Stories have always been powerful instruments for us to understand the world. But when science and rationalism have developed so much, can quantify so accurately, why haven’t the prevalence of stories diminished? Some say that it’s because stories express a different kind of truth than science, something not strictly objective. That may very well be true, but I have a slightly different way of looking at this. Stories are shortcuts for us to get a glimpse of some otherwise incomprehensible knowledge, a kind of higher-dimensional isomorphism.

Science and technology have progressed tremendously in modern times. From biological functions like heart rate and emotional states, to societal metrics such as economic growth and citizen wellbeing, we now have tools to reliably and accurately measure many things. But complex subjects cannot be adequately described using a few measurable metrics alone. Instead, many complicated concepts and topics are made up of a multitude of features, and require an equally large number of measurements in order to be described accurately. Even if we can quantify every single one of these aspects, it still might be impossible for us to fully comprehend the matter as a whole.

Take, for example, the question of “what constitutes a hero in society”. Right off the bat there are many things that we can begin to quantify. Physical attributes of the person; the degree to which others like and admire the person; the degree to which society has recognized the person’s achievements; the number lives saved or improved by the person, etc… The number of metrics that are conceivably relevant to this question explode exponentially. But just like how we are limited in our spatial comprehension to just 3 dimensions, our ability to understand concepts are also dimensionally limited. Once something exceeds that limit, we can no longer understand it as a whole.

Suppose that our dimensionality limitation for conceptual understanding is 10. That is, we can comprehend something completely, up to things that can be described by 10 features. Simple things that can fit within this 10-dimensional space can be understood easily by us. “Who is a faster runner between two people” for example, is not beyond our ability to understand. Sure there are a number of ways to quantify “fast runner”: short distance sprinting, medium and long distance endurance, running on various terrain and environments. But as long as the total number of important features to consider is around 10 or below, we can get a pretty good idea of the answer. But on the other hand, the question of “what constitutes a hero” is not so simple. The number of features to consider is easily in the hundreds, if not thousands or higher. This means that for this question, we can only look at it at lower dimensional levels, 10 or so different dimensions at a time. Of course, the dimensions we look at the issue in don’t have to be constant. We can look at it from various different sets of 10 dimensions, but we can never get the full picture.

This is akin to sampling a high dimensional object with several lower dimension samples. For example, looking at a 3D cone with various 2-dimensional samples, it can appear to be: a dot (sampled at the tip of cone), a line (sampled along the ridge), a triangle (sampled in the body perpendicular to the base), a circle (sampled in the body parallel to the base), or an ellipse (sampled in the body at random angles). Even with all these samples, a being only capable of seeing 2 dimensions at a time will never fully comprehend the shape of the cone, just like how we cannot really comprehend what a 4D tesseract looks like.

This is where stories come in to help us. Even though the question of “what constitutes a hero” requires too many dimensions for us to understand fully, we can still comprehend a story about a hero. The story acts like an isomorphism to the higher dimensional concept, that is, it contains roughly the same set of characteristics as the answer we are seeking, but it is not explicitly a massive set of measurements of the features. We seem to be able to gain an implicit understanding of this isomorphism, much more easily than the actual quantitative answer itself, and this understanding is a more holistic (albeit more vague) view of the answer than what a combination of low-dimensional feature samplings can give us.

I think that the inability for us to fully understand higher dimensional concepts is one of the main reasons that complex issues are difficult for us to get a consensus on. Stories are not the panacea for this problem however, as they are extremely difficult to write well, and not every complicated issue can have good isomorphic stories to characterize it. Many social issues, politics, and even personal emotional issues, are simply too high dimensional for us to understand holistically, and we don’t have good enough stories that encapsulates them well enough. So we resort to our own individual low-dimensional samplings, which all differ because we end up sampling different sets of features, based on our different past experiences. This is why I believe that empathetic thinking is crucial. In the absence of good stories, having more and different sets of low-dimensional samples is perhaps the best we can do. But we should not be fooled into thinking that we can see the full picture.