thread: 2011-06-28 : Designing Philosophical Arguments
On 2011-06-28, Ry wrote:
R. Scott Bakker does this with his fiction. He has a knack for transforming a philosophical point into something that can hurt people. Not as a monster, necessarily, but as a fact that monsters can exploit.
So when he wants to talk about how little we can see our own brains at work - how inaccurate our self-judgment is - he invents a neurosurgeon serial killer. The killer provokes the reader / detectives with tapes of the murders where we can see the victims behaving against our assumptions about human nature, but which agree with what we know about the brain.
That connector - the tissue from 'the brain doesn't work the way we casually think it works' to 'serial killer' is the thing between me having, say, 3 insights and writing a game. Or 2 insights and an apocalypse world hack.
