genres. A recent example is “The Da Vinci Code” [Brown, 2003], a bestselling novel
that was later made into a movie. In this page-turner (as in other books in the same
vein by the same author), the hero has to solve a series of mysteries, typically by
decoding some obscure message, and then finding the place referred to in the
message, only to discover another coded message hiding there. This on-going series
of challenges and resolutions is made more exciting by time pressure, as the hero is
being chased, both by the police for a murder that he did not commit, and by the
actual murderer who is similarly searching for the solution to the mystery. (No time
for wistful contemplation here!) The fast-paced succession of all the classic
ingredients of adventure, mystery and suspense packed in a storyline that gradually
elaborates plausible solutions to age-old mysteries about the Holy Grail, the Knights
Templar, and the origins of Christianity may explain the extraordinary popular
success of this novel.
Such a perfectly controlled, smooth alternation between mystery and prospect
is not the general rule, though. In reality, mysteries do not always get resolved just
when the agent needs the answer, and long, boring prospects do not readily make
place for the excitement and challenge of mystery. The uncertainties and dangers of
real-life adventure can just as readily produce fear, anxiety and frustration as the
pleasurable excitement of flow. In that sense, the typical narrative structures in
novels, movies or computer games are just as idealized in their perfect balance of
mystery and prospect as Newtonian theories are in their total exclusion of mystery.
This brings us back to the need to unify scientific and narrative perspectives.
Integrating Scientific and Narrative Representations
Trajectories and Observers
Starting from novel scientific concepts originating in the theories of evolution,
cybernetics and complex adaptive systems, we have developed an agent-centered
perspective that seems to fit in perfectly with the narrative perspective found in
myths, novels and movies. However, this narrative perspective, with its emphasis on
mystery, uncertainty and surprise, seems like the exact opposite of the Laplacean
worldview, which is founded on certain and complete knowledge. Yet, on a deeper
level these contradictory perspectives are actually surprisingly consonant. Part of the
reason why the recent notion of agent was so readily accepted in science is that it is a
relatively straightforward extension of the notion of dynamical system [Miller et al.,
2007; Heylighen, 2009], which is itself a generalization of the way dynamics is
modeled in Newtonian mechanics.
Underlying the worldview of Newton and Laplace is the notion of trajectory: a
dynamical system follows a predictable trajectory through some abstract space
[Heylighen, 1988, 1990]. Initially, this referred to the ordinary three-dimensional
space of positions. This was generalized, first, to multidimensional configuration
space, then to the multidimensional phase space of positions and velocities, and
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