Sorry, I don’t understand what this quote is trying to say. I’ve attempted to parse it and can sort get some sort of thing about not caring what the truth is. If that’s the meaning then it seems to be pretty anti-rationalist. What am I missing?
I found Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces not very convincing. The similarities he sees between folk stories are often rather trivial, I think, and the rubbery nature of human language makes it easy—not even mentioning selection bias.
I wonder what he would think of the possibility of “editing” human nature via technology, and how those changes might negate the usefulness of mythology as a set of teaching memes.
Greg Egan’s short story “The Planck Dive” has an interesting take on that subject. It’s about a mythologist trying to force a description of a post-Singularity scientific expedition into one of the classic mythical narratives.
I guess you could say that. I said “post-Singularity” because all the characters are uploads, but there aren’t any AGIs and human nature isn’t unrecognizably different.
An example of a well-known non-trivial similarity would be the flood-myths that
many cultures have—it seems that least some of those myths are related
somehow—but not in inherited psycho-analytical way (!) that Campbell suspects,
but more likely simply due to copying the stories (e.g. Noah, Gilgamesh).
.
Sorry, I don’t understand what this quote is trying to say. I’ve attempted to parse it and can sort get some sort of thing about not caring what the truth is. If that’s the meaning then it seems to be pretty anti-rationalist. What am I missing?
.
I found Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces not very convincing. The similarities he sees between folk stories are often rather trivial, I think, and the rubbery nature of human language makes it easy—not even mentioning selection bias.
Is The Power of Myth better?
.
Greg Egan’s short story “The Planck Dive” has an interesting take on that subject. It’s about a mythologist trying to force a description of a post-Singularity scientific expedition into one of the classic mythical narratives.
It’s not “post-Singularity”, it’s normal human technology, just more advanced.
I guess you could say that. I said “post-Singularity” because all the characters are uploads, but there aren’t any AGIs and human nature isn’t unrecognizably different.
An example of a well-known non-trivial similarity would be the flood-myths that many cultures have—it seems that least some of those myths are related somehow—but not in inherited psycho-analytical way (!) that Campbell suspects, but more likely simply due to copying the stories (e.g. Noah, Gilgamesh).