“The syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of words. And if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.”
As an extreme proponent of Shamanism, an eminent questioner of the nature of reality and a prolific shroom popper, Terence McKenna notoriously used humanity’s deficient understanding of existence and reality as the foundation for his lectures. His war against ignorance, being on a platform more metaphysical than factual, forms one of the two primary motivations for the pursuit of fictional creation.
Structurally bound life cycles and societal direction, he felt, had impeded the human ability to venture beyond banal modes of perception. We perceive life as it comes to us: through the five basic senses and possible combinations of the same. Fiction, he believed, gives us permission to think beyond the realm of the perceptually obvious. It is the door to a dimension unrestricted by earthly laws, either physical or social, and the fact that human beings are born with the ability to imagine is reason enough for attempting to open such doors, for we would otherwise be wasting a fully-functional segment of the human repertoire. He would compare it to going through life without having a sexual experience; it can theoretically be done, and quite a few in the world do it, but has one really “lived” without it?
The other side of the coin is a more empirical approach to elaborating upon the importance of fiction. A bunch of studies attempted to lay-down a scientific platform for understanding the impact of fiction on our minds and came to some fascinating conclusions. It finds that when coming across words intended to describe perceptual events, the brain experiences impulses similar to those triggered by their corresponding real-life events.
“When subjects looked at the Spanish words for ‘perfume’ and ‘coffee,’ their primary olfactory cortex lit up; when they saw the words that mean ‘chair’ and ‘key,’ this region remained dark.”
“Researchers have discovered that words describing motion also stimulate regions of the brain distinct from language-processing areas.”
The studies also touch upon the benefits of reading on a person’s approach to social settings.
“Fiction is a particularly useful simulation because negotiating the social world effectively is extremely tricky, requiring us to weigh up myriad interacting instances of cause and effect. Just as computer simulations can help us get to grips with complex problems such as flying a plane or forecasting the weather, so novels, stories and dramas can help us understand the complexities of social life.”
Either of the perspectives, much like most disagreeing arguments on abstract topics, cannot and need not be considered “correct”, especially since they arrive at the same lesson: that proper appreciation of fiction is essential to wholesome living, which is a fairly optimistic point to conclude with.
PS: Recommend reading up more about the life and ideas of Terence McKenna. The man was an enigma and has inspired many an influential creator. His podcasts would be a brilliant place to begin.