What is fiction for?

[speaker-to-trolls]

As far as I know in all human cultures people tell stories to each other, many of them may have come from true events orginally but they often end up being significantly altered in the telling because, for some reason, making those changes makes them easier to listen to. The end result of this is everything from trivial daytime TV soap operas to the Bible, but why do we do it? Why are humans so obsessed with making things up that we are surrounded on all sides by fiction of various kinds, that people would actually let some of these nonsensical stories dictate their behaviour? Does anyone have any idea why people need to make shit up either to explain the actual facts or, as is more often the case, just for the sake of making shit up?

[Darth Wong]

As far as I know in all human cultures people tell stories to each other, many of them may have come from true events orginally but they often end up being significantly altered in the telling because, for some reason, making those changes makes them easier to listen to. The end result of this is everything from trivial daytime TV soap operas to the Bible, but why do we do it? Why are humans so obsessed with making things up that we are surrounded on all sides by fiction of various kinds, that people would actually let some of these nonsensical stories dictate their behaviour? Does anyone have any idea why people need to make shit up either to explain the actual facts or, as is more often the case, just for the sake of making shit up?

I think that in the past, the notion of defining "fiction" separately from any other kind of discourse may not have existed. One of the problems we're having in society today with things like creationism etc is the fact that people have forgotten how much different society was in the past. In the distant past, I don't think people really differentiated between fact and fiction the way they do now, in large part because it didn't matter. Stories which had been handed down from generation to generation were probably horrendously wrong, but nobody cared. If your life was herding goats in the mountain passes of Greece, what did you care whether the stories you heard about your ancestors were factually accurate? It's not as if you had any better sources to compare them to anyway.

It's only in the modern age where we make this kind of sharp distinction between fiction and non-fiction, and of course, since fiction is known to be false, people like Christians bristle at the idea of declaring the Bible to be fiction, hence it must be non-fiction. But at the time it was written, it was considered to be neither. People just didn't care.

[Surlethe]

Even the present notions of "true" and "false" weren't around until a couple centuries BC; Aristotle devoted some of his writings to arguing with people who denied the laws of contradiction and excluded middle. And if that was a conflict among the greatest philosophers in the world, there's no chance the ordinary people were developing these ideas.

[The Guid]

To return to the original question I believe that it has something to do with an innate desire to have things explained. The best way to explain some things is to tell stories - certainly this is shown in myths and legends such as the Greek explanation for the echo.

It also serves as a way to communicate ideas and thoughts to other human beings. It is a broadly common human trait to want to describe everything - for instance you see children will point to things and define them ("tree!"). Telling stories is an expansion of that; Christopher Brooker's book The Seven Basic Plots goes into detail about how stories mostly have common routes. Stories are a way of defining life, and of defining our desires and intentions.

[Havok]

Personally, I think it is just a reaction to our lives. Really, the average person has a pretty boring and monotonous life. You wake up, you work, you eat, you have sex with your mate and have kids, take care of them and it just kinda goes on like that... I mean it really hasn't changed since we moved out of caves. For the average person, fiction may just be a nice way to escape that for a bit.

[Shroom Man 777]

When you aren't doing anything, you think shit up with your mind. And I'm sure cavemen, like us, enjoy going "WOAH AWESOME!" when someone makes shit up like how he killed a mammoth by punching it in the face (course, then his buddies would go "BULLSHIT!" and laugh at him) and everyone has fun. And I'm sure caveman mommies would discourage their kids from doing stupid crap by telling them shtick like "once upon a time, Ug was a naughty caveboy and he did something naughty and got eaten by a mastadon".

Awesome.

[wjs7744]

To return to the original question I believe that it has something to do with an innate desire to have things explained. The best way to explain some things is to tell stories - certainly this is shown in myths and legends such as the Greek explanation for the echo.

It also serves as a way to communicate ideas and thoughts to other human beings. It is a broadly common human trait to want to describe everything - for instance you see children will point to things and define them ("tree!"). Telling stories is an expansion of that; Christopher Brooker's book The Seven Basic Plots goes into detail about how stories mostly have common routes. Stories are a way of defining life, and of defining our desires and intentions.

That's a good explanation for religion and superstition, but it doesn't really explain other forms of fiction, for example novels. There are many forms of fiction that exist to explain nothing, simply to entertain.

[Ariphaos]

As far as I know in all human cultures people tell stories to each other, many of them may have come from true events orginally but they often end up being significantly altered in the telling because, for some reason, making those changes makes them easier to listen to. The end result of this is everything from trivial daytime TV soap operas to the Bible, but why do we do it? Why are humans so obsessed with making things up that we are surrounded on all sides by fiction of various kinds, that people would actually let some of these nonsensical stories dictate their behaviour? Does anyone have any idea why people need to make shit up either to explain the actual facts or, as is more often the case, just for the sake of making shit up?

As Wong alluded to, it's more often the case -now-. There is also a lot of older fiction created for the purpose of philosophical allegory and religious parables.

I have a little science fiction setting I've been building, called Solar Storms. Designing it is fun, I do boatloads of research and no matter how much I learn it's never enough, and there is a growing temptation to return to college for a math or physics degree. I originally created it as a roleplaying setting but it's become a lot more to me.

I've actually come to some apparently unique conclusions (ie interstellar R-bombs are stupid). Epiphanies like that are also very cool.

[The Guid]

To return to the original question I believe that it has something to do with an innate desire to have things explained. The best way to explain some things is to tell stories - certainly this is shown in myths and legends such as the Greek explanation for the echo.

It also serves as a way to communicate ideas and thoughts to other human beings. It is a broadly common human trait to want to describe everything - for instance you see children will point to things and define them ("tree!"). Telling stories is an expansion of that; Christopher Brooker's book The Seven Basic Plots goes into detail about how stories mostly have common routes. Stories are a way of defining life, and of defining our desires and intentions.

That's a good explanation for religion and superstition, but it doesn't really explain other forms of fiction, for example novels. There are many forms of fiction that exist to explain nothing, simply to entertain.

I whole heartedly disagree. Take any story, film, play or novel, certainly the classics, and you will see that they fit into some very particular themes in all the stories we tell. Where are you getting the entertainment from? It is from having one of the truths of life revealed, or far more likely, confirmed.

[Darth Wong]

Perhaps he's talking about shitty novels. Some more recent novelists have invented genres such as "military-wank" or "political advocacy disguised as a story" that do not explore any classic themes about human nature at all.

[wjs7744]

That's a good explanation for religion and superstition, but it doesn't really explain other forms of fiction, for example novels. There are many forms of fiction that exist to explain nothing, simply to entertain.

I whole heartedly disagree. Take any story, film, play or novel, certainly the classics, and you will see that they fit into some very particular themes in all the stories we tell. Where are you getting the entertainment from? It is from having one of the truths of life revealed, or far more likely, confirmed.

I guess I missed the point of your reasoning then, as it sounded to me like you were only applying it to explanations of physical phenomena, like the echo you mentioned.