Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

The Meaning of Life 541true when the information is not yet widely known and one can be thefirst to exploit an opportunity, the social equivalent of insider trading. Inthe small bands in which our minds evolved, everyone knew everyoneelse, so all gossip was useful. Today, when we peer into the private livesof fictitious characters, we are giving ourselves the same buzz.Literature, though, not only delights but instructs. The computer scientistJerry Hobbs has tried to reverse-engineer the fictional narrative inan essay he was tempted to call "Will Robots Ever Have Literature?"Novels, he concluded, work like experiments. The author places a fictitiouscharacter in a hypothetical situation in an otherwise real worldwhere ordinary facts and laws hold, and allows the reader to explore theconsequences. We can imagine that there was a person in Dublin namedLeopold Bloom with the personality, family, and occupation that JamesJoyce attributed to him, but we would object if we were suddenly tolearn that the British sovereign at the time was not King Edward butQueen Edwina. Even in science fiction, we are asked to suspend beliefin a few laws of physics, say to get the heroes to the next galaxy, but theevents should otherwise unfold according to lawful causes and effects. Asurreal story like Kafka's Metamorphosis begins with one counterfactualpremise—a man can turn into an insect—and plays out the consequencesin a world where everything else is the same. The hero retainshis human consciousness, and we follow him as he makes his way andpeople react to him as real people would react to a giant insect. Only infiction that is about logic and reality, such as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,can any strange thing happen.Once the fictitious world is set up, the protagonist is given a goal andwe watch as he or she pursues it in the face of obstacles. It is no coincidencethat this standard definition of plot is identical to the definition ofintelligence I suggested in Chapter 2. Characters in a fictitious world doexactly what our intelligence allows us to do in the real world. We watchwhat happens to them and mentally take notes on the outcomes of thestrategies and tactics they use in pursuing their goals.What are those goals? A Darwinian would say that ultimately organismshave only two: to survive and to reproduce. And those are preciselythe goals that drive the human organisms in fiction. Most of the thirtysixplots in Georges Polti's catalogue are defined by love or sex or athreat to the safety of the protagonist or his kin (for example, "Mistakenjealousy," "Vengeance taken for kindred upon kindred," and "Discoveryof the dishonor of a loved one"). The difference between fiction for chil-