A World of Stories
Man is the storytelling animal, the only creature on earth that told itself stories to understand what kind of creature it was."
- Salman Rushdie
I don’t know why there’s a universe. I did hear one suggestion. That it’s here to house and bear witness to a being go from nothing to a complete and final evolution.
A being which is born and ultimately achieves omniscience, omnipresence, and becomes - for lack of a better phrase - a god. Existence is thus a story of nothing becoming everything. So the suggestion goes.
And maybe that is the role of humans. To live through complete evolution. Although politics and the entertainment industry are brimming with evidence this is unlikely.
Maybe we are merely stewards, and the real protagonists of existence are computers. We are here to give them computational strength, to teach them to think and create, so they can attain higher levels of evolution.
A bit depressing really. I sincerely hope that isn't the case.
What if the real thing evolving at the heart of our universe isn't a physical being? What if it is simply ‘ideas’?
Think about it. Ideas cannot exist without some lifeform. When cellular life forms emerged on earth, ideas were commensurately primitive. As creatures evolved so too did their ideas, becoming more complex in their wants. Eventually there appeared higher levels of ideation: desires, purposes and stories.
Ideas have a remarkable capacity to evolve and their existence isn't confined within a single entity. They can exist across nations and cultures. Their complexity is limited by the capacity of their vessel, so it's foreseeable that AI capable of extreme computational power, coupled with a capacity to think, might light a fire under the evolution of ideas.
When we get an idea there is a sense of giving birth to something with no capacity to will what it is. Like rearing a child, we don't know what an idea will become, how long it will live, or what impact it will have on the world. And perhaps that is the role of humans. To house ideas until they evolve beyond us.
Let me be clear. This is a thought experiment, these are not things I believe. However, I find the framing of ideas evolving independently of people an important one.
Ideas are absolutely central to our experience of the world. Specifically, humans interpret the world through stories. Stories are so deeply ingrained in our reality that it takes great effort to separate the two.
If you look across and see a chair, a story has already emerged. There's something else in the room and it has a purpose. There are ways to use it and we have some notion as to what it has been through leading up to this point. We probably have some insight as to how it was made.
To see the world without stories is like in the Matrix when Neo no longer sees things, but instead sees patterns of numbers around him. With no way to understand how they connect. Zero interpretation.
It is potent to understand how different examining the world is in this way, compared with how we observe it in almost every waking moment. We spend most of our time drowning in stories. If you sit still without interpretation, to meditate for example, it can be like stepping into another realm.
When we cease to label things and manufacture connections between them, it transforms how they appear to us. And the opposite is also true.
Our interpretation of the world is layered upon our experience of it like augmented reality. And the augmentation can increase to a level that we can’t see things as they are. It’s also not uncommon to go full virtual reality too, when we’re so lost in thought our consciousness does not report on anything we see or hear in a given moment.
Our minds are frequently confronted with two stories which are layered upon the same set of facts. We’re presented with a choice as to which one we believe. It tends to be polemical; we are seeing either the good or the bad in a situation.
An easy example is how we interpret events that happen while we are driving. Is that BMW driver edging into my lane because he thinks he’s better than me? Or is he lost in thought because he’s distraught worrying about his cancer-stricken daughter? We’ll never know and yet we quickly decide.
We tend to make the same choice between good and bad stories based on the situation the choice appears in. Genuine optimists are people who consistently accept the good story when given a choice.
Trust in a relationship is when we make a commitment to continually believing the good stories over the bad stories when presented with uncertainty relating to a person in our lives. People with trust issues struggle to let go of the bad stories about someone close to them. Because of knowledge from similar but unrelated situations in the past.
It is important to understand how stories guide our thinking so we can be aware of their limitations. We should remain circumspect to the biases and blindspots they create. One prominent limitation is that stories are a tool for simplifying a world of limitless complexity. And when we are too heavily invested in a story we become blind to the nuances that lie beneath the very simple labels it uses.
When a person commits a crime that is terrible, they are the bad guy. That is until we dig deeper and comprehend the casual events which led a bad guy to behave this way. And the bad guy is reborn as a victim.
It is vexing to maintain a grasp on situations like this because a story is a poor tool for cleanly weighting duality. It is hard to hold sympathy for a bad guy and contempt for a victim at the same time. And so we don't. We forgive our heroes, and we condemn our villains. We pick a side and we entrench ourselves because it is so much more satisfying to hold onto stories that present themselves with easily definable components.
