What Are Stories Made Of? - Quantitative Categorical Deconstruction of Creation

Abstract

We extend the Microscopic Representation approach to the quantitative study of religious and folk stories: A story encrypting symbolically the creation is deconstructed into its simplest conceptual elements and their relationships. We single out a particular kind of relationship which we call "diagonal (or transitive) link": given 2 relations between the couples of elements AB and respectively BC, the "diagonal link" is the (composite) relation AC. We find that the diagonal links are strongly and systematically correlated with the events in the story that are considered crucial by the experts. We further compare the number of diagonal links in the symbolic creation story with a folk tale, which ostensibly narrates the same overt succession of events (but without pretensions of encrypting additional meanings). We find that the density of diagonal links per word in the folk story is lower by a factor of 2. We speculate that, as in other fields the simple transitive operations acting on elementary objects are at the core of the emergence and recognition of macroscopic meaning and novelty in complex systems.