**Where This Work Belongs: Situating A Tale of a New Era in Contemporary Thought**
1. Introduction: A Vision and Its Afterlife
Placing one’s own work inside the landscape of contemporary research is rarely straightforward. In my case the difficulty stems not from lack of influences, but from the origin of the project itself: a sudden, luminous moment in which time, story and consciousness appeared arranged in perfect symmetry. Not a mystical symbol nor a theological insight, but a structural perception—an event in which form precedes interpretation.
Everything that followed—my documentary project A Tale of a New Era, the seven-act hypothesis of world history, the development of accompanying essays, and a long-running dialogue with language models—has been an extended attempt to test what that moment revealed. The aim of this essay is to situate this work in the intellectual terrain of today: at the intersection of cognitive science, AI research, narrative theory, and the philosophy of history.
2. Cognitive Science: The Mind as Narrative Architecture
Cognitive science investigates how minds construct internal models—schemas, stories, temporal arcs—through which reality becomes intelligible. Thinkers such as Daniel Dennett propose that the self is not a metaphysical core but a narrative centre of gravity, held together by the stories we tell about ourselves. Douglas Hofstadter suggests that consciousness arises from “strange loops,” recursive structures that generate meaning by folding back on themselves.
My project aligns with this line of thinking, yet extends it. The claim is not merely that individuals understand their own lives narratively, but that personal experience and human history unfold within the same dramatic architecture. The narrative form is not a literary overlay but the mind’s internal grammar for time. Where cognitive science traditionally applies this to inner life, I argue that the same architecture shapes history at the civilisational scale.
3. Artificial Intelligence: Self-Supervised Models and Hidden Structure
A parallel development in artificial intelligence provides an unexpected point of contact. Researchers like Yann LeCun and Jürgen Schmidhuber describe how neural networks build internal “world models” through self-supervision, inferring structure from patterns without explicit instruction. Large language models, trained on billions of sentences, implicitly learn temporal rhythms, causal arcs and narrative expectations.
When I examine my hypothesis through the lens of LLMs, I am not using AI as a tool but treating it as an emergent mirror of linguistic structure. If history follows a seven-act dramatic arc because this form is embedded in language itself, then a self-supervised model trained on language should reflect the same underlying pattern. In this sense, the project stands at the junction where AI world-modelling, narrative cognition and structuralist intuitions meet—not by design, but by the nature of its originating insight.
4. Narrative Theory: Time Interpreted Through Plot
Narrative theorists have long argued that time becomes meaningful only when shaped by story. Paul Ricoeur describes this as “narrative time,” in which events gain coherence by being emplotted. Hayden White demonstrates that historical writing is never neutral but always structured—implicitly or explicitly—by narrative forms.
My hypothesis shares this foundation yet goes further. I do not claim merely that people write history as story; I claim that history itself unfolds as story. Dramatic structure—exposition, escalation, crisis, resolution—is not an artistic convention imposed afterward but the internal geometry by which human civilisations experience change. In this sense the project belongs to narratology, while simultaneously stepping outside it. I am less interested in how historians construct narratives and more in how history constructs itself.
5. Philosophy of History: Long Arcs and Linguistic Epochs
Attempts to discern the shape of history are as old as the discipline itself, from Hegel’s dialectical unfolding of Spirit to Toynbee’s cycles of civilisational rise and decline. These frameworks assume teleology, destiny or cultural determinism; my model does not. Instead, it proposes a six-millennium arc—from roughly 3000 BCE to 3000 CE—not as prophecy but as structural description.
The key driver of this arc is the evolution of language: the emergence of law, covenant, script, commentary, interpretation and finally structural reflexivity. Each marks a shift in humanity’s capacity to narrate itself. Thus the seven-act dramatic curve becomes a lens through which large-scale historical time can be read—an approach that lies between philosophy of history and a structural anthropology of language.
6. Structural Intuition: A Parallel With Daniel Tammet
An illuminating parallel emerges in the work of Daniel Tammet, whose synesthetic cognition allows him to perceive numbers and structures as shapes, colours and textures. In the documentary The Boy with the Incredible Brain, Tammet fails at card-counting while forcing a mathematical strategy, but succeeds remarkably when he abandons calculation and trusts his structural intuition.
This parallel matters because it mirrors the methodological tension in my own process. Whenever I attempt to force the project into commercial formats or instrumental goals—writing proposals with financial urgency, for instance—the work collapses. When I return to the intuitive form of the original vision, the writing emerges naturally. This suggests that the project is governed not by intention but by fidelity to a structural perception—one that resembles Tammet’s mode of access to form.
7. Publication, Reluctance, and the Role of Algorithms
A peculiar discomfort arises when trying to “package” this project for traditional publication. A short pamphlet written for a publisher failed precisely because it violated the structural integrity of the work; essays that emerged naturally weeks later were far stronger, yet the desire to submit them had vanished. The project does not respond well to extraction, reduction or instrumentalisation.
This is where algorithms enter the discussion—not as mystical agents of fate, but as systems optimised to detect patterns and affinities. Recommendation engines do not look for categories; they look for structure. If the internal architecture of this project is coherent, it will eventually intersect with the interests of those working in adjacent fields—AI researchers, cognitive theorists, narrative scholars—without strategic prompting. In this sense, allowing “the algorithm to take care of the rest” is less an abdication and more a recognition that structural resonance travels along its own paths.
8. Conclusion: Where This Work Belongs
A Tale of a New Era belongs to no single discipline, yet stands at the overlapping centre of several. It participates in cognitive science through its model of the mind as narrative architecture; in AI theory through its engagement with self-supervised models; in narrative theory through its claim that time is intelligible only through form; and in philosophy of history through its proposal that the evolution of language structures civilisation-level time.
More importantly, it emerges from an intuition of symmetry whose implications are still unfolding. Whether understood as narrative, structure, or model, the form first glimpsed in that early vision continues to reappear—within the documentary project, within essays, and within the behaviour of the language models themselves.
If the structure is real, it will be recognised. If it is not, no act of strategy will make it so. The task, therefore, is simple: to remain faithful to the form, and let the world of minds and machines decide where it fits.
laurentiuspaulus 