Do you have any idea what archetypal narratives are?

Perhaps a bit harsh, but the character on the receiving end of this tirade had really been asking for it:

They're the product of a few chance attractors in flesher neurophysiology. Whenever a more complex or subtle story was disseminated through an oral culture, it would eventually degenerate into an archetypal narrative. Once writing was invented, they were only ever created deliberately by fleshers who failed to understand what they were. If all of antiquity's greatest statues had been dropped into a glacier, they would have been reduced to a predictable spectrum of spheroidal pebbles by now; that does not make the spheroidal pebble the pinnacle of the artform. What you've created is not only devoid of truth, it's devoid of aesthetic merit.

From: "The Planck Dive" by Greg Egan

Gibberish does not improve the view

I like the way humor makes the point so well.
:-Dan

From: "The Planck Dive" by Greg Egan

Timon regarded her nervously. “Prospero was rambling on about flesher culture as the route to all knowledge.” He morphed into a perfect imitation, and replayed Prospero's voice: “‘The key to astronomy lies in the study of the great Egyptian astrologers, and the heart of mathematics is revealed in the rituals of the Pythagorean mystics … ’”

Gisela put her face in her hands; she would have been hard-pressed not to respond herself. “And you said — ?”

“I told him that if he was ever embodied in a space-suit, floating among the stars, he ought to try sneezing on the face plate to improve the view.”

Reading Greg Egan

This is not the only great passage out of Mr. Egan's collection, just one in keeping with my theme for this blog:

We thought we were passing on everything that mattered to our children; science, history, literature, art. Vast libraries of information lay at their fingertips. But we hadn't fought hard enough to pass on the hardest-won truth of all: Morality comes only from within. Meaning comes only from within. Outside our own skulls, the universe is indifferent.

-- From Greg Egan's short story Silver Fire collected in Luminous

:-Dan

We know that Penn reads Dawkins

I was just noticing the similarities (below), I wonder if the connection is as clear to other people. Since right before this phrase Penn is talking about his family, it might seem like he is evaluating his good genetic health, and that of his children, instead of the improbability of his own existence:

I won the huge genetic lottery

-- Penn Jillette from There Is No God

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

-- Richard Dawkins from Unweaving the Rainbow


:-Dan

I think Penn is more succinct, and Dawkins is more detailed and poetic at the same time. I think both are needed.