In which my pants are on fire

[widdertwin]

I watched the movie The Invention of Lying the other night. It was awesome. It takes place in a world more or less like this one, except everyone only speaks the truth and says exactly what's on their mind at any given time, and fiction does not exist. The implications are pretty hilarious, but it's a comedy so I'd hope so. When the protagonist eventually discovers the art of lying, he tries to let a friend in on it. But since the concept of telling anything but the truth is so foreign, he has to explain it as "saying things that aren't".

I was thinking while watching the movie about how inconceivable a world like that would be. A world with no concept of truth and falsehood would probably be condemned never to advance beyond the level of primordial pond scum or dinosaur scat. I don't mean this in the sense of conveying observed facts about reality to one another, as in "it is raining outside" or "I've been doing crunches lately so my abs are tighter than a seven-year-old's ass" (both are delightfully true!). I mean it in the much more fundamental sense of zeroes and ones, ons and offs, and proofs of axioms and whatnot.

The world in the movie had cars, airplanes, computers, and all the technology we enjoy today. If there were no falses and trues, how the hell could people engineer computers or other cognitive systems, dammit?!

More on this later, if I ever feel like organising my thoughts.