Epistemic status: playing devil's advocate.
I wrote the following a couple of weeks back for a meet-up post, and Gunnar_Zarncke suggested I should turn it into a discussion post:
Fiction is not a lie, but it is a variety of untruth. It absorbs time and energy which could be spent on fact. Although we make a conscious distinction between fictional worlds and reality, we will often use fictional examples when evaluating real-life situations. It has been argued that we should learn to take joy in the world we actually live in. Why should we allow fiction to warp our view of reality?
Perhaps fiction offers a fun, relaxing break. I can understand this claim in two different ways. The first version is that reading fiction gives us a rest from serious thinking, restoring us in some way. So, is this really true? Often when we feel tired of thinking, we're really tired of thinking about some particular thing. We gain new mental energy when we switch to something else. We think this means we're unable to do productive work, and need to take a break; but often, we could continue to be productive on a sufficiently different task, which gave us the same variety as a "break" would. (This is anecdotal. I recall seeing a discussion of this in a lesswrong post, but didn't figure out which one.) Alternatively, if we really are exhausted, reading fiction might not be restoring our energy as much as taking a nap or perhaps meditating. In either case, the pro-fiction argument seems murky. Answering this question is difficult, because it's far from obvious why certain types of thinking seem to take "mental effort" and leave us feeling drained. (It seems it might be a mechanism for sensing high opportunity cost, or it might be due to depleting a physical resource in the brain.)
A second way to interpret this is that consuming fiction is closer to being an end, rather than a means. The joy which fiction creates, or the rich inner experience, may be a good in and of itself. Whether it's useful for restorative purposes or not, it's good that society keeps churning the fiction mill, because it's one of the things which makes lifeworthwhile. Some people will readily agree with this, while others will feel it's very close to advocating wireheading. At a recent LW meetup here in LA, one person argued that if you're going to enjoy living in some universe, it might as well be the real one. I suppose the idea is that we should seek to make the enjoyable aspects of fiction into a reality, rather than exercising shallow escapism. I'm not sure this view can be defended, however. If you've got something like a computational theory of mind, and believe that uploading yourself into a virtual world is OK, how do you draw a firm line between "reality" and "fiction" to say which kinds of experiences are really valuable and in which you're just fooling yourself? Is it a matter of a sufficiently detailed simulation, which includes other conscious beings rather than puppets, and so on?
Maybe...
Robin Hanson discusses the social value of stories: those who read fiction are more empathetic toward others, seemingly fooled by story logic into acting as if good behavior is always rewarded and bad behavior punished. Although clearly valuable, this gives me the uneasy sense that stories are manipulative control directives. I mayenjoy the story, but does that make me comfortable accepting control directives from this particular author? Or should we examine the moral character of the author, before reading?
To make our arguments stick, we've got to compare fiction to relevant alternatives. It seems to me that we can havealmost as much fun reading biographies, memoirs, and (entertainingly written) history as we can reading fiction... and all with the advantage of being real facts about the real world, which seems at least a little useful.
I feel confused, and am likely missing some bad assumption. For the purpose of working through the assumptions, I'll keep arguing the anti-fiction side...
The part of me that feels like doing away with fiction could be a good idea also would be OK with doing away with many of those other things you mentioned. Eating ice cream is bad as a matter of fact (this doesn't seem to require much argument). It's just a superstimulus for "good food", and furthermore, negatively impacts health. Noticing this (consciously noticing it on a repeated basis) can in fact move preferences away from ice cream and toward healthier food, to the point where ice cream doesn't even feel tempting except socially.
(My actual motivational state is not like this, but rather flips back and forth between finding ice cream appealing and not. I have not decided to adjust my emotional state entirely toward the reality, largely because this change in motivational state would have some negative social consequences.)
Trips to beautiful natural sites do seem kind of silly to me. Looking at nice scenery is nice, but on the order of nice things, it seems like something I'm willing to pay significantly less for than what most people are. That's neither here nor there for the debate, though. The part of me that is interested in doing away with fiction says that at least this experience is fact-oriented. There is something valuable about going and seeing real scenery -- historical sites of importance, and things like that -- which is not there when the scenery is entirely simulated. The part of me concerned with wireheading says that this is enough to distinguish between the kind of pleasure produced by visiting real places vs simulating pleasant scenery.
The difference between real and simulated scenery in this respect can easily be blurred. A natural landscape is very different from a landscape specifically optimized by human hands to be pleasant. The part of me concerned with wireheading starts to be concerned about the second. (My actual motivations don't, though -- if things have been arranged in what feels like good taste to me, I enjoy it. Highly optimized landscapes such as malls and theme parks rarely feel like they're in "good taste" however.)
Casual sex isn't desirable to me. The part of me which is concerned with wireheading-like things says that this is because it's not connected to a wider web of meaning. This might be my actual reason. (I prefer a prolonged relationship -- "just sex" sounds like a painful thing emotionally.)
Music is good. The part of me concerned with wireheading says it isn't -- it's just an empty superstimulus.
Overall, I'd say the conclusion of this chain of thought is that to count things as actually-good rather than merely seemingly-good I'd like them to be connected to a wider web of meaning, rather than isolated. "fake" really means "shallow" (surface-level, lacking deeper connections). Taking things out of devil's-advocate mode, this does not seem entirely damning to fiction. It suggests that fiction can in fact be valuable, to the degree that its meaning is interconnected with other things.
It also bears noticing that this argument applies rather heavily to me and my preferences, not necessarily to other people.
So fiction was just an example of a more general proposition: enjoyment is bad. Sensual pleasure of any sort is bad. These things are a snare and a delusion.
What are they a distraction from, that should be pursued instead?