Since the Corona crisis is far from over, I’m keeping mypromise再用哲学难题来分散你的注意力一个月。这个月，这个谜题有心理学和哲学两个维度。

Here’s a bit of simplified background evolutionary thought that will point the way to the psychological side of the puzzle. It’s no surprise, from an evolutionary standpoint, that humans and other creatures evolved brains with representational capacities: memory, thought, sense perception, etc. Representational capacities allow creatures to form internal models of the world so that they can better keep track of, or figure out, where food is, where predators are, when it gets cold or hot, where one’s shelter is, and so on.

It is also not much of a surprise that humans (and perhapsTimothy Williamson’s cat) have evolvedimaginative capacities: the ability to represent situations that are contrary to how you in fact take them to be. (For those interested: I’ve distinguished different senses of “imagination” in other work, especiallythis piece). Imagining, after all, facilitates planning. And planning can help you shape the future in a way that is advantageous to you.

Of course, there are still numerous questions abouthowthe representational capacities mentioned here managed to emerge from the process of natural selection. But my point is that it’s consonant with the basic logic of selectionthatsuch capacities would be selected for, given the kinds of pressures that organisms on our planet face.

But even though it is no evolutionary surprise that we humans have imagination, one thing we do with our imaginative capacities is indeed surprising: we produce and consume boatloads offiction—stories about events that never happened and never will happen in the real world. Why would creatures that evolved to survive in a harsh reality spend so much time, energy, effort, and (in modern environments) money creating and consuming plays, epics, novels, movies, and even musicals that depict non-real events? Such a predilection appears to be an enormous drain on cognitive and other resources that could be better spent on things that directly contribute to survival and reproduction.

That puzzle, of course, isnot new. But what I want to do here is heighten it by noting an extra layer to the phenomenon:not only do we humans produce and consume fiction, but we alsoargue with one anotherabout what “really” happened in the various fictional worlds with which we become engaged.

这应该更令人困惑——至少在心理上是这样。究竟为什么我们会如此热衷于争论关于那些我们从一开始就不存在的人物和事件的“真相”是什么?“汉·索罗先开枪!”“不，他没有!”“托尼·索普拉诺最后中枪了!”“我们不知道!”为什么我们人类会为我们知道不真实的事情争论这么多?

Consider thisGoodreads threadon the character Emma in Flaubert’sMadame Bovary. What we see in it is a charming set of attempts to make sense of Emma’s behavior, often with conflicting theories, even though that character never existed and even though there can never be a fact of the matter. One person thinks Emma had affairs out of mania induced by bipolar disorder. Others think that she just felt extremely cooped up in her small, French bumpkin town. Another thinks it’s narcissism. And yet another thinks that Emma had been infected by consumerist social values and thus suffered from “shopaholism.” All the arguments for these positions appear to be made in earnest, as if there were a fact of the matter to be gotten at.

What’s so surprising, psychologically speaking, is that people even care to “correct” one another about things they know never happened. So that’s the puzzle I want to focus on. Note, also, that this puzzle doesn’t actually need an evolutionary spin to be interesting: even if selection were neutral as to whether we should care about fiction at all or more particularly in this interpersonal, argumentative way, it would still be puzzling that humans were so constituted as to be inclined to engage in such arguments. After all, we all have pressing needs in the real world. It’s easy to say, “we do it because we enjoy it!” But that just pushes the question back: why is the human psychological apparatus set up in a way that we enjoy this apparently useless activity?

The deeper philosophical aspect to the puzzle is this:

What is it we are even doing当我们互相争论小说中什么是真实的时候?假设你说P在某个小说中为真，而我说非P在那个小说中为真。现在假设你能说服我，所以我现在也相信小说中的P是真的。除了赢得一场微不足道的争论，你真正做到了什么?为什么我们不能满足于一个版本的故事出现在你的脑海里另一个版本的故事出现在我的脑海里?关于真实事件过程的人际说服可以有巨大的实际意义。但对不真实事件的人际说服完成了……什么?

Stay tuned for a solution—an attempted solution—next month!

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