Narrative: The First Principle of Our Universe

Entering the first section of the “Modern Thinking Tools” course: Basic Worldview. What kind of world do we actually live in? We must have a worldview before discussing methodology. You can largely choose your values and outlook on life autonomously, but for a worldview, you must accept it to the extent of your realization—because the world is not created according to your will.

I have selected six most basic worldviews for us to align on. These six are the foundation for the various thinking tools that follow, and they are the most valuable understandings of our world today, crucial for establishing your “Alpha advantage.”

This lecture is about the first one: the first principle of this world. The first principle is the most basic principle, the original intention, the starting point of all deduction, and the setting we cannot refute but must accept.

If you had asked me ten years ago, I would have said the first principle of the world is physical laws—everything in the world is determined by physical laws: chemistry obeys physics, biology obeys chemistry, psychology obeys biology, sociology obeys psychology… This is certainly true, but you might not help but wonder: is there something deeper behind physical laws?

Physicists have long realized that there might be infinitely many various universes, each with different physical laws. Then why does the universe we live in happen to have such physical laws?

You may have more or less heard that modern physics, no matter what version it is upgraded to, roughly consists of three theories: Special Relativity, which describes the laws of motion for macroscopic objects; Quantum Mechanics, which describes the laws of microscopic particles; and General Relativity, which describes gravity. Physics being like this, does it have any special meaning?

In 2020, Stephen Wolfram, one of the smartest people of our time, launched the “Wolfram Physics Project (WPP)” to derive the whole of physics from more fundamental principles… There have already been many results [1]. Wolfram proposed a concept called “Ruliad” (from the word “rule”), which is the “entangled limit of everything that is computationally possible,” representing the total collection of all possible physical laws—and our specific universe is a small slice in the Ruliad world.

To pursue what is truly fundamental in a computational sense, Wolfram assumes that space and time are not continuous: space consists of discrete points, and time advances beat by beat… Then, what requirements must be injected into a universe to obtain physical laws like ours?

The answer is “Narrative” [2].

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The so-called “narrative” is, simply put, a coherent description of a series of interconnected facts, or just a short story. For example, “I walked into the room, picked up the steamed bun on the table, ate it, and then I was full” is a narrative.

This sounds like nothing, but we actually have some non-trivial requirements for narrative. At the very least, you would require the narrative to have a coherent order—walk into the room first, then pick up the bun in the room—you want things to happen one after another, not in a mess, which means there must be “time” in your universe.

Furthermore, we also require a clear causal relationship between things. It must be because I ate the bun that I felt full, not because I was full that I ate the bun. Causality must be clear, and the sequence of related events must not only be orderly for one observer but must be consistent for all observers; otherwise, we cannot reason with each other.

Then physicists would say that to ensure causal invariance and that all observers are equal, your universe must obey Special Relativity [3].

Going further, to make the narrative interesting, we also require the past to be certain and the future to be uncertain. With a certain past, we can keep accounts, assign responsibility, and summarize laws to build models, facing the world methodically. But we don’t want the future to be certain either, otherwise life would be like a movie, with no suspense. How can we keep the future uncertain?

This requires Quantum Mechanics. Quantum mechanics stipulates that the behavior of microscopic particles has inherent uncertainty. You never know when an atom will decay or which slit a photon will pass through—but once it has happened, it becomes certain!

But we are still not satisfied; we also want this universe to have gravity. Because gravity helps increase order. Without gravity, the universe would just be a bunch of particles flying around, which doesn’t seem worth a narrative. It is gravity that pulls matter together to form stars and planets, allowing various objects to exist stably for a period of time, so that you can come out and tell a story. This is the role of General Relativity.

Simply put: Special Relativity provides causality, Quantum Mechanics provides imagination, and General Relativity provides the stage. You might haggle over certain specific parameters in the laws, but if the physical laws did not possess these three basic forms, our universe would not have narratives.

