In fact I'm wondering if pegasus was a representation of something well known in the past europe, like thunder, in some other cultures thunder was certainly represented by dragons. Human brain could have developped a language by using fictional animals to describe physical phenomenons, and this language would have been re-interpreted to something else by the immixtion of different cultures. Two snakes wrapped around a tree could have been how people represented double layer structure in a plasma.
Fiction might refer to a reality becoming slightly different each time it passes through the synaptic network of human brain, mostly when parameters are missing for doing the computation. That might be how we come to weird things like dark matter, when ignoring electrical interaction at a galaxy scale well explained by Hannes Alfvén, when he compare a galaxy with homopolar motors.
----- "Bryan Jurish" jurish@uni-potsdam.de a écrit :
moin Patrice,
On 2011-05-23 05:09, Patrice Colet wrote:
We can imagine many different kinds of new animals, some also have
been modelized since a long time through sculptures,
we know that almost all those weird animals are not and have never
been real.
To pick a much-overused example, is the sentence "Pegasus is a flying horse" true or false? Or do we need to ditch the principle of bivalence? What the heck does "Pegasus" refer to anyways? Clearly, we can all parse the sentence and assign it some kind of semantic interpretation, and no one here is claiming to have actually perceived any airborne equines recently, but I think there's more going on here than can be adequately described by "so-and-so-many synapses in these-and-those brains dumped so-and-so-many neurotransmitters of such-and-such a chemical composition into their respective synaptic gaps in response to an influx of such-and-such a mean volume of sodium ions"... to put it bluntly, how `real' is fiction? Maybe that's what you were getting at in the first place; apologies if I'm beating a dead horse, airborne or otherwise ;-)
marmosets, Bryan
-- Bryan Jurish "There is *always* one more bug." jurish@uni-potsdam.de -Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology