A surprisingly well-written and lucid article (given the woo-woo topic), exploring the memetic nature and evolution of stories. Selected TL;DR quotes: "As a p

A surprisingly well-written and lucid article (given the woo-woo topic), exploring the memetic nature and evolution of stories. Selected TL;DR quotes: "As a psychic creature simultaneously parasitizing and nourishing the human mind, narrative was so thoroughly successful that it is now all but inextricable from language and thought. Stories live through us, and we live through stories." "The increasingly large brains of our ancestors, all the more attuned to the world’s complexity, needed a way to organize this overwhelming torrent of information, to pass the multiplicity of experience through a reverse prism and distill it into a single coherent sequence. Stories were the solution. A story is a choreographed hallucination that temporarily displaces reality." "And if a recorded story finds itself utterly alone, it is perfectly content to wait indefinitely for the arrival of a new audience, whether that audience be human, alien, machine, or something else altogether. Stories are capable of symbiosis that transcends species; they are also a kind of life that transcends biology itself. If any organism can achieve true immortality, it is surely the story."