Category Archives: Deep Dramatica Theory

The Reasoning Behind Dramatica 2

Another installment in my ongoing series explaining why things are the way they are in Dramatica.

The Four Classes: Universe, Physics, Mind, and Psychology

As mentioned in the previous episode of this series, in our efforts to explore how story structure worked, we had early on determined that exploring the psychology of the main character might be the key to unlocking it, for reasons described there.

So, we began looking at many different kinds of stories for anything having to do with the main character’s motivations and manners of thinking, and whenever we found something that described such things, we put it on a post-it note and stuck it to the wall.

Eventually we saw patterns in the notes that had by now absolutely covered the wall in our conference room.  For example, we could see that some of theses psychological attribute seemed to be opposite attitudes such as Faith and Disbelief or to represent two ways of looking at things, such as Hope or Fear, or two approaches such as Pursue or Avoid.

So, we organized as much as we could of the notes we’d already gathered into pairs of opposites.  When we’d done that, we found we had a lot of single items left.  Naturally, we figured that once all the pairs were pulled aside, these remaining single that we had observed in stories probably also had opposites that we just hadn’t noticed or encountered yet.  Rather that go looking for them, which would take quite a while, we thought it would be a lot easier just to calculate what the opposite of a single item should be.

Now this is a pretty important decisions because it marked the first time we built a part of the model not just from observation but by extending patterns we had observed into new patterns never directly observed (at least not then, though all these “predictions” have now been verified in thousands of stories).

The notion was, in pulling together the initial pairs from data, we had developed a “feel” for the relationships between the two items.  Based on that feeling, we could take any of the single words and determine a pair for it so that the semantic relationship between the two words, between their meanings, would be just like the relationship between the pairs we had already observed.

The development of Dramatica is largely a story of seeing relationships in data, then extending the theory/model to fill in other patterns that were only partially complete.

As we continued, we saw that some of the pairs seemed like a counter-point to another pair, such as the pair of Support and Oppose seemed related to the pair of Help and Hinder – the first pair being more about attitude and the second pair more about action.

So, we started gathering as many pairs as we could  into groups of two related pairs.  As it turned out, the pairs from data did best as groups of just two pairs.  Any more pairs seemed unbalanced – again, based on intuition that story structure ought to be symmetrical.  I mean it just made sense, didn’t it?  We didn’t know, but it sure seemed that way so far, so we proceeded under that assumption, and having one pair counter-balance another pair played right into that.

We also found that some items that seemed like they were higher level concepts that were kind of like an umbrella word that described the family of two counter-balanced pairs.  In other words, our simple groups of four were now  beginning to be seen as the children of a parent post-it term.  Conversely, the parent terms might be seen as being made up of the two pairs within it – or even perhaps made up of the four items contained in the two pairs.

And then we found that two parents made a higher level  pair, and two pairs of parents were topped by an even higher level parent and so on.  Now, some of this was from observed data, some was from extending the patterns we found.  But all along, we were developing a sense of some underlying relationship that existed just beneath the surface of the patterns – we couldn’t see it, but we could feel it.

In his book about how they discovered DNA, James Watson (of Crick and Watson) describes how they had a feeling based on all the data that DNA might be some sort of helix, but had no proof and also no idea what kind of helix.  So, they ordered some molecular models, basically industrial tinker toys, and started assembling them into all manner of helices – singles, doubles, left and right handed, and also how many molecular bonds in each twist – stuff like that.

Eventually, they knocked off all the candidates but one because all the others failed to explain all of what little known hard data they had.  And that was the famous double-helix.  They were so sure they’d found it, just on the basis of its elegance and simplicity (and the lack of alternatives) that they announced their findings and, fortunately for their careers, they were soon proven right.

But we didn’t know that yet – hadn’t read the book.  We were just looking for patterns in the data we gathered from real stories, as seen through the notion of the psychology of the main character.

At some point, and I really can’t provide more information on that because we were constantly striking off in all kinds of directions simultaneously, but at some point, we realized the obvious: stories on not built from characters alone.  Duh.

As I recall, we already had some items on post-it notes we’d gathered that seemed more descriptive of plot than of characters or, perhaps, of the material world than of the mental world.

Taking a clue from the hierarchy we were building and expanding for the main character psychology,  we took those more external post-it items and started building a companion hierarchy of them.

At first, we worked the external hierarchy’s parents and children independently of the psychology.  An then, much to our surprise, we started to see that some items in one hierarchy had a  comparative item in the other.  For example, Memory in the psychology set had a counterpart in Past in the external set AND in the same relative position in external as Memory was in internal.

Now that pretty much knocked us on the floor.  It was looking as if each set was the same as the other, just with a different perspective – one looking out and the other looking in.  How?  Why?

Perhaps, we speculated, the relationships in each hierarchy represent what we see when we look at anything – all the available perspectives we have available to us.  When we look at the external world, we see things colored that way, and when we look inside ourselves, we see the very same things colored another.

But, we didn’t spend too much time getting all philosophic about it – not yet, anyway.  We were out to crack the code of story structure and make a name for ourselves – fame and fortune!

Now working with these evolving hierarchies on the wall was getting a bit cumbersome.  Everything was spreading laterally across the room.  So, Chris being (among his many talents) a graphics guy, started modeling our concepts and understandings in a more accessible form.

At first he tried putting each into a 3 D pyramid with Mind at the top of one and Universe at the apex of the other.  We discovered each was a four-sided pyramid because there were always for items in a set of two pairs.  And then their parents made two pairs that also made four items and so on.  Not making it up, just following the patterns inherent in the semantics of the words on the post-ii notes, originally discovered in stories.

And then we had the pair of Memory and Conscious in Mind and the equivalents of Past and Present in Universe.  After some work, we added Subconscious to Mind and Future to Universe.  But how could those be equivalent?  Well, perhaps, it is in the Subconscious from whence come our desires, which might be based on looking at what we want in the future?

Well, that turned out to be just wrong – at least as stated – but we had no time for that.  We were trying to finish the two hierarchies and discover a way to efficiently present them – not to try and  understand any of it yet, unless we couldn’t help it.

So, in time we got two pyramids visualized on paper, but they had a lot of problems, just like Crick’s and Watson’s tinker toy models.  For one thing, it was beginning to look like the bottom level of each hierarchy was using the same words as in the other hierarchy and in the exact same places, which was just weird: How could the external world and the internal world meet at the exact same things?

To help answer that, we attempted to put the two four-sided pyramids together, base to base.  But if things are in the same position at the bottom of each, they can’t possibly meet item to item, because you’ve flipped them over so they are at opposite sides.

Paradox.

So, we tried putting them point to point, but that provided no practical use at all.  Finally we just settled on two pyramids, side by side, where the bottom level was exactly the same in each.  Didn’t like it, couldn’t do anything about it, and at least it was easy to see equivalencies from one to the other.

Now how did we get from two classes to four?  Well as I said earlier, it’s hard to establish a clear linearity of evolution here since we were working on a myriads of things all at once, which muddies the water.  But basically, it is as follows:

Within each hierarchy, we had arranged each set of two pairs in what we came to call a “quad.”  This was designed as a visualization by Chris so that the most specific or tangible pair was put on a diagonal from the upper left, and the more ethereal of process-oriented was put on a diagonal from the upper right.  By doing this consistently, the natures of each pair and their relationship from pyramid to pyramid was easily seen.

And somewhere along the line, we realized everything in each pyramid was made of quads of four, but the top level only had two items – one pair – Universe and Mind.  If story structure was indeed symmetrical, there ought to be four.  So what would be the other two?  Well, by looking at the relationships of the pairs in the  hierarchies at all levels, we were able to determine that the pair of Universe and Mind needed a complimentary pair of Physics and Psychology.

As it turned out, we hadn’t been building a model of psychology but of mind – the tangible pieces of our inner world like Conscious, Memory, and Subconscious.  But the processes of the mind, the way it rolled, that would be in a hierarchy of Psychology.  And Universe had a process equivalent of Physics.

So, we realized what we were building were four perspectives on the reality that was the same thing at the bottom of each point of view.  We called them Classes to give a sciency ring to them.

And Chris, Graphic Man Extraordinaire, converted the pyramids to towers and eventually bound them into the 3D projection we all know and love and the flat table of story elements that holds our hearts to this day.

Again, a lot of things were going on at once, but I think this paints a good picture of where we were coming from and a glimpse at the order in which things happened.

Hopefully, this will help you adopt the same intuitive mind set to guide your logic in continuing to refine and expand the theory.

Comment from Irvaxis, a patron:

Since this post talks about the Table of Elements’ origins, there are some theoretical questions i’ve recently been debating with a friend of mine in regards to its construction. Therefore, here is my question: · In the Table of Elements, at rest, unjustified, does every quad there respect the traditional K A D T arrangement for every term/mental process placed in there, or rather, the K A D T arrangement follows a different logic for each quad, and in such case, which one? This is the closest thing i found to explain it, and it quickly became confusing beyond my comprehension. I was unable to map this onto the entire table: https://www.storymind.com/mental_relativity/mrmath2.htm Thanks in advance like always.

My response:

Hi, Irvaxis. Though I will be doing a “Reasoning” post specifically about the Table of Elements and several about the quad, let me answer your question with a few brief things to consider, and later I’ll hold forth more expansively.

First, the link you included explains part of the issue in the section entitled the non-linear form. It describes (in text and in the included graphic) how the KTAD equation iterates. Let me here address the salient points, not in a “reasoning behind” approach but, for efficiency and clarity, in a “this is what it is” approach.

First, the entire model is a K based system which means that of all the ways you could look at narrative structure, Dramatica was all built from point of view of definitive elements arranged in rigid relationships.

The “why” of this will be covered later, and there are many other ways to build a structure and an engine than this one that addresses the same thing, just as DNA can been seen as a double-heilx or under X-Ray will appear as a crystal. The Table of Story Element is the crystalline version of Dramatica.

Next – the quad is not a thing, it is a visual representation of a logic equation – even an equation of relativity. The primary equation is K/T = AD, which is from a K-base perspective. But the equation itself is designed to describe the relationships among four processes, each represented by one of the four letters, which are the four “bases” of the DNA of narrative.

When the equation iterates is is not just working like traditional iterative equations where the result is then plugged back into the variables of the equation to create expanding fractals. Rather, the quad represents an iteration in which the result of the equation changes the operations in the structure – essentially, changing the position of the variables in the equation but not the nature of the items nor the nature of the equation’s operations, just where specific variables reside in the operation.

Side note: this describes how the mind goes over the same ground again and again, but in different orders through the variables to understand the role of time (sequence) in affecting the results. i.e. : a slap followed by a scream has a different meaning than a scream followed by a slap.

From the top of the Tower of Dramatica, the K perspective (Spatial perspective) is maintained all the way down to the elements, and so, from that perspective, K is always in the upper left and KTAD maintain their relative positions.

But, laterally within the model, the horizontal levels represent the temporal aspect of the iteration, and so, as in the line you included, each quad iterates until it completes creating set of four states of the equation (or if you prefer four iterated equations of KTAD) .

But once that happens at the Type level, to create 16 types (four quads of four), then the temporal process iterates the entire set of 16 types through the same pattern as in the link to create a “chess set” of 64 variations. And so, the tower view has iterated not only horizontally but vertically as well.

