Yesterday afternoon I managed to write a short essay on the topic ‘The First Man’ that Shirley and I discussed last Friday. I seized this as an opportunity to ‘put an paper’ some ideas I’ve held in mind for a long time as a possible scenario. With time it firmed up and became established for me, rather than it fading away as something irrelevant, which also happens to some of my ideas.
The underlying idea here is that a model or theory must be efficient, explaining as much as possible with a minimum of concepts.
In physics people do thought experiments, well I do narrative modeling and test those against time and alternate narratives, using Ockham’s razor to ensure the efficiency of the modeled narrative. The underlying idea here is that a model or theory must be efficient in the way it is structured, explaining as much as possible with a minimum of concepts or principles, which must be verifiable or have a good likely hood of being correct and testable.
<9:15am
Emerging Narrative Preamble:
Over times longer than we can trace we humans have used narratives to give sense to our world by ordering our experience within it. Humanity’s many traditional narratives are examples of this human need to make sense of our lives, feel secure and understand the society we live in. Narratives lend us an understanding of our own time and how we relate to the past and what to expect in the future.
Today our world has become much more complex then even a few decades ago, never mind all the changes over one’s lifetime. Since times immemorial humans have reduced this complexity of their world by means of using structuring narratives, such as creation stories.
The results of these attempts have been passed on to us through the traditions, songs, poems, scriptures, writings and cultures. But, as time brings change these passed on wisdoms become old and irrelevant when change is resisted, avoided or ignored.
As the old narratives become less valid, we look for different ways to lend meaning to our world of experience. We then face the challenge of deciding how to create a valid framework for our lives as we experience this today in our much more complex world. What do we keep as still relevant and what has become a distraction that leads to wrong action?
It is my aim to address this challenge of formulating a relevant framework for today by using the true and tried human method of formulating a narrative for our complex global world, all the while lending pride of place to the handed down human traditions that have guided us to where we are today.
END OF PREAMBLE 2017-02-14; part of essay “Emerging Narrative”
