The Train is Coming for Us: The crushing power of fiction

The above image was AI-generated using Microsoft Copilot.

In the early days of cinema, rumor has it that some viewers were so captivated by the realism of the moving picture that they ran away from a train on the screen. This happened in 1896, during the screening of Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, made by the Lumiere brothers. Whether it is a real story or not, we find their reaction hilarious. How could they mistake a grainy film for a genuine locomotive?! Imagine what would happen if they could travel in time and watch a high-quality movie now. They might faint. But why aren’t we scared like them? Are we now experts at telling reality from fiction?

When Enter the Dragon, Bruce Lee’s influential movie, entered the film industry in 1973, it faced bans in numerous countries. The concern was plausible: viewers might mistake the staged artful martial fights for real violence. Fast forward half a century and we’re now so accustomed to staged violence that Enter the Dragon looks benign. Is it a positive change, showing our expertise in distinguishing fiction from reality, or a negative one, showing our bewilderment?

Many of us have noticed the confusion of older generations when encountering bizarre content on social media. It is a matter of expertise. The older generations aren’t familiar with the implicit norms of these platforms, making it difficult for them to spot the fake. Ironically, the tables have turned and now it’s the younger generation’s responsibility to guide and protect the older one. Take, for instance, the recent surge in casual documentary-style street interviews. The video makers record real-life encounters and conversations with ordinary strangers on the streets. They pose intimate questions or orchestrate adventurous phone calls, like asking someone to call their partner and confess a betrayal or pretend they want to dump them! These videos look realistic. But are they? Should we take them as genuine images of social life or do we need some expertise to separate fiction from reality? Moreover, is it enough to separate fiction from reality or should we also be aware of something else?

New skills are born with every new tool, and some old skills are atrophied. Even using a mundane tool like a mirror needs expertise. For example, adults know tacitly that images are not behind the mirror. But small kids would go behind the mirror to see what is there! Adults know implicitly that the left and right are reversed, hence they use it effectively for shaving or make-up. However, despite our expertise, sometimes we need help. For instance, we should be reminded that the curvature of the mirror distorts the size and distance, hence the warning on the convex wing mirrors: “Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.” If such a simple tool as a wing mirror needs warning, what about other more complex ones? What about films? Do we need warnings when watching videos? Let us examine a case.

An Iranian young couple, already established themselves as social media influencers, plan to escape Iran. Aiming for the United States, they choose a dangerous illegal route. They start from Brazil, going through many countries in South America, all the way to the US border. They record and publish their adventure in a series of professionally edited short videos (vlogs) including their traverse through the notorious and hazardous Darién Gap. The story is mostly narrated verbally by the protagonists, interspersed with occasional real-time recordings of the unfolding events. While a critical viewer might raise doubts, their adventure looks convincingly real. The question arises: “Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?” While some may insist on parsing reality from fiction, others may simply shrug and say “Does it really matter?”

On the one hand, for an underprivileged person seeking refuge, these vlogs might be inspirational. It can be a matter of life and death. For them, the stakes are high. On the other hand, for a casual viewer in search of entertainment and stimulation, these videos don’t hold much weight. They are on par with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and we know that any reader obsessed with the reality or truth of events in a novel misses the point of fiction.

However, fiction is not always “mere fiction” and powerless. It is not only their “reality” or “truth” that should be our concern but also their potential and power. Fictions have different functions and affect people in various ways, even though they lack truth or reality—or, as some fictionalists might argue, they are powerful because they lack truth or reality.

At the time of writing this post, the above-mentioned couple are in the US, if you’re curious about their fate. While awaiting the resolution of their immigration case, they’ve introduced a new twist to their narrative: they have claimed through a sensational video that the young woman has been diagnosed with cancer. After a perilous journey, now they are facing a new insurmountable obstacle on their road to a happy life. Is it a genuine case of cancer or merely another storyline in their scripted saga? Having traversed multiple national borders, they seem also skillful in crisscrossing the borders between reality and fiction. What should viewers do? Take their claims at face value or approach them with skepticism? Again, some might simply shrug and suggest we do not have any direct access to a neutral reality. Shakespeare hinted in the 17^th century that the real world is already a stage. As Khayyam said in the 11^th century and FitzGerald translated him in the 19^th century:

“For in and out, above, about, below,

It is nothing but a Magic Shadow-show,

Played in a Box whose Candle is the Sun,

Round which we Phantom Figures come and go.”

Throughout history, many have perceived the real world as a form of fiction—even before the invention of modern photography capable of creating lifelike fictional worlds. Humans have always had tools for constructing fictional realms and telling compelling stories, albeit primitive ones. These narratives were so captivating that people often wondered if the “real” world was just another fiction. With the advent of new technologies and sophisticated techniques, this feeling gains more momentum each year.

Seeing the real world as fiction is not just an entertaining philosophical thought; it has significant consequences and can change how we live our lives. A notable example is the bewilderment of the boy in Anatomy of a Fall. (Spoiler Alert!) Involved in the legal case of his father’s death, he must testify in court. The case hinges on whether it was a homicide or a suicide. In the end, after struggling for many days with the predicament, the boy recounts a detailed, memorable conversation with his father about life and death, which is so compelling that it resolves the legal case against his mother, the main suspect. Everything seems resolved, but we are left wondering, “The story told by the boy was the truth or just an instrumental fantasy to save his mother?”

The upshot is that fiction, irrespective of its “reality” or “truth,” has power. The important distinction here is not “reality versus fictionality” but the “potency versus impotency.” Fictions can cause things to happen. They have causal powers.