As an aside, this is why we say Dramatica is a quad helix, because it is really two helices, each identical to DNA, but wrapped around each other in a super double helix, which reflects in the dynamics as the two different justifications. But finally, we reach the bottom where it all falls apart. There, Quads are broken apart into their original binary pairs and then recombined into new quads in a final iterative operation that takes into account how all four classes are ultimately looking at the same things, but by the time you get into the greatest depth of detail or granularity, the physics of it breaks down.

And at that place at which all four classes come together with the same items but in arrangements that bread the bonds of the physics of it in each of the other three classes, respectively, you are on the edge of atomic dissolution where it interfaces with the quantum realm, and that is the final step before you leave the K based system and move on to the next master perspective.

And when you have iterated through all four master perspectives down to the bottom, collectively, you have arrived at the point where you are no longer looking at structure and the relationships among items, but at dynamics and the influences that alter them – the mythical dynamic model. That is where I am working currently.

Irvaxis:

Let’s see if i got this right so far: · There are at least two perspectives we can hold in the static table of elements (with no component of time/sequence): A vertical one (i assume, top down), and a horizontal one (or also named lateral, which would be within the same floor of the towers). · The vertical view keeps the classic KADT arrangement as the equations themselves are represented with the same bias. · The lateral view of a floor is iterating through the equation positions. I assume this refers to each floor independently. The top floor is the base equation, the next floor is 4 iterations, the next floor is 16 iterations and the last floor is 64 iterations, that iterate according to the rules in that article of yours that i still can’t wrap my head around at this time. · The mix/combination of these two factors decides what the mental process in that place is. Or: · The top down view is the towers/Table of Elements. This is the “spatial” component. This also determines KADT arrangement in this perspective. · The lateral view is the result of justification / is basically for the “time” component. This also determines KADT arrangement in this other perspective. · The Dynamics from the algorithms would operate upon this temporal/lateral side in matching accordance to what’s what on the top down/spatial side. Would it be one of these two? Or something else entirely? Still, i might need a bit of a walkthrough to get how these equations iterate, especially as we go down to the element level, unless that’s planned for a dedicated post. Still, thanks in advance like always.

My response:

Interestingly, all of what you said above “or” is correct and some of what you said below “or” but not all.

For the first point below “or” – Yes, the top down view is the spatial perspective of the mind, which manifests itself in a repetitive KTAD pattern from top to bottom with no iteration.

For the second point – No, the lateral view is not the result of justification. Justification has not happened yet in the model. It is the temporal view of KTAD, unjustified, and from that perspective, the KTAD pattern flows through the iterations, seen as static shifts of meaning in the semantic model.

It can help to think of it this way conceptually – In our minds we have a time sense and a space sense. They do not and cannot see eye to eye. It is like trying to put a plastic ruler down on a pencil that has been laid on a table. If you press one side of the ruler to the table, the other side will move up from the table, like a seesaw. If you press the other side down, the first side will move up. There is not way to make it match on with both sides being down at the same time (though they can both be half-way up.

Down on both sides is a solved problem. Up in any balance between the sides is an inequity in the mind. The mind is driven by inequity and will never be balanced. Self awareness is the interference pattern between space and time. It does not exist within the brain but in the differential between our space sense and our time sense. It is that interference pattern that you see between the top down view, which makes total sense spatially, and the horizontal view, which makes total sense temporally.

But when you put them both in the same space/time construct (the tower) they are incompatible and in place contradictory. And yet they both exist in the same space/time.

It helps sometimes to think of the model without any words in it and without KTAD labels stuck on it. For this perspective the framework of the model appears to make total sense from the top down and total sense from the side across. That is the view from inside out minds because our self awareness cannot view things both spatially and temporally at the same time.

And so, we cannot see the paradox within – it looks good from space, then again looks good from time, then back to space and back to time and everything appears compatible, from the inside. But, from the outside, there is that discrepancy you are beginning to visualize.

Simultaneously, the model is consistent from the top and iterating from the side, which cannot be, yet is. This is expressed in the semantics. Each word in the model was chosen to represent simultaneously the best seesaw compromise between the consistent space down view and the progressive sideways across view. That is built into the matrix of the model itself BEFORE justification.

That is the view from outside the mind, as when we are looking at others, leading to why we say, “If I were you, this is what I’d do,” because from the outside their decisions make no sense. But from inside their minds, your advice makes no sense. As my mom put it to me as a teaching moment when I was young, “People say to me, ‘If I were you, I’d do this…” and I tell them, ‘No, if you were me, you’d do exactly what I’m doing, but if you were in you but in my shoes, you’d do the way you suggested.” Smart woman, my mom.

So, as I say, that paradox is built into the model at rest, BEFORE justification. Now, imagine we can only think at all because of that paradox, and it is the best we can get living inside our minds by virtue of how they are constructed, how they MUST be constructed.

And now in that mind at rest, filled with nothing but ready to operate, life experience enters the picture. In a practical world, we see things happen a certain way long enough and we assume givens – if this, then this, and when this, also this. Then the situation changes, but we are stuck with the givens. (We must adopt givens or we would have to refigure everything we know every time we considered anything at all – bad survival trait for the species. So, we establish givens which become the framework of how we see the world.

And then something changes and those givens don’t work any longer. For example, you understand when to use logic and when to use feelings to solve a problem, but now logic isn’t working any longer because of a different environment. So, you eventually give up on it and go with somebody’s advice to stop over thinking it and just go with your feelings and you do.

That’s the moment logic moves to the back burner for this kind of problem and feeling moves to the front. And now you’ve moved a mental process from its original position in the model matrix to another position in a flip. That is the beginning of the justification process, when something is either flipped spatially, or rotated temporally to adjust to experience altering either its position in the model or its sequence.

But, since time and space are interconnected in the model, when you flip or rotate one thing, the other goes with it and is also altered – space alters time and time space simultaneously. And this is how and when the justification process is applied to the model. It is not contained in the model – that is only the paradox of the interference pattern of space and time that creates self awareness in a mind (or model) at rest, carried to the the nth degree as far into the details as we can see within ourselves before we reach the point where if we look deeper, we lose a level of the upper view – the size of mind constant – so that the model is always the same size, no matter what kind of human issue we are looking at.

And it is upon that model of constant size and built-in paradox at rest that first one justification wind up is applied and then the other, in response to the eight dynamic questions. The final four questions of the total of twelve serve to position that effect upon the model in a particular place, but more on that later.

So, that’s why the model is as it is and where and when justification is applied and does not inherently reside within the model at rest and is not involved in the paradox in the vertical and horizontal levels. Good stopping point for now. 🙂

Irvaxis:

Alright, that is super-clarifying, thanks a lot! I feel like i have the gist of why the algorithm found coded in the patent and the apparent simplicity of “there are only 8 algorithms” seemed to mismatch. I have to ask one more thing, although this may need its own topic sometime: Is there a known representation of the temporal/lateral, unjustified perspective, with the corresponding KADT attachments/iterations? Because if there is, or if it can be created, this might heavily accelerate the process of recovering the algorithms and most especially the theory behind them, i conjecture. Because if these two are implemented as a single piece of code as i suspect, de-coupling them may prove to be crucial to get back the correct understanding of it.

My response:

In fact, I do not know. I was always on the theory side, not on the implementation side, so I’d come up with the concepts and the next thing I know they’d show up working in software. I see what you are saying – that if we could take the iteration “code” out of the software the justification code would remain, sort of. But, as far as I know, the iteration code isn’t in the software at all.

Rather, that’s just the concept that explains why you run into the semantic terms seeming like they don’t follow a strict KTAD pattern in the Table. But there was no need to code that part. All that was needed was the semantic terms that were used and their position in the model at rest, and then to run the two justifications on it.

So, essentially, that whole vertical/horizontal iteration “slip” it encoded in the semantics so that the semantic relationship among the four items in a quad gradually shifts as one moves through the at rest model, indicating the changing nature of KTAD through a gradual change in semantic meaning an the relationships among those altered meanings and relationship due to iterations.

Essentially, I imagine there is a semantic change in nature of the specific words from top to bottom and a change in the semantic distance between the words within quads from side to side across the model. This way, both the alteration in meaning of moving from top to bottom spatially through the four levels KTA and D and the alteration in the nature in the change of the relationships among KTAD within the evolving equations are combined in a single semantic shift, literally word by word. Therefore, both spatial and temporal shifts are unseen in terms of the toward and only contained in the semantic values. As a result, in the program it was not necessary to code either the spatial nor temporal shifts. All that was needed was:

1. Construct the matrix of the table.

2. Assign the semantic terms to their at rest position in the matrix.

3. Twist and turn the model with the two justifications based on the algorithms, including overlaying the PRCO and 1234 with the first and second justifications, which goes first depends on the algorithms.

That’s all that really happens with the model. Then the story point relationship table is overlaid so the engine can narrow the number of storyforms remaining by making choices, thereby providing more information about the structure than the author entered. And then you derive the PRCO and 1234 information and provide that to the author as well.

You know, when I stop to think about it, perhaps my greatest frustration is that to most folks, the elegance of the model is invisible. Of course, for writers, why would they want to bother with that anyway, as long as it works.

But there’s such a hidden beauty there, yet with many people, they perceive the Dramatica quad structure of the tower view as just a bunch of nested cubby holes that are just handy for holding dramatic topics that might show up in stories and have been grouped in quads of similar words.

Of course, as described above, the quads in the tower represent nested iterative equations at four different fractal levels as their variable are altered. And the iteration of the actual operations within each equation, not the variable values but the operations of the equation itself across the horizontal axis of the model CANNOT be included in the tower itself because they cannot co-exist with the top-down fractal approach – those two view are incompatible in the same space-time, must like real and imaginary numbers.

So the words in the model do the job of illustrating the gradual shift of temporal iterations (frictals) in the lateral plane, and in that way they transcend the limitations of the three dimensional representation of space-time in the model to separate out the fourth dimension of time into the semantics. And so, the model is space from the top down, but time in the iterations of semantic meanings laterally.

Now that’s pretty freaking elegant. But the real clincher is that the whole model with the space of the quads and the time of the semantics, both locked together is that they are twisted and turned through the process of justification to represent not the at-rest state of the mind, but the the potential of the mind’s experience-derived inequities, which are manifest in the potentials created through justification.

And then, of course, there is a second justification. One of the justifications occurs in the overall story mind. The other in the mind of the main character.

The main character is our self-awareness that exists without our mind. But our mind is so much more. Self-awareness is our Conscious mind, but there is also our Memory, our Subconscious, and our Pre-conscious.

And so, there is a fractal relationship between the main character and the overall mind, for the main character resides within it, but as an exact structural fractal – one tower of the complete four, a fractal of the totality.

But what’s more is that one justification is a frictal of the other – temporal fractals of one another that operate identically but one before the other. And so they are temporal fractals (frictals).

Finally, have you as of yet seen the quad that is made up of the two fractal structures (main character and overarching mind) and the two frictal dynamics (the first wind up and the second wind up)?

The structural fractals fall into the K and T positions within this master quad and the dynamic ones exist in the A and D positions. Armed with the understandings denoted above, anything within or without ourselves can be described and understood in the most accurate perspective available to us in our existence as the interference pattern between the mental world and the material world.

