The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [60]
The chess analogy for the adaptive value of fiction and storytelling richly suggestive. Chess, after all, is not a game that the human mind engages at the level of considering all possible moves for any one situation. That, in fact, is exactly how computers have classically treated chess: they use brute computational force to outcalculate a human opponent, including eliminating huge numbers of moves so bad a human being would never consider them. Chess has an intrinsic teleology not found in a computer’s combinatorial bad-move elimination; the game situation—in order to achieve checkmate. This, in any event, is how human mind engages chess, and it is how the human mind engages strategic teleology of life, except that instead of the single checkmating purpose, in life it must engage an indefinitely large number of purposes.
In the Darwinian scheme, this begins with reproduction and survival, it is therefore not a coincidence that these fundamental imperatives precisely mirror the familiar literary/dramatic themes of sex and death. Around these deep imperatives cluster the main topics of literature oral antecedents. “Life,” as Pinker puts it, “has even more moves chess. People are always, to some extent, in conflict, and their moves countermoves multiply out to an unimaginably vast set of interactions.” remind us of the complexities, he tosses out some possibilities:
Parents, offspring, and siblings, because of their partial gene tic overlap, have both common and competing interests, and any deed that one party directs toward another may be selfless, selfish, or a mixture of the two. When boy meets girl, either both may see the other as a spouse, as a one-night stand, or neither. Spouses may be faithful or adulterous. Friends may be false friends. Allies may assume less than their fair share of the risk, or may defect as the finger of fate turns toward them. Strangers may be competitors or outright enemies.
Warming to the subject, Pinker continues by pushing his hypothesis step too far: “Fictional narratives supply us with a mental cata logue the fatal conundrums we might face someday and the outcomes of strategies we could deploy in them. What are the options if I were suspect that my uncle killed my father, took his position, and married mother? . . . What’s the worst that could happen if I had an affair spice up my boring life as the wife of a country doctor? . . . The answers to be found in any bookstore or video shop.” But the specific fictions mentions do not actually provide their audiences with sets of instructions in the way he seems to suggest here, and his account invites the response of Jerry Fodor, having fun with this passage in a review of How Mind Works: “Or what if it turns out that, having just used the ring continue to be immortal and rule the world? It’s important to think the options betimes, because a thing like that could happen to anyone and you can never have too much insurance.”
The adaptive value of storytelling in the ancestral environment would lie neither in deriving and applying relatively vacuous advisories such as “The early bird gets the worm” nor in specific instructions about avoiding road-rage incidents, lest I kill my father and end up inadvertently marrying my mother. Adaptiveness derives from the capacity human mind to build a store of experience in terms of individual, concrete cases—not just the actual lived and self-described life experiences of an individual but the narratives accumulated in memory that make up storytelling traditions: vivid gossip, mythologies, technical know-how, and moral fables—in