Is it possible that within the grand, over-arching narrative-fabula, Nirn is itself fundamentally a story, a myth, fiction. Stories constitute the physis, the apeiron, the essence of the TES universe. This is why myths and stories have so much power there. Rewrite the stories and you rewrite the cosmos. The extent to which anyone or thing is aware of this is up for debate. According to ol' MK:

Yadda yadda yadda...
Don't mess up your head with that mumbo-jumbo...
A wise man once said, and I quote:

doh

Hey, I'm only in my early 20s. And as for your quote, as the great Super Kami Guru once said

Yes of course it's a story. The purpose of this section of the forums is to discuss that story... Was anyone confused about that?

Ah, miscommunication. My intention is to argue that there is a sort of cosmic story-within-a-story scheme at work in TES. Essentially, within the game's universe there is no real metaphysical distinction between fiction and non-fiction. Tamriel is at story, through and through.

Nah I'm just messing with ya. Couldn't resist.

Here's my apology:
Picture a lonely child stuck in a big scary void telling itself stories and inventing imaginary friends to stave of the shear horror of it all. Messing with the stories is messing with the child because they're all it has.
Or if you prefer: picture a (post)modern man trying to find meaning in a meaningless existens because the alternative is unbearable.
Each and everyone of us is a self-crafted universe of assertion running from a denial that would shatter and leave us naked before the alien horror that is reality. That's why stories have power (how much power is a matter of which side of the fourth wall your standing on). They're the metaphysical fire that keeps the cold out just a little longer.

Just me musing over the quote you provided.

Following those musings the difference between story and story-teller become negligible, neither can be without the other.

Why would you be in the lore section at all if your gonna make posts like this?

And OT:If i'm understanding this right, you think that Nirn and all of it's history and people are just the product of someone's (the god-head) imagination and are not real at all? It's possible I suppose, but I hope it's not the case

Being the product of the imagination doesn't make it any less real. Are you familiar with solipsism?

I thought "cogito ergo sum" as I read the thread but it deserves more attention

But he's also a crazy despot who would be willing to horribly abuse god-like power to get a small boy a plasma screen TV. So take of that what you will.

And yes, it is a universe where story is fact literally, unlike here where stories make facts.

Screw Solipsism, this is better: http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html

Ha, I've seen that before. Love it. Beautiful logic.

a: You seem to be in the wrong corner of the Internet it seems then.

b: Michael Kirkbride, in my opinion is one of the best writers of this age. The fact you show such hostility to imagination frankly shows ignorance.

No kidding. Who could seriously think that creativity with such depth and brilliance is "mumbo jumbo that will mess up your head"?

Not in the slightest. Would you explain?

Solipism is the philosophical idea that you are the only person in the universe, everything else is a figment of your imagination. The world is comprised of one mind: you, and "the real" is just whatever you perceive.

I think what he meant to suggest was Idealism, which is the philosophical school that says the world is entirely made up of ideas, not physical things. So anything perceived by any mind is what is real. Of course any idealist system, along with any dualist one (a system that says there are minds and also bodies, two types of things) is likely to logically end up as Solipsism, as you can never prove anyone other than you exists, due to basing everything on "I think, therefore I am".

Idealism is a sort of nonsense philosophy, in that there's absolutely no distinction to be made between an idealistic world and a non-idealistic world. They're functionally the same, and indistinguishable. As such, Idealism is meaningless and irrelevant.
So is solipsism, for that matter...

Anyways, both idea are getting to the point of my post to Bazz22. Whether a thing is just a dream or has objective reality (whatever THAT is) doesn't matter. Each one is just as real to the observer, and nothing can be proved either way from the observer's point of view (which is an inescapable one).
An imagined perception is ultimately indistinguishable from a non-imagined one; they're equivalent and equally "real".

By the way, I don't personally subscribe to Descartian solipsism. Besides the obvious ambiguity of "I" in his famous phrase, I think he takes the fallibility of the senses too far.
For them to be fallible and inaccurate, there must be some objective accurate reality to measure them against. And how can you ever know such a thing? So it's just as reasonable to assume that your perceptions are perfectly fine.

Philosophers have been debating whether sensory data is reliable since the pre-socratics. I have a sneaking suspicion that it won't be solved in this thread. A good way to think about it in the context of this discussion is take Conan, then go one step farther. In Conan, the character says that if the world is simply some massive illusion, then he/you/whoever is no more or less an illusion and therefore it is real enough to you. So moving it over to TES, the world is in the mind of a sleeping god. So if you go only with the Conan words, you go zero-sum and fail. If you go with the spirit of the words, "illusion or not I'm me anyway" then you "win," for lack of a better word.