Perhaps “elegance” is too tame a word for this?

The Reasoning Behind Dramatica 1

I’m starting this new series of posts to provide a glimpse into our thought processes as we developed the Dramatica theory and the software implementation of the story engine.  It is my hope that sharing the reasoning behind key theory concepts will help provide perspectives others can employ to refine and expand the theory further.

Keep in mind the posts in this series are not intended to explain the concepts but to describe how we came to them.

The Story Mind

How and why did we come to the belief that the underlying structure of every story is the psychology of a single mind, that of the story itself, as if every story is something of a super character of which all the other characters are facets?

Here’s the quick version of how our thinking evolved, and below that a more detailed description of the pathway that got us there.

THE SHORT VERSION

Chris and I had been discussing story structure every morning over coffee for months before we each went off to our respective jobs. One day, Chris asked a question that would directly lead, years later, to the discovery of the story mind.  He asked, “If a characters, such as Scrooge, are the cause of a story’s problems, how come they can’t see it?”

We pondered that a bit and concluded that characters like Scrooge must have some sort of blind spot – a psychological filter that actually prevents them from seeing the real problem and in fact, causes him to believe the problem comes from somewhere else.  If that was true, how would something like that come to be, and more, how is that remedied by the end of a story?

At this point in our discussions we shifted gears from looking for structural patterns in stories to trying to understand the psychology of the main character, and when I eventually joined Chris at his company to work on the problem, that is where we focused.

So, we started looking at all manner of movies, books, plays, etc. to find anything in those stories that pertained to the main character’s psychology.  As we found them, we put each on on a post-it note and stuck it to the wall in the conference room.

Eventually that wall was plastered with these individual points.  But, as we mulled them over, we began to realize that some of them seemed like they belonged together, as if they belonged to the same family.  And so we grouped them as best we could, chipping away at all the remaining post-it notes that hadn’t been yet assigned to a group of similar items.

In time, it became clear that some of these psychological attributes of the main character were more like an umbrella under which a family of similar items resided.  We thought of them as parents and children.

We arranged and rearranged the notes, groupings, parents, and children, until we’d used up most of original notes on the wall.  But there was this one collection of all the remaining psychological aspects that just didn’t seem to be part of the psychology of the main character, though they were certainly psychological attributes within the story.

Our next thought was that perhaps these other points were part of one of the other kinds of characters than the main character – but which one, and how were they related.  I spent days staring at the notes on the wall, looking for a pattern that might explain what these orphan notes were and how they fit into stories.

And then, one day (and I actually recall this moment so very clearly) I was looking at all those loose notes and reading them over when I thought, no, those aren’t part of the main character’s psychology, and they really don’t fit with any of the other characters either.  So what are they?

And as I examined them more closely, reading the names of each attribute, I suddenly realized that what tied them all together as a group were that they were “higher-level” concepts than the ones in the main character group.  They were more broad stroke, more expansive.

And at that moment I said to myself, I wonder if these aren’t about the characters at all, but about the psychology going on in the story itself.  And then the next thought was the Eureka moment, it popped into may head that, “maybe the story has a psychology of its own.”

I snapped out of my thought as if out of a trance and ran down the hall to Chris’ office blurting out, “Maybe those extra post-its aren’t about the characters, maybe they are about the psychology of the story itself!”

As he often did when confronted with a wholly new concept, Chris said “Wait a minute…” got up from his desk, lay down on his back on the carpet, folded his hands on his chest and closed his eyes to let his subconscious wander around the new idea and take stock.

After what seemed five minutes (though was probably shorter) he opened his eyes saying simply, “I think you’re right.”  And from that moment forward we re-approached all the work we had previously done, dividing it into the psychology of the main character and the psychology of the story at large, which we came to refer to as the story mind.

Hopefully, that short (ish) description of how the story mind concept first emerged can help any of you who want to grok the wholeness of the theory.  It’s not so much about what’s i the theory but about how to have to see things to perceive the theory – the truth of it – to know when something is accurate to it and working as it should.  For in the end, the ability to almost intuit the structure and dynamics is what drives new concepts, rather than building them from extensions to a chain of logic alone.

THE LONG VERSION

Now, here’s how the evolution in our thinking that led to the story mind happened, step by step:

1.  In the early 1980s Chris and I had just finished producing a feature length horror movie and we about to start another script.  We recognized problems in our last story and decided to investigate if there were any truisms we might employ to solve those problems and prevent others.  So basically, we had no idea why problems in stories happened or how we might avoid them – no understanding of story at all – that’s where we were coming from.

2.  Our instructors at the USC Cinema Department didn’t seem to have a clue either.  Oh, they had some tips, but no system, no overview that hung together.  So, we weren’t sure if anybody anywhere really understood how stories work or even, for that matter, if there was any rhyme or reason to it.  We speculated that either no one had found the answer yet or maybe there was no answer and stories were just result of unfathomable intuition.

3.  We decided to cast a wider net and see what had been written about story structure throughout history.  We encountered Aristotle, of course, and his seminal work, Poetics, and we also ran into Jung and Joseph Campbell.  But we never went too deep before we became dissatisfied with inconsistencies, incomplete reasoning, and contradictions.  So, we figured we should either drop the who thing or strike out on our own to understand what was going on in stories a little better.  We were in our twenties, so of course we were filled with hubris and arrogance and decided to chase after the prize on our own.

4.  We were so full of ourselves that we decided not to read anything about story structure by anybody else, except for the little bit of skimming we’d done.  We reasoned that maybe we’d end up reinventing the wheel, but we might just go off in a direction everyone else knew would not be productive and actually find answers they never had because they had blinders on.  Yes, we actually had that conversation and then put our own blinders on to not look elsewhere while we worked on our own quest for understanding.

5.  We actually came up with a few good ideas (such as “the rule of threes” that you’ll hear about in a later post) by looking at stories that we knew worked (you could feel which stories worked or didn’t work without an inkling why).  We got lots of little original bit and pieces, but in the end, we stalled out and without any kind of an overview about structure.  We spent a few weeks stalled and then Chris wisely said we probably hadn’t had enough life experience, and perhaps we should put it all on hold until we later.  That made sense, so that is what we did, agreeing we wouldn’t pollute our virgin thinking in the meantime with other people’s ideas about story structure until we reconvened some time in the future.

6. About ten years later, Chris called me up and said, You know that old story structure project we were working on?  I think we’re ready.”  And so we met for breakfast at a booth near the door in the Coral Cafe near my home, and from that point we were off to the races and never looked back.

7. Our first order of business was to decide to meet over coffee at my home for about an hour every day before we went to our respective jobs.  Then, we went over all our old material from ten years ago, reorganizing it to suit our more experienced point of view, and beginning to ask new questions.

And that is where this long version of the story connects to the short version at the top.

Next time, we can dispense with a lot of this background material as we look into the thought processes behind the next Dramatica concept.

Dramatica and Multi-Source Intelligence Data

Here’s a white paper I wrote on my own time when we were working with the NSA, CIA, and NRO on counter-terrorism and assessing/predicting motivations and intentions of unfriendly nations using narrative, 

I’d never write this today as it is really boring and requires an extremely clamped down perspective of thinking which was novel then, but no so much now.  Anyway, here’s the article for those into inflicting upon themselves intellectual pain

Application of Dramatica Theory and Technology to
Analysis of Multi-Source Intelligence Data
& Prediction of Target Group Activities

By Melanie Anne Phillips

Co-creator, Dramatica

Introduction to Dramatica Theory and Applications

The Dramatica Theory of Story is a model of the mind’s problem solving processes which has been successfully employed for seventeen years in the analysis and construction of fictional stories ranging from major Hollywood productions to novels, stage plays, and television programs.

Software based on the Dramatica Theory is built around an interactive Story Engine which implements the problem-solving model as a method of determining the meaning and impact of data sets and of predicting motivations and actions based on potentials inherent in the data.

This is achieved by creating a Storyform – essentially, a schematic of the problem solving processes at work, their interactions, their outcomes, and the future course they will take.

The Dramatica system and its problem-solving algorithms can be applied with equal success to the analysis of real-world situations as well, specifically in determining the motivations behind the actions of a target group and in the prediction of their future actions and potentials for action.

Scalability and the Story Mind

To illustrate this methodology let us consider a generic target group. This might be a clique, club, movement, political faction, tribe, or nation. This highlights an important benefit of the system: Dramatica is scalable. It works equally well on individuals or groups of any size.

This kind of scalability is described by a Dramatica concept referred to as the Story Mind. In fiction, characters are not only individuals but[M1] also interact in stories as if they are aspects of a larger, overall mind set belonging to the structure of the story itself.

If, for example, one character may emerge in group actions and discussions as the voice of reason while another character, driven primarily by passion, becomes defined as the heart of the group.

Stories reflect the way people react and behave in the real world, and when individuals band together as a larger unit, they fall into roles where the unit itself takes on an identity with its own personality and its own psychology, almost as if it were an individual itself, in essence, a Story Mind.

Fractal Storyforms in the Real World

Similarly, if several groups become bound, as when factions join as members of a larger movement, the movement begins to take on an identity and the factions fall into roles representing aspects of individual problem solving processes.

Dramatica can move up and down the scale of magnitude from the individual to the national and even international level, while retaining an equally effective ability to analyze and predict based on its underlying model. This phenomenon is referred to the Fractal Storyform.

In actual practice, many groups of interest are ill defined, have blurry edges and indistinct leadership. Still, the core motivations of the target group can be determined, and from this the edges of the group can be refined sufficiently to create a storyform of the appropriate magnitude to suit the task at hand.

Memes and Story Points

Dramatica makes a key distinction between the underlying structure of a story and the subject matter that is explored by that structure. For example, every story has a goal but the specific nature of the goal is different from story to story. Elements such as a goal which are common to every story and, hence, every problem solving process, are referred to as Story Points.

Similarly a culture, ethnic group, religion, political movement, or faction will employ the same underlying story points but will clothe them in unique subject matter in order to define the organization as being distinct and to provide a sense of identity to its members.

Once a story point has been generally accepted in a specific subject matter form it becomes a cultural meme. Efforts to analyze and predict a culture based on memes alone have largely been unsuccessful.

Dramatica’s system of analysis is able to strip away the subject matter from cultural memes to reveal the underlying story points and thereby determine the specific storyform that describes that group’s story mind.

Essentially, Dramatica is able to distill critical story points from raw data and assemble them into a map of the target group’s motivations and intentions.

Passive Participation and Active Participation

One of Dramatica’s greatest strengths is that it works equally well in constructing stories as in analyzing them. We refer to analysis as Passive Participation and construction as Active Participation.

When dealing with a target group of interest, these two approaches translate into the ability to passively understand the target group and anticipate its behavior, and also to actively create courses of action by which to intervene in and/or influence the group’s future activities and attitudes.

To understand, we determine motivations and purposes.

To anticipate, we project actions and intent.

To intervene, we define leverage points for targeted action.

To influence, we determine nexus points for focused pressure.

Analysis

The passive approach is comprised of Analysis and Prediction. Analysis is achieved by first identifying independent story points and then determining which ones belong together in a single storyform.

Identifying Story Points

In addition to cultural memes, story points can also be derived from the target group’s public and private communications, in news publications and vehicles of propaganda, in works of art (both authorized and spontaneous), in popular music and entertainment, in the allocation of resources, and in the movements and gatherings of individuals. In short, any data can directly or indirectly provide valid story points.

