{"id":245256,"date":"2026-10-12T09:03:33","date_gmt":"2026-10-12T14:03:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/brian-boyd-on-the-origin-of-stories"},"modified":"2026-10-12T09:03:33","modified_gmt":"2026-10-12T14:03:33","slug":"brian-boyd-on-the-origin-of-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/10\/brian-boyd-on-the-origin-of-stories","title":{"rendered":"Brian Boyd on the Origin of Stories"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Seven months before ChatGPT launched, I spent two hours with Brian Boyd on a question that now feels urgent: why do humans tell stories at all?<\/p>\n

Boyd is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Auckland, the world\u2019s foremost Nabokov scholar, and author of On the Origin of Stories. His answer isn\u2019t literary. It\u2019s #evolution.<\/p>\n

Story, he argues, is an adaptation. It lets us track cause and effect, sure. But it also does something stranger: it lets us explore the world not only as it is, but as it could be.<\/p>\n

Now look at where we are. We\u2019ve built machines that produce stories by the billion. Fluent, endless, cheap. But do they know which details matter and which to ignore? Do they grasp what happens next, and why? That puzzle has a name in #ArtificialIntelligence, the frame problem, and Boyd\u2019s take on it surprised me.<\/p>\n

We also went places I didn\u2019t plan for. Heider and Simmel\u2019s famous triangle film (watch it and try NOT to see a story). Why Boyd calls art \u201ccognitive pattern play.\u201d Religion as perhaps the most powerful #storytelling ever. And why social media is a misguided attempt to control our own story.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s Karl Popper, the giant of #philosophy of science whose biography Boyd was writing when we spoke. Where Popper lands on science, stories, and revolutions is worth the listen alone.<\/p>\n

Continue reading \u201cBrian Boyd on the Origin of Stories\u201d | ><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Seven months before ChatGPT launched, I spent two hours with Brian Boyd on a question that now feels urgent: why do humans tell stories at all? Boyd is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Auckland, the world\u2019s foremost Nabokov scholar, and author of On the Origin of Stories. His answer isn\u2019t literary. It\u2019s #evolution. [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":737,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[385,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-245256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-evolution","category-futurism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/737"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245256"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245256\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}