On Narrative

Comment/ Philosophy

Yesterday I spoke with a woman called Yeliz. Yeliz means ‘footprint of the wind’ - a perfect fit for an elegant, ethereal character. She offered, smilingly, a superstitious half-belief - that names determine character. I’ve been thinking about this, about how this could be true.

Obviously it’s not the case that if you name your child ‘Frederick Very Successful’, they will go on to make lots of money. You wouldn’t invest in Frederick based on his name. The world-out-there is not narratively structured in this way. The world-out-there is what exists outside of our field of perception, beyond what we can be aware of. It’s everything that there is, and everything that there could be - possibilities, probabilities, people, stuff. It’s huge, and it’s really not obeying narrative conventions. Karma isn’t real, there’s not some grand narrative arc, there are some happy endings and others that are not. People are people - not heroes or villains. Sorry.

But there is a sense in which the idea - that names determine character - could be true, if we think about the world-to-me. This is the world as I can know it. There’s the things that I can perceive around me. There’s the things that I can remember, that exist in my memory. There are the things that I can imagine, and the things that I can infer exist from data or predictions. Basically there’s an enormous quantity of stuff (the world-out-there) and then the tiny tiny piece I have access to - the spotlight we cast as we move through the world, a little bit that we light up and become aware of, this world-to-me.

And in the world-to-me, there is a much higher density of Frederick Very Successful or similar - because we remember them. The wealthiest man in the world being called (Dollar) Bill Gates is memorable. As is the speediest being ‘Usain Bolt’; the inventor of the toilet being Thomas Crapper; an Oxford high achiever named ‘Champion’; Yeliz herself - I’m sure you have your own examples (more of mine here). So whilst you couldn’t bet that Frederick Very Successful would make loads of money, you could bet that the world-to-you, your world-to-me, will be populated by a disproportionate number of Frederick Very Successfuls.

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We are a story-telling, meaning-searching animal - ‘the species that looks at the stars and sees Orion the hunter’. It’s why we see a man in the moon, life in a tarot deck, Jesus in a piece of toast. (If you want to see this pareidolia, or search for meaning, take a look at Calder’s Work In Progress, and watch your brain.) Toddlers follow along a narrative at 18 months. Narrative seems to be an intrinsic feature of how we think and the way we process the world. We dream in intense narratives, plots and characters emerge as our brain works to reconnect the episodic fragments of the world around us.

I’ve just finished ‘The Storytelling Animal’ by Jonathan Gottschall, which describes us as ‘homo fictus’, noting how how we use stories to structure and make sense of the world. We dream in stories, remember in stories, use stories to solve problems and simulate where we could be. We spend six years of our life in REM sleep engaged in deeply immersive stories; five hours in various screen narratives of different kinds. We also daydream constantly - Gottschall reckons we spend half our waking lives testing out one narrative or another. We’re almost always in a story mode of one kind or another.

Most importantly, our memory is storied and our memory makes up most of the world-to-me. We have a single moment accessible to us, and then all of the other ‘stuff’ that we remember. Everything that is not in our direct, immediately perceptible experience relies on our memory. And our memory, the bulk of the world-to-me, is narratively structured.

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So does this matter? Well - yes. If the world-to-me and the world-to-you obey narrative conventions, that’s a big metaphysical claim. I know the world-out-there exists - of course it does - but the sum total of my experience is the world-to-me. And that is dominated by narrative conventions - because we think in stories. (I’m making a metaphysical claim - what, to me, exists, exists in such a way that it is narratively structured). The world-to-me, and the world-to-you is a world of heroes, villains, of serendipitous coincidences and defining moments, because this is how we think.

Given this, when we want to represent world-to-me, we need to be aware that it is unavoidably composed of narratively-biased memory. And when we make claims about how the world-to-me will be, what sort of structure it will have and the characters that will crop up in it, we can use narrative conventions to predict, infer and direct our action. If we want to be accurate, we should - oddly - treat the world in the same way that we might treat a fiction. If we apply word-out-there norms to world-to-me reasoning, we’ll get it wrong - we’ll be less accurate. We can bet that the world-to-me will have more Frederick Very Successful’s inside it.

This is mainly a knowledge claim. It’s about finding what is true or false, not what is right or wrong. Right or wrong is not determined by narrative. Good in a narrative is not good in the real world (just because Jurassic Park is a good story doesn’t mean we should start reviving dinosaurs). But if we’re working out how to do the right thing, we need to use the facts that we have available to us - and that means taking into account that the world is narratively structured both for us and for others. (This may also explain findings by Oatley, Mar et al that fiction readers tend to have better social skills, and higher degrees of empathy than non-fiction readers.)

Given our memory are narratively structured, what does this mean for ethics and how we should behave? Should we prioritise or weight narrative moments? Food for thought.

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P.P.S: Ignore this, but backlinking my work blog because I am a committed employee. If you are from my work, please don’t read this. Lawyers; data; EB Benchmarking; What is EB; What is EB awareness; Measuring EB; link for EB and TA; texas vs california; mood in market