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I'm not sure exactly who found and RT'd this thread today but I'm so glad to see it getting a little bit of traction. This is one of the most important ideas I know how to articulate. :) https://t.co/laOdI5tcQs
Quick thread on coincidences, synchronicity and magic. I think it was Gordon White who defined magical practice as working to maximize the number of meaningful coincidences in life. Coincidences are powerful, in a way that's hard to understand at first.
I've advanced my thinking about a lot of this stuff since I wrote this thread. If you're interested, here are some new thoughts that incorporate some pretty big ideas. All of this builds on the prior thread, rather than replacing it.
(His example: a hemoglobin molecule binds to oxygen because it has an oxygen-shaped hole in it. That hole, that 'absence', is crucial to the functioning and identity of hemoglobin as such. If you fill it in, it's no longer hemoglobin. Some absences matter.)
A story is a chain of states that flow from one to the next. Each of these states makes certain claims - e.g. "a Hydrogen atom has one proton" is a state in a scientific story about atoms. Each such claim is actually an absential property, I think.
When we want to tell if a story is true, we do that by evaluating its claims against some set of observations. In science this is easy enough, and it's why science requires all valid stories to have falsifiable claims - we simply try to falsify them, and if we can't, it's true.
Do you see how, if you squint, a 'claim' in the sense that I'm using it can be thought of as an 'absence' of a verification against some observation? That 'claim' is provisional until verified. This gets really interesting when we try to understand what 'truth' is, because...
...fictional stories do exactly the same thing as scientific stories. They posit a set of claims. It's just that the 'observed phenomena' against which we're measuring these claims don't have to be objectively verifiable - they can be subjective, contextual, dynamic.
"I found a hydrogen atom with two protons" is just as "false" as "Sherlock Holmes patiently smiled and helped Watson figure out the solution, delighting in his friend's intellectual prowess and heaping him with compliments." These are both "false" claims, right?
Each makes certain claims that, when measured against some set of observations, seems to contradict stuff that we understand as axiomatic. A hydrogen atom definitionally cannot have two protons, and most readers would agree that Sherlock Holmes is not a kind and patient mentor.
This really complicates things for anyone who is seeking an objective true interpretation of reality. There is no universal set of observations against which a given claim can be measured, right? Even our very _senses_ diverge in ways that it's easy to overlook.
Anyway. This notion that a state in a story has to conform to some set of axiomatic observations is something I call 'fit' - it's the relation of a state from a story to the reality in which the story takes place. A story where all but one states fit can be good - but not true.
(Note: you can fix this by changing the claims the states in your story make - or you can fix it by changing your observations. A lot of states have an indeterminate fit - we can't know if it's true or not. That's fine too, but for e.g. science you need to define it better.)
But I also want to talk about a specific kind of 'fit', which I call 'flow'. We've said that a story is a set of states. I've resisted just calling a story a set of claims, e.g. reducing a story to a single 'state' that can fit or not. Why? Because the order of states matters.
A story moves us from one state to the next to the next. Just a given state can make a fitness claim about its underlying 'reality', every state transition is _also_ making a fitness claim about the relationship between this state and the next one.
"I was thirsty" "I poured a glass of water" "I drank it" This is a story where each state has a strong "fit" to the next state (and also to base reality, if you're wondering, because this happened). In my parlance, this means that this story "flows". It builds meaning.
"I was thirsty" "Purple elephants ran wild over the park" "I hope nothing bad happens to my family" This is a story where each state may or may not "fit" some set of observations, but as presented the "flow" doesn't work. The states don't "fit" each other.
"flow" logic is different from normal "fit" logic for a number of reasons. It's a relation of one part of a story to another part of that same story, for starters, so it's internal. It's also atemporal - a flow may be intentionally bad at first, but then later states clarify it.
Anyway, all of this is to say that stories are way, way more interesting than you probably think. Tyrion's little speech last night about how stories are the most important thing was spot on (even if Bran's story didn't hold a candle to Arya's, really).
Try to think of a story as a sequence of states, related to their context through fit and related to themselves through flow. It'll fundamentally change the way you understand the world, if you let it, and it'll teach you how magic works in a way that few other things can. :)