Story-Centric View on the Mind

Abstract

The basic assumption of the present study is that the essence of the human mind is to generate stories by interacting with environments, or to interact with environments by generating stories. In this context, a story refers to a mental representation of an individual’s subjective world including the past, present, future, and fiction. This assumption leads us to a consistent and plausible understanding of the human mind and realization of a human-like artificial intelligence. In this paper, I present an exploratory computer-oriented theory on the mind by ways of a story-centric view. The theory comprises two concepts. First, the mind is described as an interactive story generation system between the narrator-self and a story that has the power of self-organization. Second, the interrelationship among stories is put in focus, and the generative process of stories is described in terms of the mutual actions between them. Furthermore, these two concepts are adapted to characterization of the conscious and unconscious mind.