It seems like it’s a sort of compression optimized for human brains. Some elements of a story:
Components tend to be agents with intelligible social motives, or stereotyped roles; we have a bunch of specialized capacity for social modeling, which means that we can store information more efficiently if it fits that paradigm.
Components are “causally” linked. Because of causal linkage, stories tend to unfold unidirectionally over time. Stories are not lists of things that exist simultaneously, though they do require object permanence to understand; elements in a story tend to get reused. Once you understand a story, you can infer fuzzy or forgotten parts from the parts you know. Chekhov’s Gun inference works in both directions.
What is a story?
It seems like it’s a sort of compression optimized for human brains. Some elements of a story:
Components tend to be agents with intelligible social motives, or stereotyped roles; we have a bunch of specialized capacity for social modeling, which means that we can store information more efficiently if it fits that paradigm.
Components are “causally” linked. Because of causal linkage, stories tend to unfold unidirectionally over time. Stories are not lists of things that exist simultaneously, though they do require object permanence to understand; elements in a story tend to get reused. Once you understand a story, you can infer fuzzy or forgotten parts from the parts you know. Chekhov’s Gun inference works in both directions.