There is an anecdote about Thomas Aquinas. He enters a room where his friends are curiously looking through the window. The young Thomas asks, “What are you looking at?” They answer with excitement “A flying pig.” Thomas rushes to watch. Friends burst into laughter. Realizing the prank, Aquinas says, “I’d rather believe in flying pigs than in lying friends.”

This anecdote can be interpreted in different ways. On the one hand, with a healthy sense of humor, Thomas could join his friends in laughter, instead of patronizing them. He has missed the point of playful friendship. On the other hand, one might claim that he has seized the opportunity to eternalize a deep insight: pranks are enjoyable but can easily get out of control. The moral: it is not confabulation as such that is harmful, but deceptive manipulation. In other words, truth and lies both are powerful. Another fable might make this point more clear.

A horseman encounters a stranger who is walking. The rider, out of kindness, offers the walker a ride. After riding together for a while, the stranger betrays the horseman by pushing him off the horse and attempting to steal it. As the thief rides away, the horseman calls out and begs him not to tell anyone about what happened. The thief, puzzled, asks why. The horseman explains that if people hear about such betrayals, they might become less inclined to help others in need, diminishing trust in society. Here again, we have the difference between “telling the truth” and “causing something to happen.”

The moral of these fables is that we should not focus only on the truth or reality. Sometimes simple fiction is powerful enough to be detrimental—in the case of Thomas and his friends—and sometimes the truth is destructive—in the case of the horseman and the thief. Moreover, sometimes the truth is powerless, like the allegory of the boy who cried wolf. He lost his power to mobilize his people, even though he was telling the truth at the end of the fable. Fictions can do things that cannot be undone. We cannot simply come out of the theater and go back to our “real” life. So, what is at stake is not always the truth as such, but what can be done.

Imagine the crowd in 1896, watching a black and white train on the screen. Which group had a better grasp of what was happening—the calm spectators sitting in their seats, trusting the filmmakers and enjoying the scene, or those running away in fear? What about us today, as the train becomes more realistic year after year? If we see a very realistic 3D train coming toward us, should we remain calm or get worried? What if the cinema is shrunk into our headsets? Is it enough to say, “Don’t worry! These are mere fictional trains”? Is “reality versus fiction” the only important concern here?

Sifting reality from fiction has an ancient history in many cultures. Here is a brief historical sketch. The allegory of Plato’s cave has inspired many to distinguish between the transient world of appearance and the real world of ideas, so philosophers are encouraged to abandon the play of shadows in search of reality. In the modern age, Descartes—after failing to prove the external reality—saved himself from deception by appealing to a trustworthy God. Hume remained skeptical of any solution. Kant’s Copernican Revolution grounded reality not in the external world but in the workings of the human mind. In other words, he perceived reality as “constructed” by humans not “merely found.”

This radical move opened the space for various kinds of “constructivism” or “constructionism.” If the human mind is constitutive of the construction of reality, then the boundary between constructed fictional worlds and the real one would get blurred. This idea has been developed throughout the years and has led to the notorious intellectual “wars” between defenders and deniers of the truth at the end of the 20^th century—see for example Science Wars. Defenders of the truth have a plausible concern: blurring the boundary would harm the truth. If we lose the firm ground of reality, then anything goes. It is a justified worry but we should also have another concern: drawing a sharp line between reality and fiction can also be detrimental in another way. It can blind us to the power of fiction. If we encounter a fictional world with causal powers, independent of our minds, pushing and pulling us in different directions, is it plausible to feel safe just because it is mere fiction lacking any reality or truth?

To have a safe encounter with a train, it is not enough to know that it is fictional. What is at stake is not the reality of the train, whatever it means, but its power. For a train on the screen to be dangerous, it doesn’t need to be “real” in the narrow meaning of the term. Fictional trains are sometimes more powerful and more dangerous than the real ones.

The boy who cried wolf mobilized his community by constructing a very primitive “virtual reality” just by shouting simple words, “Wolf! Wolf!” Ironically, he was blind to the power of his self-made fiction, or the reality of the virtual. Our situation is not dissimilar to the boy who cried wolf. We build fictional worlds easily, now with our AI accomplices, and share them on the internet on a gigantic scale. We are in danger of being blind to the power of these fictional worlds.

Of course, any experienced user nowadays is more or less aware of the “fictionality” of these worlds. We can even go further and label these allegedly “fake” stories to make it clear that they are fictional. However, fictionality is not synonymous with being harmless, and this is a subtle point that is easily forgotten. Fictions do things that cannot simply disappear by acknowledging that they are fiction. We cannot simply turn off our virtual headsets and return to the objectivity of “the view from nowhere” in our real lives. We are living in a Cambrian explosion of fictional viewpoints. Our current situation is more like experiencing everything everywhere all at once. But, even though we cannot get rid of fictions, we still do have some leeway in choosing which fictional worlds we want to live in.

If we appreciate the power of fictions, then running away from a fictional train does not seem hilarious. In some cases, it might be the most reasonable reaction.

Sadegh Mirzaee

Sadegh Mirzaee is a PhD candidate studying the philosophy of science and technology in the Institute for Philosophy at TU Darmstadt. His research focuses on the concepts of model and modeling, encompassing model-based reasoning in cognitive science and the emerging field of model-based science. He is particularly interested in the continuity between everyday life and scientific reasoning, and the role of informal elements in human cognition, such as models, artifacts, analogies, metaphors, and fiction.