aren't duplicated, they create fake towns and if they appear in someone else's map, they can claim duplication. However enough people have gone to a paper town actually create the town. John Green's paper town and TED talk goes more in depth about fiction becoming reality or reality forming from fiction.
I've always had a big interest in the idea of subjective reality. I mean, we already know that we're perceiving reality subjectively as individuals, and I think that "reality" ends up being less of a THING and more of a very widely agreed-upon idea. Like, just as what we deem moral as a culture is something that we sort of agree on democratically, what we deem to be "real" is similarly a "majority rule" kind of thing. Is the guy who is seeing "unreal" things really "wrong," or is he just experiencing and extremely unpopular or underrecognized version of reality? I think it's unhelpful to consider anyone's reality less authentic than our own, but we can certainly call it less useful.
As a writer myself, I am a extremely large believer in subjective reality. It doesn't make getting good grades or not breaking the law or seeing my girlfriend any less important, but it does help my writing considerably. I have a very unique take on my own personally reality, (Which is somewhat inescapable and rather hard to cope with sometimes) my head is always full of people and places and things and events and I can feel the realness of all of them, but at the same time they don't mean anything if not put down on paper. Books are our gateways to other realities, a chance to escape and live among others. (Okay I'm sorry if this sounds like I'm preaching. Sorry about that. 'm just gonna say that these are just my opinions and you can take or leave what you will. Have a lovely day!)
This is quite an interesting idea. The sci-fi/fantasy fan in my head loves the idea of a "democratic reality," but I also find myself strongly disagreeing with it. While a fun concept, it cannot hold up to scientific discovery. Once upon a time, the world collectively believed that the earth was the center of the universe. Due to subjective reality, this should have made it the center of reality. However, science proved that it was not, and fact changed perception instead of the other way around. With a few specific exceptions, perception does not shape reality. No matter how much we wish it did.
***** Wonderful point! Although I would like you to keep in mind that we are all the center of our own visible universe, and there is something to be said for different levels of reality. In another point, our own visible universes do not necessarily have to line up EXACTLY with that which is outside. If all made-up universes are false, just things to be disclaimed by science(Which is an awesome tool that i am not trying to discredit) Then is our entire perception false? Who's to say? (Once again just my opinions, take or leave what you will)(YAY DEBATES!)
Seeing this topic discussed on your channel is so very refreshing. I've always believed that just as soon as a world is thought up and detailed, it has become a reality elsewhere. I believe that we as humans have the power to create (and destroy) other worlds. This begs the question, though...Are we simply a creation of someone else's imagination? If so, what if they get bored with their work?
Just as works imply that after their endings the worlds within them will continue to exist and those characters would continue to live, when the creator of our world got bored wouldn't we also continue to exist? Just like a story is implied to continue after a work ends, the characters met within are implied to have lived full and real lives before having ben been met. The "imaginer" if you will, simply has to lay out the grounds for a world, they do not have to detail every aspect of every persons life. However, thats just my idea. You pose a really interesting concept!
msxbrc Anybody seen that cracked after hours episode about musicals and how the whole world revolves around the main character and we're all sucked into his song and dance involuntarily?
Here is a question: how do you explain that fictional objects have a very clear effect on the real world? Just by having an effect,they do become a part of reality, no matter if they objectively exist. By definition, almost all religions are false since they contradict each other, but still, they do have a very visible effect on the world. If we follow Ernst Cassirers philosophy, we do not have access to objective truth, all we have are cultural patterns which allow us to perceive a truth. If we have a fictional story which is done in the same cultural patterns such as news, this story will be indistinguishable from truth - and it may become truth because of this. This is what happened in Berlin 1989 - people believed the wall was down and this affected their actions in a way which lead to the fall of the wall. The fact it was a mistake made absolutely no difference. So the difference between reality and fiction - especially in media - is that fiction is displayed in another way.
Just wanted to say that the original WOTW broadcast didn't actually cause a public panic, at least not on the scale that most people think. This is an excerpt from Wikipedia's List of Common Misconceptions: "There was no widespread outbreak of panic across the United States in response to Orson Welles' 1938 radio adaptation of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. Only a very small share of the radio audience was even listening to it, and isolated reports of scattered incidents and increased call volume to emergency services were played up the next day by newspapers, eager to discredit radio as a competitor for advertising. Both Welles and CBS, which had initially reacted apologetically, later came to realize that the myth benefited them and actively embraced it in their later years." Citations are provided in the article, it's legit.
"Anathem" by Neal Stephenson deals a lot with the idea that the brain is a kind of quantum computer. That's to say, your consciousness spans different copies of you in alternate universes, and quantum interference "knits the different versions of your brain together" so you can know things beyond what you can observe in a single moment in this universe. So similar to Possibilism, you could say that fictional worlds do actually exist, but in other universes. We are able to imagine and think about these fictional worlds because our consciousnesses exist in those worlds, and observing it by reading a book or watching a movie "collapses the wavefunction" into the idea of the fictional world. (Alternatively, maybe only the author is the one who observes the fictional world and collapses it into the form of a book.) I don't know much about philosophy but Anathem was a great book and I really liked the idea of a quantum mind.
Someone actually had the audacity to call IdeaChannel a "Vsauce wanna be?" Vsauce (at least Vsauce 1) Asks a question and then goes on tangents to trick the watcher into learning something but usually there is no defiant answer. (Seriously that is what they said they do) While Idea Channel, very similarly, asks the question but always stays sort of on topic. Yes they are both similar, and I believe neither is better then the other, there both awesome at what they do. The way people are acting is as if just because someone does something first-or even not first, just because they are more popular- it means someone else shouldn't be able to too. Take Pewdiepie for example, although I don't watch his videos I know he does "let's plays" does this mean no one else can do let's plays? I don't think so.
Really great video this week. I think that Welcome to Night Vale is a recent contender for this video and this idea of a real item, that obviously doesn't exist, but references so many things that do. Night Vale is a community much like any small American town (or so we think), and so we automatically fill in our stereotypes and ideas of what a small town should look like, feel like, and "be". The wonderfulness about this "reality" is that it is familiar enough, but so very strange that the "weirdness" of the town becomes reality. The listener (much like War of the Worlds broadcasts) is shocked at first, but quickly assimilates the out of place elements into the physical place of the story. When I listen to War of the Worlds, about 5 minutes in I loose sight that the robots are fiction, and I start to invest in the character's realities among the battles and the aliens. Much the same has happened in the development of Night Vale, where I simply just accept hooded figures, the un-human city council, and the waterfront development in the desert as ordinary happenings, and I am invested in the characters development in their perfectly ordinary reality. Oh, and great show. Mad props.
Whoa whoa, there's an ocean of philosophical detail we've skimmed over here and modal realism has been misrepresented. The difference between fictional objects and concrete possible worlds is that possible worlds aren't supposed to depend on us for their existence, whereas fictional things (if they can be said to exist) do. When you quantify over them in formal logic you also use very different operators: fictional universes each get their own quantifiers but possible worlds all get referred to with the possibility operator. You also didn't mention any of the reasons for believing in concrete possible worlds that Lewis, its main proponent, put forward, or the problems it throws up either, like whether it actually explains modal statements. Also you said that modal realism says that possible worlds exist because their inhabitants would refer to theirs as the actual world: in fact the indexicality of actuality is not an argument for modal realism, it's a consequence of it - that was the biggest mistake. Moreover you didn't mention the alternative theory, abstract possible worlds, which would serve your purposes about as well here. Also also, you talked about Meinongian Objects as if they were a thing that lots of people agree on but actually they're hugely controversial and have big problems in the theories, not least of which is that they lead to contradictory properties. Sorry to be a comedown :( If there's going to be talk about philosophy we need to make sure we accurately represent the theories though. I do, however, love the way you pronounce 'Surrey'.
I don't think he actually uses the indexicality of the worlds actuality as an argument for modal realism... think your twisting what he said a little bit.
I don't want to come across as unduly picky, but here it says that modal realism is true "because" of the indexicality of actuality, which modal realists don't argue for. They argue for modal realism on the basis of other claims and then say that actuality is indexical because of that. Here the consequences of the theory have been mixed up with the arguments for it.
I think one of the great things about your videos (that Vsause lacks) is the sense of community. I love the fact that you leave these questions open to your viewers and directly respond to a good amount of the comments. Trolling can get in the way of intellectual discourse on the internet and when it is disregarded, a lot of great ideas are bounced around. Both of you guys are awesome though :D
You talk about these worlds existing, but till not? It reminds me of a movie i once called called The Never Ending Story, the movie is about this world inside the book that is only in existence because our minds imagine it to be, the world is an embodiment of our imagination, but the movie end saying that the world that imagines that world may only be existence because of another being is imagining it.
When you mentioned objects existing in several fictional universes it reminded me of AUs (alternate universes) fanfiction writers create. It's like those fictional characters are given completely new existence in those worlds. It feels awesome to see your favourite character in attack on titan to be able to be actors in AUs.
Yes I'm not alone in that! I subscribed to them both. Their channels are so good, I think mostly by the way they do things. They can do something I don't care about at all, but because they are doing it, it's good. It's simply the way they do what they do.... if that makes sense to you. lol
The first movie ever showed a train passing by the camera. When this recording was shown in a theatre-like room to an audience, everyone freaked out because their minds couldn't comprehend what they were looking at. They really thought the train would crash through the image and into them. I think this is interesting. Our only possible definition of reality is that it's the stuff we can see, hear, touch, smell or in short: PERCEIVE as reality and in this very example in the minds of the audience there was no difference between reality and the illusion they just saw and so this fiction became reality. If an artist would draw a tree with blue leafs, a rationalist would say: That's fiction. Trees don't have blue leafs. But what if the artist had some sort of colour blindness and he really saw this tree having blue leafs. Would it still be fiction? What if it was the other way around? What if everyone except this artist had this colour blindness? Would his drawing still be fiction or would it depict reality? It doesn't even need to be a colour blindness. All colours are just the way they are because of the structure of our eyes and brains. Nobody can say that's the true colour of the leafs because this colour only exists in our head and someone (f.e. a different species) could see it very differently. So there is no consistency in reality. Everyone has their own reality. The only true difference between reality and fiction is that we KNOW it is real or it is fiction. When we know this we can accept that and won't freak out when we see a fictional U.F.O. blowing up a fictional white house in front of our eyes. So the fine line between reality and fiction is exactly there where WE put it. Where we BELIEVE it is. Why else would we be terrified by the Psycho shower scene or get goose bumps when we see Batman putting on his mask for the first time? Both events only took place in our heads but for some reason... it doesn't make a difference. Why are we still telling fairy tales to our children without even knowing if and how they originally happened? Appearently those morals still have values, although the stories might not even be real. Why are children trying to stay awake in the night each december 25th in the hopes of hearing Santa land on the rooftop and why are there still grown up people out there going through there lifes, not even questioning, that Sherlock Holmes was once a man who really lived before his story got adapted in books and movies. Because for them just the belief that they are real... makes them real. Maybe not for you. But for them. So, don't tell your children that Santa doesn't exist. He might exist and the tree in your garden might have blue leafs. Depends on what you believe. Belief forms your reality.
