Narrative Attractors Across Minds, Traditions, and Models
Narrative Attractors Across Minds, Traditions, and Models Toward a Cross-System Theory of Idea Stabilization in Cognitive, Cultural, and Computational Information Systems Article-length conceptual draft prepared for interdisciplinary review Abstract This article develops a conceptual framework for explaining why some ideas recur, stabilize, and become disproportionately influential across distinct information systems. I argue that this phenomenon can be modeled in terms of narrative attractors: interpretive patterns that become easy to activate, easy to repeat, and difficult to displace. The argument integrates four literatures that are rarely placed in direct conversation: research on the availability heuristic, work on identity protective cognition, scholarship on the Synoptic Problem and the hypothetical Q source, and technical accounts of transformer-based language models. The central claim is not that human cognition, oral tradition, and large language m...