Identifying a Storyform

Once a collection of story points has been assembled, it must be determined which ones belong together in the same storyform. Each storyform represents a different state of mind, but there may be many states of mind in a single target group. These are not different mind sets of individuals, but different mind sets of the group itself:. And just as stories often have subplots or multiple stories in the same novel, target groups may have a number of different agendas, each with its own personality traits and outlook.

This can be illustrated with an example from everyday life: a single individual may respond as a banker at his job, a father and husband at home, a teammate in a league and a son when he visits his own parents. Similarly, a target group may have one storyform that best describes its relationship to its allies and another that describes its relationship to its enemies.

It is crucial to determine which storyform is to be analyzed so that an appropriate subset can be selected from all derived story points.

Results from Limited Data

The Story Engine at the heart of the Dramatica software cross-references the impact and influence of different kinds of story points as they interact with one another, both for individual story points and for groups of story points.

Once the scope of the storyform is outlined, the software can actually determine additional story points within that closed system that had not been directly observed as part of the original data set. This creates a more detailed and complete picture of the situation under study than is evident from the limited data.

Spatial Data vs. Temporal Data

Unique to Dramatica’s software, the Story Engine is able to determine the kinds of events that must transpire and the order in which they will likely occur, based on the static picture of the situation provided by the complete storyform.

In stories, the order in which events occur determines their meaning. For example, a slap followed by a scream would have a different meaning that a scream followed by a slap. Similarly, if one understands the potentials at work in a storyform derived from story points pertaining to the target group, the Story Engine is capable of predicting what kinds of events will likely follow and in what order they will likely occur.

Conversely, if the originally observed data set includes sequential information, such as a timeline of a person’s travels or of the evolution of a sponsored program, the Story Engine can convert that temporal data into a fixed storyform that will indicate the motivations and purposes of the group that led them to engage in that sequence of events.

Prediction

The Dramatica theory and Story Engine (when properly used by experts) is able to translate the spatial layout of a situation into a temporal prediction of how things will unfold from that point forward.

Signposts and Journeys

The Dramatica storyform breaks events into Signposts and Journeys. These concepts are similar to the way one might look at a road and consider both the milestones and the progress being made along the path.

In stories, this data is described by Acts, Sequences, and Scenes, concepts which represent different magnitudes of time. Acts are the largest segments of a story, sequences one magnitude smaller, and scenes are even smaller dramatic movements.

Wheels within Wheels

It is commonplace to think of story events as simply being driven by cause and effect. A more accurate model may be roughly visualized as wheels within wheels, where a character sometimes may act in ways against its own best interest. For example, larger forces may have been brought to bear and might carry greater weight.

The outside pressures that are brought to bear on the target group build up these potentials as if one were winding a clock. In stories, this creates potentials that make each wheel (such as an act of a scene) operate as if it were a dramatic circuit.

Each story point within a given dramatic circuit is assigned a function as a Potential, Resistance, Current, or Power. Determining which of these functions is associated with each story point is essential to accurately predicting the nature and order of a target group’s future activities based on an understanding of the different magnitudes of motivation at work.

Closed Systems and Chaos

Storyforms are closed systems. They are snapshots of a moment in time in the mindset of a target group. But just as an individual or a character in a story is constantly influenced by outside events, new information, and the impact of others, so too is the target group. To the ordered world of a storyform, such outside influence is seen as chaotic interference.

The accuracy of a storyform analysis and its predictions has a short shelf life. The more volatile the environment in which the target group operates, the more quickly the accuracy of the storyform degrades.

Fortunately, storyforms can quickly incorporate new data to be updated in real time to give a constantly refreshed accuracy to the analysis.

In addition, just because a target group’s motivations and agenda is continually being altered by outside events does not mean the effects upon it are completely chaotic.

Some influences, such as an earthquake, an unexpected death, or a surprise attack are truly chaotic, while other influences only appear to be chaotic because they are not part of the closed storyform. Rather, they are part of a larger story.

Applying the concept of the fractal storyform, it is possible to create additional storyforms of both larger and smaller magnitudes to surround the target group so that it is seen not only by itself, but also as a player in a larger story or in terms of individual players within it. In this manner many events which previously appeared chaotic can be predicted and the accuracy of the target group storyform is enhanced.

Movie Frames

Another method for minimizing inaccuracy in prediction is to create a series of storyforms for the target group over a given period. These are then assembled in sequence, like frames in a movie, to determine the arc of change over time.

Truly chaotic events will largely cancel out, but ongoing influence from larger and smaller storyforms with their own individual agendas will create a predictable curve to the manner in which the target group’s storyform is changing, thereby allowing us to anticipate not only what the target group might do on its own, but what it is likely to do as the situation in which it operates continues to evolve.

Direct Intervention

In contrast to Passive methods, with Active methods we consider altering the actions and attitudes of a target group by either direct intervention or indirect influence.

Identifying a Problem

Once a storyform has been created and analysis and prediction have been employed, an assessment must be made to determine if the target group is currently of a mindset contrary to our interests and/or if it will be in the future.

Before a response can be developed, the specific nature of the problem must be fully defined. Again, the storyform and its component story points offer an accurate mechanism for determining the specific nature of the problem: the story point or story point arrangements that are in conflict with our interests.

Identifying a Solution

Some solutions simply require the alteration of a single story point to a different orientation within the storyform (corresponding to a slight shift in attitude, motivation, or actions by the target group). Often, once the specific nature of the problem is understood, a direct surgical impact on that story point may alter the direction of the story. Modifications to the storyform must be approached with caution, because a single small ill-advised move can sometimes do far more damage than the original problem. More complex problems may require replacing the current storyform with a completely different one.

“What If” Scenarios

Fortunately, Dramatica’s Story Engine allows for altering one or more story points to see the nature of the new storyform that will be created as a result. A large number of alternatives exist by simply altering a few story points, resulting in the ability to game out “what if” scenarios in real time to determine a wide variety of alternatives that would accomplish the same end.

Risk Analysis

By comparing the effectiveness, ramifications, and projected timelines of each alternative storyform solution, it is possible to create an effective risk analysis of each available option to ensure maximum impact with minimum risk.

These alternative storyforms can indicate the kinds of risks involved in each potential response to the problem, as well as the magnitude and likelihood of each risk.

Indirect Influence

Direct intervention may be inadvisable for any number of reasons. Also, if the problem with the target group is its overall attitude, the strength of its motivation, or its unity of purpose, any overt action might prove ineffective or even counter-productive, resulting in a response opposite to that intended.

In such cases, it may be more prudent to exert a gradual influence or series of influences over an extended time. Here again, Dramatica is able to provide tools to know when and for how long to apply specific kinds of visible and/or invisible influence to ultimately obtain the desired changes in the target group’s mindset.

Identifying Problem Qualities and Directions

At times, there may currently be no problem, but the storyform may reveal that, if left unaltered, the course of events will lead the target group into an undesired orientation. This allows for the allocation of our own resources in advance so that we might prevent the Target group from taking that particular course and opting instead for one more consistent with our interests.

Again, the first step is to create a storyform from available data and then determine the qualities of the target group’s story mind that are contrary to desired attributes.

Determining Desired Qualities and Directions

Once the problem qualities and/or directions have been defined, alternative storyforms can be created using “what if” scenarios and risk analysis to determine the best choice for a new storyform we would like to see in place.

This storyform may represent a new state of mind for the target group as a unit, or a different path that will take it through an alternative series of actions than it would otherwise instigate.

Context and the Larger Story

One method of manipulating a target group into a new outlook or attitude is through the subtle placement of the psychological equivalent of shaped charges. Rather that the direct impact of intervention, a number of small, seemingly unconnected exposures to information or manipulated environments can combine to create a single and powerful influence that will provide an immediate course correction to the undesired qualities and directions of the target group.

To effect such a subtle and undetectable influence is possible due to the depth and detail of the Story Engine’s ability to calculate the collective influence of many small magnitude story points on the overall storyform.

Movie Frames

Returning to the “movie frame” concept in a proactive, rather than analytical manner, it is possible to create a series of storyforms, each of which is slightly different that the previous one. As with individuals, the mind of a target group is more open to accepting small changes and establishing a new normal than to larger immediate changes which raise resistance.

Over time, subtle influences can follow a planned arc of change that leads the target to a new mindset, perhaps even diametrically opposed to its original viewpoint.

It is important to recognize that any long-term arc must be constantly updated and adjusted so that new influences are brought to bear to limit or leverage the impact of chaotic influence on the chosen alternative course.

Potential Future Implementations

Currently, the story engine requires manual operators versed in the Dramatica theory for processing and creating storyforms for purposes of Analysis, Prediction, Intervention, and Influence.

In the future, natural language processing can be coupled with the story engine’s operations to bring a degree of automation to the identification of story points using hub theory to locate them in large quantities of raw data.

Influence networks can be employed to determine which story points are likely to belong to the same storyform and to assemble them into alternative storyforms which may co-exist in the same raw data.

Employing a real-time version of Dramatica’s Story Engine could allow for real time analysis of ongoing data flow and indicate new storyforms as soon as they manifest in the mindsets of target groups, alerting operators when existing storyforms have dissolved or altered due to ongoing influences.

Natural language output can provide continuously updated options in time-crucial situations with a series of live “what if” scenario suggestions.

In Summary

The Dramatica Theory of Story and the software that implements the theory in an interactive story engine has, for the last seventeen years, successfully enabled accurate analysis and creation of story structures in motion pictures, novels, stage plays, and all forms of narrative communication.

By identifying the crucial story points in the mindsets of target groups of any size, the Story Engine is equally effective in analyzing and altering a target group’s current and future attitudes and behavior in the real world.

Copyright Melanie Anne Phillips

Dramatica Theory Application on World Problems

Here’s a little “white paper” I wrote on my own time for our intelligence agencies while we were working on anti-terrorism narratives to help them better understand the potential of Dramatica in the real world.

Dramatica Theory Application on World Problems

By Melanie Anne Phillips

Co-creator, Dramatica

Introduction to Dramatica Theory and Applications

The Dramatica Theory of Story is a model of the mind’s problem solving processes which has been successfully employed for seventeen years in the analysis and construction of fictional stories ranging from major Hollywood productions to novels, stage plays and television programs.

Software based on the Dramatica Theory is built around an interactive Story Engine which implements the problem-solving model as a method of determining the meaning and impact of data sets and of predicting motivations and actions based on potentials inherent in the data.

This is achieved by creating a Storyform – essentially, a schematic of the problem solving processes at work, their interactions, their outcomes, and the future course they will take.

The Dramatica system and its problem-solving algorithms can be applied with equal success to the analysis of real-world situations as well, specifically in determining the motivations behind the actions of a target group and in the prediction of their future actions and potentials for action.

Scalability and the Story Mind

To illustrate this methodology we let us consider a generic target group.  This might be a clique, club, movement, political faction, tribe or nation.  Which brings us to the first benefit of this system: Dramatica is scalable.  That is to say that it works equally well on individuals or groups of any size.

This kind of scalability is described by a Dramatica concept referred to as the Story Mind.  In fiction, characters are not only individuals but come to interact in stories as if they are aspects of a larger, overall mind set belonging to the structure of the story itself.

