I had a weird thought and thought I'd share it. Imagine you were transmigrated to some fictional world with a "logical" power system that's incorporated into the world-building and tried to explain to one of the characters that it's all made up by some random author and you come from a world where it doesn't exist. It doesn't seem weird at first thought, but think about if someone tried to explain that to you. It'd be something like this: "Wait, so your world doesn't have gravity? Does everyone just float around or something?" "No, we stay on the ground, too, we just don't need gravity to make it happen. The author just decided to make up an imaginary power to explain why it happens in your world." "But gravity is one of the four fundamental forces of the Universe! Next, you'll tell me magnets don't exist where you come from!" "Oh yeah, that whole 'four fundamental forces' thing was really good world-building. Cool alliteration, too. Gravity was all about explaining the big world setting with stars and planets and stuff, the strong and weak forces were good for all the small complicated stuff, and Electromagnetism bridged the gap and was great for explaining all the magic tech you guys have." "But all the maths checks out for it to work this way! You can't tell me a fiction writer made a system this convoluted work!" "Eh... But it doesn't really work. The author knew that so he made up some incomprehensible nonsense to fill in the gaps. Haven't you heard of it? It's called quantum." "..." "..." "Wait a sec, did you say you guys don't have stars and planets?!" I can't tell if my rambling makes sense or if it's just nonsense, but that's what I was thinking about.
Lol it would basically be an impossible task, no sane person would believe you no matter how convincing your argument. Meaning anyone who did actually believe is probably someone best given a wide berth. Although I would doubt the whole "I'm inside a fictional world" thing. A fictional world is fictional because it isn't real, if I'm somehow inside such world I'm either dreaming, or it was actually a real world all along.
Or maybe the world you knew was the fictional world and the world you though was a story is the real world.
Congratulations! you've just explained "Techno Babble" form Star Trek! nah, but seriously, it would be such an alien idea that it would feel awkward reading it, there is something called "Common sense" that you have to rely on to explain and extrapolate ideas and concepts from, based on some basic knowledge that culturally everyone has agreed upon, it's memetic in nature and exists intrinsically in language... when they say "write about what you know about" it's precisely because of this concept... this is also the reason why some works can be judged as crass, homophobic, misogynist, disgusting, by current generations, because back then it was the "accepted norm" but NOW we know better. And there is a perfect example for it, Xianxia. The "Xianxia" world as built upon thousands of thousands of literary works on this genre is, quite simply, so alien and foreign to western audiences if you pick a random one without ever reading anything like it before, you basically don't understand almost ANYTHING of how things work in it. But it's based on cultural and historical legends, so EVERYONE has at least heard of the concept and is familiar with it in China. You're putting extremes in your example, but it's almost impossible for something like that to be written because it would be way too outside of "common sense" you don't need to "reinvent the wheel as a square" to make a "unique" setting... and explaining the concept of "levels" in a world where they don't exist isn't such an alien concept, "we don't level up, we just grow stronger, there is no *ding* and no goddess telling us *next level aquired*, and we don't have *gifts* we just created guns... and the steam engine makes all the energy we will ever need" Of course you would need a bit of knowledge to extrapolate on that, but it's not that farfetched because whatever the author wrote needs to be set in rules within common sense since that author is human and can only write what he knows about.
Instead of persuading someone that their world is contrived, wouldn't it be more fruitful to yourself acknowledge that the universe can be an act of divine creation? Not that they are mutually exclusive, but the fact that you'd preach the common knowledge of your previous world, examine everything through its lens and indiscriminately apply it despite living out the proof of the contrary is itself self-defeating.
This is probably true I was thinking less about whether the world is fictional or real and more about a character from a magic world (with magic built into the world) trying to imagine a world without magic and how that would be comparable to us trying to imagine a world without gravity or electricity The fact that it's incomprehensible is kind of the point I was making. It's easy for an author to go forwards and create a fictional universe by adding major things to the world we currently live in, but going backwards and trying to imagine a fictional universe that is just like ours but without things that we consider major to our world is almost incomprehensible. And, therefore, a character from a fictional world trying to imagine our world by going backwards and imagining a world like theirs but without the major things the author added would find it similarly incomprehensible. What I was thinking about in comparison to the fundamental forces of our world was when stories have magic integrated into all their tech and nature. The equivalent conversation would be something like this: "Wait, so your world doesn't have life energy? How are you even alive??" "We're alive, too, we just don't need life energy to make it happen. The author just decided to make up an imaginary power to explain why it happens in your world." "But life energy is one of the five types of magic! Next, you'll tell me magic stones don't exist where you come from!" "Oh yeah, that whole 'five types of magic' thing was really good world-building. Life energy was all about explaining the crazy wildlife and sentient forests and stuff, the internal energy was good to explain how strong you guys are, the holy and fel energies were less about explaining the world and more about creating a conflict and making cool attacks, and arcane energy bridged the gap and was great for explaining all the tech you guys have with magic stones." "But all the arithmancy checks out for it to work this way! You can't tell me a fiction writer made a system this convoluted work!" "Eh... But it doesn't really work. The author knew that so he made up some incomprehensible nonsense to fill in the gaps. Haven't you heard of it? It's called glyphs." "..." "..." "Wait a sec, did you say your forests aren't sentient?!" Things like life energy and magic stones would be so fundamental to their world that trying to imagine a world without them would be like us trying to imagine a world without gravity or electromagnetism.
