Fiction is containerization

Honestly, a version of this bakes down to "fiction is virtualization", which at that point feels like the kind of semi-tautological philosophy wonk that makes me want to roll my eyes a little bit. Nonetheless, it has depth! The point is that fiction is a "functional simulation" – an unreal space in which real work is done, work which can often only be done within the confines of an unreal space.

Really the question therefore ought to be: why? What are unreal spaces good for?

It's a good moment to be uncomfortable with the word "unreal". What makes a claim to reality, in the course of my living and dying? It feels more than anything like a civilizational construct, more to do with what rules apply or what languages we are speaking in – a frame with special social privileges, whose structure encourages reflexivity (the illusion of self-verification). "Reality" is a frame in the memeplex which, if you're not careful constructing it, verifies "reality is true". One false proof: "real and true mean the same thing" "reality is what is real" "reality is what is true" "reality is true". Errors herein are several varieties of "frame escape" – outside the frame F, X R_F Y_F is a claim about how F feels about some fact X¹. However, inside the frame F, it's a "bare" claim about X. Without switching out of F, you can't tell the difference.

"Unreal", on the other hand, is an inversion of the structure: something that deliberately verifies "unreality is false". Great fun! You can think of exactly the kind of people it rubs the wrong way, exactly the kind of situations in which somebody using this frame would piss you off. personally. and that already reveals a couple of things about what the social structure of the "reality" frame is. Some that come up for me:

• it's useless
• it's frivolous
• it has no attachment to what "matters"