It’s interesting that you mention apologists; there’s definitely an element of ‘belief’ to all this which as a diehard materialist I was never comfortable with.
Being a "die hard" anything hints at deep belief.
Materialism is an ontological monism (the universe IS material, wholly material, and nothing but material), which requires a firm commitment to the proposition that what cannot be proven empirically need not be proven--this is a commitment to the cognitive fallacy "What you see is all there is." More charitably, it is a leap of faith.
I accept aspects of utilitarianism, but not as a monism (i.e., happiness in various formulations is good, but does not exhaust the good). I also accept materialism, but not as a monism. Strictly speaking, this means I am not a materialist, because materialism is a monism by definition. As the ancient monotheistic Gods have demanded of people, the new God of materialism demands that we shall have no other Gods before It (Checkmate Idealists!).
As far all-in-one Gods go, however, I must admit that Materialism is quite formidable as explanation device of the material world. Of course, I must also admit that Mathematics and Logic are quite formidable as an explanation device for abstractions (and let's not forget that we can't do science--the Holy Church of Materialism--without foundations in mathematics and philosophical commitments).
I would wager that it is not your materialism that holds you back here, but merely your understanding that fiction is a game and that we should not get too carried away with it. Or perhaps, you are one of those people who gets enough of a "fix" in fiction (a complete experience) experienced directly that you don't need fan fics, and conventions, and Silmarillions, and schematics of the Starship Enterprise to enjoy fiction. Now, I personally, will admit to having an occasional fascination with the expanded world or a deep world, but I also recognize that it is a fools errand when pushed too far (like lifting up the frame of the painting in the expectation of exposing a hidden part of reality).
Long story short, I think your aversion may just be a sign of sanity, or at least just a understanding of the contract of fiction.
I guess I don’t fully get why one can’t be invested in something without ascribing a degree of reality to it. But maybe that’s true and one can’t.
Well, we do talk about suspension of disbelief, right? We do get upset when a drama becomes too unrealistic, yes? You do have emotions when watching movies, right? You have cried? You have laughed? You have screamed? You have felt anger, even rage? If so, the question is why we would be so moved by what we know is a lie--moreover, why would we hold fiction's capacity to move us to be a primary metric of quality (e.g., a comedy that makes no one laugh is not much of a comedy).
Take fanfiction (a phenomenon I personally abhor). Of course people invest in the original work and become attached to the characters (hardcore fans even more so), but at the same time, how could one possibly claim an underlying reality to them while changing their behaviour at one’s whim in fanfiction (no matter how canonical that is, it’s the ‘writer’ making all of the decisions on behalf of the characters, adding backstories and hence having non-diegetic control, etc)?
When kids play with action figures from their favorite cartoons and movies, I suppose that they're doing the same thing. When adults do the same thing, I think it similarly suggests that they want another helping, that they want to playful explore an enjoyable place.
My main complaint with fan fiction is simply that so much of it is bad (cringey AF). If you are not an accomplished writer who can write as well and in the style of the person who made the original, you will only produce drivel. It's... ...embarrassing.
And I suspect, in some cases, that some of this stuff hints at mental illness (e.g., those fans who painted themselves blue and reported massive depression after having seen the first
Avatar film, a film which wasn't even that good). If your need for escapism requires an experience machine, a constant connection with another world, then something seems to be going wrong in the world you're in).
It’s this formulation that I personally struggle with:
I don’t know where the certainty that that’s the case comes from.
Well, that's a bit of a rhetorical flourish. I love hyperbole. I do not commit to the proposition that we believe
wholly, but that, in some sense (I do not know precisely what), we must believe. If we cannot, in some way, go through the looking glass, then we will only experience fiction from the outside. But we don't. Our minds have a talent for simulation very little stimulation and we can invest in these stories.
Perhaps this has something to do with our capacity to dream? Or perhaps this is connected to consciousness itself (which is a continuous story told to us in our minds as our brains reduce millions of bits per second down to the narrow bandwidth of consciousness).
To use a slightly extreme example, plenty of people worldwide find meaning and draw references from religious scriptures, even when it comes to the creative process (narratives inspired by all manner of religious writings). When it comes to The Epic of Gilgamesh, is the argument that anyone actually believes there’s an underlying historical reality to it (other than that a King Gilgamesh (probably) existed)?
Sure. Again, rhetorical flourish. However, if you felt moved with by Gilgamesh's loss of his friend Enkidu--it must have seemed real in some way to you. And if you have ever cried during a movie, it must have seemed real enough to move you to tears. There's a paradoxical alchemy in fiction.