So, for example, one character may emerge in group actions and discussions as the voice of reason while another becomes defined as the heart of the group and is driven primarily by passion.

Stories reflect the way people react and behave in the real world, and so we find that when individuals band together as a larger unit, they fall into roles so that the unit itself takes on an identity with its own personality and its own psychology, almost as if it were an individual itself, in essence, a Story Mind.

Fractal Storyforms in the Real World

Similarly, if several groups become bound as when a number of factions join as members of a larger movement, the movement begins to take on an identity and the factions fall into roles representing aspects of our own problem solving processes.

Like nested dolls, Dramatica can move up and down the scale of magnitude from the individual to the national or even international level and its ability to analyze and predict based on its underlying model is equally effective.  This phenomenon is referred to the Fractal Storyform.

In actual practice, many groups of interest are ill-defined, have blurry edges and indistinct leadership.  Still, the core motivations of the target group can be determined, and from this the edges of the group can be refined sufficiently to create a storyform of the appropriate magnitude to the task at hand.

Memes and Story Points

Dramatica makes a key distinction between the underlying structure of a story and the subject matter that is explored by that structure.  For example, every story has a goal but the specific nature of the goal is different from story to story.  Elements such as a goal which are common to every story and, hence, every problem solving process, are referred to as Story Points.

Similarly any culture, ethnic group, religion, political movement, or faction will employ the same underlying story points but will clothe them in unique subject matter in order to define the organization as being distinct and to provide a sense of identity to its members.

Once a story point has been generally accepted in a specific subject matter form it becomes a cultural meme.  Efforts to analyze and predict a culture based on memes alone have largely been unsuccessful.

Dramatica’s system of analysis is able to strip away the subject matter from cultural memes to reveal the underlying story points and thereby determine the specific storyform that describes that group’s story mind.

Essentially, Dramatica is able to distill critical story points from raw data and assemble them into map of the target group’s motivations and intentions.

Passive and Active Modes

One of Dramatica’s greatest strengths is that it works equally well in constructing stories as in analyzing them.  We refer to analysis as the Passive mode and construction as the Active mode.

When dealing with a target group of interest, this translates into the ability to not only passively understand and anticipate the group, but also to actively create courses of action by which to intervene in and/or influence the group’s future activities and attitudes.

To understand, we determine motivations and purposes.

To anticipate, we project actions and intent.

To intervene, we define leverage points for targeted action.

To influence, we determine nexus points for focused pressure.

Let us look more deeply into the methods employed in the Passive mode, then return to do the same for the Active mode.

Analysis

The passive mode is comprised of Analysis and Prediction.  Analysis is achieved by first identifying independent story points and then determining which ones belong together in a single storyform.

Identifying Story Points

As described earlier, story points can be derived from cultural memes, but are also evident in the target group’s communications (both for internal and external consumption), in new publications and vehicles of propaganda, in works of art (both authorized and spontaneous), in popular music and entertainment, in the allocation of resources, in the movements and gatherings of individuals – in short, any data can directly or indirectly provide valid story points.

Identifying a Storyform

Once a collection of story points has been assembled, it must be determined  which ones belong together in the same storyform.  Each storyform represents a different state of mind, but there may be many states of mind in a single target group.  These are not different mind sets of individuals, but different mind sets of the group itself or, put in a different way, just as stories often have subplots or multiple stories in the same novel, for example, target groups may have a number of different agendas, each with its own personality traits and outlook.

This can be illustrated with an example from everyday life where a single individual may respond as a banker at his job, a father and husband at home, a teammate in a league and a son when he visits his own parents.  So too, a target group may have one storyform that best describes its relationship to its allies and another that describes its relationship to its enemies.

Crucial to this aspect of the process is to determine which storyform is to be analyzed so that the proper story points can be selected as a subset of all those that were derived.

Results from Limited Data

The Story Engine at the heart of the Dramatica software cross references the impact and influence of different kinds of story points upon one another, both individually and in groups.

As a result, once the scope of the storyform is outlined, the software can actually determine additional story points within that closed system that had not been directly observed as part of the original data set.  Some story points are more influential than others, but the bottom line is that Dramatica is able to create a far more detailed and complete picture of the situation under study than is evident from sparse data by itself.

Spatial Data vs. Temporal Data

Unique to Dramatica’s software, the Story Engine is able to determine the kinds of events that must transpire and the order in which they will likely occur, based on the static picture of the situation provided by the complete storyform.

In stories, the order in which events occur determines their meaning.  For example, a slap followed by a scream would have a different meaning that a scream followed by a slap.  Similarly, if one understands the potentials at work in a storyform derived from story points pertaining to the target group, the Story Engine is capable of predicting what kinds of events will likely follow and in what order they will likely occur.

Conversely, if the originally observed data set includes sequential information, such as a timeline of a person’s travels or of the evolution of a sponsored program, the Story Engine can convert that temporal data into a fixed storyform that will indicate the motivations and purposes of the group that led them to engage in that sequence of events.

Prediction

As described, the Dramatica theory and Story Engine (when properly used by experts) is able to translate the spatial layout of a situation into a temporal prediction of how things will unfold from that point forward.

Signposts and Journeys

In Dramatica storyforms, events are broken into Signposts and Journeys, just as one might look at a road and consider both the milestones and the progress being made along the path.

In stories, this data is represented in Acts, Sequences, and Scenes.  Each of these is a different magnitude of time.  Acts are the largest segments of a story, sequences one magnitude smaller, and scenes are even smaller dramatic movements.

Wheels within Wheels

As a loose visualization, one might think of story events as not being driven by simple cause and effect, but rather being wheels within wheels, in which sometimes a character may act in ways against it’s own best interest (for example) because of larger forces that have been brought to bear and carry greater weight.

In fact, it is the outside pressures that are brought to bear on the target group that build up these potentials as if one were winding a clock.  In stories, this creates potentials that make each wheel (such as an act of a scene) operate as if it were a dramatic circuit.

In fact, each story point within a given dramatic circuit is assigned a function as a Potential, Resistance, Current, or Power.  Determining which of these functions is associated with each story point is essential to accurately predicting the nature and order of a target group’s future activities based on an understanding of the different magnitudes of motivation at work.

Closed Systems and Chaos

Storyforms are closed systems.  As such, they are flash photographs of a moment in time – a snap shot of the mindset of a target group.  But every group, just as an individual or a character in a story, is constantly influenced by outside events, new information, and the impact of others.  To the ordered world of a storyform, such outside interference is chaotic.

The accuracy of a storyform analysis and its predictions, therefore, has a short shelf-life.  The more volatile the environment in which the target group operates, the more quickly the accuracy of the storyform degrades.

Fortunately, storyforms can quickly incorporate new data and changes in older data and update literally in real time to give a constantly refreshed accuracy to the analysis.

In addition, just because a target group’s motivations and agenda is continually being altered by outside events does not mean the effects upon it are completely chaotic.

While some influences, such as an earthquake or an unexpected death or a surprise attack are truly chaotic, other influences only appear to be chaotic because they are not part of the closed storyform.  Rather, they are part of a larger story.

Applying the concept of the fractal storyform, it is possible to create additional storyforms of both larger and smaller magnitudes to surround the target group so that it is seen not only in and of itself, but as a player in a larger story and also in terms of individual players within it.  In this manner many events which previously appeared chaotic can be predicted and the accuracy of the target group storyform is enhanced.

Movie Frames

Another method for minimizing inaccuracy in prediction is to create a series of storyforms of the target group over a given period.  These are then assembled in sequence like frames in a movie to determine the arc of change over time.

Truly chaotic events will largely cancel out, but ongoing influence from larger and smaller storyforms with their own individual agendas will create a predictable curve to the manner in which the target group’s storyform is changing, thereby allowing us to anticipate not only what the target group might do on its own, but what it is likely to do as the situation in which it operates continues to evolve.

Again, this method allows for real-time updates so that the most accurate prediction of the likely motivations and actions of the target group can be both anticipated and acted upon.

Direct Intervention

Turning our attention from Passive methods to Active methods, we consider altering the actions and attitudes of a target group by either direct intervention or indirect influence.

Identifying a Problem

Once a storyform has been created and analysis and prediction have been employed, an assessment must be made to determine if the target group is currently of a mindset contrary to our interests and/or if it will be in the future.

Before a response can be developed, the specific nature of the problem must be fully defined.  Again, the storyform and its component story points offer an accurate mechanism for determining the specific nature of the problem – the story point or story point arrangements that are in conflict with our interests.

Identifying a Solution

Some solutions simply require the alteration of a single story point to a different orientation within the storyform (corresponding to a slight shift in attitude, motivation, or actions by the target group).  Often, once the specific nature of the problem is understood, a direct surgical impact on that point may alter it by direct force alone.

Still, this is not certain and (especially in more complex problems that require replacing the current storyform with a completely different one) a single small ill-advised move can do far more damage that the original problem and perhaps in ways not anticipated.

“What If” Scenarios

Fortunately, Dramatica’s Story Engine allows for altering one or more story points in a storyform to see what kind of new storyform will be created as a result.  In fact, a large number of alternatives exist by simply altering a few story points.  This results in the ability to game out “what if” scenarios in real time to determine a wide variety of alternatives that would accomplish the same end.

Risk Analysis

By comparing the effectiveness, ramifications, and altered projected timelines of each alternative storyform solution, it is possible to create an effective risk analysis of each available option to ensure maximum impact at minimum risk.

In fact, alternative storyforms can indicate not only the kinds of risks involved in each potential response to the problem, but also their extent, their magnitude, and their likelihoods.

Indirect Influence

Often, direction intervention is inadvisable for any number of reasons.  Further, if the problem with the target group is its overall attitude, the strength of its motivation, or its unity of purpose, any overt action might prove ineffective or even counter-productive, resulting in a response opposite to that intended.

In such cases, it may be more prudent to exert a gradual influence or series of influences all at once or, alternatively, put into play over and extended time for a less obviously directly influence.  Here again, Dramatica is able to provide tools to know when, and for how long to apply specific kinds of visible and/or unobserved influence to ultimately obtain the desired changes in the target group’s mind set.

Identifying Problem Qualities and Directions

Again, the first step is to create a storyform from available data and then determine the qualities of the target group’s story mind that are contrary to desired attributes.

At times, there may currently be no problem, but the storyform may reveal that, if left unaltered, the course of events will lead the target group into an undesired orientation.  This allows for the allocation of our own resources in advance so that we might prevent the Target group from taking that particular course and opting instead for one more consistent with our interests.

Determining Desired Qualities and Directions

Once the problem qualities and/or directions have been defined, alternative storyforms can be created using “what if” scenarios and risk analysis to determine the best choice for a new storyform we would like to see in place.

This may simply be a new state of mind for the target group as a unit and/or a different path that will take it through an alternative series of actions than it would otherwise instigated.

Context and the Larger Story

One method of manipulating a target group into a new outlook or attitude is through the subtle placement of the psychological equivalent of shaped charges.  Rather that the direct impact of intervention, a number of small, seemingly unconnected exposures to information or manipulated environments can combine to create a single and powerful influence that will provide an immediate course correction to the undesired qualities and directions of the target group.

