I found Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces not very convincing. The similarities he sees between folk stories are often rather trivial, I think, and the rubbery nature of human language makes it easy—not even mentioning selection bias.
I wonder what he would think of the possibility of “editing” human nature via technology, and how those changes might negate the usefulness of mythology as a set of teaching memes.
Greg Egan’s short story “The Planck Dive” has an interesting take on that subject. It’s about a mythologist trying to force a description of a post-Singularity scientific expedition into one of the classic mythical narratives.
I guess you could say that. I said “post-Singularity” because all the characters are uploads, but there aren’t any AGIs and human nature isn’t unrecognizably different.
An example of a well-known non-trivial similarity would be the flood-myths that
many cultures have—it seems that least some of those myths are related
somehow—but not in inherited psycho-analytical way (!) that Campbell suspects,
but more likely simply due to copying the stories (e.g. Noah, Gilgamesh).
.
I found Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces not very convincing. The similarities he sees between folk stories are often rather trivial, I think, and the rubbery nature of human language makes it easy—not even mentioning selection bias.
Is The Power of Myth better?
.
Greg Egan’s short story “The Planck Dive” has an interesting take on that subject. It’s about a mythologist trying to force a description of a post-Singularity scientific expedition into one of the classic mythical narratives.
It’s not “post-Singularity”, it’s normal human technology, just more advanced.
I guess you could say that. I said “post-Singularity” because all the characters are uploads, but there aren’t any AGIs and human nature isn’t unrecognizably different.
An example of a well-known non-trivial similarity would be the flood-myths that many cultures have—it seems that least some of those myths are related somehow—but not in inherited psycho-analytical way (!) that Campbell suspects, but more likely simply due to copying the stories (e.g. Noah, Gilgamesh).