I understand where you are coming from, that brain hack is how we remember cause and effect. It's very much like the use of Jazz Hands to signal to the dullards "now is the moment you're supposed to remember and say 'oh, I liked that'" A narrative story used as a vehicle to convey moral lessons and life guidance is the Jazz Hands of our fragmented and incomplete human instruction manuals.

This sounds like a fully general argument against being alive and having experiences; you could equally well call love a "brain hack". I also care a lot about solving practical problems, but the reason it's important to solve them is because it leads to human flourishing, which includes participating in all these activities you're deriding. Otherwise why are we doing anything at all?

The "story form" is a brain hack, i.e. a way of disseminating "problem X may cause Y and be resolved by Z". Whether that's useful depends entirely on what's being communicated and how.

Art, music, humour, poetry are more basic and the commonality is more or less "I bring you surprising phenomena". If phenomena are surprising to you then your mental model of the world needs improving.

What's Riemann's last theorem?

> No.

What's the purpose of this? You didn't disagree, you just went on a tangent. Is this another "brain hack?" If so, there is something wrong with them. They often make words appear to be something that they are not.

Like a magician would use a thing called "indirection."

Culture and art can teach something to its audience, unlike most of the garbage you likened it to. It's clear you don't hold it in much regard, since you compare it to outright scams (clickbait) and even imply that consuming fiction is basically done for virtue signalling.

But like it or not, humans are not computers. They are animals with messy, complex thinking and reasoning that is impossible to fully describe, and incredibly complex societal systems created from their chaotic interactions. These messy people don't learn from datasheets and reference manuals, even if you'd like it to be otherwise.

Of course, there's a place for non-fiction, I like some of it a lot. But art has subtlety to it - instead of smacking people in the face with data and lists of objective measurements, it can pry into them by using the human ability to imagine themselves in other shoes, experience emotions that aren't results of real life events, and much more. There is a reason why parents teach their children values by reading them fables or educational stories, not the legal code of their jurisdiction. And this is also why fiction actually changes the minds of people reading it, arguably doing it more effectively than nonfiction. Slop (clickbait, average tiktok content, whatever else you're imagining) doesn't make you feel new things or think of something you haven't thought of before, art does.

The aiens are also a bit of a copout. You're just assuming that there's bound to be this perfect species (that are effectively computers) that operate only on mathematics and discrete logic, who are obviously superior to us and can show us our wrong ways. What if computers aren't always superior? Or what if organic life requires some of that messiness you don't like to be viable? What if the aliens had their own weird things we could never relate to?

We already suspect that many non-human animals have a "sense of beauty" and a sense of humor. At least one other species spontaneously dances on the "beat" to music (parrots).

I think alien intelligence would be able to appreciate art and humor, even without necessarily feeling it viscerally, as we do. We know that our particular brands of them rely on highly-developed and specific aspects of our psychology, but at a basic level, they seem to fundamentally be about congruence, incongruence, expectation, and interpretation/perspective. Any embodied intelligence that can observe physical reality is capable of grokking those concepts.

Shit engineers say