To affect such a subtle and undetectable influence is possible due to the depth and detail of the Story Engine’s ability to calculate the collective influence of many small magnitude story points on the overall storyform.

Movie Frames

Returning to the “movie frame” concept in a proactive, rather than analytical manner, it is possible to create a series of storyforms, each of which is slightly different that the previous one.  As with individuals, the mind of a target group is more open to accepting small changes and establishing a new normal that to larger immediate changes which raise resistance.

Over time, subtle influences can follow a planned arc of change that leads the target to a new mindset, perhaps even diametrically opposed to its original viewpoint, that would be impossible to achieve immediately, even with the most powerful influences brought to bear.

It is important to recognize that due to the effects of chaotic influences (as described earlier) any long-term arc must be constantly updated and adjusted so that new influences are brought to bear to limit or leverage the impact of chaos on the chosen alternative course toward a more desirable storyform for the target group.

Implementation

Currently, the story engine requires manual operators versed in the Dramatica theory for processing and creating storyforms for purposes of Analysis, Prediction, Intervention, and Influence.

In the future, natural language processing can be coupled with the story engine’s operations to bring a degree of automation to the identification of story points using hub theory to locate them in large quantities of raw data.

Influence networks can be employed to determine which story points are likely to belong to the same storyform and to assemble them into alternative storyforms which may co-exist in the same raw data.

Employing Dramatica’s real-time Story Engine (in operation since 1991, but not included in the commercially available version of the software) can allow for real time analysis of ongoing data flow and indicate new storyforms as soon as they manifest in the mindsets of target groups and alert operators when existing storyforms have dissolved or altered due to ongoing influences.

Natural language output can provide continuously updated options in time-crucial situations with a series of live “what if” scenario suggestions.

In Summary

The Dramatica Theory of Story and the software that implements the theory in an interactive story engine has, for the last seventeen years, successfully enabled accurate analysis and creation of story structures in motion pictures, novels, stage plays, and all forms of narrative communication.

By identifying the crucial story points in the mind sets of target groups of any size, the story engine is equally effective in analyzing and altering the target groups’ current and future attitudes and behavior in the real world.

For more information on Dramatica visit our web site at Storymind.com

Published by Storymind Press

Copyright Melanie Anne Phillips

Scientific American Style Article on Dramatica

Back in 1993 Chris Huntley and I already written our book, Dramatica: A New Theory of Story, but felt that as we had no scientific credentials, perhaps we should prepare a concise “white paper” article describing the key concepts of Dramatica in a style similar to that of Scientific American magazine.

You can see the result in this PDF of the article.

As per usual, I did pretty much all of the writing, Chris did all the editing and all the artwork and it was all based on the theory concepts we had developed together.

In the thirty years that followed, we’ve seen nothing to invalidate any of these notions, though we have learned better ways to explain them, and also more about the implications and applications of what this article contains.

Narrative Psychology | Justification and Neuro Science

This is an excerpt from the transcript of a class I gave on narrative psychology…

We are going to start with the neurology, and work our way through understanding justification in terms of the brains neurology about chemistry, and then we are going to work our way through mental relativity understanding, and then we are going to work our way through a psychological understanding, and then we are going to work our way into the final perspective which is external or physical justification.  So, we are going to start with the physical part of the mind, and then go to the mental relativity part of self-awareness, and then go to the psychological part of the mind, and then we are going to carry it outside, and then bring it back to the body.  So, we’ve gone full circle. 

Q:  So, justification is a style of problem solving? 

Well, problem solving and justification are two means for dealing with an inequity.  When you try to get rid of the inequity, it’s problem solving, when you try balance the inequity, that’s justification. 

O.K., so first of all, in terms of the neurology, there are a couple of models.  (ON BOARD):

We have narrow networks in the brain, and these narrow networks are little things that look like little brains.  They are called ganglia.  There’s a left-headed ganglia, and a right-headed ganglia, and within it, maybe four thousand neurons are all interconnecting.  Then they connect one to another and then you have all these little neural networks.  That’s why it’s not just in neurology, because they are little tiny networks, within a larger network, with subgroups.  And there’s a biochemistry that exists outside here, that all of these ganglia are in that effects them as a group.  And there’s also a membrane of the ganglia, a little micro-climate zone, and one side of the ganglia produces primarily the dopamine, and the other side produces the seratonin.  There is sort of a balance between the dopamine and the seratonin in the network.  This is where our real space and time sense come from in the ganglia. 

Our sense of mass and energy are kind of dealing with the external here.  There’s this larger biochemistry and the big network.  The big network has 4,000 neurons and if we look at it as a single entity, that’s like one switching point, and this is another switching point between themselves, so it has less resolution, than when start looking at what’s actually going on here.  This matter of resolution here is that they would each appear to be containing our sense of mass.  In other words, it’s there, it’s not a very binary sense, all these things work together and say yes or no.  So, you sort of get that sense.  Whereas, the biochemistry that works outside of it, is our sense of energy.  That there is either pressure upon it or  not, in a very unsophisticated way or less resolved way.  When you get down to the level of the ganglia themselves, inside, it becomes more sophisticated, because now you are dealing with relationships between things, instead of just binary states between things. 

And you have the enclosed micro-climate in our biochemistry is such that you have a neuron, and there’s something over here called the threshold.   The threshold here is an  electrical difference between the outside of the neuron, and the inside of the neuron, when you are looking at the axon.  The axon is this  body of the neuron, and it has its receptors, and it’s dendrites.  And they all come up here and go to various neurons.  So, all of these connections to various different neurons.

One of the first places we notice space and time is in the synapse, where the two come together.  There’s some neuron over here that’s firing  and  when it fires, the way it works is down at the bottom, there are little spherical containers holding the neurotransmitters, that are created inside one of these little areas and shooting it out.  And these things migrate and are attracted to the edge of the membrane, depending upon the degree of calcium that’s contained in this liquid inside.  And the amount of calcium has to do with how frequently this is fired.  So, the more familiar you become, the more calcium builds up.  And the more calcium that builds up, the more of these things are ionized, and attracted to the bottom .  And when enough of them are attracted to the bottom, what they do is they sit there long enough, which is where you get time – spatially you get a bunch of them down there.  Temporally, they have to be there long enough.  And when they are there long enough, then if you made one of these larger, with just the edge of this, with one of these things sitting down there, you go through a series of steps, where it begins to open up to the outside, until you end up with something like that.

Eventually, it just goes straight, but in the meantime what’s happened is that it has dumped it’s neurotransmitter in here outside into the open environment.  And then your neurotransmitter is totally out, and the membrane is closed, so there’s a real interesting way that it opens up like that.  And, if it’s there long enough, it will do this.  As they are created, it’s are they getting close to the edge, and they are sort of like, do you have one here, and they are all lined up on the edge, or are they pointing out in the center like this.  So, that’s going to determine how many are close to the edge, and we have how many are close to the edge.  And we have how many are close to the edge, tendency because they are pulled there to stay there longer, and in greater quantities.  And so it adjusts how much of this stuff flows out.  It’s not just that you are going to end up with having it all flow a certain level.  We can modulate it’s affect.  So, even though it fires or doesn’t fire, if it fires, it could just be a little tiny fire, and there could be a lot of neurotransmitter dumped out. 

So, that controls the amount of biochemical that’s going into the synapse.  Remember, the synapse is the one that comes down here, and then it’s captured by the one that comes in.  The neurotransmitters don’t just go directly from here to here, like flaming torpedoes or something, some of them go directly there, but they also spread out, and get into the general mix.  Various atoms of the neurotransmitters.  And as they do, they get over here, they get to work throughout the ganglia, inside it.  So that whenever anything fires, that has thought that occurs.  But, maybe they could be firing seratonin, or they could be firing dopamine.  Or a lot of other neurotransmitters, but they all have the same kind of effect, to cause excitement or slow them down.  Well, the dopamine has a tendency to reduce the calcium inside, while the seratonin has a tendency to increase it.  So, it doesn’t just affect the receiver, it also reflects what’s happening here.  So, that while you have something that is firing, and gives it a tendency to fire more and more frequently, at the same time, what’s out here, could be causing it to fire less and less frequently. 

So, that means that there could be inhibitors  from the outside that inhibit a specific signal coming from the outside.  In other words, even if something is very familiar, coming from this particular neuron, from a sensory neuron, of which there are millions throughout your body, — well, if one of these pathways says “fire” and the rest of the ones have something going on that say “don’t fire” its not going to fire, because this threshold is the difference between an inner and outer electrical energy, in terms of the ionization , and as such, that can be controlled by putting more ions of one kind or another inside or outside.  And because of that you can adjust the action potential.  All of a sudden the potential gets to this point, and if it hits that threshold, it will fire.  When it fires, it overloads, spikes, and it goes down back like this and then comes just under it, and it forms real interesting wave patterns, a typical wave pattern. So, it’s going along underneath it., and it’s always ready to fire.  Something drives it over the edge, then it takes up it’s own inertia, goes through the whole thing, and then after it fires it dips down, so that it will prevent it from firing, which is what gives us our binary sense.  If it just came back down, being ready to fire, we would think analog, instead of thinking binary.  

But, the very fact that it dips down, prevents it  from doing that.  

Read the entire transcript here.

Narrative Psychology | Justification in Space and Time

This is an excerpt from the transcript of a class I gave on narrative psychology…

Now, why would there be such a thing as justification?  Why would that even exist in the species?  Well, in fact, you can’t get away from it.  The reason you can’t get away from it is because of the fact that we have either a spatial brain operating system or a temporal brain operating system.  We either favor space or favor time intrinsically.  Men favor space and women favor time, in terms of male and female mental sex.  And why would this be?  Well, in reality, outside of our minds, there is only mass and energy.  There is no time, there is no space.  They just don’t exist.  They only exist in our minds.  The fact that we have bodies, the fact that we sit in a room, the fact that we can see things and perceive them – all that mass exists, but the space it takes up is all in our minds, because it really takes up no space at all. 

As a matter of fact, it doesn’t take up zero space, there’s no such thing as space.  Space is when we have a relationship between space and time that favors space.  What that means is that when we have a sense of looking at how things are arranged versus how that arrangement changes, the fact that things had any kind of arrangement is all in our heads, because we are putting a pattern on something and saying here are things that are related.  And all those relationships is an order that we impose on the essential key of nature of energy and mass.  So, whenever we perceive something as being arranged in a pattern, we’ve supplied the pattern.  We projected it, we organize it that way. 

Q:  We can’t argue that, because there wasn’t something to perceive the space then there would be no way to say that there was anything.  It seems that mass a shape to it, and because mass has a mass that can be great or small, then it inherently has something, that’s at least related to space. 

Mass has nothing to do with size.   As an example a black hole or a neutron star.  Matter can be compressed, infinitely small by the forces of gravity.  So that, it still has the same mass, but it’s being compressed, because it’s warped space.  And what do we get when it’s warped space, it’s warped our perception of it.  Which is the relationship between mass/energy and space/time.  Space and time are subliminal, and mass and energy are awareness. 

Q:  But then what is the objective  of a shared space, what is the great mind that  space that we all seem to be able to share, the earth, etc..?

