Crash space

Human cognition is bounded cognition, ecological cognition, only possessing enough exaptive ‘slop’ to mimic general cognition; the modern world as reorganized and represented by science, meanwhile, is drifting ever farther from the meaningful worlds we are adapted to solve. We live in what I call ‘crash space,’ environments where the problem-solving reliability our basic heuristic toolkits can only degrade over time. On my view, fantastic secondary worlds provide readers with faux adaptive problem-ecologies, settings that can be reliably parsed and understood in psychological terms. They provide what I call ‘cheat spaces,’ places where we have learned, over time, to game our cognitive predilections. And in this sense, you can see fantasy fiction as a kind of cultural grave marker, a place to make-believe our dead relatives are alive. It shows what has become of meaning in the world. [ Philosophers who write science fiction or fantasy - part 3: R Scott Bakker, by Helen De Cruz