The Semantics of Narrative: Part II

Narrative correlationism is built on the premise that the human experience is narrative by nature; Conscious processing, in other words, is synonymous with narrative experiencing. My definition of story is ‘meaningful connections across time,’ and those connections - to our knowledge - are something that only consciousness can facilitate. And if that is the case, then the advent of conscious processing also effectively represents the origin of storytelling. It stands to reason, then, that coming to understand why consciousness may have evolved could help us further refine our understanding of the nature of stories, and to identify what might have been their original purpose.

Darwin’s theory of evolution is as simple as it is elegant: genetic traits that increase the survivability of a species will be passed down to subsequent generations, and those that don’t will die out. But, that being said, for much of recorded history, biological evolution could be viewed as a terribly inefficient way of making a species more fit to survive in the world. Untold thousands of organisms with unfavorable traits had to die in order for valuable innovations to take hold on a genetic level, a process that is both drawn-out and wasteful. This - according to neuroscientists like Daniel Bor - is why animals developed brains, specialist organs designed to more efficiently process information, to enable adaptive behavior within an animal’s own lifetime. Bor characterizes the brain as nothing more than a complicated, biological “information-processing device” (1), and the consciousness that our brain facilitates certainly does increase our capacity for information-processing by leaps and bounds.?

Of course, every evolutionary innovation emerges as a solution to a problem - as a coping mechanism to further our survival in an uncertain world - and the development of advanced conscious processing was no different. With that in mind, one way for us to get a better handle on what consciousness is and how it works is by examining some specific examples of what it may have originally evolved to do. What problems, in other words, precipitated the need for this kind of information processing in the first place?

Picture this: It’s tens of thousands of years ago, and you’re an early human, or one of our evolutionary forebears. You need to keep yourself safe from predators, and you have no fewer than five distinct senses by which to do that: Sight, sound, smell, touch and taste. Pretty good defense mechanism, right? Except, here’s the problem: Now that you’ve opened those floodgates of perception, your brain is being bombarded in every waking moment by more sensory input than it can efficiently process. So, when a predator rears its ugly head, there is so much other data competing for your attention that you suffer what modern-day gamers refer to as ‘analysis paralysis’; You have too much information to respond to, and as such, you’re paralyzed by an inability to know what to do. And those few seconds of indecision can mean the difference between life and death. The bottom line is, in order to keep yourself safe, you need a way to more efficiently process all of this incoming information, by deeming some sensory input more important than others. Ryan paraphrases Mark Turner in observing that “noticing objects or events in our perceptual environment amounts to constructing embryonic stories about them,” (2) and from a cognitive science perspective, it appears Turner is absolutely right. Our brains decide what to focus on by creating stories, meaningful links between information in the present and information from our past. And Wilhelm Dilthey posited the same idea in the early years of the 20th century, using almost the same words: We obtain meaning, Dilthey believed, by fashioning a relation between past and present. (3)

Let’s put you in the driver’s seat again, back in the days of early humankind, with a more specific example: One day, your group is attacked by a saber-tooth tiger, and it kills one of your number. Obviously, an event like this is going to stick with you, on account of both the trauma of losing someone close to you, and how close you came to dying yourself. So your brain categorizes saber-tooth tigers as dangerous predators, and puts your senses on high alert for any sign of them you might find in the future. And, sure enough, a few months down the line, you come across another such tiger. Seeing this tiger calls to mind your encounter with the other one, and your brain draws a meaningful connection between the two events by way of a simple story: “Once, I saw a creature like this kill my friend, so if I want to ensure my own survival, I’d best keep my distance.” Your brain, in this example, surveyed the scene, identified the thing in your perceptual environment that it deemed most biologically relevant to you in that particular moment - in this case, a threat to your very existence - and directed your attention to that thing to the exclusion of everything else.?

How in practice does your brain accomplish this? Well, cognitive research has shown that, in our every waking moment, all of the sensory data in our perceptual environment is vying for our attention. The reason that any given thing emerges victorious in this neuronal battle for your attention is because there is something about that thing that your brain has deemed relevant to you. The way the brain evaluates this is by drawing a meaningful connection between that thing and something that was relevant in your past. This meaningful connection between your past and your present is the embryonic story to which Turner refers. And, given that noticing anything is the result of this kind of story construction, you can start to see that our entire waking life is comprised of one story after another, which are all, in turn, a part of the larger, evolving story that is our life. It’s all really just a way of saying that being consciously aware is tantamount to having a narrative experience. And you can certainly see the distinct evolutionary advantage that being able to form meaningful connections across time confers; Humans with this capability would have had a much higher likelihood of survival out in the wilderness, because they were now well-equipped to identify novel threats, spot them quickly, and to take decisive action to avoid them when they do.

Historically, philosophy itself has been broadly understood to be humankind’s search for meaning. And if indeed, as we’ve been suggesting, the human condition is “tantamount to an ever-changing construction site for meaning” (4), then, as Johnson and Lakoff suggest, “living a human life is a philosophical endeavor.” (5) But science is a search for meaning, too. Daniel Bor, for his part, attests that “all life is itself an implicit scientific enterprise.” (6) And Dilthey holds that, on a fundamental level, “Human beings are historical beings.” (7) We’ll be exploring each of these assertions in greater detail in the remainder of this series, but suffice it to say for now that narrative correlationism suggests that all of these things are true; Our lives are philosophical, scientific, and historical endeavors in equal measure. Because consciousness is the common denominator to all scientific, philosophical, and historiographical inquiries into what it means to be a human being. Consciousness helps determine what we focus on from moment to moment, and in turn what we remember in the aggregate. And the connections that it builds in the process define what we believe about the world, and what we believe about ourselves. In all of the most important moments of your life, your brain is actively forging these kinds of meaningful-connections between what’s happening to you in the here and now and related events from your past. From the moment you’re born, then, until the day that you die, your brain is actively engaged in telling stories: The stories of your life.

So, there you have it: Our orientation to the world is a narrative one because experiencing narratively is the most efficient way that evolution has found for us to develop a comprehensive approach to successfully living in the world. Our narrative capacity came about as a way of implementing, within our neural landscape, a battle royale for the survival of the fittest ideas, as determined by their utility in promoting our continued survival. Human beings, therefore, are born storytellers. The first, and longest story we experience is the story of our life. And the version of that story that we strive to tell is the one that is most likely to make our life a long and happy one.

Move on to Entry #3

Go back to Entry #1

SOURCES

(1) Bor, D. (2012). Ravenous Brain (p. 106). Basic Books.

(2) Ryan, M.L. (2007). Toward a Definition of Narrative. In D. Herman (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Narrative (pp. 22-36). Cambridge University Press.

(3) Dilthey, W. (2002). Introduction to Volume III. In R. Makkreel, F. Rodi (Eds.), Wilhelm Dilthey: Selected Works, Volume III: The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences (pp. 9-10). Princeton University Press.

(4) Brockmeier, J. (2009). Stories to Remember: Narrative and the Time of Memory. Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, 1, 115-132. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25663011

(5) Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (p. 9). Basic Books.

(6) Bor, D. (2012). Ravenous Brain (p. 36). Basic Books.

(7) Dilthey, W. (2002). Drafts for a Critique of Historical Reason. In R. Makkreel, F. Rodi (Eds.), Wilhelm Dilthey: Selected Works, Volume III: The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences (p. 311). Princeton University Press.