2 posts tagged with "Taig Mac Carthy"

Nakamas getting hurt​

Nakamas resisting​

The Bible already did it. Duh.​

You all went to school as a child. All of you. Every day, you woke up, went to school, took clases, played games, dealt with teachers and did a bunch of things. So imagine: I pick one of those days, literally, one of the many days that you went to school. Imagine any particular day in which specific things happened. If I described that day, minute by minute, would it be the best way of describing the truth of going to school? No. It's not. It's just one day. It would be extremely boring. Because most of the day is filled with the teacher talking, you waiting in line, and doing insubstantial things. It would be the best way of describing that day, but it's a poor way to explain the experience of going to school.

But now imagine if you analysed every day that you went to school and you extracted the most important things that happened across all days. You pick the things that had the biggest impact over you. Maybe a day in which you told a girl that you liked her, or the day in which you got caught doing a bad thing, maybe your birthday, or the day when you found a frog. And then we do that with each and every person of this room. We find the things that were important for most of us, across all of the days that we went to school. You all had different childhoods, but there maybe be lots of things that were common and that you remember specially. Maybe playing with snow and throwing snow balls. Maybe playing hide and seek with your best friend.

The realest day​

Now we make up a day in school that includes all those elements. This would be a story about one day in school that didn't really happen, but that includes all the elements that truly represent going to school, for everyone one of us. We make up a day that never happened, in which you found a frog, played hide and seek and told a girl that you liked her.

What I'm saying is that the fictional story is a more truthful representation of the reality of the actual experience of going to school. It's the condensed and distilled story of what constituted going to school every day. You take the essence, you distill it, and create a representation. That's a meta truth.

So, again, what you do is you extract the essence of many truths, and build up a story that carries the maximum exponents of those truths. That's a meta truth. Is the most representative representation.

Is the Straw Hat crew based on a real crew?​

We all know that Luffy and the straw hat pirates are not, technically, factually navigating the sea in a boat, living adventures. But their story is extremely insightful. The story is a carrier of truths, more so than what's happening to any boat that's in the ocean right now. Right? The story of the straw hats carries more insights about how to behave with your friends, how to pursue dreams, how to deal with failure... more so than what is happening in any of the boats that are currently, as we speak, in the ocean.

And it's in this sense that I would argue that the story of the straw hats is very real, it's very truthful - because it contains the most important and impacting elements of our day to day, and presents them in the extreme and most meaningful way possible.

A good way of looking at it is that the stories are erroneous in detail, and right in pattern. So the pattern that they represent is very accurately described in the story. Actually, the pattern is more accurately described in the story than in any actual and specific day. So the story is erroneous in detail, but right in pattern.

The pattern is so abstract, it's so meta, that it goes beyond any instantiation, it's more correct, more useful, more truthful than any particular occurrence of the pattern. And if the pattern is well extracted, it's useful beyond the detail. For instance, even if you grew-up in a place where it never snows, and I tell you how I had fun in a snow ball fight with my best friend, you can still understand how that totally represents the pattern of going to school; you can translate that to the specific details in your instantiation of the pattern.

It's easy to see how meta truths help you solve the problem of how to behave in the world, or what decisions to make in your personal life. Because you need to understand patterns of behaviour. And patters are encoded in stories. So you need to predict what would happen if you do that, or the other, and you can only predict that I've you've observed the pattern. And the pattern is transmitted through the story. And you want the most effective pattern, and that's the one of a meta story.