what purposes do myths serve?

[ZachSylvanus]

I would argue that your definition of myth is extremely overarching, and well beyond what would be considered the normal definition. You seem to be arguing for a subjectivity of reality, which I suppose is fine (though extremely arguable), but is a completely different matter from what myths are.

To have a personal take is to have an opinion; such a matter is definably and demonstrably different from a myth. Again, you aren't arguing myths, you're arguing relativism based upon sensory limitations. Completely different animal.

[Robert Tulip]

I'm sure it's been noted previously in the thread (and I confess I've not read the thread in its entirety), however this is my personal take on myths. I view myths as a pre-scientific explanation of the world as our ancestors saw it.

Hi Zach. Your view is the modern mainstream. I explained some problems with it in my post in this thread dated 20 September. You are assuming a modern theory of progress which is highly contestable, in that the power of science conceals its own lack of meaningful foundations. Kepler complained that the Copernican Revolution away from the flat earth/geocentric theory risked throwing the baby out with the bathwater, in that the "myth" of scientific objectivity lost its connection with the original purpose of myth, which was to explain how human life is intrinsically connected to reality.

From the very beginnings, which would presumably go back to the formation of language and when humanity consisted of isolated tribes of hunter/gatherers, I'm sure we've been trying to make sense of this ball of rock we call home. When life is, as Hobbes put it, "nasty, brutish and short", there isn't a lot of time to devote to formal exploration of the intricacies of our world. Our ancestors were familiar that a few things existed and had power over their environment; humans could effect changes on the environment, plants grew and provided sustenance, and animals had varying qualities.

Your comment illustrates how you are under the sway of a modern myth. Hobbes was wrong, in that many non-Western cultures had highly sophisticated spiritual lives, and were able to meet their material needs fairly easily, so their situation was very far from being nasty and brutish, even if it was often shorter than the lives modern medicine has enabled. Hobbes' ideas, with those of Locke and Hume about property and morality, served the racist interests of European imperialism in justifying the theft of land and destruction of indigenous cultures around the world. These 'Enlightenment' ideas were entirely mythic in function, providing meaningful narrative utility for the dominant politics of the age of colonial expansion. A big part of the power of the modern myth was their specious claim to be objective and rational, as an intrinsic part of a narrative of racial superiority.

I think it's reasonable to say that with a limited toolset and even more limited amount of time in which to postulate on the "deeper meaning" of things, myths originated as a way of explaining why it rained, what happens when people die, and how things appeared to be as they were. Mankind creates objects for use in daily life, so it only stands to reason that something created mankind and all he saw. Fire is useful to people, and helps them survive, so obviously this creator saw fit to grant us fire for our use. The list goes on. The fact that one can draw broad similarities between cultures and their myths indicates that it's a fairly universal method of trying to make sense of what's going on. Of course, as humanity became more sedentary and agriculturally based, the myths developed more complicated overtones and sought to incorporate more things. Groups of individuals likely started to formulate power in their hands as intercessors with gods and goddesses to counteract the growing power of warlike and charismatic men who otherwise accrued followings as chiefs, kings and emperors. As our understanding and the amount of time we could devote to such pursuits increased, the myths become more complicated, and we see the creation of reasons for Earth's history, stories telling us why we should follow the laws (a god made them, and he'll be very unhappy if you don't obey), and other things. Finally, as we progress through the more recent epochs of human history into recorded history, we see a more refined method of investigating the world around us (I'll focus primarily on the West, as it's the culture I'm most familiar with). The Greeks and Romans especially start to develop what we have come to consider Science, although at its start it was tied inextricably with philosophy; even now there's a distinct philosophical method to Science. After the fall of Rome and the regress of human learning, we still see the seeds of science growing in the cultures of religion--almost-scientific explanations for some aspects of nature from Christian monks (clouded as they were by the prevailing culture of Judeo-Christian mythology) and Islamic scholars. So to summarize, in a way myths are the precursors to scientific reasoning. They display a need to explain the human condition and the reason for why things are as they are. Some people have moved along with the progressing of mythology, coming to see it for what it is, others cling to various tenets of a myriad of mythologies, taking solace in the comfort that they provide against what they see as nihilistic and meaningless explanations provided by more modern methods.