So, see, dream or not, it exists to people inside it. If we were to assume the world is illusory, but rubbed our hands against a stone, we would feel the roughness or smoothness, the coldness or warmth, etc. If a guard was to lean against the walls of the Imperial City, he would feel the texture of the wall on his back and shoulder, or the pressure of his armor being pushed against him by the counter-pressure of his own weight. World's real enough to the character.

Oh, no, it's real. As others have posted quite eloquently, sensations are epistemologically (method-of-learning-ology, just in case that word is unfamiliar) valid measures of the world. All phenomena are real, if only as experiential mirages and reflections, that is to say, if you think you saw a ghost, the sensation was real even if the spook wasn't.

Now really, what I'm trying to say is that the TES universe is metaphysically meta-referential, its godhead (a deceptive term for our purposes, since it doesn't necessarily refer to deities and has nothing to do with physical heads. When I use it, and I'm pretty sure that when MK uses it, godhead refers to the preeminent reality, the sum total of the cosmos) is somehow aware that its the back-story for a computer RPG, and is thus a half-formed, schizophrenic, ball o' plot threads lacking true parents (for the devs are legion). Metaphysically, the TES godhead is meta-narrative. This, I feel, is ultimately why Lorkhan be mantled, Cyrodiil made temperate, and dragons can break. Telling different stories on Nirn doesn't just change people's minds, it changes the mind (by which I mean, of course, the neoplatonic Nous)

Hmm, well, yes, but that doesn't mean you have to get all postmodern about it. The Earth Bones are still there, at least implicitly, all the time- if Nirn cannot be formed into a single comprehensible _fabula_, this may merely be evidence of an abundance of empical facta- of the strength of its (un)-reality, raw and untold, yet to be domesticated by quills. The sload are still out there, plotting, regardless of whether you can make it mean anything, and they still grow saltrice in Gnisis, because they need to eat.

In other words, TES are quite capable of telling lies and not believing them- the resulting, naturalistic ambiguity actually makes the world stronger. There is a spiny reality under Nirn, an infra-narrative, evidenced by the blood on my blade, itself under the mythoi, themselves under the intent of the maker-meta-hydra. The angels of these levels are not really Neoplatonic, because they had that legion of masters with competing visions, and they got out of control and went backwards. Then the Heroes came, selfish and vigourous like young gods, and killed those wan aedra/angels, and the corpses became the Earth Bones. This is why we love Lorkhan.

Nirn is and is not Barthesian. Consider: I killed Dagoth Ur by my own hand; no-one can take that away. But meta-narrative means nothing to his corpse, to the factum (that's Latin for 'deed'- it's a triple-meaning). When a Hero cuts off the Godhead, it becomes irredeemably and gloriously physical, and you will never have it back. We can't just go back and rewrite the world by changing the script, because it has been murdered and turned into the evidence of our agency and our failure, fertiliser for something much more wholesome.

[edited for capitalisation]

Thats going a bit far, isn't it? An idealistic world is vastly different to the one we find ourselves in, as is a solipsistic one. If a tree falls in the wood and no-one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? For Berkeley the question is not "yes" or "no", its a meaningless question, as no such event could possibly occur (it would have to be perceived by God). If you do employ the sort of omnipresent creator that Berkeley does things do start to appear much like physical reality, but that is not a necessary component of idealism. Solipsism is even more wildly different: in a solipsistic world, there is no reason to ever give money to charity, it would literally be throwing money away, unless you were there to perceive the results.

Talk of "function" only really makes sense here in the dualistic sense: i.e function of generating certain sense data patterns. In reality, the function of moving a physical object is very different from the function of moving an imagined one. They may be indistinguishable, yes, but they are very different actions, one governed by physical laws, the other..imagined laws? What is to stop someone with a powerful enough will moving the world by thought alone, in an idealistic universe?

Which brings us back to The Elder Scrolls. I suppose the OP is right, The Elder Scrolls universe really is an idealistic one, in that it is imagined. The games provide signs from which we extrapolate a fantasy world. What does it mean for Vivec to have CHIM? It means that Todd Howard let the writers run wild, allowing people like MK to shape Morrowind according to how it would best fit Vivec; I guess that's what he meant when he called Vivec the most realised character in gaming history.

Edit: see M'aiq's excellent post here for further details http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1159627-what-is-chim-when-is-it-mentioned/page__view__findpost__p__17449170

Not to jump off-topic, but is this a quote of some sort (MK maybe?) or am I just experiencing a bewilderingly irrational sense of deja vu?

It's not a quote, as far as I know. Perhaps its infectious. I started off trying to write something utterly transparent, but the complexity of what I was trying to evoke twisted it into some kind of exegesis. Whatever dubious value it has is entirely my own, I think.