If you believe the world was created by God, you could say God set these physical laws so that we could have narratives. A more scientific understanding is that there are countless universes, many of which have no clear causal relationships, where the past is uncertain and the future is a dead end. In such universes, no intelligent creatures would summarize scientific laws and build homes… And the fact that we can do these things is just because we were lucky enough to be born in a universe that allows narratives.

I once asked GPT to independently derive a set of “theories behind physics.” The content it generated was not as advanced or elegant as Wolfram’s, but it reached the same insight: “Definable phenomena and preservable records are the lowest semantics of existence itself.” To put it bluntly, it’s narrative.

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So I think narrative is more fundamental than physics; it can be said to be the first principle of our universe.

Because there is narrative, because you are always telling yourself stories, you have consciousness. Because existing AI models are put online immediately after training, and they are no longer trained after going online, they have no experiences of their own, no historical narrative, so we temporarily believe AI has no consciousness [4]. In fact, even your concept of “self” is born for the convenience of narrative: since there is a narrative, it is best to have something as the narrator and protagonist, which is the self. In the words of philosopher Daniel Dennett [5], the self is not an entity, but merely a “center of narrative gravity.”

Narrative doesn’t exist because of “me”; “I” exist because of narrative.

Narrative serves three key roles for us.

The first is predictive processing. If you can state a series of facts coherently, containing clear causal relationships, then you have a simple world model, and you can use this model to make predictions and take actions selectively. In fact, our every move is predictive processing: the reason I reach out to take a cup and drink water is that I reasonably predict this action can let me drink water; the reason you are willing to continue working is that you believe in the narrative that work brings rewards.

Of course, you must frequently polish your various narratives to make the models more and more accurate. If the narrative is inaccurate, you will receive a small surprise: why is the water spilled? Neuroscientist Karl Friston proposed a “Free Energy Principle” [6], stating that the brain is a prediction machine. Every time it receives a surprise, it raises free energy, thereby reminding itself to modify the narrative to keep free energy as low as possible.

The second role of narrative is to provide meaning. Why is it so difficult for us to read argumentative articles but so easy to get into a novel? Because the narrative of a novel has protagonists, emotions, and intentions. As long as you hear a person’s intention, you automatically care whether they can achieve that intention. Thus, you have a direction of concern.

Our values and the meaning of life come from here. You want to stand out because you have been telling yourself a story of hard work since childhood; you want to revitalize China because you accepted this narrative long ago.

The third role is public coordination. The reason we humans can achieve large-scale cooperation is that we can jointly believe in certain fictional things, such as myths, nations, currencies, companies, laws, etc.—these things do not exist in the physical world; they are narratives purely imagined by us.

This is the signature theory of history writer Yuval Noah Harari [7]. What exactly is a company? Is it the factory buildings and machines? Is it the capital? Is it the workers? Is it the founder? Replace all of those and the company still exists. A company is essentially a virtual concept; it exists because people believe it exists. You believe this banknote has value because everyone else believes it has value—even if physics tells you it’s just a piece of paper.

Simply put, the beliefs that drive action, the direction of action, and even action itself, are all composed of narratives.

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Don’t just list facts. String facts together to form a narrative, and only then can you trigger action.

If you lead a troop out to fight a war and only tell the soldiers facts—how many enemy troops there are, how the forces are distributed, what the terrain and weather conditions are—the soldiers will only be confused. But if you just say one sentence, “The key to this battle is to block the opponent’s supply line before sunset,” everyone immediately knows the meaning of your series of arrangements and can even actively help you check for gaps and optimize details.

We never react to a pile of facts and data; we react to narratives.

Entrepreneurs must tell a good story to get investment, and investors also require entrepreneurs to tell stories. A company’s stock price is primarily a function of confidence, and confidence comes from the narrative of the future. Nobel laureate in economics Robert J. Shiller proposed a theory in 2017 called “Narrative Economics” [8], saying that narratives that spread like viruses are core variables affecting economic behavior.

We sometimes overreact to narratives, and you cannot say facts are not important—but we don’t make decisions based on facts; we make decisions through narratives. Facts seem as though they should be a hard constraint on narratives, but in many cases, fictional narratives are more effective at prompting action.

