We cannot escape stories
Narratives make reality meaningful
In an election season those of us who care get bombarded with all sorts of political stories.
Seems that most people are interested in other stories until election time - but that's a different story.
I've been reading the Mainstream Press in many media for 60 years now. I know to my core just how biased the press is.
You can't write a story without a bias of some sort to hang it on.
I've seen that from experience when I worked in a TV newsroom.
I edited newsfilm which would arrive to me as 100 feet of 16mm film with a bunch of random clips from a correspondent a hundred miles away along with his story.
The idea was to organize the clips so they presented a visual story that was comprehensible. Often enough the visual story didn't connect directly to the verbal story - it was more an animated illustration.
But there had to be some sort of narrative connection. It couldn't be just "one damn thing after another".
Once I got to both write and shoot film for a story. I had no clue. The situation was a house whose pipes got frozen on a cold day causing floods and huge icicles. I picked up on how odd and sort of beautiful the scene was. WRONG!!! sigh - I guess there's a reason people go to journalism school
We need stories to make the world meaningful. Political stories make the political world meaningful. There's a pattern there; raw data (ie info about the political world) is processed to produce meaning. This seems to be the way the neo-cortex works - it takes in raw sense data and presents it to the rest of the brain as a meaningful experience.
Once I did a sensory deprivation experiment for a friend Jacob who was a psychology student.
He put me on a bed in a soundproof room with my eyes covered. I just lay there and after a while my joints were feeling sore just as Jacob was coming into the room.
Turns out that 3 hours had gone by. Jacob had been monitoring my pulse and breathing and didn't think I'd gone to sleep. These days I'd say that since my neocortex had no story to tell that it just grew quiet and so I had no experience. As soon as Jacob disturbed the doorknob
my neo-cortex sprang into action.
I got home very late - Mom was sitting up waiting. "What have you been up to?" she asked. "Oh, nothing." I hastened to explain
It's the work of narratives again.
Once I thought of anesthetics as somehow deadening the nervous system so pain wasn't transmitted. Problem is that our bodies need our nervous system to be working all the time. I think that sedatives and anesthetics work by quieting just one part of the brain - the neocortex - and that is a delicate job indeed.
Confesses that I have no evidence for that story other than experience of both anesthetics and sedatives
But following that conjecture we might suppose that psychedelics work in the opposite way - that they amp up the neocortex rather than damp it down.
The media (all silos) acts as a sort of strange neocortex for society. It tells us stories that help us understand the world around us. Right now that story telling facility seems to be running towards the psychedelic end of the scale. I've lived when society's storytelling seemed to be running toward the narcotic end.
Sobriety is standing balanced in the middle.
(he says soberly)
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.