+Drace90 I think you made one small mistake; this movie was a recording of a real train doing real train things, (e.g. the train was not shown to be flying). (And these poor people were totally uninitiated to the powerful sensory effect of moving images.) It's not exactly "fiction." If the "fine line" is "where WE put it," then that is what makes it so appealing; we cannot experience all reality directly, but in bits and pieces - always taking the majority of the world & universe on faith. The fiction-part is allowed to bleed-through in the places we can't see right/hear/feel right now, making us wonder what really is real, and what really is possible. "Depends on what you believe. Belief forms your reality." I'm pretty-sure that's the definition of opinion; if the reality is that there is a tree, it doesn't matter if the tree is seen as blue if you're going to crash into it at 90 MPH!
Drace90 So if your mother is presently in Uzbekistan and you are in Wisconsin, then you telling the story of her giving birth to you is fiction because she's not present to hear the story?
ism schism ...That makes little to no sense and has nothing to do with my example. What I tried to explain was that reality can only be defined by what we perceive and as that is very variable (for example when people believe that there is a train while there is none and it makes no difference to them) then that must mean that there is no definite reality.
It makes little to no sense? All I did was to basically replace "train" in your sentence with "mother" in mine; the flow of logic should remain the same! Reread your sentence: "It was fiction due to the fact that there wasn't really a train in that room." Now I'm assuming a very simple truth - that you were born by your mother. Next I'll say that you tell this story of your birth, but, like the train in your story, she's not really there, (maybe you're watching a video of your birth now that your mother is in Uzbekistan). Does a truth become fiction just because a picture is involved? No! It's the facts in the story being presented. If you say your father gave birth to you, then it's fiction. "...reality can only be defined by what we perceive..." I'm doubting that [not denying it - just doubting it]... but reality, (say, "gravity"), affects a believer & a skeptic equally; so do bullets & bad guys in dark alleys. It's why most people don't run red lights while just wishing & hoping & praying & believing that they won't crash. Have you ever had to write a true or false story before?
I was first introduced to some of these ideas via Alan Moore's "Promethea" comic. In the comic, the heroine actually discovers a creature/form that exists as a bridge between the world of 'reality' and the world of 'imagination' (Although it's more about a collective unconscious than individual words for individual fictions). The story itself is a bit of a literal interpretation of his philosophy, which seems to be, where the world of imagination is equal, if not greater, in its relevance to the universe than the 'real' world. By being a creative and creating worlds and stories like these, you're ultimately a god-like creature in the world of the imaginary. Of course the more people you spread your own ideas to, the more relevant and the more powerful they become. He considers this to be a magic, which can ultimately influence 'reality' via the power of inspiration. From there it starts joining into occultism. From there you can go ever further into the idea of Religion being true in the sense that they're extremely powerful fictions that have obviously effected the 'real' world in profound ways. I wonder what your views on this idea might be.
Assuming that you actually created worlds by inventing them for books etc., wouldn't that mean that it's highly unethical to write horror stories or any story that made a character suffer without a "sufficient" reason or "reward"?
+joelproko no one said you're actually creating a world with real things in it. youre creating a fictional world with fictional things in it, which are not real.
For me, fiction is when an object has associated to it properties that it does not really contain. This way, an unicorn is fiction because in its definition it exists as a living animal with magical properties, but in reality it does not. The same applies to illusion. Illusions and tricks are fiction in the sense that we atribute to them properties that they clearly don't have. When a card "has been shredded" to pieces and suddenly is whole again, we attributed to it the property of being shredded, even though it was never shredded in the first place. We gave it a property that it did not have, and for a moment there we created a fictional object. Fiction can come both from imagination, but also from ignorance. Another important point is that context, as a property, matters. A real object out of context is fiction. A modern day gun in a medieval story is fiction. One interesting thing about this notion, is that objects that are fiction can become real if either their properties become real or their definitions change. For example, if we could make a genetically modified horse with a horn, we could say we made a unicorn. That unicorn would be real, but it would still not be the unicorn from our stories, as it lacks magical properties, and even if we could some how imbue it with magic, it still would be unicorn in modern day life, and not in a world of magic, so in a sense the property of context is still not satisfied. What would probably happen then, is that such property would no longer be a requirement for the definition of unicorn, and the definition itself would change, like it happened to Vampires and werewolves in modern culture.
Im having something of an existential crisis... to my mind, the only necessity of falsehood of my existence is that my origins can be traced to the something awful forums.
If you go by the multiverse theory (which I personally like), I imagine anything and everything logically possible is reality in some universe. Well, an infinite number of universes.
you should know that there are different kinds of infinity and thus, their maybe aren't as many universes as the conceivable possible ones (if there is any other than this one).
I second this. There are tons of religious and political ideas being raised in this very simple yet complicated game of Pokemon Red. An episode analyzing all these elements would be potentially incredible.
When discussing fictional worlds, I think a necessary point to discuss is that they are not only different for each person, but also more real for each person. One person can read a fictional story and roll their eyes and move on, and the story has a relatively small effect on their everyday life. However, a different person can read the same story and be brought to tears, feeling a huge amount of empathy for a person (or creature, or thing, etc.) in a world someone made up. The individual experiences that each person has largely effect what constitutes fictional worlds, how "real" they are, and the amount of impact they have.
Well, this problem gets even more interesting when you drop fiction which you dont believe in, and discuss fiction you believe in - knowledge, or fictions of factual representation (to quote Hayden White). When historians invoke the past, they make "it"/things up. The past does not exist, by definition. It passed. Yet we keep writing what we find to be better and better representations of "it". These are really true, but not! We believe in them, yet we have no (or at least a much smaller) sensation of the things!! To find the explanation to be "realer" than the sensation, one must idolize the thing in itself! Also, I love your show!!!
This all makes me think of the Thermians [Galaxy Quest] who couldn't distinguish historical documents from a tv show or lie. But, oops, the Thermians are themselves fictional, so that seems to be an issue of meta-meta reality. Or non-reality. Dang it.
Nope. Possibilism is impossible according, to the entire way the universe works. Just like Schrodinger's cat either is or is not alive. The fact that he doesn't know the answer & can't find out doesn't make it both.
The question appears to me, whether anything beyond actual experience can be categorized as 'real'. A mathematical set can only be proven by actually proceeding through every single step - no matter, how often this has been done before and the result is already memorized as 'familiar'. However, the intellectually grasped 'potential' of a matter makes the difference between a convincing narrative and mere fantasy.
Given a human being's experience, being limited to the modes of experience that the senses provide, I'd argue that immediate experience itself i constructed of not only the direct, intuitive information from our senses, but also from the language we use to make sense of that information, which can allow us to communicate about things that have happened in the past, and also to speculate about what might happen in the future. Which raises the question, how real is language? Seeing as, in a conversation about past events, the words used to describe the past are not describing or indicating anything that is actually "real" in the situation. To the person hearing what is being communicated, the information being taken in is as real as that person believes, seeing as there is no way to verify it as being real or not. Even language being used to communicate about the present moment creates a symbolic separation between object and subject. For example, even if the word "tree" didn't exist, trees would still exist. Because words are just mouth noises, which are possible to apply meaning to. Therefore, given this logic, words, being somewhat ambiguous by nature, (as we are the ones who put faith in the meaning that is put behind them) represent possibilities. This means that language may or may not be a distortion of reality, seeing as words merely point to what is, isn't, was, wasn't, will, will not, could, could not, should, and should not be. I guess we could all try living in a world where everyone stopped talking to make things as "real" as possible, but I'm not sure what that would look like. This is why lying is so dangerous: it distorts what is, intentionally. If you're interested in this sort of thing, check out what Terence McKenna has to say about language. I wouldn't say he's entirely scientifically accurate all the time, but he sure made me think about these things.
Shayne Chrystian That's a lot of typing I can respond to in a sentence. The phrase "Easter Bunny" is real, but the "Easter Bunny isn't real. And this is an entirely separate subject. The argument against Possibilism is that there is nothing in the entire scientific world to suggest that every possible event creates entire new universes. It was a thought exercise that got out of hand and turned into a religion.
I had an amazing history professor that often told me things don't have to have happened to be true. What she meant was that stories from the past have profound meaning because their very existence suggests that they were not only stories worth telling but stories worth proliferating. There have been a lot of commentaries on the idea of "truth" here already but I can't help but wonder how much fictions become our "truths" even when we don't accept them as factual. diatribe follows: I have to mention the idea of "desire as action" that is so prevalent in movies and novels, and is not at all just a Western trend (Anime is rife with "if you want it bad enough/ fighting spirit"). I mean: the underdog story, which actually goes against what most people will say they think is just. "The up and comer, still learning what they're doing, outdoes the veteran that has spent years of their life learning their craft. This may not be an ideal that any random person on the street would identify with if put in the most basic terms, yet the existence of this as a trope in story telling reveals a lot about humanity in this place and time.
I think this is sorta like the MEANing of 'rule 34'... just saying, on a universal level what I mean is; if it exists there is ______ to it (I wanna say 'universe' but you get my point.)
I agree. In other words, if the there are two (or more) references that DO exist, then you can create a new additional (albeit gross in rule 34's context) reality of something.
it's an icon not a label come back with something interesting or be on your way. (To Jamie; well I could have used a long winded text on what I was saying but putting a simple word helps with understanding it better or in this case a label...) But you got my point.
talon274 well rule 34 is a part of the idea i think its more than that meaning that every fan fiction, every part of fiction is reality somewhere, also i feel like i guess in one reality i have all ready met sherlock holmes and he dosn't like me much
I once played a card game with my girlfriend (I can't remember the name of the game) in which I used the word "dragon" to fit into the category "reptile." She argued that dragons could not be reptiles because they aren't real, and so can't actually have the properties required to be a reptile. The rest of the group voted that dragons did count as reptiles, however, because within the realm of fiction, they usually do have the properties of a reptile. However, you could also say that anyone is free to make a story where a dragon is a mammal. There are a huge number of fictional stories on the Internet nowadays, so we had to make some informal rules about what counted as real or canon fiction for the sake of the game. For example, can you call Harry Potter a wizard, because he is not really a real wizard. He's only one in fiction. Maybe. BUT can you call him a politician if he appears in someone's fan fic as the president of the United States? Probably not; we had to arbitrarily distinguish between what was canonized fiction and what was to be considered non-canonized fiction for the sake of the game.
Great episode. Fictional objects are mental constructions as far as I can tell, although I'm more than ready to change my mind if I were shown some hard evidence that say, the Doctor or something existed. Although they are mental constructs, they do not belong solely to the author, artist, creator, etc. Rather there is a separate mental construct of each fiction (and each piece of it) formed by each viewer. This is where we get into the idea of referencing things we already know (schema). When I watch a film my take away (my mental construct) is different, sometimes radically, from someone else who watched exactly the same film. Our schema tells us how to interpret what we've just watched and creates a unique mental construct of it. This is one reason I think, why books are considered by many people to be "deeper" or more intellectual and often spark more meaningful or philosophical conversation. A book, being just printed words and occasionally printed images, leaves a HUGE amount to be determined by your schema. When I read "craggy rocks like black crows" I might think of something like I saw in a horror movie, someone else will think of the rocks on a mountain trail where they hike, etc. Even when watching a film or reading a book in a group, each person's mental construct of the characters, items and events are different. Fictions are composed of fictional objects which are mental constructs possessed solely by the individual.
It took a while, but they finally managed to cut down a tree. In all seriousness, they could use the episode to explore the effectiveness of Democracy.
