Fiction and unreality
The post on fictional characters has spawned a lot of offspring – Norm’s, George Szirtes’s, Mick Hartley’s, Tom Freeman’s.
The subject is related to one that Jean and I talked about a little today – when you’ve been in the blogosphere, have you been to a real place? When you interact via a blog, is that really interacting? Jean has a related post at Talking Philosophy.
I think Internet interaction is decidedly real interaction, but only for the people for whom it is so; that could be everyone, for all I know, but I don’t think it necessarily is. But I think it is so, at least, for people for whom language, thinking, writing, talking are important – or perhaps not so much important as essential. Jean points out in the post that blogging is addictive; so it is, and why? Maybe partly for the same sort of reason we get involved in fictions. Distance in one case, fictionality in the other; either way it’s not about real, fleshy, breathing people in the room with us, and yet it yanks us in just the same. George’s ‘guess is that the imagination does not distinguish carefully between the real and the imagined.’ It may be – in fact there’s evidence to suggest that it is – that the mind does not distinguish carefully between the imagination and memory, either. When you think about someone who is ten miles away at the moment, is that a memory or an imagining? A lot of both, usually, isn’t it? And are we always sharply aware of the boundary between the two? More like never, I would think.
Ophelia, That’s very interesting, the fiction-blogosphere connection. And maybe there is some relationship with the addictiveness. Hey, you’ve got the really interesting, juicy thoughts about this over here and over at TP it’s all sliced vs. unsliced bread! (Actually…that’s fun too. I always hate people who won’t allow a conversation to degenerate a bit.)
OB: “When you think about someone who is ten miles away at the moment, is that a memory or an imagining?”
Doesn’t that depend a bit on what exactly you are thinking about? In some cases it is likely to be more memory, in others more imagining.
The interesting idea is that memory may be always part imagining.
I do in fact think that memory and imagination are hard to distinguish under most circumstances. Testifying in a court, of course, means we are being asked to make precisely such a distinction, and, when put to it, we can make a pretty good, if not foolproof job of the task. In the same way we can make functionally reliable observations of phenomena. (The postmod argument is that we cannot because of ulterior interests.)
My argument would be that even as we did recall or make observations we would sense that something was missing, particularly once we had returned to life in general, that is to say to a sphere where we were no longer focused on a very narrow set of factors.
Nor would this ‘general’ state of affairs be without value. Indeed, it might be regarded as a necessary condition. Memory, imagination, desire, apprehension ratiocination, drawing conclusions, uncertainty about those conclusions leading to further apprehensions, desire, imagining etc are – I suspect – vital to a sense of coherence, without which we may be helpless.
I also suspect this is what opens the door to religion and why railing against the religious instinct, as opposed to the specifics and assumptions of this or that sytematic religion, may be less effective.
Of course, as an artist – thart is to say someone who attempts to make comprehensive, significant, humane forms in whatever medium – I would be concerned with the extent and function of my own vocation (if that is the right word), and while I would, and often do, argue against mystification and the priesthood that goes with it, I cannot altogether abandon those less defined, associative areas of experience that seem to me to vital to human well-being and to an understanding of the world.
hmmm,
recalling “The mind’s I” (Dennett & Hofstadter) we are perhaps approaching a sort of online Turing test here? :-)
Cassanders
In Cod we trust
Actually, George, there’s growing evidence (and worry) that when testifying in court we often can’t make a pretty good job of it. That is, there’s worry (at least among cognitive scientists) at the fact that the legal system relies heavily on the idea that we make a pretty good job of it when in fact there’s a lot of reason to think we don’t. The legal system (not surprisingly) doesn’t really know much about how memory works, and it tends not to work as well as the system has always assumed.
I find this thought quite disturbing.
I first realized (it was something of a ‘eureka’ moment) that memory and imagination are very hard (in fact impossible, I would say, if you don’t know the difference going in – if you don’t have them as it were labeled) to distinguish, when I was reading Elizabeth Loftus on memory. I simply sought out a memory and then an imagining and compared them. Well guess what – there is no distinguishing feature. We don’t generally notice that because we do have the labels in place. But the labels can be wrong…
I think you’re right about religion. That’s part of what Pascal Boyer talks about.
(Good to see you, by the way!)
I expect you are right about memory and imagination, Ophelia. Indeed it is probably what I would say myself, except it would leave one in a fairly impossible position. Not being a lawyer I don’t know what the chances are of being convicted on the evidence of a single witness, but I would hope they were low.
On the other hand, after my mother died back in 1975, I talked to my father on tape about his life and theirs. At first he said he remembered nothing, then, on being asked specific questions he expanded and expanded and we had talked for well over five years before he got to the age of thirteen. It doesn’t mean he didnt change his stories afterwards. I think he was trying to get them better as stories without ever thinking he was. And, of course, further, and sometimes conflicting, details occured to him.
Now that he is 90, however, he wakes up recalling his old form lists when he was a schoolboy, name for name, and the words of songs he thought he had long forgotten. That, at any rate, could be checked as evidence and I would expect to find he was right.
It is fascinating how in beautifully written memoirs the reader is given perfect accounts of conversations along with physical gestures and postures and other incidental detail. I have read many such and doubted. Their very vividness seemed unlikely. It was not their truthful intention, or indeed some kerygmatic sense of truth I doubted, just the detail.
I haven’t read the books you refer to. It seems I should.
When it comes to recalling conversations, I feel we should always be very careful in trusting even our own memories.
It always seems to me that when doing the remembering we actually rebuild a conversation from sensations and concepts and don’t actually remember the words used at the time. I’ll admit there are exceptions, particularly striking sentences or phrases for instance, but most of the time I think there is a lot of “making it up as we go along” (or, maybe more charitably, recreating) going on without us noticing.
One weird experience for me was, after having spent 1 or 2 years in London, and not having spoken French much or at all during that time, remembering conversations I had with my brother or friends back in France and remembering them in English! And it didn’t “feel” wrong; logic was actually the only thing telling me that, no, that exchange could not possibly have been conducted in English…
(It’s at times like these that you tend to connect on the Eurostar website pretty fast and tell yourself that maybe you have time for a holiday after all…)
This makes me think that maybe much of the confusion we experience between memories and imagination, and by extension between our emotional response to real people and fictional characters, is language-related.
And then there is also the fact that we do tend to treat real people as imaginary constructs, giving them intentions, desires and fears when we cannot really know what’s going on in their heads. Indeed, without doing this we probably wouldn’t able to have a emotional rapport with them. Imagination is a key component of empathy.
So maybe it is not so surprising that we can relate so easily to characters in novels or on the stage, everybody is a product of our invention.
That’s all really interesting, Arnaud. (I never do remember conversations. Ever. I sometimes remember the gist, and the odd sentence or phrase, but that’s it. I always simply assume long conversations in memoirs are straightforwardly invented (though not necessarily unfaithful to the gist).
That bit about treating real people as imaginary constructs (I would say we think of them that way, without necessarily treating them that way) is what I was getting at in the posts.
“So maybe it is not so surprising that we can relate so easily to characters in novels or on the stage”
Especially novels – because of course the thing that makes (good) novels so engrossing is that in fact we know far more about the point of view characters than we do about real people. That’s the magic of the omniscient narrator. Austen can just tell us what Lizzy is thinking, and because it’s a novel, what she tells us is true. We know what’s in Lizzy’s head in a way we can’t ever know what’s in anyone else’s head in reality – we know it as beyond a doubt, as plain fact.
Blogging addictive? Nope, not by any stretch of the imagination or science but it might be a problem of impulse control for some, just like gambling.