Summary and concluding comments
In this chapter I introduced the notion of a “storied-world” – a collection of stories around certain seed-points
representing cosmological and psychological elements of the world. I gave a few examples of storied worlds including
that of science, Christianity, Buddhism, and stoicism. The world of science includes detailed description of the
cosmology, and, I believe, largely ignores the human psychology. Both Christianity and Buddhism are introduced in the
context of the evolutionary transition from earlier teachings (Old Testaments and Brahmanism) to highlight the growing
awareness of the psychological dimension in these doctrines. We have a fairly elaborate description of the multiverse in
Buddhism, accompanied by the insistence on the significance of the mental states, contrasted to conditioning by actions
in the tradition of Brahmins. Biblical texts include very rudimentary description of the cosmology. Compared to Old
Testaments focused on the compliance of the believer’s behaviour with certain quite specific rules, Christianity
highlights the significance of mental states of the believer. Finally, I introduced the storied-world of stoics. With
this last example, the intention was to show that secular SWs worlds are not restricted to the world of science. In fact
there could be many different non-religious interpretations of the world, and we will see in the next chapter some
building blocks for such worlds when discussing philosophical metaphysics. Stoicism also provides an example of the
storied world focused on psychology, with very little consideration given to cosmology.
The key point advocated in this chapter is that all interesting storied worlds are infested with contradictions.
Furthermore, without contradictions these worlds do not make sense. Yet if the whole story is a mess and there are too
many inconsistencies it makes hard for us to believe it. Special reservations are always in place to handle
contradictions residing in established storied-worlds. In the case of science a typical reservation is that these
contradictions are just transient features, hypotheses that wait for their due date to be resolved and explained, and
when that day comes they all will be happily integrated into the existing body of knowledge. With regard to religious
texts the justification often goes as follows, the God is great and almighty and there is a grand design and purpose but
we are too small to comprehend it. “God works in mysterious ways”. Contradictions are instrumental to Zen Buddhism and
Daoism. According to these teachings, the logical thought can comprehend only some fraction of the world. The rest of
the world (which does not follow logic) must be reached and apprehended through the unconscious awareness of it. With
these reservations in place the whole story gets credibility, and even if there are inconsistencies, they are pushed
aside, swept under the carpet, suspended in a thin air until time comes when they are resolved. However, there is no
guarantee whatsoever that the way they will be resolved will be consistent with the existing body of knowledge.
Storied worlds considered in this chapter have been presented largely as static entities. However, the dynamic nature of
these worlds must not be underestimated. The evolving nature of such worlds is highlighted, for example, in Kuhnean
interpretation of the world of science (ref). For Kuhn the science evolves through the periods of normal development
interrupted by revolutions. During the normal course of science, a paradigm is well established and agreed upon, and the
progress is made through the refining and improving minor bits of the existing structure. During the revolutionary phase
the foundations are questioned and authorities are challenged and the whole system is redesigned.
Storied-worlds represent evolving and fundamentally incoherent systems, but some of these systems may give us a better
image of the reality. Scientific description of the world, for example, may not be fully self-consistent, but at least
in science we hope that with time, through all these permutations and metamorphoses, we are getting ever improving
picture of the reality that helps us to understand it and cope with it. We can observe various parts of the nature and
provide correct description of these parts (even though descriptions for different parts may contradict to each other).
So instead of focusing on the consistency of some idealised linguistic constructs detached from the reality (whatever
this word means), let’s get down to Earth and ask how well these constructs correspond to the measurements and
observations. Let’s see how well we do in terms of the correspondence truth?