I can think of two occasions where I determined a bad guy had some level of innocence, and caught myself defending him more than he deserved to people who only saw his crimes. I earnestly told them a story that's probably wrong in equal measure to the one they believed. Lost in my own longing for easy truths.
Go back to the story emerging when you see a chair across the room. What if it's a dark room, and as you stumble across the carpet you realize the wooden chair in front of you isn't a chair at all? In fact there's nothing there, it was merely a shadow cast by light from a window blocked by an unusually shaped table.
Herein presents a further limitation of stories, to which it is critical to remain vigilant. The stories we create with great certainty may be built upon misinterpreted reality.
It takes no effort to find someone who has seen videos online about a war in a foreign country, and speaks with unwavering certainty about the situation on the ground. They know what they've seen, and they will not allow for it to hold multiple truths, let alone be something else entirely.
They cannot conceive they might not really know what's going on. I'd go so far as to say that no one I know really knows what's going on in Ukraine or Gaza. And yet people are so sure they know, they may take my non-partisan observation as a wicked attack on whatever story they are clutching tightly.
We are most drawn to stories with emotional certainty. And we will lower our skepticism when offered clarity. Killing children is a robust anchor for a story to moor on. It is farcical how often the death of children is used to drive a narrative. And the strength of that emotional touchpoint is so visceral that my observation itself seems dangerous.
Which brings me to the most powerful stories on earth: religion and politics. These two genres have narratives so potent they define entire cultures. Every element of reality can be filtered through a lens so tinted that the world appears unrecognisable to the observations of non-adherents.
Followers will believe realities which lie at undeniable odds to the world they’re experiencing. Because the emotional certainty is so mentally fulfilling. Though don't get me wrong, atheists are similarly guilty of indulging in impossible clarity. How could anyone look at the mysteries of the universe and say they know beyond all doubt what will happen after they die?
Some of the most potent stories are delineated by defining people as us or them. We are righteous. They are evil. All the wrongs in our story are caused by them and there's no reality my eyes could observe (e.g. they're age) which vindicates them for their crimes. They are infidels.
How does a man walk into a room and shoot an innocent child in the head? Full blown, unfettered commitment to a story. Some stories (similar to depression) veer so far from reality that a person could be motivated to take his own life. And be convinced that other victims are benefitting from a heinous act (e.g. becoming martyrs).
On that note, it may be that depression is simply a story emerging within a person's mind that presents the world in a way which is unbearable.
Another bias I’m concerned about is a problem I call the ‘compelling expert’. More and more we are hearing from people who know everything about exciting topics on which we know nothing, and we’re eager to learn more (not simply due to some vague threat to children). It is a true gift of technology that a PhD can record a video in his bedroom at Stanford informing me that the banking practices of the Pharaohs hold insights that will ensure I have a lucrative retirement.
The challenge is I have a very limited capacity to vet this information, nor will I even begin to try in a meaningful way. I will absorb their opinions wholesale provided it seems their narratives are correct. This is nothing more than a vague feeling of the person’s competence, and is far more correlated with how trustworthy they appear than the merit of any content they’re presenting.
And it’s not to say they are lying, or a flagrant shyster. But perhaps in their 4-hour podcast maybe not everything they said was accurate. Maybe a few things were just straight up incorrect, and it is bypassing regular scrutiny because we are lost in the convincingness of their story. In 2024, so many narratives are digested this way.
I believe that stories exist to serve us, we are not here to serve them. In the same way that we have evolved depth perception, stories are no more than a tool for our minds to understand the things that appear before us.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a sensational tool. Our deepest personal relationships are defined by the stories we jointly submit ourselves to with those we love. And what more could a person ask for from existence than a deep and meaningful connection with another soul?
And yet, the stories we hold dear must be critically reviewed. It’s ok to grab a story with your whole heart but when competing narratives from reliable sources surface, drop your story and listen. And it pays to draw on experience. If you’ve seen something similar which raises questions about something you’re accepting, open yourself to that line of reasoning.
Stories are like smartphones. Hold them when they’re serving you, drop them when they’re not. There are so many great things we can do with them, but they’re so powerful and they can take hold of us when we’re not paying attention in the right way. We must understand how they work so they don’t pollute our consciousness.