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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7344795" data-attributes="member: 42582">On fiction and existence: this is a response to  [MENTION=16814]Ovinomancer[/MENTION]r,  [MENTION=23935]Nagol[/MENTION],  [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION],  [MENTION=38016]Michael Silverbane[/MENTION] and  [MENTION=99817]chaochou[/MENTION].To begin: reading, listening, imagining etc are real processes that take place. Imagining involves causal processes in the brain. Listening also involves processes in the ears. Reading also involves processes in the eyes.I am taking the above to be uncontenious, so if you disagree you're going to have to let me know explicitly.There is more to these processes, too, which I will get to below.The process in the brain when these things - reading, listening, imagining - occur involve the linguistic capacity of the person to a high degree. I'm not really across the science of this, and am going to describe it in more colloquial terms: the person who is reading, listening or imagining forms and entertains ideas. Assuming that they know what they are reading, listening to or imagining is a fiction, however, then they don't form beliefs (other than prsently irrelevant beliefs, such as "I am now reading Hound of the Baskervilles").For instance, a person reading Hound of the Baskervilles forms ideas - such as the idea of a super-capable detective called Sherlock Holmes - but does not (unless s/he has mistaken it for a documentary report) form the belief that there exists, or once existed, a super-capable detecitve called Sherlock Holmes.The causal process whereby those ideas are formed invovles not only the person's brain, but their eyes. But it is not confined to the brain and eyes of the reader. The causal processes also involves the use of physical materials (ink, paper) to create visually perceptible markings (writing) which - due to other causal processes around language learning - are apt to cause certain ideas to arise in the brain of the reader.The question of how lanugage "encodes" ideas is complex, and seems largely unnecessary to address in this thread. It's probably enough to say that a book (or a speech, or an episode of quiet imagining) is a concrete thing that "eccodes" or representes an abstract thing (ie a set of ideas). The causal capacity of the book to produce ideas in a reader can't be explained simply by referring to the ink marks on the paper - it's necessary to note that they "encode" ideas in a systematic fashion (ie linguistically) and also to note that the reader has a capacity to apprehend that encoding (ie the reader has learned the language in which the book is written).This is a good part of the sense in which fictions are real. There are further interesting questions about what constitutes a given fiction (eg why does my fanfic published on a Sherlock Holmes website not count as part of Hound of the Baskervilles). Upthread, discussing RPGing, I have simply glossed this as a type of social process whereby thje participants in the episode of RPGing arrive at a consensus on what their shared fiction is.From the fact that fictions, and ideas, are real, it doesn't follow that their content is real.  [MENTION=99817]chaochou[/MENTION] has given a quite straightforward example above. When I read his sentence "I have a giant yellow teapot full of dragons in my front garden" I understood it. It's a perfectly straightforward sentence of English, and I grasped its meaning - I formed the requisite idea in my brain.That doesn't mean that there exists a dragon, a giant yellow teapot, etc - those are all purely imaginary.There is an obvious similarity, in this respect, between fictions and false beliefs: just as fictional things don't exist, nor do (say) events that are falsely believed to have occurred. Eg if someone falsely believes that humans have travelled to Mars, that person's belief is a real thing, capable of exercising causal power (eg it migh tlead them to ask "When did humans first land on Mars?) - but obviously it doesn't follow that there ever existed such an event as the landing of humans on Mars. But as I said above, there is also a difference between false belief and imagintion, namely, that imagination doesn't involve belief. It's a different sort of propositional attitude.Thus, to say that The Hound of the Baskervilles - a story - exists, but that Sherlock Holmes does not, is no more nonsensical than to say that a mistaken news report about a human landing upon Mars exists, but that no actual such landing has occured. Ie not only is it not nonsensical, it's the only tenable thing to believe! (Spoiler alert: likewise it is as obvious that a cultural practice around Santa Claus exists, as it is that Santa Claus is not real. This is not a paradox: it's common sense, as every child who has had their fantasy punctured can tell you.)The fact that we can have stories (like Hound of the Baskervilles) that are about non-existent things (like Sherlock Holmes, or the hound) and that we can have cultural practices that are about and operate around non-existent things (like Santa Claus or Mickey Mouse) just reinforces the point that words and ideas can deal with non-existent things.One consequence of the (I would say obvious) fact that imaginary things don't really exist is that we can imagine impossible things. In my Traveller game, we imagine starships that travel faster than light. In my D&D game, we imagine impossible magic, imposibly large insects, impossibly heavy flying creatures like dragons, impossible socieities and economies, etc. If ideas could only be about existent things, then (i) false beliefs would be impossible, and (ii) so would imagination.Finally, to say that fictional things exist in the fiction or exercise causal power in the fiction is not to say anything more than that we can imagine things (characters, orcs, swords, studies, maps), and we can imagine things that do things (eg we can imagine people kiling orcs with swords, or finding maps in studies). That is a pretty banal point. It tells us nothing about what might count as a useful technique for RPG action resolution.</blockquote>

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