The Explanation Generator

I'm cleaning up and reviewing some old directories. Here and there in them I find little essays, and when one seems especially good, I'll repost hit here... This, in an email to a friend talking about myths and their roles in modern life:

Briefly: we have lots of modern myths. We swim in them. Even oral
ones -- see Snopes.com and all of Brunveld's "Urban myths" books.
These are all highly colored, emotional stories that people concoct
and tell each other.

My understanding of current thinking is that the human brain contains
a functional part (not necessarily located in specific anatomy) that
we could call the Explanation Generator.

The EG runs in parallel, examining everything we pay attention to,
trying to generate explanatory accounts for everything
we see. When it succeeds, we feel reassured. When it fails, it
kicks up a fuss and we feel discomfort, unease. We can't help it,
this is basic wiring -- we are literally hooked on explanations, crave them.

The EG isn't scientific, it doesn't work with logical, algorithmic or
structural explanations, it only does narratives. And it has a stock
of standard skeletal templates for these narratives. Most of those would be
learned, but -- if there are templates that emerge from genenome-directed wiring,
those would be the
Jungian "archetypes."

The EG is powerful and demanding. If it needs input, the imagination is only too
ready to help. The sense-interpretation circuits can even be
persuaded to select, distort, and reinterpret in order to shut the
EG up. And memory is a total whore to it.

Everything that happens in the brain after simple awareness, including
the generation of explanations, is
"constructed," filtered and extruded through our vocabulary of language
and cultural gesture. So every account that we come up with is unique
to our individual history and embedding in culture and time.

Explanatory accounts that address common issues, and which satisfy the
EGs of a community of people: these are myths, interpreting the word to
mean "an accepted public explanation for a widely-felt concern."

In this sense we are surrounded by myths, only we don't see them as
such because we call them "explanations." Some of our modern myths
have a sound factual or scientific basis, like modern cosmology or darwinian
accounts of life. The factual basis is valuable, but irrelevant to their function
as myths, which is to satisfy the junkie-craving for explanations
of big issues. (A factual basis is a good reason for choosing one
explanation over another, but doesn't change the reason for craving explanations
in the first place, and doesn't change the EG's fundamentally emotional reasons
for accepting an explanation and being satisfied with it.)

Economic myths: Marxism was a big one. Libertarian free-market
economics is an economic and moral myth that has vast influence in
America today. Each is an explanation of the past that offers
guidance for the future. In the field of religion, the Christian,
Islamic, Judaic, and Buddhist traditions each contain an
internally consistent explanatory narrative that addresses concerns
that trouble many people. (Again, this is not relativism, I do not say
that because they operate as myths they are equally desirable in
an abstract sense. I only say that all exist to fulfill the same
fundamental craving.)

Given the fundamentally organic, species-specific basis for this,
it shouldn't surprise to find common constructions across cultures.
Such commonality only goes to prove and clarify this basic myth-myth, or meta-myth,
that I've just expounded.