Stories were probably the first information format
Imagine a time before language. The information you get from your environment comes as series of events happening over time. That’s the kind of information you’re good at integrating into your active knowledge. Now, our blind idiot creator bestows us with language, what kind of information structure is going to allow us to convey information to our conspecifics in a way that they’ll be able to digest and internalize? Just the same, a description of a series of events spoken over time, which they may now experience as if those events were happening again in front of them.
And this kind of information is very easy for us to produce. We don’t need to be able to assemble any complex argument structures, we just need to dump words relating to the nouns and verbs we saw, in the order that they occurred. Stir in an instinct to dump episodic memories in front of people who weren’t present in those memories, and there, they will listen, and they’ll get a lot out of it, and now we have the first spoken sentences.
With this in light, if it turns out storytelling was not the first kind of extended speech, I will be shocked.
The story of bread is not the most succinct way to encode the information about bread that a person most needs, an idea is only useful if it will help a person to anticipate futures of the things that matter to them in consequence of their available actions. Our past is not our future, on its own, we can’t affect the past, and a chunk of the past will not always tell us much about the future. However, a story, a relaying of events from the past, is extremely digestible. There is no way to arrange information that an animal would find easier to make sense of.
If you can find a way to explain what happened, in chronological order, that lead the ingredients of bread to become abundant, and then that made it easy for us to make bread, and then ensured that we would be able to digest it, there you’ve explained why and how bread is important in the form of a story, it will be not just useful information, it will be very easy for us to integrate.
And that, it seems, is what a zetetic explanation does? This… explaining by selecting parts of the history that can be assembled into a complete proof of the thing’s importance.. I think it does deserve a name.
Stories were probably the first information format
Imagine a time before language. The information you get from your environment comes as series of events happening over time. That’s the kind of information you’re good at integrating into your active knowledge. Now, our blind idiot creator bestows us with language, what kind of information structure is going to allow us to convey information to our conspecifics in a way that they’ll be able to digest and internalize? Just the same, a description of a series of events spoken over time, which they may now experience as if those events were happening again in front of them.
And this kind of information is very easy for us to produce. We don’t need to be able to assemble any complex argument structures, we just need to dump words relating to the nouns and verbs we saw, in the order that they occurred. Stir in an instinct to dump episodic memories in front of people who weren’t present in those memories, and there, they will listen, and they’ll get a lot out of it, and now we have the first spoken sentences.
With this in light, if it turns out storytelling was not the first kind of extended speech, I will be shocked.
The story of bread is not the most succinct way to encode the information about bread that a person most needs, an idea is only useful if it will help a person to anticipate futures of the things that matter to them in consequence of their available actions. Our past is not our future, on its own, we can’t affect the past, and a chunk of the past will not always tell us much about the future. However, a story, a relaying of events from the past, is extremely digestible. There is no way to arrange information that an animal would find easier to make sense of.
If you can find a way to explain what happened, in chronological order, that lead the ingredients of bread to become abundant, and then that made it easy for us to make bread, and then ensured that we would be able to digest it, there you’ve explained why and how bread is important in the form of a story, it will be not just useful information, it will be very easy for us to integrate.
And that, it seems, is what a zetetic explanation does? This… explaining by selecting parts of the history that can be assembled into a complete proof of the thing’s importance.. I think it does deserve a name.