Do Mine Eyes Deceive Me?

In the second chapter of Marie-Laure Ryan’s Avatars of Story, one particular quote in the introductory paragraph caught my attention: “…fiction differs from other modes of virtual thinking in that it contemplates the virtual for its own sake, rather than using it as an instrument to shape the real.” This concept of “virtual thinking” is intriguing because it introduces the idea that one has the “ability to detach thought from what exists and to conduct mental experiments about what could be or what could have been” but also because, for me, the terms ‘virtual’ and ‘thinking’ have never been put together and ‘thinking’ has always meant one long, connected and conscious stream: my ‘chain of thought’

The term and the suggestion of ‘virtual thinking’ puts a bit of a twist into my beliefs about thought because it offers a new perspective. Virtual is something in effect, though not in actual fact or name, and there can be no concrete proof of thought, only the written and verbal results of such a process, so all thinking is virtual. Fiction, according to Marie-Laure Ryan, is virtual thinking, because the narrative induces thought about virtual situations. I agree with Ms. Ryan on this point, and especially when she begins to talk about man-made pictures. Pictures, just like written works, can be fictional narratives: objects that tell a story, but are “make-believe” because they go against the natural constructs of the human mind and the world in which those minds live. If we see a picture of Mother Theresa and a picture of Aphrodite, we will believe in Mother Theresa and “make believe” in Aphrodite because, as humans, we know that Mother Theresa was a real woman, and Aphrodite a fictional creation, a myth.

So, I wonder, can there ever be a time when thought is not virtual? Thought could be non-virtual if a person were to think of a concrete object or an event as it actually happened, but even then our minds are not perfect, so our brains fill-in missed information to create a close representation of what the object could be, or interpret the event to what our previous schemas allow us to see. This could create a fictional series of events that we believe to be true. Do we ever think factually, or do our minds cause us to ‘slip up’ every time?