"Fiction is a series of real things that never happened." I forget who said that, but I always liked it. I write stories, the characters and worlds are, to me, more real that stuff that goes on in in even this world. There are places and people who I've never seen, things I've only ever heard of, but why should these be any more real than the things in my book? "Real" is about perspective, as many things are, so it simply begs the question of whether or not it is considered real by consensus, or what we can do in order to change the accepted definition of "real" or "fiction."
I noticed a little editing trick during the "Imagination" sample to lengthen your reaction to the scene. It added a level of "Fakeness" to the show I've never experienced till now, almost as if it became more of a...fiction. Touché.
The only problem with this episode is, that there never was a mass panic; that myth began with newspapers reporting about the "hysteria" that their new rival, the radio, had caused and grew over time. [clarification start, feel free to skip ahead] Actually, there were very few people listening to this show due to more popular programs that aired at the same time, and a telephone survey conducted on the evening of the play found that of the at best 2% that were listening to the play, none thought it was a news broadcast (there may have been a small percentage of people that we're frightened, but it were to few to be registered by the survey). [/clarification end] What is really interesting about this however, is how very relevant this is to this weeks episode. The citizens of America may not have feared for their lives in 1938, but today a majority of people believe that they did. For them, the fiction about a mass hysteria has become an accepted reality. A nonexistent event has attached to it real properties, and due to people's acceptance of it's apparent realness attribute, this fiction has influenced real decicions and had therefore an actual effect on what we call "the real world".
Well my theory is that fiction is another world created by a maker who is the god of said world, you are limited to what you see and can do to that world, by that god. Another person can try to add onto that world, but unless they have acceptance from the god of said world their additions are only possibilities of that world, and not proven. Any changes made by the god or those who have acceptance means that is real and you originally perceived the world wrong. So class any questions?
I just started reading Borges this past weekend for a college class and he's been following me ever since. AHHH!!!! Also, a Night Vale tweet: There is no such thing as fiction. Just non-fiction written in the wrong parallel universe.
Im a big fan of PBS Idea Channel. However, some of your videos are applying too much thought to otherwise common knowledge subjects. "Fiction, is any creation that is a known work of a persons imagination." Regardless if the story mentions actual places or objects. For example, the novel "American Psycho" by Bret Easton Ellis, mentions that Tom Cruise is a neighbor of the protagonist. Just because it mentions an actual person, does not mean the novel is automatically nonfiction.
"..."Fiction, is any creation that is a known work of a persons imagination."..." . So a detailed plan of some future action is fiction, but only so long as it is known? By whom? What if the one person that knows dies? What if the plan is carried out? What if it is carried out but not exactly according to plan? Can anything ever occur 'exactly as planned' without being overly vague about what 'exactly' was planned? . Is there such a thing as a fictional procedure?
Totally agree whit you. I dont like this complicated, philosophic way of thinking. Fiction is something that doesn't exist, is just imaginary. It is simple.
burt591 That definition seems too restrictive to be functional. Do you consider your personality to be fictional? What about your past? Does your past exist right now? If not, doesn't that fit your definition of 'fiction'? Your view of your past is how you imagine it to be, no matter how historically accurate you believe it to be. What about your future (not what you imagine your future to be, but actually your future)?
I think ARG's (Augmented reality games) are a growing story telling format that definitely blurs the line between reality and fiction, much the way Welles did with 'War of the Worlds'. In the case of ARGs i think developers are not only aware but count on this blurring of reality to create engagement and hype. ARG's like Bungie's 'I love Bees' attempted to connect our world with the Halo world by placing our present in its time line and making the internet (a 'real' thing) part of a characters backstory (a 'fictional' thing). Anyway, just a thought. Keep up the inspirational work Mike.
I love your mention of the (semi-obscure) Alexius Meinong, but the full scope of his theory is even more wild and crazy and fun. One of his more well-known theories was his attempt to explain the difference between "A thing" and "THE thing". To him, indefinite descriptions (i.e. A thing) were mental objects or sets of mental objects made of properties - as you said. So "a cat" is just the idea of cat-i-ness. Definite descriptions (i.e. THE thing), on the other hand, were what happened when you linked these abstractions either to the senses (so not just A cat but rather THAT cat, right there), or to memories or other cognitive states (that cat that I recall). The trick was that Meinong was an empiricist, and so he didn't trust his senses, and it was for this reason that we could talk about manticores and square circles. As an extension of this, we don't actually interact with the world around us but instead interact with the mental objects which our senses project into our minds - whether those mental objects are real or not. In other words, according to Meinong's theory, even outside of works of art, fiction vs "truth" is a sticky subject. Also note that things like optical illusions were first being studied/discovered at the time, so he had a leg to stand on. People at the time, especially Frege, didn't really like his approach to language and reference though, so Meinong kind of got buried.
You could also say that that our world is fictional. Because we as humans can only perceive the world around us through what our senses tell us about it. So our minds have to create a sort of mental image made up from the information gathered by what we see, hear, feel, smell, and so on. So in actuality our mental image of what we understand of our surroundings is just a "made up" idea of what we think is around us. So what we see as our world is nothing more than a "fictional" representation of what we label as "real". Cause you can never see how another person sees an abject. Cause each person might perceive the world around them in different ways. Someone might hear a sound differently or a smell might be different to someone else. So each person has his or her own "fictional" version of the world. Every person on earth has there own version of the universe around them. So each person creates there own fictional world. Cause think about it, how could you PROVE to someone with a doubt that an apple is red and not green? How could you do that? If they wanted to say its green and it looks green to them and they were completely sure it was green, how could you 100 percent prove to them that its actually red? you couldn't, so to you there version of that apple is fictional and to them your is.
+Chris L Good, (the first 3/4), but I wouldn't call that "fiction." Of course we do the best we can to make a limited conception of reality, but I think "fiction" is an intentional construct within this framework of society. Your example is one of difference of perception. If I said, "Hey you see that green apple right here sitting between us?" And they said, "You mean the red apple?" And I said, okay not important, "What if that apple were a foot-tall & made of gold & weighed 90-lbs?" That's fiction; unless you've *got* such an apple.
+ism schism I see what you mean, but really that's just arguing semantics, cause each persons "fiction" could be different, and also if one person believes in that fiction then its of course no longer fiction to THEM, but fact. you see what i'm trying to say, is that each persons perception of our world could in reality be fiction but to them its fact, that's all.. It's that i can not convincingly prove to you that your "fact" is "fiction" and you cant prove to me that that "fiction" is "fact". But when i said that our perception of the world is our own minds fictional representation of it, i just meant that our mind creates its own image of what it understands from the information that it receives from out senses, we each create a mental image of ourselves and the world around us in our "mind's eye" and that image could be false because its based purely off of what little information that our senses can give to it and understand. So i was just trying to say that that "image" could be fiction. Its just like when i read a book, i get a mental image of the characters and the places in that book based off the information given to me, I create a mental landscape of the situations and everything else going on in the book, Now if i was to take my idea of what the people and places look like and compare them to yours, of course there not going to be the same. BUT does that make mine the false idea, or yours? Is mine what the people "really" look like or is yours? You see what i'm getting at, i know that the real world isn't the same, cause if i know what a house looks like and so do you, and we both would agree that its a house, i'm just saying, that our world around us, even though we all as the human race agree on what most things are and look like, we still created that understanding in our heads, then shared those ideas with others, but in truth we have no idea of knowing if those ideas are right, we could ALL be wrong for all we know. But when i say fictional, i just mean that its a close approximation to the real thing. When i think of stuff like this it makes me think about stuff like the Bose-Einstein Condensate, which proved that reality doesn't exist if your not looking at it. Each person creates his or her own idea of the world around them in there minds, And that each person has there own ideas of what everything is and no two people can ever truly know the world form another's perceptive.
"...but to them its fact" Hmmm... but to them it matters; yes, and within that context it's truith. [yes, that's a new word.] "...we each create a mental image of ourselves and the world ...that image could be false because its based purely off of what little information that our senses can give to it and understand." Yes, the image could be false, and it could be true - *because* there is a truth to the matter at-large ("the universe"). I think I agree with you on much of what you say, but "...when i say fictional, i just mean that its a close approximation to the real thing." I think that definition is going to lead you down a long road of misunderstood conversations with other people. In reality, I think I've argued for your point before, and honestly I hope I didn't sound like that, cuz it seems like it's a lot of wheel-spinning! (sorry). A = A or B or C? How could one ever know 1% of another's reality - or even their own? Yes, each persons fiction could be different! That's why I can safely say, "I shot him in the head" in a fiction story - if it's a non-fiction story, the guy's probably dead from the shot - without it even being in his opinion/fiction/world-view.
The line of thought that says that a parallel universe exists because somebody thought it up begs the question of whether our current universe was the original. Are we the dreamers, or merely the figments of someone else's dream?
Tolkien makes the point in Leaf by Niggle that the creative process begins and ends in a "Tree of Ideas" which is akin to the platonic World of Ideas, but with the difference that Tolkien's tree is more like a colective imagination, the complete ammount of human culture, which for him does really exist, outside any person's mind paradoxically. Tolkien insists that men cannot "create" (sort of like Melkor, because we don't have power over the Imperishable Flame) and instead we "sub-create" taking things that exist in the Tree of Ideas and giving them our specific shapes and structures.
It's an interesting concept and is especially thought provoking when you think of it in terms of the Bible. That means there is a world out there where all the believers would be right. Of course they are choosing to believe this one is that world.
From a most fundamental kind of perspective everything that exist is basically just information. What the information describes and the perspective we choose to interpret it from determines whether it is a proton, an sandwich or two slices of bread with stuff in between. In a physical sense you could argue that anything that you imagine actually physically exists as electrons running through your brain and you are just choosing to interpret the information described by those electrons as whatever you're imagining. That basically defines what something is by the perspective you choose to view it from. I like that way of thinking because it opens up a lot of possibilities and has a kind of 'you get as much out of it as you put in'-feel.
My first sociology teacher often repeated what might have been a famous quote: "things believed to be real are very real in their consequences" And though you can't quote (or paraphrase) from the narrator of The Glass Bead Game as strictly something Herman Hesse said/believed: "All history is first and foremost a form of literature." And though as a teacher of middle school children I am required to teach my students the definitions and characteristics of fiction and non-fiction (and take that charge seriously) it is far more important for my students to see their current world/self in reflection of the text they just read than to care whether or not Bilbo Baggins ever turned oxygen, water and carbohydrates into energy and carbon dioxide.
Holy crap! I've been telling people for literally decades that since we live in an infinite universe, the math shows that anything that could be, is somewhere. And your philosopher has real names and stuff for it! Awesome! I guess the next question is: Are authors Creating these pockets of fictionally described reality, or are they channeling a reality that exists independent of an author? Ooh, and is that why anything worth looking at in space is do impossibly far away?
The tweet just makes me think of this Portal 2 quote: 'GLaDOS: Well done. Here are the test results: You are a horrible person. I'm serious, that's what it says: "A horrible person." We weren't even testing for that.'
Also, in light of next week's Harry Potter episode, while you were talking about this whole thing, I had a HP7 quote rolling around my head that applies quite nicely. When Harry's in Kings Cross talking with Dumbledore and says: "Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?" Dumbledore replies, "Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?" that sums up my feelings on fiction.
