By “story,” I mean something like a causal/conceptual map of an event/system/phenomenon, including things like the who, what, when, where, why, and how. At the level of sentences, this would be a map of all the words according to their semantic/syntactic role, like part of speech, with different slots for each role and connections relating them together. At the level of what we would normally call “stories,” such a story map would include slots for things like protagonist, antagonist, quest, conflict, plot points, and archetypes, along with their various interactions.
In the brain, these story maps/graphs could be implemented as regions of the cortex. Just as some cortical regions have retinotopic or somatotopic maps, more abstract regions may contain maps of conceptual space, along with neural connections between subregions that represent causal, structural, semantic, or social relationships between items in the map. Other brain regions may learn how to traverse these maps in systematic ways, giving rise to things like syntax, story structure, and action planning.
I’ve suggested before (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KFbGbTEtHiJnXw5sk/?commentId=PHYKtp7ACkoMf6hLe) that I think these sorts of maps may be key to understanding things like language and consciousness. Stories that can be loaded into and from long-term memory or transferred between minds via language can offer a huge selective advantage, both to individual humans and to groups of humans. I think the recogition, accumulation, and transmission of stories is actually pretty fundamental to how human psychology works.
Thank you for explaining it. I really like this concept for stories because it focuses on the psychological aspect of stories as understanding something which sometimes is missing in literary perspectives. How would you differentiate between a personal understanding of a definition and a story? Would you?
My main approach to stories is to define them more abstractly as a rhetorical device for representing change. This allows me to differentiatie between a story (changes), a description (states) and an argument (logical connections of assertions). I suppose, in your understanding, all of them would be some kind of story? This differentiation could also be helpful in understanding the process of telling a story versus giving a description.
Unfortunately, you did not explain how your answer relates to “stories have the minimum level of internal complexity to explain the complex phenomena we experience”. In your answer you do not compare stories to other ways of encoding information in the brain. Are there any others, in your opinion?
By “story,” I mean something like a causal/conceptual map of an event/system/phenomenon, including things like the who, what, when, where, why, and how. At the level of sentences, this would be a map of all the words according to their semantic/syntactic role, like part of speech, with different slots for each role and connections relating them together. At the level of what we would normally call “stories,” such a story map would include slots for things like protagonist, antagonist, quest, conflict, plot points, and archetypes, along with their various interactions.
In the brain, these story maps/graphs could be implemented as regions of the cortex. Just as some cortical regions have retinotopic or somatotopic maps, more abstract regions may contain maps of conceptual space, along with neural connections between subregions that represent causal, structural, semantic, or social relationships between items in the map. Other brain regions may learn how to traverse these maps in systematic ways, giving rise to things like syntax, story structure, and action planning.
I’ve suggested before (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KFbGbTEtHiJnXw5sk/?commentId=PHYKtp7ACkoMf6hLe) that I think these sorts of maps may be key to understanding things like language and consciousness. Stories that can be loaded into and from long-term memory or transferred between minds via language can offer a huge selective advantage, both to individual humans and to groups of humans. I think the recogition, accumulation, and transmission of stories is actually pretty fundamental to how human psychology works.
Thank you for explaining it. I really like this concept for stories because it focuses on the psychological aspect of stories as understanding something which sometimes is missing in literary perspectives. How would you differentiate between a personal understanding of a definition and a story? Would you?
My main approach to stories is to define them more abstractly as a rhetorical device for representing change. This allows me to differentiatie between a story (changes), a description (states) and an argument (logical connections of assertions). I suppose, in your understanding, all of them would be some kind of story? This differentiation could also be helpful in understanding the process of telling a story versus giving a description.
Unfortunately, you did not explain how your answer relates to “stories have the minimum level of internal complexity to explain the complex phenomena we experience”. In your answer you do not compare stories to other ways of encoding information in the brain. Are there any others, in your opinion?