I was thinking more about attitude and (scientific) temper. The initial disbelief would make sense as would attempts to interpret the otherworld in terms of the original world, but I believe the transmigrator, as one who has lived through both worlds, would have a far easier time accepting the new reality he's been thrust into (not that that necessarily implies the questioning would stop) than the one who has only seen his own world since he (the listener) would have no empirical evidence (especially since our laws wouldn't even work there) or experience to admit to what another random person says. The bigger question would be whether this new world has some rhyme and reason to its workings; I can see the author making random stuff up by taking recourse to general vagueness and theories yet to be unravelled, but I can't imagine a world which won't have some form of logical consistency in its functioning, probably because it is the system I grew up in and I can't think outside its confines as anything beyond a vague idea (note that the otherworlder might be the same in relation to explanation of our science).
You'd be violating the rules of epistemology so the native inhabitants would be right to ignore your arguments. Moreover, it can just as easily be argued that you're wrong. See, the thing is that the quality of worldviews on how the universe works is all about how well they describe natural phenomena. Take the real world for example, you can go about telling modern scientists and philosophers that our universe isn't real, and that it only exists as a dream from Azathoth, and that as soon as he wakes up, our entire reality will be wiped away. How seriously do you think that anyone would take your ravings? In order to have a new worldview replace existing ones, there are two main requirements. The first is evidence - and the wilder the claim, the more evidence is required to support it. The second is that this worldview has to be better at describing things than the pre-existing ones do or else it's useless. For this latter one, we can go back to the Azathoth example. If the universe behaves exactly the same under the current world views as it does under the Azathoth dream hypothesis, then the latter doesn't actually do anything so there's no reason for it to be valid. There might be enough merit in the idea for people to investigate it, but until they find something, it can only be labeled as pseudoscience.
True. With the truth right in front of their eyes, the transmigrator can't exactly deny the reality in front of them. Using the scientific method, they will eventually come to understand the new world they're in (as well as anyone can understand the world they're in, anyway). This will be especially easier for them, considering it's basically just their old world plus new features. For a resident of the new world, it would be much more difficult to accept the reality. First, they'd have to believe the transmigrator is telling the truth when telling them these seemingly outlandish things. Let's say that this is solved by some truth-detecting magic or something. Even then, they would have a harder time accepting the reality than the transmigrator since even comprehending a world without things they believe are fundamental to reality will be difficult - never mind believing it. Of course, if further evidence and time are given, they would also eventually come to accept the reality of the differing worlds. This is true. From the perspective of the people of the fictional world, they have no reason to believe the transmigrator. Even from the perspective of the transmigrator, it might be more rational for them to believe that the whole memory of our world was the result of a bad drug trip or something. I was imagining a scenario with people that trusted each other when I thought this up, though. Like, the transmigrator goes to a fictional world, uses their meta-knowledge to solve some stuff, and makes friends with some of the characters. Then, one of the characters confronts the transmigrator about how they know all this stuff, so the transmigrator decides to come clean and explains their situation. What follows is the equivalent of the conversation I put in the OP. The transmigrator's meta-knowledge provides both evidence and a reason to act with this new worldview in mind.
I don't know when or where I read it but there was a post where people were asked 'various possible theories about earth'( I don't know the exact title but this was the closest I could name it) the answers were "What if earth is a part of some random alien's solar system collection" To which there was a reply "it could also be a science project of an elementary schooler" To which there was a reply," the project would be graded D" My point in writing this is to show that, human imagination is limitless and there are endless possibilities of what is possible and what is impossible, but,until and unless proven, all they'll remain as "A Possibilty". So, I assume, the chances of a native believing a transmigrator is subjective. For me even if someone comes up to me and says this world is fictional, my response would probably be something like" as I already have logical reasons for why and how this world is working, I don't care if this world came into existence because of some author or God or the big bang theory, the point is, it exists and there are some laws which we abide by." This response was considering that I'm part of the mob and this whole believe it or not is about the world setting and not the story that happens between the characters. And as you said, that the character questioned the transmigrator about how they know all this, there's not much choice left for the character is there, the character can check the validity of transmigrator's words by crosschecking the future events with what they said, the character will obviously believe. As for the statement " You can't tell me a fiction writer made a system this convoluted work!", the author definitely didn't make this system work, as many book transmigration stories with system start with the statement "the world evolved itself and whatnot", which means there is a proper and logical evolution system working in that world as well, just different from ours, there is no way I'd believe that there's a whole world functioning on the basis of author's writing. For example, cultivation novels, author wrote that there are 9 levels in cultivation and details about that but they definitely didn't write about how cultivation came into existence, who was the first person to cultivate,how did they determine that there are 9 levels etc., but it is common sense for that world, just like gravity is for us. I didn't realise it got that lengthy because I was writing with my phone instead of laptop. I half heartedly apologise to everyone who took the trouble to read that.
If someone were to say this and tried to convince me that this is in fact a fictional world. I only had one questions for him to verify my doubt. "So, who is the main character of this world?"
If the transmigrator has empirical evidence to prove that he knows things about the world then that would give credence to his claims. However, the world being made up by someone has no explanatory power because it is altogether arbitrary so people taking this up as a new worldview would be worse off than they were before!
I mean, billions of people accept that the world they live in and all its laws were made up by one being. I'm not sure what you're getting at. Something like the conversation you thought of does come up in quite a few transmigration stories though, and it's always been cringey. I always wonder, though, what makes people so confident the world they entered is the same as [insert novel/game/whatever]? Just them being in the setting automatically makes it different. Not because of their actions changing the plot, but just existing as a person makes the world different from what they read about. I can easily imagine some guy going to a xianxia world and throwing himself off a cliff to get some cheat item and then he just breaks his legs and there's no cheat item because the world is only similar to the novel, not the same. It's actually weirder to expect that a world would be the same as any novel, anyway. Authors take "artistic liberties" all the time even in non-fiction works. They change even just small details to make the story more entertaining or easier to read. Even if the author really created the world of the novel, usually there are setting/character notes that never made it into the story and plot points that got changed or removed from the novel because they wouldn't sell well.