Much of what you have said here about capturing ideas is why I (and perhaps others) tend to prefer deep narrative as a means of conveying a lot. I mean, read Puzo’s original Godfather—more is in there than the movie. And ye gods, the movie has a lot in it. A summary of the movie is more or less meaningless to capture the multiple highly-coherent gestalts and meta-models available in the movies. I’m not even sure it points well at them later. I don’t know if you could even make something less than 1k-4k words that even points well at pieces* of the high-coherency embedded information in a powerful story (make it Dune, Breaking Bad, or Harry Potter as you like). At some point the best one might be able to do is write several paragraphs that point to pointers that point to the platonic ideal of an elegant pointer to whatever is conveyed. (And maybe I’m pointing well at something in this paragraph, that people who have been blessed by being consumed in a beautiful story world understand.)
So, with any real deep narrative, maybe it conveys something like living in the territory for awhile, or maybe it shortcuts your mind to something like a complex hyper-dimensional surface through back-propagation. Basically, you might be able parse what would or would not be consistent in the Harry Potter universe (depending on how well you read the books/watched the movies) pretty well, even in some really odd details, after your neural network was trained by the narrative. Fanfic is about someone building their own models of possibilities given the training data, and (not having read much) I assume part of the satisfaction in it is providing an extension to people that is consistent (“rings true”) within that world. People also often feel uneasy when a character or world becomes inconsistent (such as when the storyline of the TV show passes the original writer’s material and the committee just cannot nail it or has inconsistent intentions in their approach or agendas beyond total honesty of intention to the story and its characters). We humans are pretty good at noticing narrative consistencies, I think.
(I know I have gone a bit divergent from what you were saying, but you did push me to thinking about all this, so thank you)
EDIT: Are Koans attempts to do this? Maybe sometimes they come close to non-lossy compression for what amount to really vast hyper-dimensional surfaces in just a couple of sentences. To some extent they may still depend on context (though I can feel Hakuin hitting me with a stick when I suggest this).
Much of what you have said here about capturing ideas is why I (and perhaps others) tend to prefer deep narrative as a means of conveying a lot. I mean, read Puzo’s original Godfather—more is in there than the movie. And ye gods, the movie has a lot in it. A summary of the movie is more or less meaningless to capture the multiple highly-coherent gestalts and meta-models available in the movies. I’m not even sure it points well at them later. I don’t know if you could even make something less than 1k-4k words that even points well at pieces* of the high-coherency embedded information in a powerful story (make it Dune, Breaking Bad, or Harry Potter as you like). At some point the best one might be able to do is write several paragraphs that point to pointers that point to the platonic ideal of an elegant pointer to whatever is conveyed. (And maybe I’m pointing well at something in this paragraph, that people who have been blessed by being consumed in a beautiful story world understand.)
So, with any real deep narrative, maybe it conveys something like living in the territory for awhile, or maybe it shortcuts your mind to something like a complex hyper-dimensional surface through back-propagation. Basically, you might be able parse what would or would not be consistent in the Harry Potter universe (depending on how well you read the books/watched the movies) pretty well, even in some really odd details, after your neural network was trained by the narrative. Fanfic is about someone building their own models of possibilities given the training data, and (not having read much) I assume part of the satisfaction in it is providing an extension to people that is consistent (“rings true”) within that world. People also often feel uneasy when a character or world becomes inconsistent (such as when the storyline of the TV show passes the original writer’s material and the committee just cannot nail it or has inconsistent intentions in their approach or agendas beyond total honesty of intention to the story and its characters). We humans are pretty good at noticing narrative consistencies, I think.
(I know I have gone a bit divergent from what you were saying, but you did push me to thinking about all this, so thank you)
EDIT: Are Koans attempts to do this? Maybe sometimes they come close to non-lossy compression for what amount to really vast hyper-dimensional surfaces in just a couple of sentences. To some extent they may still depend on context (though I can feel Hakuin hitting me with a stick when I suggest this).