The best way to describe it is that mass and energy continue to move towards entropy.  So, the external universe is the force of entropy and the force of extropy which is the increasing complexities that force us to self-awareness.  The two of them are in conjunction and at the moment there is a trend toward self-awareness becoming more complex.  The chance of dependency that eventually it will become less complex, or cease to exist at all.  Perhaps it is so large it will collapse under it’s own weight or just float off somewhere, and no longer be in this universe.  If it collapses under it’s own weight, it’s like what happened during the dark ages.  Knowledge was lost, awareness was lost.  The levels of thinking were lost.  Societally, but individually as well, because there isn’t much difference between a cave person and a person of today.  You have the same essential innate capacities of mind, but our thoughts are much more grand today because of the combined knowledge that we have; the complexity that has happened in society. 

When different self-aware awarenesses come into being, the first one that thinks of a concept makes that concept manifest, tuned here to reality, just by perceiving it.  In other words, instead of saying I’ll believe when I see it, it’s I will see it when I believe it.  But, all existence comes from perception, from this perspective.  Of course because were made of material that generates our minds, all perception comes out of existence.  Remember we can never get to the heart of the matter because we can’t see everything, because we are part of the picture.  So, we can’t step out of it, no matter where we place ourselves, that’s a part of the picture we can’t see.  So, we’ll never get the whole deal.  However, when you have a new concept, it could very well be that for millions of years the earth was flat.  It could have very well been. 

Now, why did it not stay flat?  Well, it didn’t stay flat because someone created a larger paradigm that explained more, bordered more things.  Created patterns of understanding that were larger, that required having a round earth.  And describing those things that required a round earth, then allowed a round earth which accomplishes much of the notion of a flat earth, but also came with it the larger paradigm for understanding even more stuff, that before was completely non-understandable.  And as a result of it being a larger paradigm, it shifted the perspectives of all those who were aware of it, and changed the nature of the way the world worked.  Meaning that there’s still plenty of opportunity in terms of thinking about nuclear science and astrophysics — in terms of looking at social movements.  There’s plenty of opportunity for changing the way things really are, because we come up with another explanation for how we perceive them. 

So, did this seem any less liked a chair, because we know there are atoms in it?  But, once atoms were conceived and agreed upon, there where atoms in the chair.  Until that was agreed upon, there was no need for there to be atoms in chair, because they’d never been thought of before, and so the chair could exist without atoms and truly be a solid material. 

Q:  And the effect of that  versus making the world round,….it’s like if the world hadn’t changed in nature, they got all this false evidence created….

No.  See that is the thing — any paradigm that explains things, that has to replace one learning curve, has to explain everything the earlier paradigm explained and more.  And that’s the key.  Now, guess how that works?  That’s why it becomes more and more difficult to come up with new paradigms that shift everything around.  Now that’s what we’ve done with story.  Until we came  up with the notion that some of this was psychology, it wasn’t.  Our own thoughts during the psychology of finding a way to make that explain using the psychological paradigm, yet stories were actually a psychology of the single human mind.  As soon as we came up with it, that’s what they were.  And the more people believe it, the more firm it becomes, because then you have a lot of people from a lot of different perspectives, a lot of different self-awarenesses, converging on a particular conception, so that they all agree with it.  And they bring to it baggage from their own personal existences, that isn’t shared by the general community. 

Although the concept is shared by the general societal community, the individuals don’t share it, they have their own experience, and it’s got to prove true to each one of those.  As long as it proves true to each one of those, it is true, and that’s what it is, but if one of them says it doesn’t work for me because of something in my personal experience, then what they need to do is to come up with a paradigm that explains that everybody else’s point of view and their’s as well in  a new light, and as soon as they do that, then that’s what it was supposedly all along, but in fact from this perspective, it only comes into being when it is proposed. 

Q:  Hmmm. That’s wild because it seems like almost contradictory — it’s weird.

It’s a very big thought.  And it’s the same place you get when you go to your passionate argument, and you begin to see that all is nothing and nothing is all.  It’s as narrow as infinity.  When you begin to see that and it makes sense, then you have become a model of Zen.  When you get this particular thought, you become more aware of mental relativity, because it really is one of the central places that you have to lose the paradox, in order to know that you are becoming one with that perspective. 

So, all this is tied in then to our space sense and our time sense, and whether things are right or wrong, or good or bad, or whether we should stick with our guns or change.  Or whether we should change from seeing the problem outside, to seeing the problem inside.  Or whether we should see the problem as outside, still, but just give up on it, because it can’t be solved.  Now, that by itself is an interesting philosophy, but it doesn’t come into existence until you actually creating a model in our society, whereby you can explain the mechanism through which it happens.  This is really intriguing.

Read the entire transcript here.

Narrative Psychology | Four Approaches to Change or Steadfast

This is an excerpt from the transcript of a class I gave on narrative psychology…

Q:  Does Change or Steadfast always affect your approach?”

Not necessarily — It doesn’t have to because sometimes problems aren’t between the inside and the outside, sometimes problems are between the inside and itself, and problems are between the outside and itself.  In other words, when you look from a “they” perspective, you’re not personally involved.  You don’t have any feelings about it one way or another.  You are a judge sitting on a bench and you have to make things work out between the parties, and you don’t have any favorites, ostensibly.  And then in that case, it’s a completely external inequity you are dealing with, and so you are going to be putting all your work out there.  The whole notion of being a do-er or be-er will be applied to the situation as to how you deal with it.  But, change and steadfast will not have anything to do with it.  Change and steadfast will be “do I try to resolve it, or do I stop trying to resolve it externally”. 

Whereas for an internal situation, in which you feel a certain way, or a lack of motivation for something, and you want to create a motivation for something, or you have tendencies or drives that you want to get rid of, you are working with yourself, and there really is no external manifestation of it, it’s yourself you are trying to work with. 

“I don’t like being this kind of person, why do I say this or do that?” .  “Maybe I can change myself inside.”  Well, that’s not really change in change and steadfast, that’s be-er’s work, and be-er’s working to alter themselves inside, because they are trying to snuff it, internally.  And if they are trying to work with themselves inside, if they eventually give up on it, then that’s change. 

And if they stick with it, then that’s steadfast.  How long do they have to keep working with themselves before themselves change.  Did they give up too soon, because whatever was holding them back was just ready to give because of their persistence in trying to think a certain way, in terms of Zen or in terms of controlling our emotion.  Could they have broken the back of it, if they had lasted just a little bit longer.  Or is it a useless endeavor because they really can’t change that no matter how they try.  That’s the leap of faith for a be-er, internal working person. 

Do-ers and be-ers both have external only problems and internal only problems and problems between the outside and the inside.  And when they are between the outside and the inside, both do-ers and be-ers can perceive it as being this is where it ought to be resolved; externally or internally.  And then once they determine where it has to be resolved, what makes them a be-er or do-er is when they determine whether it’s inside or outside and has to be resolved, where they are trying to strike a balance.  So, a lot of stuff is going on in that.  But, change and steadfast is do you switch from looking from outside to inside, or inside to outside and the other one is at the crossfire, do you stop trying or give up on it.  Or do you keep going — inside do you keep going or give up on it.  Those are the four change and steadfast issues in the change/steadfast quad. 

Read the entire transcript here.

Narrative Psychology | Spatial and Temporal Snuffing

This is an excerpt from the transcript of a class I gave on narrative pscyhology…

There’s never been a moment like they describe in terms of the “Big Bang”.  Not where things reduced to a singularity.  Because that’s a limit line that you approach.  You approach and you never actually get that limit line.  Eventually something throws you to the other side of the limit line and we’ll talk about that later too.  But when it throws you too the other side of the limit line, you’ve never actually been at that moment of singularity, you’ve just gotten infinitely close to it on one side, and then you are infinitely close on the other and moving away from it, instead of close towards it.  And this causes the universe to act like an oscillation, where it expands almost to infinity and then contracts almost to singularity, then expands on the other side into the anti-energy.  Reverse energy, reverse time, anti-energy, negative space, non-mass …That’s what you have when you go into the other side of the other universe. 

And in fact, because all of them go at once, you can never tell when you are in the positive or negative universe.  Because all you have to compare things are things that are either all positive or all negative.  As long as this happens, things are working properly — they oscillate between the positive and the negative, but it always seems neutral when you are in one or the other, because all you have are all positives or all negatives to compare it to.  We are not talking about anti-matter here, we are talking about non-matter; things that not only do they not exist, but they strongly do not exist.  In other words, their lack of existence is an existence of it’s own.  In other words, it would take more than just transmitting energy to create mass.  You’d have to overcome some inertia, against coming into existence first.  Overcome the entropy when someone has a catalyst even to bring it to a neutrality where it could begin to exist. 

So, existence is not just something that is there.  It is a matter of how firmly it is there.  And even if it’s not there at all, that’s just neutral, because some things have a definite tendency not to come into existence.  A lot of things have a tendency not to happen.  And some of these negative aspect, only if you’re negative can you compare them to the positive.  And in fact, even in this universe, you can easily look at things and say — Here is something that has a tendency to happen.  Here is something that has a tendency not to happen.  On any given day there is a great tendency not to have a plane crash.  Within in the days of the year, there is a great tendency  to have at least one plane crash.  Because on any given day, most likely one is not going to happen.  A lot of things have to converge to make the plane crash happen.  And because those things don’t happen very often, there is a tendency for a plane crash not to occur, within a period of one day.  But, if you change the way you measure it, and say now I’m going to show it within a year, you can’t predict any given plane will crash, but you can say there will probably be some crash of some plane within a year of a reasonable size jet-liner.  Certainly within 5 years.  We’ve never had a five year period where we haven’t had a jet-liner crash.  You can almost count on it.

Plane crashes have a strong tendency to come into existence in the generic sense in a five year period.  But, in a generic sense, within a one day period, they have a great tendency not to occur.  Well, how can it be that day by day, there is a great tendency not to, and yet at the end of the year or two years, there is a great tendency to.  When does it switch over?  That’s that limit line I was talking about, that you never actually hit, but get close to.  When does it change from being a tendency not to come into existence to a tendency to come into existence.  How does that happen?  When does it switch from not being to being?  It’s a magic moment.  And that was the moment I was looking for in the unified field theory, because it’s the key to understanding how everything hangs together — it’s that magic moment.  And it turned out that it’s not anything intrinsic to what you are looking at — it’s intrinsic to how you look at it.  It’s all in the context, it’s all in the perspective.  It’s all in what you measure. 

There is no point at which you can stack up the number of days and say now there is a plane crash.  But, there is a way when you can go through a five year period and say I would be very surprised  if there wasn’t a plane crash.  It depends on your measurement.  Where you begin measuring is arbitrary.  And how long you measure is arbitrary.  It works kind of like this…there are tendencies and there are trends.  And they work in opposition to each other.  Trends are when you see something and say….like suppose you’ve got a coin, and you are flipping a coin.  You flip this coin five times in a row and it comes up heads every single time.  What’s the trend?  The trend is it’s coming up heads.  So, based on the trend, you would expect it would come up heads again.  Now, what are the actual odds on any given toss that it will come up heads or tails?  On any given toss?  How can you say you expect it to come up heads if the odds are 50/50.  Because there’s been a trend that has shown that it has done that. consistently, and one would expect maybe that there’s some outside force at work that is affecting things so that in and of itself, intrinsically the item under study has a 50-50 chance of coming up one way or another, in the environment in which it is being flipped, something is apparently affecting it to come up heads, and one could expect that that’s the inertia that it carries. 

