I think too much can be made of story-telling being a human trait or activity. I have heard of a penguin leading a scientist to a cache of whale bones. I'm quite sure that, had the penguin been able to communicate verbally, it would have had a story to tell. And don't bees tell quite a story about their discovery of a source of nectar through a dance they perform on their return to the colony?
Another useful function of story-telling is to avert physical violence. For example, the Inuit societies had a custom (and perhaps still have) whereby potential combatants were brought together in public and were allowed to tell stories on each other in song without reservation with the purpose of achieving a catharsis without violence.

A True Love Story
I was fortunate some years ago to be invited to my brothers time share in Maui, a wonderful place to just be. About half way through the week the four of us, my twin brother and his wife and my girl friend and I decided to take a snorkel boat trip for the day with a 150 dollar discount if my brother attended a time share sales meeting for an hour anytime that week. Well being we were staying for free at his beautiful beach front abode and being identical twins I offered my girlfriend and I to go in their place. Well it was far from a group meeting which I assumed, my girl friend and I got involved in a one on one interview with a salesmen who grilled us with questions regarded my brother and his life. I lied over and over again for about a half an hour holding to the deception that we were my brother and wife and finally said thats enough, I couldn't do the sales meeting anymore. The salesmen said if I could not finish the meeting I would have to go to the reception desk and pay the 150 dollars we had already spent. Reluctantly I couldn't lie for money anymore so we left and I paid.
That afternoon the four of us found another beautiful beach to snorkel and low and behold I found a gold ring lying amongst the coral of the Pacific Ocean, and it fit my ring finger perfectly. That night on the Way to dinner we passed a jewelry store and I walked in to find out what the gold ring was worth, they said (years ago when gold was valued much less than today) 150 dollars.
Karma?
I wear the ring still today to remind me truth is worth more than money and as fortune goes the ring became much more than just a truth ring, recently it has become a loving wedding ring.
Truly me,
=

讲故事是古老的，而关于讲故事的故事是不断演变的，从这个意义上说，是新的。我想起了一部电影——以及其中的一个故事。这部电影就是《疯狂的麦克斯:超越雷霆穹顶》。故事中的故事是关于一个部落里的野生孩子们，他们坚持着沃克船长的神话——这个神话给了他们希望和理由，让他们坚持自己的小世界和日渐减少的人性。梅尔·吉布森(饰演麦克斯)被这些年轻的异类拯救了。他花了一段时间才弄明白他们是如何运作的。但其中的象征意义很明显，导演“做对了”。其他评论者可能会在这篇文章中或多或少地说些什么。我期待着他们的发言。

The ape in the monkey suit is an insult to apedom. But apes cannot fight back. Yet. Supposedly, an elephant can "talk" now. Is he/she only aping an ape, or pretending to be a human in elephant's clothing? It is confusing---isnt it? Some say I think too much. Well, cogito, ergo, sum. And so on.

I have a general question about Philosophy Talk -- not sure this is the best place for it, but it's a philosophical question. There's a term that gets thrown around a lot on the show, and I feel like either I've missed the definition, or it's been a bit sloppy.
When KT and JP use the term "rational," what precisely do they mean? Formally, I would expect it to indicate that the conclusion in question follows from an explicit set of axioms, in combination with a set of logical rules, and that the conclusion follows from an appropriate application of those rules. Of course, we aren't generally so formal that we have to spell out that whole argument, but "rational" indicates that we could do so with relatively little effort.
Does "rational" apply, though, regardless of the content of the axioms? That is, if an argument chooses entirely different axioms (and maybe even rules of logic), but proceeds according to those rules in a self-consistent way, does it qualify as rational?
For example, suppose there is a system with the following axiom: "Zeus controls every bit of physical matter at every instant according to his purposes." From this, one can conclude that there need not be any "laws of physics" by which things must happen; after all, Zeus is doing what Zeus does. If he chooses to be consistent for a long time, that's his business. All observations we make are simply observations of what Zeus' purpose in the moment was, without any content about what "must" happen. Missing from this description of the universe is Occam's Razor and the scientific method. But it's entirely self-consistent. Is it "rational"?
If not, what does "rational" mean? If it insists on a particular set of axioms, then calling any other system "irrational" may be correct by the definition, but seems a bit ad hominem. Or maybe it means something entirely different that the formal definition above?

I haven't heard so much about how stories are received by listeners. I think the ability to be affected by stories, instead of parsing them for facts, is noteworthy.

Knowing that John did a lot of work on identity I'm surprised he didn't make the natural point that storytelling reinforces our sense of personal identity over time, something dear to us but whose logical foundations are shaky at best.

