Have you ever watched a foreign film without subtitles in a language you don’t speak ? You probably didn’t watch the whole thing, because—no matter how worked up the actors got—you didn’t follow it and they’rejustactors anyway. Contrast that feeling of lack of interest with the intense feeling of engagement you get watching your favorite film. For me that would beAmerican BeautyorThe Godfather, Part I. Let’s call the first kind of feeling the this-is-lame feeling and the second the this-is-awesome feeling.

Here’s the puzzle I want to raise, which I think is the same as the one John was getting at in his most recent blog. It seems like—rational creatures that we are—weshouldbe having the this-is-lame experience foranyfictional work or drama that we take in. After all, we know that the events depicted aren’t real; all that’s real is a bunch of people making noise and playing with props on stage or in front of a camera. We know this. Worse yet, there might only be words or flickering images on the screen, with the authors or actors long dead. How and why is it that a bunch of fakers manage to give us the this-is-awesome experience? People are normally committednot认真对待假货。

想想这个谜题的大小吧!社会在电影、小说、电子游戏、戏剧和电视节目上花费了数十亿美元和不知道多少时间。世界杯赛程2022赛程表欧洲区为什么要花这么多钱去买这么多虚幻的东西?你可以用虚构的戏剧给人带来快乐来解释这笔支出。但这只是把问题推了回来。为什么我们如此喜欢某些形式的不现实，而不是其他形式的不现实?

如果你喜欢进化心理学——就像我在某些情况下喜欢的那样——你可以这样解谜。从我们知道不是真的故事中获得快乐的倾向究竟是如何进化的?在这样的故事上花费时间不就是在浪费可以用来生存和繁衍的宝贵时间吗?We can make sense of people’s enjoyment oftruestories from an evolutionary perspective, because a propensity to enjoy true stories might get us to listen in ways that produce knowledge (which could ultimately be used to help us survive and reproduce). But how do we make sense of our enjoyment of stories we know aren’t actual? Why wasn’t this propensity weeded out by natural selection?

I’m not going to solve this mystery here. My purpose is rather to quicken our sense of the mystery; fiction is so common that we take enjoyment of it for granted, but we shouldn’t. In keeping with this purpose, I want to take a few paragraphs to shoot down two rather tempting approaches to solving the mystery and thereby show that it’s still a pretty big mystery after all.

First, a lot of people think taking in fiction brings learning and knowledge. (I actually heard my Dad say this recently. Sorry, Dad.) Fiction doesn’t teach us facts about the actual world, so the story goes, but experiencing fictional works exercises our ability to think about possible situations that might arise. We rehearse in our minds what might happen in certain situations and learn how to respond. Thus, to complete the story, fiction equips us for life.

This solution is bunk. Socrates pretty much already demolished it in Plato’sIon. Ion, a Homeric rhapsode, argues in that dialogue that studying Homer helps people become better generals, warriors, deliberators, horsemen, and the like. Socrates makes the point in response that if you actually consider the relevant passages from Homer on warfare and such, you see that they’re totallyun对实际情况有帮助。任何一个像荷马将军那样战斗的将军都会被消灭。虚构的事件是风格化的和不现实的，所以对于产生可应用的知识的目的是无用的。但荷马是历史上最伟大的剧作家之一，他能产生“这就是了不起”的感觉。所以，无论小说中是什么东西产生了这种“这真是太棒了”的感觉，它都不可能产生关于如何在“可能的情况下”采取行动的有用知识。这个谜团仍然存在。

Here’s the second attempted solution. We have a lot of emotional centers in the brain—amygdala, hypothalamus, etc.—that respond to stimuli in a way that’s largely independent of higher cortical processing. If someone throws a rubber snake at you, you could well feel fear even if you know the snake isn’t real. If you add that going through emotional experiences often leaves us feeling good whenever we come out well in the end, then maybe we could explain why fiction gives us the this-is-awesome feeling as follows: the actions and events depicted in fictional drama stimulate the emotions without the participation of higher cortical processing or higher belief systems, leaving us with an emotional this-is-awesome experiencedespiteour not believing in the events. The idea is that lack of belief in the reality of the story doesn’t matter as long as the images or events depicted are such as to get the emotions going—spark the emotional systems. Reason doesn’t matter for fictional enjoyment. (Book X of Plato’sRepublicactually gives a picture of fictional enjoyment that looks something like this.)

But this “solution” doesn’t work either. Remember the experience of the foreign film without subtitles—the this-is-lame feeling. There were probably many emotionally charged scenes depicted in the film—kung fu fights or angry arguments to excite the emotional centers in the brain—but the overall experience was still lame. The reason it was lame was that a higher-level understanding of the events was missing. (Or, if you did have the this-is-awesome feeling at the kung fu film, it was probably because you could follow the plot despite not knowing the language.) So some sort of higher reasoning isneeded为了最终获得这种很棒的感觉。橡胶蛇的各种刺激不会让我们在座位上呆上两个小时。仅仅通过图像来刺激情感中心是不足以解释好的虚构戏剧的“这是很棒的”感觉的。所以第二次尝试的解决方案不起作用。这个谜团仍然存在。

周二播出的剧集会揭开谜底吗?我想约翰、肯和史蒂文(我们的客人)会做得很好。但它是困难的。我们可能永远也找不到真正的解决方案(实际上我认为真正的解决方案，无论它是什么，都需要修改和结合这里提到的两种解决方案)。但下次你开车去百视达(Blockbuster)再花4美元看穿紧身裤的人的动态照片时，你可以考虑一下这个问题。谁知道呢?也许你的神秘感会让你享受到更多的乐趣。