Whats most interesting is the knowledge that a lot of the information/reporting surrounding the mass panic was in fact created by newspapers inorder to deter the public from relying upon the radio for news. What makes this interesting is the "Truth" of what actually happened and the "Truth" of what was reported it relative to the discourse of their respective editors
OMG I saw that old TV show...I was just a kid so it totally freaked me out (along with the Unsolved Mysteries and Dark Shadows theme songs) ! Those long fingers reaching around the Earth *full body shiver*
This was a really interesting thought experiment - made me think of the D'ni from the Myst games, they wrote books (fiction) and used these as links/portals, to other worlds: The D'ni's beliefs can be summarised as follows: 1) There are an infinite number of universes or Ages. These form part of Terokh Jeruth, the Tree of Possibility. 2) When a Descriptive Book is written, a connection to an already established Age is written. 3) Following this line of reasoning, no new Ages are ever created or destroyed. 4) When a change is made to a book, the age does not actually change, but the writer is actually creating a link to a different world that the book now describes,
When I went to order a copy of war of the worlds (the book), the lady over the phone asked who's name to save it under. When I said, "Nathan wells", she laughed for about 3 minutes straight.
I once read an article similar to this subject and they called it hyper-reality. For instance arctic berry sounds like it could be a juice drink. There is no such thing as an arctic berry but we know that it implies cold and refreshing and maybe even tasty. These implied properties become real when you taste a drink called arctic berry and you dont recognize the flavor. The "fiction" in the name becomes something entirely new even though it referenced something that already existed. Whats more interesting is that these implications affect our perception. If you were to drink "arctic berry" you might not notice the apple flavor till i told you: "Most juices use an apple base." Yet if you were to take another swig, you would suddenly notice the apple flavor.
I was reading Jung's 'Psychology and the Occult' and even though he drags on about something irrelevant, he seems to also believe that 'ideas' like 'fictional ideas' are real and exist. It's not the fact that something is tangible that makes it real but because we all agree on the characteristics. Therefore, whenever someone talks about the unicorn it doesn't truly exist, but that doesn't stop us from knowing what he is talking about. All this statement is doing is kinda reinforcing what you said, but still find it fascinating!!
I'm sure the guy comparing you to Vsauce was just trying to troll you. I enjoy both your channel and the Vsauce channels equally. Your channel for pushing my mental boundaries; making me think about things that I wouldn't usually think about and making connections between things that I would've never thought of. And Vsauce for highlighting and explaining the complexities of things that I have no interest in researching myself.
Everything fictional is real we just don't know it yet...
You going with the multiverse theory on this one? Each fiction is just a branching off the river of time? This poses a very interesting thought, we may very well be characters in someone else's fiction. Thinking like that kind of opens some doors, have a crush on someone? Might as well ask them out, your writer may very well be setting up his story for you and your crush to live happily ever after.
Not to say that fictional worlds are as real as ours, but our "real world" is totally just a fiction we tell ourselves based on interpretations of stimuli. I mean, like your example of London being incomplete, our individual knowledge of our own world can't possibly be complete. This is why people have misunderstandings-- conflicting fictional accounts of real events.
+Punk Patriot there's a theory that states that you can have nesting fictionalities, such as a play within a play, or a play within our universe, if it is really true that our universe is fictional.
Tom Cruise may not be a dock worker, but he does pack fudge in his free time.
I think it's interesting that there are things that exist in our real, tangible world that have no context. For instance, the word "teleportation". It's a real word, it's in the dictionary, it exists. And yet, there's nothing in our world that adheres to its definition.
Teleportation does exist nowadays, search for quantum teleportation.
Michael Simek
Haha, I was waiting for somebody to catch me on this. I considered putting "quantum mechanics aside" as a disclaimer, but decided to forgo the warning because I was speaking in a general term. Still, the basic premise can be applied to a multitude of real words, such unicorns or dragons or telekinesis, in that they do not exist in any sense of "our reality" and yet they do.
Questions like this are why I'm an engineer and not a philosophy major.
I actually wrote about this in my thesis! Specifically whether Shakespeare's London is "London" or even if it is the same "London" across different plays. Basically, no, it's a character. It is temporally fixed in a way that no "real" landscape can be, and it directly interacts with the human characters in such a way that provides another avenue of agency for the author. There could of course be arguments made for London being the real London, but I think it is the same question as whether or not "real" people in biopics are the people themselves. No, no matter how faithful to the original real human as the script is, the person still becomes a character, if only because once placed in a fictionalized narrative, all actions take on plot necessary cause-and-effect status which real life most certainly lacks. Setting in fiction acts upon the fiction and is therefore not "real." Unless fictionally agency is "real" which is a really cool concept which I am now reading about in post-humanist theory, but I am not 100% sold on yet... so, TBC.
I love how no matter how hard we think about possible answers, we all continue to struggle with the seemingly opposing questions of "What is Real?" and "What is Fiction?".
Say, do you think that if we came up with a definitive answer for one, we would by extension be able to find a definitive answer for the other?
There is an old philosophical idea that humans can only know two things with absolute certainty: How we feel, and how things seem to us. E.g to a blind person, everything seems dark and that is as real as when a sighted person sees light. So maybe that's true reality?
Everything we imagine and remember isn't exactly true. Even as an LA native, the LA I imagine is not a perfect truth of it, but rather my impression and interpretation of what I know about LA. Usually we use these fictional representations to link to something in reality. Fiction is, then, assembling these ideas and representations into something that isn't directly based in reality.
But then what about breaking the fourth wall? When characters break the fourth wall, they're basically admitting to not being real.
"If the universe is truly infinite, then there is no such thing as fiction only distance." -William Howes 2014
I've always liked to believe in the Multiverse, and that there is a universe in which every possible course of events imaginable has happened. By that logic, every work of fiction we HAS to be true somewhere in the multiverse, and maybe a writer in one of those other universes has written a story that exactly matches a true event in this universe. It's possible
If there's an infinite number and it's possible then it's certain
TheYopogo Thank you for pointing that out =D
TheYopogo
Fallacious logic. There is no need for an infinite set to contain all possibilities.
If I create a fictional world where the number pi = 2.31, does it HAVE to exist?
Robert Bereza Sure! Why not? People of another universe could conceive math differently, or maybe math itself could work in different ways.
"People say nothing is impossible...but I do nothing everyday." - Winnie-the-Pooh. I love using this quote on people
As someone who writes fiction I would say that fiction is real but if it's a different 'world' that, at least in terms of books, that people have different images, different experiences in life, memories and bias and pre-conceived notions that it builds a different world despite being born from the same work. When books become films, there is a huge focus on who the cast is going to be, who will represent the important characters. I think this is in some way, making the fictional world more real to people, so many have their own ideas or desire to see different actors/actresses or to have the world shown in a certain way. As a writer, fiction is very much a huge part of my experience of life as it is now, it takes a lot of my thoughts and energy and is a core aspect to my life and my identity. So is the fictional world that I AS A WRITER imagined, the REAL world as opposed to the READER'S world they thought up?
So is fiction real? Or are there multi-verses of the same world?
When I wrote my novel, I always saw it as a Studio Ghibli film, in the way of 2D hand-drawn art style and drawing. Someone may see my characters as looking as people in the 3D world but to me, they're essentially cartoons. Is one more true than the other? That's why I mentioned 'multi-verses'. Great video as always, great ideas as always, keep it coming.
In a way it's a huge compliment to have others interpret your work, even if it's not exactly what you envisioned. Think of Hamlet. Here's a character that's been around for 400 years, yet every year there are more of them, they all try to show something unique through the role, and most people have a favorite interpretation. And, once in a while, you see one that's a revelation even though you may know the play back to front. And for all the deifying of Shakespeare, he wanted to write popular plays, so I think he'd be happy every time someone bought a ticket to see one.
But, putting aside what others think, most of my favorite films or literary works are the ones I can revisit at different times in my own life and find something new in. A new way of seeing. The work hasn't changed, I have. I'm older, have more experiences, can notice something new because I'm familiar with the plot, etc. And I love learning something new from another person's perspective. They may have noticed something I didn't, and my experience becomes richer as a result.
Unless you are dealing with propaganda or non-fiction, great fiction invites engagement and interpretation. The goal, even in fantasy or sci-fi, is to try to hit those notes that resonate within people based on our common experiences of life. I'm positive that Orson Welles would be tickled that people are still talking about a radio broadcast he threw together in just over a week. It wasn't just the brilliant manner in which he adapted and presented the material and used the medium, but also his timing. Hitler was taking over Europe and Japan was expanding into China and the Pacific. The nation was expecting invasion, and they were expecting to learn about it over the radio.
So, from a writer's perspective, as attached as we become to our creations, if people become engaged enough in what we've created to talk about, interpret, act out, argue over, even parody, the better. It means we've done something right.
DC comics took upon this similar topic,Superboy Prime is from a similar world, where all the dc heroes he read was fictional
I rewatched The Truman Show today and there are some interesting quotes on reality in it.
In the beginning Christof, the director, says "While the world he inhabits is, in some respects, counterfeit, there's nothing fake about Truman himself." Later, he says "We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented."
The way we relate to fiction is real, our emotions are real. Even if we know that the fictional world is fake, it can still resonate with us and touch our hearts. The way we perceive fiction depends on our view of reality, and has a lot to do with our upbringing.
Fiction is just multiple elements of non-fiction put together. For example, take the unicorn, while it doesn't exist in real life, the horse in which it's based off of does. Now take the narwhal's tusk, put it on the horse's head, and behold, you now have a more accurate representation of a unicorn.
but can't fiction also consist of something that is not non-fiction? that is purely imagined? like the adamantium metal in x-men. sure it is like non-fiction metal, but it is unbreakable whatsoever, which is fictional
quoabell
But when you imagine/describe the adamantium you'd have to say things like it's 10x as hard as titanium or, it's as light as carbon fibre (or whatever I really don't know). So you're relating it back to non-fictional things to make it so you can picture it in it's fictional setting.
quoabell
But metal exists in real life, doesn't it?
quoabell Perhaps fiction arises not from the combination of things that do exist in ways they don't, rather it is reality "extended" beyond itself. Horses are real, however a horse with the addition of a horn, is not. We add the fictional "extension" of the horn onto the non-fictional horse.
quoabell Again, based in reality. In this case it's metal that is real. The fiction is in it's properties of being unbreakable. Anything you can create in your mind is in some way based on real things.
I usually love this channel and the videos posted as I consider myself a very deep and philosophical thinker, but ideas such as these make me role my eyes. It's always important when thinking deeply about things to zoom out every now and then and come back to reality. I write a fictional story on a piece of paper and that's all it is; words on a paper describing something that doesn't exist as anything but a story. You can argue that the things in that story exist in some way or that they are real in some alternate universe, but like many ridiculous things, you can only say that because it can't be proven wrong. This type of thinking can often be pointless and time wasting as literally anything is possible because we can't actually prove anything, so ideas like this are not profound, they are cheap.
We can't prove these thing true yet, but physics does tackle this type of concept (they call it the anthropic principle). It may theoretically be possible to travel to an alternate universe and see the worlds referenced in fiction. Even if true though, it's most likely just chance that a possible world out there resembles one of our fictions, but you never know. Maybe some writers actually see into other worlds :) It's a fun fiction to play with anyway.
Why pointless and time wasting? We may not be that far off from proving that another universe or many exist. If they do exist well could our fiction be fact there? On the other hand you are right in that we can't prove anything, but this type of thinking still creates thousands, if not millions, of people from thinking critically, creating synapses in our brains, and raising the average intelligence across the world.... Thank you Mike and everyone else for making me and everyone else smarter on a regular basis.
