
The Story of Storytelling - longdefeat
https://harpers.org/archive/2019/03/the-story-of-storytelling/
======
Radim
A surprisingly well-written and lucid article (given the woo-woo topic),
exploring the memetic nature and evolution of stories.

Selected TL;DR quotes:

 _" As a psychic creature simultaneously parasitizing and nourishing the human
mind, narrative was so thoroughly successful that it is now all but
inextricable from language and thought. Stories live through us, and we live
through stories."_

 _" The increasingly large brains of our ancestors, all the more attuned to
the world’s complexity, needed a way to organize this overwhelming torrent of
information, to pass the multiplicity of experience through a reverse prism
and distill it into a single coherent sequence. Stories were the solution. A
story is a choreographed hallucination that temporarily displaces reality."_

 _" And if a recorded story finds itself utterly alone, it is perfectly
content to wait indefinitely for the arrival of a new audience, whether that
audience be human, alien, machine, or something else altogether. Stories are
capable of symbiosis that transcends species; they are also a kind of life
that transcends biology itself. If any organism can achieve true immortality,
it is surely the story."_

~~~
hammock
Seems a little post hoc to me. Due example, what evidence is there that "a
sequence" is specifically necessary?

~~~
aklemm
This snippet comes across maybe overblown, and surely it’s not scientifically
accurate, but it serves to elevate and venerate what stories are; it’s
literary. It makes its point with imagery rather than accuracy.

~~~
whitten
It is an interesting view, but the accuracy of the model is important to me as
well, as I'm interested in NaNoCoMo ie: computer generating novels as
discussed at
[https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/nanocomo/](https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/nanocomo/)