Your narrative has a compelling quality in supporting the idea of progress, and can point to modern technology and the explosive growth of scientific knowledge to justify it. I agree that superstition and false belief are serious problems, but we need to be very careful here in demarcating between truth and falsity. My view is that the concept of the supernatural is entirely unhelpful in explaining reality, as modern science has established a basis for everything to be explainable on a natural basis. However, that in no way implies that myth is meaningless; on the contrary, it gives a basis to analyse mythology with new eyes, to find the evolutionary adaptivity within it. The trouble with the myth of progress is that it sits incongruously alongside an equally powerful myth, that of fall and redemption. From Augustine and Calvin, there is a strong popular resonance with the claim that our society is depraved and corrupt, and that the rational vision of the progress myth lacks power to do anything about this problem, because it is partly responsible for it.

I would argue that your definition of myth is extremely overarching, and well beyond what would be considered the normal definition. You seem to be arguing for a subjectivity of reality, which I suppose is fine (though extremely arguable), but is a completely different matter from what myths are. To have a personal take is to have an opinion; such a matter is definably and demonstrably different from a myth. Again, you aren't arguing myths, you're arguing relativism based upon sensory limitations. Completely different animal.

Your comment is in response to Sifusylvain, who suggested that "all that we "think" ... is a result of cognitive filters that are shaped by our memories of experience." You describe such 'subjectivity of reality' as 'extremely arguable'. This is an important debate, because it helps to delimit the meaning of objectivity. In my view your critique rests on an elision (an invalid inference) from scientific knowledge to a scientific narrative of history. The 'pure science' view, from R. Carnap and A.J. Ayer, holds there is no meaning outside science. While 'logical' in a sense, that claim is so arid and inhuman that few now support it explicitly. But once we accept that meaning involves more than the accumulation of facts, we hit subjectivity, the view that meaning must be 'for some one.' Here, with the requirement that all meaning is filtered by human perspective, is where mythic thought seeks to weave facts and values into a seamless whole. Mythological worldviews do not just try to explain objective truth as a sort of proto-science. The motive was rather to build a narrative vision in a context of why the explanation matters for people, to provide a theory of value. Science lacks a theory of value, witnessed in comments such as Weinberg's lament that the more we learn, the more we see the lack of point of the universe. This lament identifies the gaping abyss of meaninglessness into which the myth of human progress is inserted as a stop gap.

[ZachSylvanus]

I think you misunderstand me, and that is no doubt due to poor explanation on my part. I had thought I had made it clear that while science is mostly objective (although not completely, especially given how we learn new things as time goes on, and throw out old models and ideas), it is far from the sole source of meaning. Science provides some form of explication for why things are as they are, however it is up to us to make sense of that and how we deal with it.

I also apologize for ignoring a lot of your point, but I don't really have a solid grounding in philosophy, and honestly your arguments seem to stem mostly from that sort of "we need a higher purpose" argument, that while not supernatural in its claim, seems to rest still on the whole issue of "all is nothing, in the light of science". I think this is, and pardon my language, bullshit.

I think one of the greatest failures of society to date is its inability to cope with the reality of how things seem to be. In that I mean that we are not special (other than being the only sort of truly thinking animal, if you make some allowances for my poor choice of words there), our world is one of billions, if not trillions or more, and our solar system is a pretty middling, every-day one. We do seem to be lucky that the conditions are such that human life was able to evolve, but other organisms around other stars may be thinking they're similarly lucky that their (vastly different) conditions are also sufficient for them to have evolved.

So in short, while some of us have managed to move beyond this coddling need to explain the human condition in light of meaning, most of us have not. It's a hard jump, I think, to move from a sort of religious background of "we have meaning because we were put here for a purpose" and embrace the sort of idea that life holds only the meaning that you give it, and that we don't need some sort of higher purpose that sets us apart from the other animals to enjoy and lead enriching lives.