I both agree and disagree with you here. I do not think that reality is subjective, and the "anything that cannot be dis-proven" argument is silly to me. I prefer Ockham's razor myself. However, dismissing this discussion as "cheap" is rather unfair. There are many people on this very thread that disagree with you, and you have just dismissed them. Dismissing the argument dismisses the people that disagree with you. Someone will always be wrong or just uninformed. Take the opportunity to share your thoughts and perhaps see those of others, and if you still consider a discussion beneath you, just avoid it. That is always better than insulting those that do not see things your way.
What about fanfiction, though?
If we go with the mentality that fiction is a reality to some degree, then does that mean that all that fanfiction where Harry and Voldemort are having passionate sex are, in a sense, also a reality? Because that leads to some horrifying possibilities.
I agree that fanfiction is, in a way, a reality same as the original work. However, its more of a sub-reality within the reality of the thing being written about. A part of it, yet not IT in any way.
Wow. I run a philosophy channel on IRC. I'm going to be referencing this video a TON. These exact topics come up over and over and over.
Good job.
The question isn't really what is fiction, it's what is real, and this is far more complex. In general - Vox populi vox dei. We make reality.
Can the populi please train my cat? Because he doesn't seem to care much about my reality in which he shouldn't tear up the couch.
Jessica Lakis what right do I have to take away your cats agency?
I'll buy pizza.
Jessica Lakis You think I would change the very fabric of reality in clear violation of the universal declaration of kitten rights for a mere pizza?
Are you bringing cocktails as well?
You drive a hard bargain, sir. By the way, have you ever watched an old series called The Day the Universe Changed, by James Burke? He takes a devilishly irreverent look at how what we think about the way the world works has changed over time and how that has influenced the world we live in. It's on RUclips and worth a watch.
This is now my favorite episode! I have been saying for years that every time a story is told, it becomes real. I'm so glad that I now have some specific subjects to read up on this idea.
It's not like it becomes real.
I believe it was real,and all authors do is subconsciously copy the events from the universe
And science fiction tends to shape the future. Does science fiction become real over time?
Not necessarily, science fiction itself doesn't shape the future, it's just fairly good at predicting it. However, people tend to ignore the wrong predictions and pay attention to the correct predictions. A lot of Nostradamus' haven't come true yet and probably never will
And, therefore, what about fantasy? "Magic is just science we don't understand yet" - Arthur C Clarke
The way i think of fiction leading towards our own future is that, it seems that human creativity is somewhat limited and people tend to have similar ideas at times and as knowledge and technology advances it gives people the possibilities to create the things that were thought of in the past as fictional.
What i was leading toward is that fiction doesn't become real on its own but as we advance we become capable of creating our previously fictional ideas.
Jackie Rose if thats the case if magic is explained in a fictional world, then it would no longer be magic. then it would be science. Also that could mean that all science is magic simply because we only get it to a point.
As a fiction writer, it's important to my work for me to make a constant distinction between 'realistic' and 'believable'. To the layperson, these terms seem almost interchangeable, but when writing fiction they mean two very very different things. Realism is about representing things as they are in our world, while believability is about representing things as they would be in the world of the story. Believability is the foundation of verisimilitude.
The intuitive part of this is that not everything must be realistic to be believable. If we construct our story world to suit it, we can make almost anything believable.
The less intuitive corollary to this is that not everything realistic is believable (this is often tough for my first-year creative writing students to get a handle on). Just because something is real, or really could happen, in our world doesn't mean that it makes sense in a story. We still must craft our world carefully to make even realistic things come off as believable.
This is why, for example, most historical fiction is so 'inaccurate'. For most of the general audience, realistic history is tough to relate to, and it's easier for the writer to use the fictional constructs people already believe, than to create a world in which the real history becomes relatable or believable.
If you want to talk about the fictional nature of War of the Worlds, how about the fictional nature of Tom Cruise; specifically, the version of Tom Cruise that you see in movies. Tom is a whopping 5-feet-7-inches tall, but every movie he's in goes to great lengths to cast him next to short people or otherwise manipulate camera angles and poses to portray him as taller because that's the image expected of a larger-than-life action hero in our society. I assume he has it built into his contracts... But as a consequence of this, if you are a fan of action-movie Tom Cruise, then you meet him in actual-sized-person, are you really meeting the object of your fandom?
Search for College Humor and Tom Cruise height if you want some great visual examples of this.
I while watching this episode I remembered a sentence from one popular online game reviewer "We are a society so immersed in escapism, that we find mundanity in things that never existed". And I realized that it is true. I've seen heated arguments on message boards about dragons from Game of Thrones and The Hobbit. Some people stated, that, technically, they should not qualify as dragons, because the have only two legs and wings, and as such, they should be considered wyverns. I was amazed how heated and specific the argument was. Dragons do not exist, yet there are people with so strong idea of what a dragon is, they will fight against faulty depictions. And, actually, I don't know if we may say that dragons are less real than, say jerboas. After all, ask yourself or anyone around you, if you have a stronger idea of what a jerboa is, than what a dragon is?
I'm a fan of the quantum theory, that anything that can exist does simultaneously. This plays with the fun of creation that - yes, this might exist as fiction here, but there's a sliver of possibility that somewhere, out there, something awesome happened.
Like that George Lucas was awesome for capturing the original Star Wars - and that some where out there an orphaned moisture farmer destroyed a space station that wasn't a moon. And that same Lucas could get some quantum criminal action for the foisting Jar Jar Binks on some parallel universe.
This reminds me of the idea of paper towns. When a map company wants to make sure their maps aren't duplicated, they create fake towns and if they appear in someone else's map, they can claim duplication. However enough people have gone to a paper town actually create the town. John Green's paper town and TED talk goes more in depth about fiction becoming reality or reality forming from fiction.
I've always had a big interest in the idea of subjective reality. I mean, we already know that we're perceiving reality subjectively as individuals, and I think that "reality" ends up being less of a THING and more of a very widely agreed-upon idea. Like, just as what we deem moral as a culture is something that we sort of agree on democratically, what we deem to be "real" is similarly a "majority rule" kind of thing. Is the guy who is seeing "unreal" things really "wrong," or is he just experiencing and extremely unpopular or underrecognized version of reality? I think it's unhelpful to consider anyone's reality less authentic than our own, but we can certainly call it less useful.
You two should do a video together. You would blow the internet's electronic mind!
Lesson Zero?
As a writer myself, I am a extremely large believer in subjective reality. It doesn't make getting good grades or not breaking the law or seeing my girlfriend any less important, but it does help my writing considerably. I have a very unique take on my own personally reality, (Which is somewhat inescapable and rather hard to cope with sometimes) my head is always full of people and places and things and events and I can feel the realness of all of them, but at the same time they don't mean anything if not put down on paper.
Books are our gateways to other realities, a chance to escape and live among others.
(Okay I'm sorry if this sounds like I'm preaching. Sorry about that. 'm just gonna say that these are just my opinions and you can take or leave what you will. Have a lovely day!)
This is quite an interesting idea. The sci-fi/fantasy fan in my head loves the idea of a "democratic reality," but I also find myself strongly disagreeing with it. While a fun concept, it cannot hold up to scientific discovery. Once upon a time, the world collectively believed that the earth was the center of the universe. Due to subjective reality, this should have made it the center of reality. However, science proved that it was not, and fact changed perception instead of the other way around. With a few specific exceptions, perception does not shape reality. No matter how much we wish it did.
***** Wonderful point! Although I would like you to keep in mind that we are all the center of our own visible universe, and there is something to be said for different levels of reality.
In another point, our own visible universes do not necessarily have to line up EXACTLY with that which is outside.
If all made-up universes are false, just things to be disclaimed by science(Which is an awesome tool that i am not trying to discredit) Then is our entire perception false? Who's to say?
(Once again just my opinions, take or leave what you will)(YAY DEBATES!)
Internet, I need GIFs of Mike's face at 0:25 (freaking out), 1:07 (explosions!) and of course the stare at 8:11. LOL
Seeing this topic discussed on your channel is so very refreshing. I've always believed that just as soon as a world is thought up and detailed, it has become a reality elsewhere. I believe that we as humans have the power to create (and destroy) other worlds. This begs the question, though...Are we simply a creation of someone else's imagination? If so, what if they get bored with their work?
Just as works imply that after their endings the worlds within them will continue to exist and those characters would continue to live, when the creator of our world got bored wouldn't we also continue to exist? Just like a story is implied to continue after a work ends, the characters met within are implied to have lived full and real lives before having ben been met. The "imaginer" if you will, simply has to lay out the grounds for a world, they do not have to detail every aspect of every persons life. However, thats just my idea. You pose a really interesting concept!
And you have a more interesting reply! It's correct in theory, I was just posing a question for thought's sake lol.
See >Solipsism
msxbrc Anybody seen that cracked after hours episode about musicals and how the whole world revolves around the main character and we're all sucked into his song and dance involuntarily?
I think this channel is completely on par with vsauce in terms of how it attracts my attention, albeit through different ways.
Here is a question: how do you explain that fictional objects have a very clear effect on the real world? Just by having an effect,they do become a part of reality, no matter if they objectively exist. By definition, almost all religions are false since they contradict each other, but still, they do have a very visible effect on the world.
If we follow Ernst Cassirers philosophy, we do not have access to objective truth, all we have are cultural patterns which allow us to perceive a truth. If we have a fictional story which is done in the same cultural patterns such as news, this story will be indistinguishable from truth - and it may become truth because of this. This is what happened in Berlin 1989 - people believed the wall was down and this affected their actions in a way which lead to the fall of the wall. The fact it was a mistake made absolutely no difference.
So the difference between reality and fiction - especially in media - is that fiction is displayed in another way.
Just wanted to say that the original WOTW broadcast didn't actually cause a public panic, at least not on the scale that most people think. This is an excerpt from Wikipedia's List of Common Misconceptions:
"There was no widespread outbreak of panic across the United States in response to Orson Welles' 1938 radio adaptation of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. Only a very small share of the radio audience was even listening to it, and isolated reports of scattered incidents and increased call volume to emergency services were played up the next day by newspapers, eager to discredit radio as a competitor for advertising. Both Welles and CBS, which had initially reacted apologetically, later came to realize that the myth benefited them and actively embraced it in their later years."
Citations are provided in the article, it's legit.
He said it! He said doobly-do! :D
John Scalzi's Redshirts tackles this exact topic in a very funny way.
who wants to bet that the next bps idea channel is something about twitch plays pokemon?
He said what the next video is going to be about 1:55
"Anathem" by Neal Stephenson deals a lot with the idea that the brain is a kind of quantum computer. That's to say, your consciousness spans different copies of you in alternate universes, and quantum interference "knits the different versions of your brain together" so you can know things beyond what you can observe in a single moment in this universe.
So similar to Possibilism, you could say that fictional worlds do actually exist, but in other universes. We are able to imagine and think about these fictional worlds because our consciousnesses exist in those worlds, and observing it by reading a book or watching a movie "collapses the wavefunction" into the idea of the fictional world. (Alternatively, maybe only the author is the one who observes the fictional world and collapses it into the form of a book.)
I don't know much about philosophy but Anathem was a great book and I really liked the idea of a quantum mind.
Someone actually had the audacity to call IdeaChannel a "Vsauce wanna be?"
Vsauce (at least Vsauce 1) Asks a question and then goes on tangents to trick the watcher into learning something but usually there is no defiant answer. (Seriously that is what they said they do) While Idea Channel, very similarly, asks the question but always stays sort of on topic. Yes they are both similar, and I believe neither is better then the other, there both awesome at what they do. The way people are acting is as if just because someone does something first-or even not first, just because they are more popular- it means someone else shouldn't be able to too. Take Pewdiepie for example, although I don't watch his videos I know he does "let's plays" does this mean no one else can do let's plays? I don't think so.
Really great video this week.
I think that Welcome to Night Vale is a recent contender for this video and this idea of a real item, that obviously doesn't exist, but references so many things that do. Night Vale is a community much like any small American town (or so we think), and so we automatically fill in our stereotypes and ideas of what a small town should look like, feel like, and "be". The wonderfulness about this "reality" is that it is familiar enough, but so very strange that the "weirdness" of the town becomes reality. The listener (much like War of the Worlds broadcasts) is shocked at first, but quickly assimilates the out of place elements into the physical place of the story. When I listen to War of the Worlds, about 5 minutes in I loose sight that the robots are fiction, and I start to invest in the character's realities among the battles and the aliens. Much the same has happened in the development of Night Vale, where I simply just accept hooded figures, the un-human city council, and the waterfront development in the desert as ordinary happenings, and I am invested in the characters development in their perfectly ordinary reality.
Oh, and great show. Mad props.
Whoa whoa, there's an ocean of philosophical detail we've skimmed over here and modal realism has been misrepresented. The difference between fictional objects and concrete possible worlds is that possible worlds aren't supposed to depend on us for their existence, whereas fictional things (if they can be said to exist) do. When you quantify over them in formal logic you also use very different operators: fictional universes each get their own quantifiers but possible worlds all get referred to with the possibility operator. You also didn't mention any of the reasons for believing in concrete possible worlds that Lewis, its main proponent, put forward, or the problems it throws up either, like whether it actually explains modal statements. Also you said that modal realism says that possible worlds exist because their inhabitants would refer to theirs as the actual world: in fact the indexicality of actuality is not an argument for modal realism, it's a consequence of it - that was the biggest mistake. Moreover you didn't mention the alternative theory, abstract possible worlds, which would serve your purposes about as well here.
Also also, you talked about Meinongian Objects as if they were a thing that lots of people agree on but actually they're hugely controversial and have big problems in the theories, not least of which is that they lead to contradictory properties. Sorry to be a comedown :( If there's going to be talk about philosophy we need to make sure we accurately represent the theories though.
I do, however, love the way you pronounce 'Surrey'.
I don't think he actually uses the indexicality of the worlds actuality as an argument for modal realism... think your twisting what he said a little bit.
The word was 'because'...
Can't that be specifying either a consequence or the conclusion of an argument?
I don't want to come across as unduly picky, but here it says that modal realism is true "because" of the indexicality of actuality, which modal realists don't argue for. They argue for modal realism on the basis of other claims and then say that actuality is indexical because of that. Here the consequences of the theory have been mixed up with the arguments for it.
the because part is describing modal realism.. though... I suppose you could take his description of modal realism as also an argument for it?
I think one of the great things about your videos (that Vsause lacks) is the sense of community. I love the fact that you leave these questions open to your viewers and directly respond to a good amount of the comments. Trolling can get in the way of intellectual discourse on the internet and when it is disregarded, a lot of great ideas are bounced around.
Both of you guys are awesome though :D
You talk about these worlds existing, but till not? It reminds me of a movie i once called called The Never Ending Story, the movie is about this world inside the book that is only in existence because our minds imagine it to be, the world is an embodiment of our imagination, but the movie end saying that the world that imagines that world may only be existence because of another being is imagining it.
When you mentioned objects existing in several fictional universes it reminded me of AUs (alternate universes) fanfiction writers create. It's like those fictional characters are given completely new existence in those worlds. It feels awesome to see your favourite character in attack on titan to be able to be actors in AUs.
You remind me of Vsauce
Yes I'm not alone in that! I subscribed to them both. Their channels are so good, I think mostly by the way they do things. They can do something I don't care about at all, but because they are doing it, it's good. It's simply the way they do what they do.... if that makes sense to you. lol
There's a quote from the Here There Be Dragons book series: "All stories are true. Some of them just never happened."
The first movie ever showed a train passing by the camera. When this recording was shown in a theatre-like room to an audience, everyone freaked out because their minds couldn't comprehend what they were looking at. They really thought the train would crash through the image and into them.
I think this is interesting. Our only possible definition of reality is that it's the stuff we can see, hear, touch, smell or in short: PERCEIVE as reality and in this very example in the minds of the audience there was no difference between reality and the illusion they just saw and so this fiction became reality.
If an artist would draw a tree with blue leafs, a rationalist would say: That's fiction. Trees don't have blue leafs. But what if the artist had some sort of colour blindness and he really saw this tree having blue leafs. Would it still be fiction? What if it was the other way around? What if everyone except this artist had this colour blindness? Would his drawing still be fiction or would it depict reality? It doesn't even need to be a colour blindness. All colours are just the way they are because of the structure of our eyes and brains. Nobody can say that's the true colour of the leafs because this colour only exists in our head and someone (f.e. a different species) could see it very differently. So there is no consistency in reality. Everyone has their own reality.
The only true difference between reality and fiction is that we KNOW it is real or it is fiction. When we know this we can accept that and won't freak out when we see a fictional U.F.O. blowing up a fictional white house in front of our eyes. So the fine line between reality and fiction is exactly there where WE put it. Where we BELIEVE it is. Why else would we be terrified by the Psycho shower scene or get goose bumps when we see Batman putting on his mask for the first time? Both events only took place in our heads but for some reason... it doesn't make a difference. Why are we still telling fairy tales to our children without even knowing if and how they originally happened? Appearently those morals still have values, although the stories might not even be real. Why are children trying to stay awake in the night each december 25th in the hopes of hearing Santa land on the rooftop and why are there still grown up people out there going through there lifes, not even questioning, that Sherlock Holmes was once a man who really lived before his story got adapted in books and movies. Because for them just the belief that they are real... makes them real. Maybe not for you. But for them.
So, don't tell your children that Santa doesn't exist. He might exist and the tree in your garden might have blue leafs. Depends on what you believe. Belief forms your reality.
+Drace90 I think you made one small mistake; this movie was a recording of a real train doing real train things, (e.g. the train was not shown to be flying). (And these poor people were totally uninitiated to the powerful sensory effect of moving images.) It's not exactly "fiction."
If the "fine line" is "where WE put it," then that is what makes it so appealing; we cannot experience all reality directly, but in bits and pieces - always taking the majority of the world & universe on faith. The fiction-part is allowed to bleed-through in the places we can't see right/hear/feel right now, making us wonder what really is real, and what really is possible.
"Depends on what you believe. Belief forms your reality." I'm pretty-sure that's the definition of opinion; if the reality is that there is a tree, it doesn't matter if the tree is seen as blue if you're going to crash into it at 90 MPH!
ism schism
It was fiction due to the fact that there wasn't really a train in that room.
I don't really understand your other points. Sorry.
Drace90
So if your mother is presently in Uzbekistan and you are in Wisconsin, then you telling the story of her giving birth to you is fiction because she's not present to hear the story?
ism schism
...That makes little to no sense and has nothing to do with my example. What I tried to explain was that reality can only be defined by what we perceive and as that is very variable (for example when people believe that there is a train while there is none and it makes no difference to them) then that must mean that there is no definite reality.
It makes little to no sense? All I did was to basically replace "train" in your sentence with "mother" in mine; the flow of logic should remain the same! Reread your sentence: "It was fiction due to the fact that there wasn't really a train in that room." Now I'm assuming a very simple truth - that you were born by your mother. Next I'll say that you tell this story of your birth, but, like the train in your story, she's not really there, (maybe you're watching a video of your birth now that your mother is in Uzbekistan). Does a truth become fiction just because a picture is involved? No! It's the facts in the story being presented. If you say your father gave birth to you, then it's fiction.
"...reality can only be defined by what we perceive..." I'm doubting that [not denying it - just doubting it]... but reality, (say, "gravity"), affects a believer & a skeptic equally; so do bullets & bad guys in dark alleys. It's why most people don't run red lights while just wishing & hoping & praying & believing that they won't crash.
Have you ever had to write a true or false story before?
I was first introduced to some of these ideas via Alan Moore's "Promethea" comic. In the comic, the heroine actually discovers a creature/form that exists as a bridge between the world of 'reality' and the world of 'imagination' (Although it's more about a collective unconscious than individual words for individual fictions).
The story itself is a bit of a literal interpretation of his philosophy, which seems to be, where the world of imagination is equal, if not greater, in its relevance to the universe than the 'real' world. By being a creative and creating worlds and stories like these, you're ultimately a god-like creature in the world of the imaginary. Of course the more people you spread your own ideas to, the more relevant and the more powerful they become.
He considers this to be a magic, which can ultimately influence 'reality' via the power of inspiration. From there it starts joining into occultism. From there you can go ever further into the idea of Religion being true in the sense that they're extremely powerful fictions that have obviously effected the 'real' world in profound ways.
I wonder what your views on this idea might be.
Assuming that you actually created worlds by inventing them for books etc., wouldn't that mean that it's highly unethical to write horror stories or any story that made a character suffer without a "sufficient" reason or "reward"?
+joelproko no one said you're actually creating a world with real things in it. youre creating a fictional world with fictional things in it, which are not real.
If I recall the video correctly, it was one proposed thought.
I wouldn't have thought fiction deals with "real" or "not real" but rather creates a sequence of events that didn't actually happen.
I'm too dumb for this shit, but I'll keep trying.
You call yourself dumb and proceed to wear L's symbol? Ironic.
Indeed
007MrYang To Blax3k: Aspirations!
To 007MrYang: You can be quite hard on yourself; I'd bet your effort proves more for your intelligence than not.
For me, fiction is when an object has associated to it properties that it does not really contain. This way, an unicorn is fiction because in its definition it exists as a living animal with magical properties, but in reality it does not. The same applies to illusion. Illusions and tricks are fiction in the sense that we atribute to them properties that they clearly don't have. When a card "has been shredded" to pieces and suddenly is whole again, we attributed to it the property of being shredded, even though it was never shredded in the first place. We gave it a property that it did not have, and for a moment there we created a fictional object. Fiction can come both from imagination, but also from ignorance. Another important point is that context, as a property, matters. A real object out of context is fiction. A modern day gun in a medieval story is fiction.
One interesting thing about this notion, is that objects that are fiction can become real if either their properties become real or their definitions change. For example, if we could make a genetically modified horse with a horn, we could say we made a unicorn. That unicorn would be real, but it would still not be the unicorn from our stories, as it lacks magical properties, and even if we could some how imbue it with magic, it still would be unicorn in modern day life, and not in a world of magic, so in a sense the property of context is still not satisfied. What would probably happen then, is that such property would no longer be a requirement for the definition of unicorn, and the definition itself would change, like it happened to Vampires and werewolves in modern culture.
Under 301+!
Indeed
Im having something of an existential crisis... to my mind, the only necessity of falsehood of my existence is that my origins can be traced to the something awful forums.