However, there’s another force at work.  The force at work is tendency.  When you have a trend that says it has come up this many times, what would you expect for the next five, in order to make the odds come out 50-50?  It would come up tails, and that’s the tendency.  Although the trends points to coming up heads, because of something perhaps environmental.  Maybe though, there’s nothing environmental, and it’s just a matter of chance that it’s come up heads 5 times in a row.  But, for the odds to hold true, which they eventually will have to, then you needs five times that it will come up tails, if all you were going to do is ten tosses.  But see you would expect the tendency is pulling it towards coming up tails on the next throw. 

Now there is the most interesting relationship between those things, because it has to do with like Las Vegas odds.  Las Vegas odds in the long run and the longer that you measure, the more likely it will come down to the exact odds.  If you put a slot machine in a Las Vegas establishment, and certain odds have been established on it, and it’s a brand new machine, and you put in one coin, and you hold down the handle, there’s no way anybody knows what it’s going to do, because the statistical nature of it, to make sure that the odds come out to a certain level, to a pay-off, can’t function with only one play.  The odds don’t work out.  The more you play it, it’s bound to pay anything off, assuming that it is functioning correctly.  In order for that slot machine to be working at the proper odds, eventually it’s got to catch up.  So, if it doesn’t pay off, and it doesn’t pay off, and it doesn’t pay off, and it’s done that for ten years, and it hasn’t payed off at this place, and it’s working properly, that has got a lot of built up tendency.  And that would be a machine you’d want to play, because when you play that machine, then you figure eventually it’s going to have to pay off a lot, in order just to make up for all the ten years when it didn’t pay off.  So, it doesn’t matter actually when you begin measuring or when you stop measuring — it’s a subjective thing.  So, that would be a way to play it at Vegas. 

What is it that prevents us from actually doing that?  Because you would think everybody could get rich from just by looking at somebody playing and playing who ran out of money and left, and they hadn’t gotten any wins, then that’s when you want to sit down and you will end up in the long run even ahead of the game, because you’ve already built up a negative potential on it.  The point is it’s not even the matter of a starting point, because that’s kind of arbitrary, because there are many different places you could start, and any one of them to have the odds be right from wherever you start, they’d have to be equal.  But, that’s only because you are looking at things in terms of time.  How many times it takes something to do it. 

You don’t look in terms of space, because in terms of space, you look at the casino as whole, and if you look at the casino as a whole, there’s going to be one machine there that just happens to pay off twice as much as another machine there, that pays off half as much, and another machine that hardly ever pays off at all.  And yet they are all built the same, they all have the same odds on each machine.  But, in the spatial scenario, some of them, just as a matter of chance, will not pay out very much at all.  And others will pay out quite regularly — but there’s no way to predict which ones will be which, because the minute you sit down at that machine and say “this one has traditionally paid off a lot”.  But, it may be that it will stop paying off, and another machine will start paying off a lot somewhere else.  So, if you look at all the machines, and you see how much they pay off, they are all like peaks and valleys.  They are up and down like bar graphs, and some are down negative, and some are high.  But, there’s no guarantee that this will continue. 

So, when you look at it temporally on any given machine, you can expect that the tendency is for it to be pulled back to the odds, whatever direction the trends happen to be momentarily.  And the longer a trend goes one direction, the greater the tendency to go to another.  But, trends and tendencies won’t tell you what it will do, because there are other machines, and when you take them all together collectively, they do the odds.  But, collectively in that casino, one casino is going to pay off, more than another casino, because of the fact that it just happens in terms of chance that the machines in one casino are paying off at a higher rate than another casino.  And you can go out wider, and wider and wider, and eventually you get to the point where the scope of the limit of your measurement, you can see no real difference.  When we see no real difference, for all practical purposes, the odds are holding true and right to form. 

So, you can’t win it, because whenever you look at it in terms of time only, you can see it in terms of space, we can see space only in terms of time, and that’s why we are trying to make other people justified.  What you want to do is give them one of those things where they seem like they’re seeing rewards, and if they are not, look at the other one.  And because all of us have the capacity within ourselves to see both time and space, but only one at a time as it were, or one being foremost, and the other one being secondary, because of that, if you can focus somebody’s primary sense, or the one they use first, and make them see apparent progress, then you can have them lose like crazy at the one they are not looking at and they won’t be able to notice it because they are seeing progress where they are focusing.  And that’s the nature of focus and blind spot in a very conceptual sense is that if you are focusing on time, your blind spot is space.  If you are focusing on space, your blind spot is time. 

The only way to protect yourself against ills, is to vacillate between the two as frequently as you can, so that you look at it timewise, and then you look at it space-wise, then you look at it timewise and look at it space-wise.  As you go back and forth between those very quickly, it doesn’t allow time for a lot of things to go through.  So, is that what we have to train ourselves to do, go back and forth between time and space?  No.  Because going back and forth quickly between time and space is talking about doing it quickly which is time.  And as  result that means that we are ignoring a spatial way of doing it.  And the spatial way of doing it is not to go back and forth between the two quickly, but to go back and forth between the two on any given subject. 

So that whenever anything comes up, you make sure that you look at it spatially and you look at it temporally.  Because if you go back and forth too many times, you don’t stick with one perspective long enough to see anything change.  So, if you are going quickly, you are losing your sense of things changing, and then you are caught unawares when something comes up and bites you, because it was changing very slowly.  You lose your long wave perception, and you can’t see gradual change.  On the other hand, if you look at things spatially, and you see it all in space, and then you stop and look at it all in time, and only do those measurements, you don’t see change either, because you don’t see two instances of it from the temporal view and two instances of it from the spatial view, you only see one of each.  So again you don’t see change.  So, either way you’re screwed. 

You can widen your scope, but the minute you widen your scope, you also open yourself up to more instances of trouble, so you can limit within any given scope how many unexpected things are going to happen within it, and how susceptible you are to them, but you do that by widening your scope of consideration, while only being concerned with this part.  But, as soon as you open your consideration wider, then you are letting more things into the system which can upset things out here, that can ultimately change this thing and impact it in ways that you hadn’t expected.  So, it’s a no win situation.  A losing situation is a neutral situation, it all comes out to zero.  And that’s what it really comes down to, is the fact that there is no objective way to say that things are good or bad, or right or wrong.  But there’s plenty of subjective ways, because each of us is one of the little machines that we have as a slot machine.  Each of us finds that in our life, we lead a charmed life or a doomed life.  And we can’t really tell between the sense of a charmed life or a cursed life — we can’t predict if it’s going to continue.  Some people are so lucky, one thing after another happens to them; everything good, they die happy, never have any problems, worries or fears.  Other people suffer from the moment they are born, and live a long suffering life and go to their graves feeling miserable.  How can you predict, how can you determine, how can you protect yourself?

Well, the only thing you can do for a subjective viewpoint, is unlike a slot machine, you can change your odds.  You can change your odds by shifting context.  When you shift context, that’s when you justify, because then you are balancing inequities.  If you steal yourself against inequities, and try to snuff the inequity at their source, then you are problem solving.  And here we have the beginnings of do-ers and be-ers and change and steadfast.  Where people balance and where people snuff, differs between do-ers and be-ers.  Everybody snuffs and everybody balances.  If you are a be-er, you are going to have a tendency to snuff internally, and balance externally.  For example, you have two kids and you’ve got one piece of cake.  Both of them want the piece of cake, and they are arguing and screaming when you walk into the room.  Now, a be-er will try and balance things by saying, “O.K. who got the cake out?”  or you could say, “You get the cake this time, you’ll get the cake next time”  and balance it out that way.  That would be a balance.

And when they snuff things it would be that there’s only one thing, and they know that only one kid can have it and not the other one; maybe there’s an award, or something that can’t be divided or something, and you give it to one kid or the other, because you have to make a choice.  And you realize the inequity, that you have to snuff it inside.  So, you do the work inside of trying to snuff it inside, so you do the work inside of trying to snuff your feelings, or you do the work outside and try to balance things off.  “Oh, well here’s this jacket that was sent to us, there’s only one jacket, and you have a jacket and instead you get the beach ball.”  So, you try and balance things off, so that you make up for it.  We are making things up on the outside, robbing Peter to pay Paul, and that’s something a be-er does. 

Whereas a do-er is somebody who is going to try and snuff the problem outside.  They would be the ones to divide the cake up.  They would say, either you each share it or nobody gets anything.  They put the balance in a different direction and they were trying to balance things inside, and they were balanced inside by saying, “Yes, I know that it’s not fair to this one not to get the cake or jacket, but this person needs the jacket more because they are out in the cold more, so that’s why they are going to get the jacket and the other one is not going to get a jacket.”  So, they would balance inside.  And you will see that the approach between do-ers and be-ers is that often in terms of items that have to be divvied up, of which there aren’t enough, do-ers will seem to rely on an analytical external view, and inside they seem to be heartless, in situations where there isn’t enough to go around.  Whereas, be-ers seem to miss the point, because be-ers are trying to give oranges to satisfy a taste for apples, in external situations.

So, anyway the one who tries to balance inside is the do-er, and snuff it outside, just take action, precipitous action to make it work itself out — to resolve it.  Whereas, the be-er is going to try to resolve it inside, and then take action to balance it outside. 

Read the rest of the transcript here.

Narrative Psychology | Entropy, Complexity, and the Big Bang

This is an excerpt from the transcript of a class I gave in Narrative Psychology.

Now, what determines if one is justification, and one is problem solving?  Well, as we said balancing an inequity is justification.  Resolving an inequity is problem solving.  Sometimes resolving an inequity is bad.  And sometimes balancing an inequity is good.  Good and bad have nothing to do with whether it’s problem solving or justification.  It has to do with how you approach the inequity.   Look at them as extropy and entropy, when you have extropy you’ve got building up, getting more complex; creating an infrastructure that is more and more gossamer.  It has more and more connections to it, and eventually if you build it big enough, it will grow too weak to support it’s own weight.  And it will collapse on itself or it’s gravity in the area is not strong enough, and it will just float away and you won’t have it anymore because you made it so big, that it just gets picked up by the currents of wind and taken away.

Buckminster Ford did some research and found that you could build a geodesic dome of a certain size that was so big that because the triangles you are creating that increase as the area of the outside, the volume is increasing as the cube, while the area is increasing as the square, and you reach a point eventually where the thing can become so lightweight compared to it’s size, that the slightest breeze could make something a half a mile across just take off into the air, because of the breeze.  And so, that’s the physics of it, and the same thing happens mentally as well. 

But, there’s that second force, that force of entropy that is trying to bring it all down.  Entropy is not just a destructive force, entropy is the force that seeks unification, as opposed to complexity; instead of variety, singularity.  Entropy tries to make things more and more simple.  Simplify is what it’s really about in terms of entropy.  But, that’s not necessarily a good thing either.   If you simplify enough, you get to singularity, and as we talked about earlier, when you get to singularity, then you have nothing to compare things to and it becomes completely neutral.  When you have complete neutrality, there is nothing — no life, no thought, no movement, no inertia, no change, nothing.  Look at the moment of the “big bang”.  Big Bang is the ultimate singularity.  Complete expansion of the universe to an infinite degree would be complete complexity.  It is my opinion that neither of these has ever been achieved. 

Read the complete transcript here.