We humans are vulnerable because we take things for real which are not there, now. We are ruled by the storytelling about concepts being NOT PRESENT. This might be very useful for our survival – it may get used or abused. I want to make the case that it is a chance…not just a door for manipulation.
To change a world-view which is based on the evidence of things PRESENT within 35min is not an easy task. To give a hint with an experiment everybody may conduct by themselves is one secret weapon to open a dialogue about that.
“Combining Neuroscience, Philosophy and Linguistics, Herwig makes the case that our making sense of the world is based on storytelling – not on an objective, fully accessible reality. We create our world through the poetic formation of concepts already on the sensory level, and communicate and post-stabilize our experience through the use of metaphors, which we both live by and decide with. This has all kinds of interesting implications. We must re-evaluate the role of imagination and language, and reconsider the meaning of deception – self-deception, habits, social conventions, propaganda, mass manipulation – as “a necessary consequence in a world we make up out of fragmented and incomplete stimuli”. Description of the talk I gave at the ALIBISFORINTERACTION conference held on 22-23 October 2015 in Landskrona, southern Sweden.
You can see the full talk at their website or on youtube:
http://www.alibisforinteraction.se/portfolio-item/herwig-kopp-the-world-really-is-fiction/