Speaker: James Carney @James_Carney
Affiliation: Brunel University, London (UK)
Title: Anxiety, Entropy, and Imaginative Culture: Counterfactual Fabulation as Evidence Hallucination
Abstract: Human cultures are unique in their propensity for flooding the world with cheap, counterfactual representations. And yet, it is not clear why this should occur, given that even negligible costs of counterfactual fabulation will, over time, accumulate to the disadvantage of those who produce and consume them. In this talk, I propose to account for this propensity as a form of evidence hallucination. Departing from a discussion on anxiety as an aversive mental state that is occasioned by entropy (i.e. unpredictability), I will explore how cheap counterfactual representations can serve as hallucinated evidence for theories of world––and thereby reduce both collective and individual anxiety. That is, I will argue the predictions of such theories are made true by flooding the world with confirmations of these predictions in the form of styles, artefacts, landscape alterations, fictive experiences, and many other (relatively) cheap cultural forms. Thus, the counterfactual representations encountered in decoration, art, literature, religion, and other non-practical domains become explicable as an anxiety reduction strategy. Using concepts from information theory and thermodynamics, I will then expand these ideas into a wider discussion of the relation between imaginative culture, information, and thermodynamic work. The result will be an account of human counterfactual fabulation that lodges it in a naturalistic framework whilst respecting its autonomy as a cognitive practice. At all points, I will illustrate my claims with examples from across the cultural record.