Everything evolves, Everything, that is, involving life and/or consciousness. Philosophers and life-scientists have been dancing with this notion for decades---without stating the obvious. Professionals are fearful of being wrong, or of advancing unproven (unprovable?) hypotheses. There is a research engineer in my town who claims to have tinkered with time. He says he has a device, the effects of which may ultimately lead to time travel. Certainly, he has detractors---and rightly so. I do not know about warped space or other anomalies of physics. This local guy, Marshall Barnes, may know something. Or, he may not. Not for me to say. I grow vegetables.
Live as well as I am able---given fixed income issues, and give no more than I can. Google Mr. Barnes, if you like. I'm sure he is on the net. I mean, why wouldn't he be, hmmmm?
今晚绿洲很平静。骆驼说:嗯。为什么不呢?
Oh, alright. I'll pose two questions about time travel. First, the past: If Barnes and many others are right about the immutability of history, why should we wish to go there? If it is broke but we can't fix it, uh----?
未来:我们现在就可以改变这一点——如果我们愿意的话;也不明白为什么要改变，以及如何改变。所以，时间旅行是一个谜，是一个假设，对吗?问马歇尔巴恩斯。他似乎知道。

理性可能在字典里。当然，宙斯也是，但宙斯是个神话。也许理性也是一种神话?奥卡姆剃刀吗?达摩克利斯之剑?神话和隐喻——大多在字典或其他古怪而又被遗忘的传说中。语言学家史蒂文·平克(Steven Pinker)和他的同事们经常拿这些事情开玩笑。不管宙斯或其他类似的神话是否真的形成了我们的梦境和幻象似乎都不太合理。但是所有这些公理——不是吗?复杂性只是另一种表达方式:嘿，我要接这个电话，你介意吗? Yeah. I do. See you again---whenever---if I'm so unlucky...

虽然这可能不完全是热门话题，但我对Brian提出的问题很感兴趣。我经常想知道为什么“理性”有积极的含义，而“合理化”有消极的含义。也许理性应该被认为是一个心理学而不是哲学术语。然后，根据弗洛伊德的观点，理性思维包括(a)考虑所有可用的事实，而不仅仅是理想的事实，以及(b)健全的逻辑推理。
Rationalization usually refers to a process that begins with a desired conclusion and then goes in search of facts that fit.
理性主义作为一种哲学，相信真理和知识只能通过理性来获得，已经被历史过程所否定(或者，我这么认为)。
Perhaps, too, a degree of ambiguity is unavoidable. Otherwise we may end up like the two hapless philosophy professors of Barrows Dunham's delightful vignette, who, after an overly critical philosophical examination of the proposition "it is good to be healthy," had one forced to admit that he didn't know what he meant, while the other was forced to admit that his statements meant nothing at all but were just grunts of approval or disapproval.

Truth
If your searching for a Way to box in Truth with axiomatic ideals, natural laws, scientific theories and proofs, religious dogmas of gods and faiths, or even philosophical rationalism's and reasonings, you've gone the wrong Way.
Truth is absolutely free.
Just be,
=

There's another important function of storytelling that's relevant to the evolution of our ability for it. Somebody above in comments touched on it. I think story-telling is more than just reinforcing of identity. I think our ability to tell stories may be absolutely and fundamentally integral to consciousness itself. The other important social aspects of it, yes, those are important, but in a different way. Our ability to shape our experiences into some kind of creative self-image, whether it's truthful or totally coherent, is a fundamental part of identity formation. I think that perhaps story-telling then is not a result of our nature but our nature as consciousness is a result of our story-telling ability.
我每周都在dailykos写关于古典音乐的日记，这样做已经很多年了。对我来说，作为听众的我们如何处理所有这些抽象的声音，并从中得到一些东西，这比作曲家自己将我们所想象的意义注入其中的过程要有趣得多。我以前就把它和一个人看罗夏墨迹的过程做过比较，他看到的是一个图像，尽管我们可能会客观地说，那里没有真正的图像——只有我们强加在墨迹上的主观意义。因为墨迹没有作曲家，通过这样的比较，我认为我们在听贝多芬时所想象的双向交流不是你我听贝多芬，而是你我听那水管般的声音本身。我们把所有的声音编织在一起，整合成某种主观意义上的东西，就像我们解读罗夏墨迹(Rorschach)，或者编造我们是谁、我们从哪里来、想要去哪里的故事一样。
This has some implications as well, I think, in AI and artificial consciousness, an area of interest to me. Any successful artificial consciousness, I think, will have to have some process for both keeping a log of past events and of knitting them together into some kind of storyline of what it has been doing, what is happening to it now, what it wants, etc.

Sigmund Freud was a neurotic misfit. I arrived at this conclusion while reading comments on a newer Philoso?hy Talk blog post: Are Some People Better Than Others? It annoys me that Dr. Freud was ever taken seriously at all. Snake oil and hokum; surmise and personal transference. But, it teaches us something about the genetics vs. environment dichotomy: there are mitigating circumstances that enable certain folks to become better than others, whether those be risk-taking or taking a shrewish wife (same thing?). Or being neurotic misfits? Well, its a Grimm prospect, isn't it? (Heh,heh...) End of story(?)