Paper ID: 2309.06600

Narrative as a Dynamical System

Isidoros Doxas, James Meiss, Steven Bottone, Tom Strelich, Andrew Plummer, Adrienne Breland, Simon Dennis, Kathy Garvin-Doxas, Michael Klymkowsky

There is increasing evidence that human activity in general, and narrative in particular, can be treated as a dynamical system in the physics sense; a system whose evolution is described by an action integral, such that the average of all possible paths from point A to point B is given by the extremum of the action. We create by construction three such paths by averaging about 500 different narratives, and we show that the average path is consistent with an action principle.

Submitted: Sep 6, 2023