Narrative is our interface for interacting with the world.

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And what I most want to tell you is: all narratives are subjective.

At every moment, countless plots are unfolding around you—sunlight is shining, air is flowing, plants are growing, insects are crawling, stock prices are changing, news on TV and short videos on phones are playing—then why do you focus on this narrative and not that one? This is just your subjective choice.

Even for the same fact, you can choose different narrative directions.

Here is half a bottle of water. You can say it is already half full, or you can say it is still half empty. This company’s performance report is right in front of you. If you say its performance is so excellent that it will surely continue to expand in the future, then your implicit meaning is that the stock price will rise; but you can also say that although the performance is good, the stock price is already very high, which hints at not adding to your position.

For example, many new words have emerged in the Chinese-speaking world in recent years. A decline in economic indicators is not called a decline, but “negative growth”; someone being unemployed is not called unemployed, but “awaiting employment” or “flexible employment”; the suffering being experienced is not called suffering, but “tempering,” “struggle,” or “inspirational”; migrant workers who cannot find work in big cities and have to go home are said to be “returning home for entrepreneurship”… Discriminating people say this is linguistic corruption, but from the perspective of a narrator, this is precisely choosing a narrative direction.

Narrative determines your objective function.

Many times we are unconsciously living in narratives set by others, but you can completely jump out and choose a narrative of your own! The boss paints a picture with a narrative: although the salary is low, the workload is heavy, and we work overtime every day now, at least it’s better than nothing, and it’s all for the sake of making big money together in the future! But you can completely jump out and think, I must change jobs as soon as possible; my objective function here is experience points.

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Jumping out of narratives set by others is the most fundamental awakening consciousness of modern people. There is a line in the movie The Good Stuff (好东西). The line is: “How can it be considered good? Who is the referee? Why can’t it be messed up? Where could it go wrong? Then let’s not play their game anymore.”

But that’s not enough. Not only can we jump out of others’ narratives, but we can also set narratives for others—you must strive for “narrative power.” That is a high-level tool, which we will discuss later.

In summary, “narrative” is a clue structure that strings together a series of real or fictional things: this clue can be a chronological order, a goal orientation, a naming and characterization, or an identity declaration or a commitment of position—the key is that there are lurking verifiable causal relationships within it, which can guide action and calibrate emotions.

The level of tools you can use depends on the narrative you tell yourself and others. And I only wish for you to have one more bit of initiative.

Closing Poem

Live in stories, not imprisoned by them. Weave the net with causality, pull the rope with evidence. The traceable past, testifies forward; The testable future, strikes the gavel today. The universe gave us the grammar of narrative [9], As for what to write, it’s my choice.

Notes

[1] Wolfram, Stephen. “Finally We May Have a Path to the Fundamental Theory of Physics… and It’s Beautiful.” Stephen Wolfram Writings, April 14, 2020. [2] Consciousness Red Capsule 9: Wolfram’s Insight. [3] This derivation is not that complex, but it is indeed not the theme of this course. If you are interested, you can ask GPT. [4] AI has no Manas-vijnana. [5] Dennett, Daniel. “The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity.” In Self and Consciousness, 1992. [6] Friston, Karl. “The Free-Energy Principle: A Unified Brain Theory?” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 11, no. 2 (2010): 127–138. [7] See books such as “Sapiens” and “Nexus.” Actually, the original inventor of this statement was the American philosopher John Searle. [8] Shiller, Robert J. “Narrative Economics.” American Economic Review 107, no. 4 (2017): 967–1004; “Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events,” 2020. [9] Strictly speaking, some physicists believe that the spacetime slice family of relativistic quantum field theory has a certain “non-narratability,” see Albert, David Z. “Physics and Narrative.” In Reading Putnam, Routledge, 2012; and subsequent discussions: Judes, Simon. “Narratability and Cluster Decomposition.” arXiv (2010). So maybe narrative is not the true first principle of this universe… but as you can see, this article is also a narrative, and the art of narrative lies in giving only part of the facts.