I am eager to explore your answer. Why do you think that “stories have the minimum level of internal complexity to explain the complex phenomena we experience”? Is it only because you suppose we internalize phenomena as stories? Do you have any data or studies on that? What’s your understanding of a story? Isn’t a straightforward description not even less complex because you do not need a full-blown plot to depict something like a chair?
I notice that while a lot of the answer is formal and well-grounded, “stories have the minimum level of internal complexity to explain the complex phenomena we experience” is itself a story :)
Personally, I would say that any gear-level model will have gaps in the understanding, and trying to fill these gaps will require extra modeling which also has gaps, and so on forever. My guess is that part of our brain will constantly try to find the answers and fill the holes, like a small child asking “why x? …and why y?”. So if a more practical part of us wants to stop investigating, it plugs the holes with fuzzy stories which sound like understanding.
Obviously, this is also a story, so discount it accordingly...
I notice that while a lot of the answer is formal and well-grounded, “stories have the minimum level of internal complexity to explain the complex phenomena we experience” is itself a story :)
Yep. That’s just how humans think about it: complex phenomena require complex explanations. “Emergence,” as complexity arising from the many simple interactions of many simple components, I think is a pretty recent concept for humanity. People still think intelligent design makes more intuitive sense than evolution, for instance, even though the latter makes astronomically fewer assumptions and should be favored a priori by Occam’s Razor.
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?
I am eager to explore your answer. Why do you think that “stories have the minimum level of internal complexity to explain the complex phenomena we experience”? Is it only because you suppose we internalize phenomena as stories? Do you have any data or studies on that? What’s your understanding of a story? Isn’t a straightforward description not even less complex because you do not need a full-blown plot to depict something like a chair?
I notice that while a lot of the answer is formal and well-grounded, “stories have the minimum level of internal complexity to explain the complex phenomena we experience” is itself a story :) Personally, I would say that any gear-level model will have gaps in the understanding, and trying to fill these gaps will require extra modeling which also has gaps, and so on forever. My guess is that part of our brain will constantly try to find the answers and fill the holes, like a small child asking “why x? …and why y?”. So if a more practical part of us wants to stop investigating, it plugs the holes with fuzzy stories which sound like understanding. Obviously, this is also a story, so discount it accordingly...
Yep. That’s just how humans think about it: complex phenomena require complex explanations. “Emergence,” as complexity arising from the many simple interactions of many simple components, I think is a pretty recent concept for humanity. People still think intelligent design makes more intuitive sense than evolution, for instance, even though the latter makes astronomically fewer assumptions and should be favored a priori by Occam’s Razor.
I don’t have anything to add, but this phenomenon was discussed in greater detail in Explain/Worship/Ignore. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yxvi9RitzZDpqn6Yh/explain-worship-ignore
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?