If you go by the multiverse theory (which I personally like), I imagine anything and everything logically possible is reality in some universe. Well, an infinite number of universes.
you should know that there are different kinds of infinity and thus, their maybe aren't as many universes as the conceivable possible ones (if there is any other than this one).
... I do know. It's all _what ifs_ anyway.
its really a shame that we will never know
Fiction is just friction that never went to pirate school.
Please do a twitch plays pokemon episode! Praise the Helix
I second this. There are tons of religious and political ideas being raised in this very simple yet complicated game of Pokemon Red. An episode analyzing all these elements would be potentially incredible.
They could explore the effectiveness of Democracy.
When discussing fictional worlds, I think a necessary point to discuss is that they are not only different for each person, but also more real for each person. One person can read a fictional story and roll their eyes and move on, and the story has a relatively small effect on their everyday life. However, a different person can read the same story and be brought to tears, feeling a huge amount of empathy for a person (or creature, or thing, etc.) in a world someone made up. The individual experiences that each person has largely effect what constitutes fictional worlds, how "real" they are, and the amount of impact they have.
I foresee a twitch plays pokemon episode
Well, this problem gets even more interesting when you drop fiction which you dont believe in, and discuss fiction you believe in - knowledge, or fictions of factual representation (to quote Hayden White). When historians invoke the past, they make "it"/things up. The past does not exist, by definition. It passed. Yet we keep writing what we find to be better and better representations of "it". These are really true, but not! We believe in them, yet we have no (or at least a much smaller) sensation of the things!! To find the explanation to be "realer" than the sensation, one must idolize the thing in itself!
Also, I love your show!!!
This all makes me think of the Thermians [Galaxy Quest] who couldn't distinguish historical documents from a tv show or lie. But, oops, the Thermians are themselves fictional, so that seems to be an issue of meta-meta reality. Or non-reality. Dang it.
Voldemort signing "Say my name" caught me off guard. LOLd hard
Nope. Possibilism is impossible according, to the entire way the universe works. Just like Schrodinger's cat either is or is not alive. The fact that he doesn't know the answer & can't find out doesn't make it both.
The question appears to me, whether anything beyond actual experience can be categorized as 'real'.
A mathematical set can only be proven by actually proceeding through every single step - no matter, how often this has been done before and the result is already memorized as 'familiar'.
However, the intellectually grasped 'potential' of a matter makes the difference between a convincing narrative and mere fantasy.
Given a human being's experience, being limited to the modes of experience that the senses provide, I'd argue that immediate experience itself i constructed of not only the direct, intuitive information from our senses, but also from the language we use to make sense of that information, which can allow us to communicate about things that have happened in the past, and also to speculate about what might happen in the future. Which raises the question, how real is language? Seeing as, in a conversation about past events, the words used to describe the past are not describing or indicating anything that is actually "real" in the situation. To the person hearing what is being communicated, the information being taken in is as real as that person believes, seeing as there is no way to verify it as being real or not. Even language being used to communicate about the present moment creates a symbolic separation between object and subject. For example, even if the word "tree" didn't exist, trees would still exist. Because words are just mouth noises, which are possible to apply meaning to. Therefore, given this logic, words, being somewhat ambiguous by nature, (as we are the ones who put faith in the meaning that is put behind them) represent possibilities. This means that language may or may not be a distortion of reality, seeing as words merely point to what is, isn't, was, wasn't, will, will not, could, could not, should, and should not be. I guess we could all try living in a world where everyone stopped talking to make things as "real" as possible, but I'm not sure what that would look like. This is why lying is so dangerous: it distorts what is, intentionally. If you're interested in this sort of thing, check out what Terence McKenna has to say about language. I wouldn't say he's entirely scientifically accurate all the time, but he sure made me think about these things.
Shayne Chrystian That's a lot of typing I can respond to in a sentence. The phrase "Easter Bunny" is real, but the "Easter Bunny isn't real.
And this is an entirely separate subject. The argument against Possibilism is that there is nothing in the entire scientific world to suggest that every possible event creates entire new universes. It was a thought exercise that got out of hand and turned into a religion.
Isn't this just a variation on multiple universe theory though?
I had an amazing history professor that often told me things don't have to have happened to be true. What she meant was that stories from the past have profound meaning because their very existence suggests that they were not only stories worth telling but stories worth proliferating. There have been a lot of commentaries on the idea of "truth" here already but I can't help but wonder how much fictions become our "truths" even when we don't accept them as factual.
diatribe follows:
I have to mention the idea of "desire as action" that is so prevalent in movies and novels, and is not at all just a Western trend (Anime is rife with "if you want it bad enough/ fighting spirit"). I mean: the underdog story, which actually goes against what most people will say they think is just. "The up and comer, still learning what they're doing, outdoes the veteran that has spent years of their life learning their craft.
This may not be an ideal that any random person on the street would identify with if put in the most basic terms, yet the existence of this as a trope in story telling reveals a lot about humanity in this place and time.
I think this is sorta like the MEANing of 'rule 34'... just saying, on a universal level what I mean is; if it exists there is ______ to it (I wanna say 'universe' but you get my point.)
I agree. In other words, if the there are two (or more) references that DO exist, then you can create a new additional (albeit gross in rule 34's context) reality of something.
why are you a brony
it's an icon not a label come back with something interesting or be on your way. (To Jamie; well I could have used a long winded text on what I was saying but putting a simple word helps with understanding it better or in this case a label...) But you got my point.
talon274 well rule 34 is a part of the idea i think its more than that meaning that every fan fiction, every part of fiction is reality somewhere, also i feel like i guess in one reality i have all ready met sherlock holmes and he dosn't like me much
wow there are no aternet universes its fiction even if there was wtf does sherlock have to do with this weirdos
I once played a card game with my girlfriend (I can't remember the name of the game) in which I used the word "dragon" to fit into the category "reptile." She argued that dragons could not be reptiles because they aren't real, and so can't actually have the properties required to be a reptile. The rest of the group voted that dragons did count as reptiles, however, because within the realm of fiction, they usually do have the properties of a reptile.
However, you could also say that anyone is free to make a story where a dragon is a mammal. There are a huge number of fictional stories on the Internet nowadays, so we had to make some informal rules about what counted as real or canon fiction for the sake of the game. For example, can you call Harry Potter a wizard, because he is not really a real wizard. He's only one in fiction. Maybe. BUT can you call him a politician if he appears in someone's fan fic as the president of the United States? Probably not; we had to arbitrarily distinguish between what was canonized fiction and what was to be considered non-canonized fiction for the sake of the game.
Are you reading the fiction or is the fiction reading you?
In Soviet Russia fiction read you!
I'm sorry, I had to. I'll go now.
Great episode.
Fictional objects are mental constructions as far as I can tell, although I'm more than ready to change my mind if I were shown some hard evidence that say, the Doctor or something existed.
Although they are mental constructs, they do not belong solely to the author, artist, creator, etc. Rather there is a separate mental construct of each fiction (and each piece of it) formed by each viewer. This is where we get into the idea of referencing things we already know (schema). When I watch a film my take away (my mental construct) is different, sometimes radically, from someone else who watched exactly the same film. Our schema tells us how to interpret what we've just watched and creates a unique mental construct of it. This is one reason I think, why books are considered by many people to be "deeper" or more intellectual and often spark more meaningful or philosophical conversation. A book, being just printed words and occasionally printed images, leaves a HUGE amount to be determined by your schema. When I read "craggy rocks like black crows" I might think of something like I saw in a horror movie, someone else will think of the rocks on a mountain trail where they hike, etc.
Even when watching a film or reading a book in a group, each person's mental construct of the characters, items and events are different.
Fictions are composed of fictional objects which are mental constructs possessed solely by the individual.
There better be a twitch plays pokemon episode or so help me helix....
It took a while, but they finally managed to cut down a tree.
In all seriousness, they could use the episode to explore the effectiveness of Democracy.
"Fiction is a series of real things that never happened." I forget who said that, but I always liked it.
I write stories, the characters and worlds are, to me, more real that stuff that goes on in in even this world. There are places and people who I've never seen, things I've only ever heard of, but why should these be any more real than the things in my book?
"Real" is about perspective, as many things are, so it simply begs the question of whether or not it is considered real by consensus, or what we can do in order to change the accepted definition of "real" or "fiction."
"Tweek" of the week? Any relation to twerking?
I noticed a little editing trick during the "Imagination" sample to lengthen your reaction to the scene. It added a level of "Fakeness" to the show I've never experienced till now, almost as if it became more of a...fiction.
Touché.
Please make a video on TwitchPlaysPokemon!
The only problem with this episode is, that there never was a mass panic; that myth began with newspapers reporting about the "hysteria" that their new rival, the radio, had caused and grew over time.
[clarification start, feel free to skip ahead] Actually, there were very few people listening to this show due to more popular programs that aired at the same time, and a telephone survey conducted on the evening of the play found that of the at best 2% that were listening to the play, none thought it was a news broadcast (there may have been a small percentage of people that we're frightened, but it were to few to be registered by the survey). [/clarification end]
What is really interesting about this however, is how very relevant this is to this weeks episode. The citizens of America may not have feared for their lives in 1938, but today a majority of people believe that they did. For them, the fiction about a mass hysteria has become an accepted reality. A nonexistent event has attached to it real properties, and due to people's acceptance of it's apparent realness attribute, this fiction has influenced real decicions and had therefore an actual effect on what we call "the real world".
Well my theory is that fiction is another world created by a maker who is the god of said world, you are limited to what you see and can do to that world, by that god. Another person can try to add onto that world, but unless they have acceptance from the god of said world their additions are only possibilities of that world, and not proven. Any changes made by the god or those who have acceptance means that is real and you originally perceived the world wrong. So class any questions?
Allen Moore's Promethea series (personal favourite graphic novel) explores the themes from this video VERY thoroughly. Definitely recommended!
Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?
Couldn't resist, sorry everybody!
Is this just fantasy?
It is only as real as you can imagine.
Alex Pope
Caught in a landslide
Francisco Haladjian
No escape from reality.
I just started reading Borges this past weekend for a college class and he's been following me ever since. AHHH!!!!
Also, a Night Vale tweet: There is no such thing as fiction. Just non-fiction written in the wrong parallel universe.
Im a big fan of PBS Idea Channel. However, some of your videos are applying too much thought to otherwise common knowledge subjects.
"Fiction, is any creation that is a known work of a persons imagination." Regardless if the story mentions actual places or objects.
For example, the novel "American Psycho" by Bret Easton Ellis, mentions that Tom Cruise is a neighbor of the protagonist. Just because it mentions an actual person, does not mean the novel is automatically nonfiction.
"..."Fiction, is any creation that is a known work of a persons imagination."..."
.
So a detailed plan of some future action is fiction, but only so long as it is known? By whom? What if the one person that knows dies? What if the plan is carried out? What if it is carried out but not exactly according to plan? Can anything ever occur 'exactly as planned' without being overly vague about what 'exactly' was planned?
.
Is there such a thing as a fictional procedure?
Totally agree whit you. I dont like this complicated, philosophic way of thinking. Fiction is something that doesn't exist, is just imaginary. It is simple.
burt591
That definition seems too restrictive to be functional.
Do you consider your personality to be fictional?
What about your past? Does your past exist right now? If not, doesn't that fit your definition of 'fiction'? Your view of your past is how you imagine it to be, no matter how historically accurate you believe it to be.