And I would agree that this ends up being subjective, but again, that wasn't my point with SifuSylvain. My point was that a line has to be drawn somewhere, else we have a slippery slope where we run into the conclusion that we cannot make any statements about reality, because at the heart of it all, everything is interpreted through our feeble sensory and mental systems. It seems that extrapolating myth beyond the classical definition I outlined above, while perhaps simplistic, avoids this trap of semantics and post-modernist hogwash.

But also as I said, I have no background in Philosophy, and so perhaps I'm in over my head in this discussion. I certainly know that I'm not quite sure how to respond fully to your post, and it definitely reflects a deficiency in my background.

[Interbane]

Tulip: "Here, with the requirement that all meaning is filtered by human perspective, is where mythic thought seeks to weave facts and values into a seamless whole. Mythological worldviews do not just try to explain objective truth as a sort of proto-science. The motive was rather to build a narrative vision in a context of why the explanation matters for people, to provide a theory of value."

The values you speak of are nothing more than a markup language between reality and my brain, so that I may coexist with others and help myself survive. Without sentient beings, there would be no values.

Is science all that's required to explain reality to artificial intelligence? I think so. Does AI need values if they lack the mental structure to use those to navigate reality? I don't think so. Perhaps if they were to coexist with humans, we would like them "programmed" with values so that we aren't endangered by them. The equivalent to our values would be the programming of a robot to recognize and not interfere or damage other robots.

Being part of the world, our behavior impacts our world, thus making it objective. Our behavior is influenced by our values. This should be explored scientifically, and not through myth. There are evolutionary reasons we act the way we do, and those are being uncovered by science all the time. There are also areas of science that uncovers social phenomenon from our history. What may seem like ideas born from nowhere or patterns with no explanation are actually able to be examined empirically.

[Ashleigh]

I'm going to play Devil's Advocate here and say that even some of the events in religious texts are myths [I do however, believe that it is possible that there are miracles and maybe some of these things happened, but also think that maybe there can be historical or scientific explanations like for the historic aspects of such texts - another discussion though].

In our lives we are bombarded by myth. Think about it. Our movies, television shows, books, all have mythic elements. For example, Harry Potter could be the story of the Hero With A Thousand Faces, or Odysseus, facing battles and obstacles.

Dickon in the Secret Garden is a manifestation of the youthful version of Pan, God of Nature.

These also come under archetypes - that of the Hero or Helper but I won't go into archetypes here.

Myths permeate everything. They can still be seen as a way of explaining things even in today's scientific world for those who do not subscribe to the Big Bang Theory. We have myths about little green men that we want to prove. But once a myth is proven fact, it is fact, and no longer myth and we need to search for more myths.

We always need some kind of mythic belief to sustain us. Santa Claus, The Easter Bunny, or the myths of the Ancients retold in modern settings. To believe in a myth is to have some kind of light at the end of the tunnel, like the myth or belief or an afterlife. This is what religion can give us, and what science cannot.

[ZachSylvanus]

Do we really need some sort of mythic belief to sustain us? Why rely on crutches to walk, when we have perfectly good and un-damaged legs?

The fact that religion offers us lies and false comforts, simply because they make us feel better, isn't really a great endorsement.

[Ashleigh]

Well, why not? Once everything is proven by whatever technology proves it, what is there to believe in then? One day we'll prove Atlantis, God, everything that needs belief will somehow have proof of existence or non-existence [not just somebody saying it exists/doesn't exist because I say so - somebody saying that because SCIENCE has proven it to be so]. What do we have when all there is is fact and no belief? Do we not as humans need to believe something, even if its just a myth, to be human? Science is science, its technology, one day it will be all we have and belief will be nothing.

[ZachSylvanus]

Again, why do we need to "believe" in anything other than the joy we bring to our friends and family, and the joy we derive from them?

[Ashleigh]

Because that mightn't be enough for some people. There might be sections of society who need to believe in something more to feel like the world is complete. They might feel abandoned or something, or need more than just joy and love to believe in, like people who have experienced abuse for instance. There could be any amount of reasons as to why somebody needs more than just joy to believe in,

[ZachSylvanus]

I guess I just don't understand the appeal of wrapping yourself up in a lie to feel comfortable.

I mean, on one level, we all lie to ourselves. But compared to what religion has on offer, those are pretty damned small lies.