The typical response to that is that it’s a kind of psychological reality, but even so, there are plenty of influential mythological narratives that imo have limited psychological verisimilitude, yet humans are still emotionally moved by them.
This is where genre comes in. Genre is a kind of contract. It tells us what to treat as signal and what to treat as noise.
At some level, fiction must drill down to something "real" so as to make us respond. The mirror must reflect something we recognize as "true" in order for us to travel through it.
I have a family friend who explicitly acknowledges that he watches/reads horror/speculative genres to ‘get away from [his] terrible reality’, because surely the happenings in genre fiction are ‘worse’ and his real life feels bearable by comparison. It’s been decades since I first heard this, but it blew my mind as I cannot relate at all, so that does make me wonder if it’s as much of a universal take on the speculative as he seemed to think.
That is one of the traditional answers to the paradox of tragedy. There may be some truth in it.
I have, for example, been an adherent to the roller-coaster theory of horror (a safe simulation of terror which allows us to experience and in some way master our fears). Fiction gives us "safe danger" as does the amusement park ride.
However, I have also known people who have reveled in their own tragedy and horror. Listen to two old people compete verbally in listing their various ailments. Listen to a parent boast of how much harder it was for them, when they were kids. In short, I think that the appeal of tragedy, is that we all like to feel like martyrs and suffering saints--that is, our suffering is proof that we're right and that life is meaningful in some way. It allows us to take the world seriously. Comedy is the enemy of tragedy. It deflates deep meanings and those who tilt at them. It reduces the world to serious accidents (which is quite nice when the world feels too overwhelming and we do not wish to take it so seriously). I think people like the pain, because it is an ennobling pain (without the actual consequence--in the case of fictive tragedy--having had to do anything to earn that ennobling aspect). Like horror, tragedy allows us to have our cake and eat it too. I don't think it is necessarily or predominantly a case of schadenfreude, but "Sainthood on the Cheap."
It’s amusing that ‘real life’ was at the time perceived as ‘perfect tranquility and repose’ or a ‘languid… state of indolence’, but, yeah.)
To the extent that we do not live epic lives, I suppose this is true. Our heroes go on adventures which few of us ever approach (and those who do come back with PTSD and fewer limbs).
Anyway, I feel like one mostly gets adrenalin from tragedies/emotionally taxing genres, and is a rush of adrenalin that disagreeable? I think it can be fun. I don’t know. On the other hand, surely some of us know someone to get upset by horror and get no ‘pleasure’ whatsoever from experiencing ‘disagreeable’ emotions vicariously?
That's true. However, I can imagine a roller-coaster rise that I would NOT ever get on (one that has a substantive threat of death) and games I would never play (Russian Roulette). I think the people who cannot abide horror are more sensitive souls who feel as if they are in the scene more deeply than horror lovers. Horror fans are more like lucid dreamers. As a child, for example, I remember horror movies being quite traumatizing. As an adult, I made an adjustment and learned to enjoy them. As an old man, I am typically disappointed because very few films scare me know (I just see tropes, stock characters, bad plotting, character beats, etc.). I would not wish to revisit the terror of my childhood (the prepubescent child watching slasher movies), however, I do miss the roller coasters of my early adulthood. Now the park appears to me to be filled with kiddie rides.
That level of analysts feels a bit rudimentary, but maybe we just can’t get to the bottom of our response to narratives as a species yet.
Perhaps it's not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be enjoyed? In good fiction we believe what we don't believe.
I will fight Hume’s corner when it comes to most things, but would really love to read something where someone tackles it in appropriate detail, taking into account the contemporary understanding of neuroscience.
Ah, you are a dedicated materialist. Dig deeper into biology and you may only find more correlates. You won't necessarily find meaning there, just descriptions of how various bits are associated with other bits. I am sure that there are truths of psychology to be learned in neuroscience, but it is of no help, for example, in solving the "free will" problem. Everything we needed to know about the brain to recognize the problem philosophers recognized hundreds of years ago. More trivia about how the brain works doesn't bring us any closer to untying the knot of determinism. At most, it is overkill, beating a dead horse named "libertarianism." Beware greedy reductionism, the impulse to explain everything from one level of observation. Someone had to engage in deductive abstraction
a priori, before we could get to the
a posteriori accounts of the neuroscientist. A world may be nothing more than what the materialist promises, but it must be lived and understood as if it were not (as if our abstractions are substantive, as if there is a realm of ideas, as if our choices are free, as if we have self-understanding).