What about your future (not what you imagine your future to be, but actually your future)?
bengr71 The term fiction refers in particular to literary works like a novel or a story, not to things like my personality, my past or my future.
burt591 THANK YOU!
I think ARG's (Augmented reality games) are a growing story telling format that definitely blurs the line between reality and fiction, much the way Welles did with 'War of the Worlds'. In the case of ARGs i think developers are not only aware but count on this blurring of reality to create engagement and hype.
ARG's like Bungie's 'I love Bees' attempted to connect our world with the Halo world by placing our present in its time line and making the internet (a 'real' thing) part of a characters backstory (a 'fictional' thing).
Anyway, just a thought. Keep up the inspirational work Mike.
This comment refers to a fictional object. But it is possible.
I like meta statements. Like this one.
Nice
drosteScincid I'm So Meta Even This Acronym
I love your mention of the (semi-obscure) Alexius Meinong, but the full scope of his theory is even more wild and crazy and fun. One of his more well-known theories was his attempt to explain the difference between "A thing" and "THE thing". To him, indefinite descriptions (i.e. A thing) were mental objects or sets of mental objects made of properties - as you said. So "a cat" is just the idea of cat-i-ness. Definite descriptions (i.e. THE thing), on the other hand, were what happened when you linked these abstractions either to the senses (so not just A cat but rather THAT cat, right there), or to memories or other cognitive states (that cat that I recall).
The trick was that Meinong was an empiricist, and so he didn't trust his senses, and it was for this reason that we could talk about manticores and square circles. As an extension of this, we don't actually interact with the world around us but instead interact with the mental objects which our senses project into our minds - whether those mental objects are real or not. In other words, according to Meinong's theory, even outside of works of art, fiction vs "truth" is a sticky subject. Also note that things like optical illusions were first being studied/discovered at the time, so he had a leg to stand on. People at the time, especially Frege, didn't really like his approach to language and reference though, so Meinong kind of got buried.
You could also say that that our world is fictional. Because we as humans can only perceive the world around us through what our senses tell us about it. So our minds have to create a sort of mental image made up from the information gathered by what we see, hear, feel, smell, and so on. So in actuality our mental image of what we understand of our surroundings is just a "made up" idea of what we think is around us. So what we see as our world is nothing more than a "fictional" representation of what we label as "real". Cause you can never see how another person sees an abject. Cause each person might perceive the world around them in different ways. Someone might hear a sound differently or a smell might be different to someone else. So each person has his or her own "fictional" version of the world. Every person on earth has there own version of the universe around them. So each person creates there own fictional world. Cause think about it, how could you PROVE to someone with a doubt that an apple is red and not green? How could you do that? If they wanted to say its green and it looks green to them and they were completely sure it was green, how could you 100 percent prove to them that its actually red? you couldn't, so to you there version of that apple is fictional and to them your is.
+Chris L Good, (the first 3/4), but I wouldn't call that "fiction." Of course we do the best we can to make a limited conception of reality, but I think "fiction" is an intentional construct within this framework of society. Your example is one of difference of perception. If I said, "Hey you see that green apple right here sitting between us?" And they said, "You mean the red apple?" And I said, okay not important, "What if that apple were a foot-tall & made of gold & weighed 90-lbs?" That's fiction; unless you've *got* such an apple.
+ism schism I see what you mean, but really that's just arguing semantics, cause each persons "fiction" could be different, and also if one person believes in that fiction then its of course no longer fiction to THEM, but fact. you see what i'm trying to say, is that each persons perception of our world could in reality be fiction but to them its fact, that's all.. It's that i can not convincingly prove to you that your "fact" is "fiction" and you cant prove to me that that "fiction" is "fact". But when i said that our perception of the world is our own minds fictional representation of it, i just meant that our mind creates its own image of what it understands from the information that it receives from out senses, we each create a mental image of ourselves and the world around us in our "mind's eye" and that image could be false because its based purely off of what little information that our senses can give to it and understand. So i was just trying to say that that "image" could be fiction. Its just like when i read a book, i get a mental image of the characters and the places in that book based off the information given to me, I create a mental landscape of the situations and everything else going on in the book, Now if i was to take my idea of what the people and places look like and compare them to yours, of course there not going to be the same. BUT does that make mine the false idea, or yours? Is mine what the people "really" look like or is yours? You see what i'm getting at, i know that the real world isn't the same, cause if i know what a house looks like and so do you, and we both would agree that its a house, i'm just saying, that our world around us, even though we all as the human race agree on what most things are and look like, we still created that understanding in our heads, then shared those ideas with others, but in truth we have no idea of knowing if those ideas are right, we could ALL be wrong for all we know. But when i say fictional, i just mean that its a close approximation to the real thing. When i think of stuff like this it makes me think about stuff like the Bose-Einstein Condensate, which proved that reality doesn't exist if your not looking at it. Each person creates his or her own idea of the world around them in there minds, And that each person has there own ideas of what everything is and no two people can ever truly know the world form another's perceptive.
"...but to them its fact" Hmmm... but to them it matters; yes, and within that context it's truith. [yes, that's a new word.]
"...we each create a mental image of ourselves and the world ...that image could be false because its based purely off of what little information that our senses can give to it and understand." Yes, the image could be false, and it could be true - *because* there is a truth to the matter at-large ("the universe").
I think I agree with you on much of what you say, but "...when i say fictional, i just mean that its a close approximation to the real thing." I think that definition is going to lead you down a long road of misunderstood conversations with other people.
In reality, I think I've argued for your point before, and honestly I hope I didn't sound like that, cuz it seems like it's a lot of wheel-spinning! (sorry). A = A or B or C? How could one ever know 1% of another's reality - or even their own?
Yes, each persons fiction could be different! That's why I can safely say, "I shot him in the head" in a fiction story - if it's a non-fiction story, the guy's probably dead from the shot - without it even being in his opinion/fiction/world-view.
The idea that all works of fiction are possible existences is nothing less than the greatest thing ever. Period.
Grovers Mill Co. is like 2 minutes from my house. Seeing it on Idea Channel makes me feel proud...
The line of thought that says that a parallel universe exists because somebody thought it up begs the question of whether our current universe was the original. Are we the dreamers, or merely the figments of someone else's dream?
Tolkien makes the point in Leaf by Niggle that the creative process begins and ends in a "Tree of Ideas" which is akin to the platonic World of Ideas, but with the difference that Tolkien's tree is more like a colective imagination, the complete ammount of human culture, which for him does really exist, outside any person's mind paradoxically. Tolkien insists that men cannot "create" (sort of like Melkor, because we don't have power over the Imperishable Flame) and instead we "sub-create" taking things that exist in the Tree of Ideas and giving them our specific shapes and structures.
It's an interesting concept and is especially thought provoking when you think of it in terms of the Bible. That means there is a world out there where all the believers would be right. Of course they are choosing to believe this one is that world.
From a most fundamental kind of perspective everything that exist is basically just information. What the information describes and the perspective we choose to interpret it from determines whether it is a proton, an sandwich or two slices of bread with stuff in between.
In a physical sense you could argue that anything that you imagine actually physically exists as electrons running through your brain and you are just choosing to interpret the information described by those electrons as whatever you're imagining. That basically defines what something is by the perspective you choose to view it from. I like that way of thinking because it opens up a lot of possibilities and has a kind of 'you get as much out of it as you put in'-feel.
My first sociology teacher often repeated what might have been a famous quote: "things believed to be real are very real in their consequences"
And though you can't quote (or paraphrase) from the narrator of The Glass Bead Game as strictly something Herman Hesse said/believed: "All history is first and foremost a form of literature."
And though as a teacher of middle school children I am required to teach my students the definitions and characteristics of fiction and non-fiction (and take that charge seriously) it is far more important for my students to see their current world/self in reflection of the text they just read than to care whether or not Bilbo Baggins ever turned oxygen, water and carbohydrates into energy and carbon dioxide.
Holy crap! I've been telling people for literally decades that since we live in an infinite universe, the math shows that anything that could be, is somewhere. And your philosopher has real names and stuff for it! Awesome! I guess the next question is: Are authors Creating these pockets of fictionally described reality, or are they channeling a reality that exists independent of an author? Ooh, and is that why anything worth looking at in space is do impossibly far away?
The tweet just makes me think of this Portal 2 quote:
'GLaDOS: Well done. Here are the test results: You are a horrible person. I'm serious, that's what it says: "A horrible person." We weren't even testing for that.'
Also, in light of next week's Harry Potter episode, while you were talking about this whole thing, I had a HP7 quote rolling around my head that applies quite nicely. When Harry's in Kings Cross talking with Dumbledore and says: "Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?" Dumbledore replies, "Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?"
that sums up my feelings on fiction.
Whats most interesting is the knowledge that a lot of the information/reporting surrounding the mass panic was in fact created by newspapers inorder to deter the public from relying upon the radio for news. What makes this interesting is the "Truth" of what actually happened and the "Truth" of what was reported it relative to the discourse of their respective editors
OMG I saw that old TV show...I was just a kid so it totally freaked me out (along with the Unsolved Mysteries and Dark Shadows theme songs) ! Those long fingers reaching around the Earth *full body shiver*
This was a really interesting thought experiment - made me think of the D'ni from the Myst games, they wrote books (fiction) and used these as links/portals, to other worlds: The D'ni's beliefs can be summarised as follows:
1) There are an infinite number of universes or Ages. These form part of Terokh
Jeruth, the Tree of Possibility.
2) When a Descriptive Book is written, a connection to an already established Age is written.
3) Following this line of reasoning, no new Ages are ever created or destroyed.
4) When a change is made to a book, the age does not actually change, but the
writer is actually creating a link to a different world that the book now describes,
When I went to order a copy of war of the worlds (the book), the lady over the phone asked who's name to save it under. When I said, "Nathan wells", she laughed for about 3 minutes straight.
Man now I have to watch Spielberg's War of the Worlds again. One of my favorite movies ever.
I once read an article similar to this subject and they called it hyper-reality. For instance arctic berry sounds like it could be a juice drink. There is no such thing as an arctic berry but we know that it implies cold and refreshing and maybe even tasty. These implied properties become real when you taste a drink called arctic berry and you dont recognize the flavor. The "fiction" in the name becomes something entirely new even though it referenced something that already existed. Whats more interesting is that these implications affect our perception. If you were to drink "arctic berry" you might not notice the apple flavor till i told you: "Most juices use an apple base." Yet if you were to take another swig, you would suddenly notice the apple flavor.
I was reading Jung's 'Psychology and the Occult' and even though he drags on about something irrelevant, he seems to also believe that 'ideas' like 'fictional ideas' are real and exist. It's not the fact that something is tangible that makes it real but because we all agree on the characteristics. Therefore, whenever someone talks about the unicorn it doesn't truly exist, but that doesn't stop us from knowing what he is talking about. All this statement is doing is kinda reinforcing what you said, but still find it fascinating!!
I'm sure the guy comparing you to Vsauce was just trying to troll you. I enjoy both your channel and the Vsauce channels equally. Your channel for pushing my mental boundaries; making me think about things that I wouldn't usually think about and making connections between things that I would've never thought of. And Vsauce for highlighting and explaining the complexities of things that I have no interest in researching myself.
When he said "links all over the place," I so much wanted him to just superimpose a bunch of pictures of Link from GMM.