Your verbals reminded me of something I’ve been pondering.

As you said, we create narratives of our lives, and of our world around us. I’ve been wondering about the narratives that we inherit from our culture that are popularly accepted without question. For instance, though it is doubtful that most have read the play Oedipus Rex and Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, the flavor of the two are inseparably within our cultural narratives. I doubt that few today can think of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex without thinking of Freud’s interpretation of it, though without a substantive understanding of either, which is to be expected. 

My thought is that Sophocles was likely writing about the theme of fatalism, freedom, and questioning if the prescience of oracles is of an immutable future. I suspect that Sophocles simply needed a heinous crime, and what is worse than patricide and lying with one's own mother. But in our post-Freud cultural narrative the play is about our shared tendencies to commit those same horrid acts, with questions of fatalism no longer considered. So, not only is there today a warped interpretation of the play but also a warped interpretation of human identity, bent to fulfill Freud’s purpose. As a Doors fan since my early teens, I am well guilty of adopting Freud’s reworking of mythology. 

More recently, I think that the film AI I confuses people because of the luggage of misleading metaphors of humans being just complicated robots. I see the film not as questioning any moral duty to robots, as nearly all reviews of the film have claimed, but as being a story about the search for confirmation of God in a silent universe. AI’s God, his adoptive mother, abandoned him in the woods, as we all are, and he spent every day searching for her and for proof of her unconditional love of him. Unfortunately, the film has a botched ending, likely added after Kubrick’s death, where he is returned to his mother and lives happily ever after. It should have ended with him trapped within feet of the Blue Angel for eternity, never getting proof. 

So, in our shortcuts through life we carry these narratives and maybe rarely, if ever, put them to question. 

As is obvious, I am from the humanities, not the sciences, but any thoughts are welcome.

Peter