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Comment by dkarapetyan | Hacker News Reader

I think the trouble with stories, language, and symbolic meaning is that over time people confuse the symbols with reality. Somehow the story becomes the reality and people forget that they made it up. Conspiracy theories are a really good example of stories and fantasies that people are convinced is reality. When you keep substituting symbols for reality it is pretty easy to confuse the two at some point.

Another example is fantasy literature. Much of it is concerned with magical systems that revolve around saying the right things. As if the right words and gestures can shape reality. I think this is the definition of magical thinking. Even though saying the right words will not make them reality people really like to think that is the case.

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symbols are designed to be conflated for reality. in our own minds we are interacting with the mental representations of external things and only the external reality by proxy of our mind. cogito ergo sum and other such observations are just pointing out this basic truth: we live in our minds are interact with symbols as the primary objects of consciousness.

the higher-order symbolic systems, like narrative fiction, or mythology, are designed to run with this natural conflation and go beyond merely conflating the symbol with reality, but instead now conflating the symbol with SUPER reality. the symbol now stands for something better than the real. more meaningful, more beautiful, more true than reality could ever be. in other words, it becomes culture, which is more important to people whose lives are embedded within a cultural context than reality is to those people.

the really strange thing about this is that it is adaptive, up to a point. when your daily life is much more about navigating through a culture than it is about navigating through a wildnerness it is perfectly understandable why the cultural symbols become primary in their importance.

this can go too far, of course. the culture can be a deranged, destructive, rapacious, monster of a thing and we know what the consequences of that can be. still, it seems quite clear why stories carry the weight and importance that they do.

re: magic systems

Although a lot of good magic writing involves a training phase where the trainee is parroting the words of the master, yet casts no spell. The words are correct, but the trainee is lacking some internal state. The magic comes from that internal place. The words are a side effect.

Words really do have power when spoken correctly and received openly. If you and I are arguing about something and I persuade you to my side, in some sense you had no power to resist. The ways in which you might resist would be logical errors. Things like status quo bias, or motivated misunderstanding.

> Even though saying the right words will not make them reality people really like to think that is the case.

I sometimes compare programming to these 'magical systems' because in both cases 'saying the right thing' has a direct or almost-direct effect on reality.

Other forms of writing obviously have an effect on reality too, but with programming (and magic systems) it's much more obvious and 'literal'.

And notice how many flame wars there are in programming forums. It's almost like the programmers forget that the tools they use are just tools and that they are a means to an end instead of an end in and of themselves. The focus shifts from solving problems and people start comparing the relative merits of one tool against another instead of discussing the best way to go about solving a problem.

In programming I think we substitute the language for the problem space and forget that the problem space is primary and the language is secondary.

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