by Kirk Stefanski

Created on: October 30, 2008   Last Updated: December 08, 2009

Which form of literature speaks greater volumes (no pun'"It's easy!" It also depends on the sort of insight you seek. Since the dawn of time literature has taken the form of myth, which was crystalised human insight from experience, perception, and yes...imagination. It has also taken the form of man's best efforts at recorded measurement and procedure, from which actions might be taken, or further research performed.

It's terribly constricting to qualify the counterpoint of fiction as "science" or 'scientific writing'. Historical documents, for example, escape the categorization of "science", but still offer themselves as "fact". Likewise journalistic writing similarly seeks to evince objective truth, as science does. To avoid confusion let us say "fiction", for those documents that depict any event or events which cannot be verified as having occurred in our collective material reality, nor claim to. For the other side- "non-fiction", which refers to documents that claim an objective verifiable account of reality. (Now, at times, the authors of fiction lay it before readers as fact. This is done for various reasons and always at the author's license.)

How would one go about measuring the total net amount of insight or truth in the world? Most scientists, at least the honest ones, would bow and submit to the limits of objective perception. At the quantum level there is all manner of conjecture as to how the truth is behaving. If one were to write in a journal a treatise on neurochemistry, for example, then (assuming they are a competent professional) others would gain insight from the work, which was based, we hope, on careful observation and measurement. In that instance and in that field, the author would have provided insight to his colleagues, and anyone else with an interest into neurochemistry. Now the formulations of mind-alterring drugs can continue, which...absurdly...might diminish the potential for insight from patients who are prescribed those drugs.

And what of our dear doctor's motivations? His or her perceptions? How do you quantify a person's emotions, thoughts, or capacity for cognition? More science right? We hope. Where does the inspiration come from to make the connection that a certain set of molecules may combine in a certain way to give a certain feeling? Anyone can read and absorb factual information and be utterly stumped when confronted with something not previously encountered. That is where true insight rears its head.

People speak often of "flashes" of insight...which arise of seeming spontaneity. Creative fiction is the domain where people can take insight and intuition and present it in a format that is not of the purpose to increase the total amount of quantifiable data in the world. Authors' aims vary as greatly as they themselves number. There's good fiction and bad fiction and no one agrees.

Science tells us that everyone has a heart, yet it is the author of a story who might help us find it. A story may not have ever actually transpired as it was written, but so long as it includes elements familiar to us - people, jobs, opinions, and, yes, fact, it can move us to think differently, or make different choices.

Even some science now tells us that reality exists not as a fixed set of dense, perceptible objects, but a grand matrix of probabilities. If a story sounds as if it could have occurred...perhaps science will someday show that it did.

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