Re: Complexity and Narrative. Formalisms versus Stories

[Judith Rosen <***>]

Hi Rodrigo,

It seems to me that there are at least two separate and different views expressed in the two articles, and I can add a third. Perhaps I should begin with my own "take" on this. I think they're both onto something important, but I see it from the other direction. For example; the reason human beings can create stories which illustrate larger truths (parables, for example) is due to what my father described as one of the main aspects of "Natural Law": Entailment patterns remain consistent, even when transferred to a model from a natural system. In a sense, a fictional story can sometimes illustrate the consequences and behaviors of a set of entailments more clearly than reality. It can give us a new perspective, allowing us to get past some aspect of the real context which is blocking our ability to see and recognize. What a parable is doing is creating a model. It represents a transfer of the entailment pattern of some real situation into a construct and allowing people to see, via the construct, what those entailments will lead to if we were to behave in a similar way in real life. 

The new context of the story may be able to illustrate better because we are a step removed when reading fiction and can therefore see "the bigger picture" but there are also cases where the context of some real situation is too obscure for most people to see what it means or where it will lead. In situations like that, a fictional story can create a new, more familiar context in which the entailment pattern is clearer. Either way, once people recognize the pattern from experiencing the story, they are better able to see how the real version actually impacts their own reality. Star Trek was a master at this, especially the original series from the 1960's. For example, there was an episode that was directly about the illogic of racism and how stupid and destructive that pattern can be. There was a planet with a race of humanoids, all of which were black on one side and white on the other, who had all but wiped themselves out. The reason they had done so was because roughly half of them were black on the right side and the other half were white on the right side-- so they were mirror images of one another. Only two members of this entire civilization were still alive, and because they were each a representative of the single visible difference between them, they were trying to kill each other over it. The main point was to represent how insane it is to base value judgments about a whole person on something as superficial and unimportant as skin color. It was a powerful episode because it never got preachy and because it showed the consequences of a very human set of entailments in a manner that didn't trigger the prejudices it was attempting to illustrate.

However, there's another aspect to this; namely that prejudices are based on a human tendency to create mental models based on personal experience and then extrapolate predictions from those models. Sometimes we don't even need to build our models on direct personal experience-- we just take someone else's word for it. I think the fact that human intellect has evolved so far as to supersede the encoded information (instinct) in many ways has contributed to a real necessity to learn how to get along in the world. Part of learning is listening to the experiences of others. This is why certain ways of thinking tend to run in families: politics, religion, racism, bigotry, etc. We are taught from an early age that "this is the way it is" and we tend to believe it. It's very hard to get past that kind of teaching. Any counter-example tends to be dismissed as some weird anomaly. I think this may help explain part of why scientists have such a hard time getting past the early physics training-- especially if they are working in a field which doesn't have much of a problem using those models of reality. To them, biological systems are "some weird anomaly". 


Anyway, as I said; I think the reason that stories appeal to us is because of our intellectual capabilities and also because we intuitively sense that context is everything. Therefore, it's fascinating to follow a really well developed entailment pattern through a fictional context and see where it leads. 

Judith
Web address: http://www.rosen-enterprises.com
BioTheory: An electronic journal of general science based on the Relational (Rosennean) Complexity Paradigm
On Sep 23, 2005, at 7:05 PM, Rodrigo Peláez wrote:

> <x-tad-smaller>Judith and all: Please excuse me in advance the length of this post. I can’t make a résumé of the ideas involved in the two articles below.</x-tad-smaller>
> <x-tad-smaller>Judith as a writer, artist, and illustrator and as a profound connoisseur of the work of her father could comment for us her own ideas about some interesting relationship between narrative and complexity and formalisms versus stories.</x-tad-smaller>
> <x-tad-smaller>Rodrigo</x-tad-smaller>
> <x-tad-smaller> </x-tad-smaller>
> <x-tad-smaller>“Complexity and Narrative: The co-evolution of stories, science and new insights into human behavior. </x-tad-smaller><x-tad-smaller>People remember stories, not statistics, and recent research in many disciplines suggests that the intersection of complexity and narrative may hold powerful insights into human behavior. Some writers have already begun exploring this intersection, and two argue that our species should be called Pan Narrans—the storytelling ape—rather than Homo sapiens. Mathematician Ian Stewart, a science writer who also writes science fiction, and Jack Cohen, a reproductive scientist who is the United Kingdom’s leading xenobiologist—that’s a human doctor with expertise on the physiology of alien organisms and life forms—says the ability to tell stories may have enabled our species to survive our Neanderthal cousins. In a recent issue of Complexity, sociologist Michael Agar suggested the best tool for complexity-based sociology would be ethnography, the study and systematic recording of human cultures.</x-tad-smaller>