I agree that getting chinese whispered into nonsense is a real failure mode, pop sci quantum mechanics shows this well enough. I think it unlikely that there was that much of a real, true and important point behind most myths. Repeatedly rerecord a sound on analogue media enough and you get static. Repeatedly retell a story and you get mythology. We can’t tell much about what the signal started as, but I doubt it was all brilliant rationality, because most of our really old documents aren’t that rational.
I think we should consider looking at indigenous stories, I’ve heard that a lot of them encode genuinely useful knowledge about ecosystems, this can be a bit hard to discern from the outside (if you don’t live in the old ways in the old ecosystems you wont understand the myths), and colonisation is often so brutal that the connection is lastingly obscured, the ecosystem knowledge is lost and by the time the survivors are ready to return to their roots, the connection is lost, the myths are dead, don’t mean what they used to, don’t serve a purpose in the new world. Some peoples recognise this and try to start remaking their myths (per my recommendation), but it’s hard to tell how the new myths reflect the old ones.
Something I worry about is that a lot of things that qualified as entertainment to the ancients aren’t recognisable as entertainment to me. I could potentially be very confused by that. Was it really funny or insightful given the right cultural background, or were the audience just starved for novelty and willing to accept the bare minimum amount of wit? Was it a tacit metaphor for something or were they just amused by the idea of a literal talking fox?
I agree that getting chinese whispered into nonsense is a real failure mode, pop sci quantum mechanics shows this well enough. I think it unlikely that there was that much of a real, true and important point behind most myths. Repeatedly rerecord a sound on analogue media enough and you get static. Repeatedly retell a story and you get mythology. We can’t tell much about what the signal started as, but I doubt it was all brilliant rationality, because most of our really old documents aren’t that rational.
I think we should consider looking at indigenous stories, I’ve heard that a lot of them encode genuinely useful knowledge about ecosystems, this can be a bit hard to discern from the outside (if you don’t live in the old ways in the old ecosystems you wont understand the myths), and colonisation is often so brutal that the connection is lastingly obscured, the ecosystem knowledge is lost and by the time the survivors are ready to return to their roots, the connection is lost, the myths are dead, don’t mean what they used to, don’t serve a purpose in the new world. Some peoples recognise this and try to start remaking their myths (per my recommendation), but it’s hard to tell how the new myths reflect the old ones.
Something I worry about is that a lot of things that qualified as entertainment to the ancients aren’t recognisable as entertainment to me. I could potentially be very confused by that. Was it really funny or insightful given the right cultural background, or were the audience just starved for novelty and willing to accept the bare minimum amount of wit? Was it a tacit metaphor for something or were they just amused by the idea of a literal talking fox?