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COVER
ABOUT THE BOOK
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
ALSO BY TERRY PRATCHETT, IAN STEWART & JACK COHEN
TITLE PAGE
EPIGRAPH
1 MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE
2 THE UMPTY-UMPTH ELEMENT
3 JOURNEY INTO L-SPACE
4 THE ADJACENT POSSIBLE
5 REMARKABLY LIKE ANKH-MORPORK
6 THE LENS-GRINDER’S PHILOSOPHY
7 CARGO CULT MAGIC
8 PLANET OF THE APES
9 THE ELVISH QUEEN
10 BLIND MAN WITH LANTERN
11 THE SHELLFISH SCENE
12 EDGE PEOPLE
13 STASIS QUO
14 POOH AND THE PROPHETS
15 TROUSER LEG OF TIME
16 FREE WON’T
17 FREEDOM OF INFORMATION
18 BIT FROM IT
19 LETTER FROM LANCRE
20 SMALL GODS
21 THE NEW SCIENTIST
22 THE NEW NARRATIVIUM
23 PARAGON OF ANIMALS
24 THE EXTENDED PRESENT
25 PARAGON OF VEGETABLES
26 LIES TO CHIMPANZEES
27 LACK OF WILL
28 WORLDS OF IF
29 ALL THE GLOBE’S A THEATRE
30 LIES TO HUMANS
31 A WOMAN ON STAGE?
32 MAY CONTAIN NUTS
INDEX
COPYRIGHT
You spotted snakes with double tongue,
Thorny hedgehogs, be not seen;
Newts and blind-worms, do no wrong,
Come not near our fairy Queen.
I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had, but man is but a patch’d fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was.
I’m nae listenin’ to them! They’ve got warts!
APOLOGY: this book is a true account of events in the life of William Shakespeare, but only for a given value of ‘true’.
IN THE AIRY, crowded silence of the forest, magic was hunting magic on silent feet.
A wizard may be safely defined as a large ego which comes to a point at the top. That is why wizards do not blend well. That would mean looking like other people, and wizards do not wish to look like other people. Wizards aren’t other people.
And therefore, in these thick woods, full of dappled shade, new growth and birdsong, the wizards who were in theory blending in, in fact blended out. They’d understood the theory of camouflage – at least they’d nodded when it was being explained – but had then got it wrong.
For example, take this tree. It was short, and it had big gnarly roots. There were interesting holes in it. The leaves were a brilliant green. Moss hung from its branches. One hairy loop of grey-green moss, in particular, looked rather like a beard. Which was odd, because a lump in the wood above it looked rather like a nose. And then there was a blemish in the wood that could have been eyes …
But overall this was definitely a tree. In fact, it was a lot more like a tree than a tree normally is. Practically no other tree in the forest looked so tree-like as this tree. It projected a sensation of extreme barkness, it exuded leafidity. Pigeons and squirrels were queuing up to settle in the branches. There was even an owl. Other trees were just sticks with greenery on compared to the sylvanic verdanity of this tree …
… which raised a branch, and shot another tree. A spinning orange ball spun through the air and went splat! on a small oak.
Something happened to the oak. Bits of twig and shadows and bark which had clearly made up an image of a gnarled old tree now equally clearly became the face of Archchancellor Mustrum Ridcully, Master of Unseen University (for the extremely magical) and running with orange paint.
‘Gotcha!’ shouted the Dean, causing the owl to leap from his hat. This was lucky for the owl, because a travelling glob of blue paint removed the hat a moment later.
‘Ahah! Take that, Dean!’ shouted an ancient beech tree behind him as, changing without actually changing, it became the figure of the Lecturer in Recent Runes.
The Dean spun around, and a blob of orange paint hit him in the chest.
‘Eat permitted colourings!’ yelled an excited wizard.
The Dean glared across the clearing to a crabapple tree which was, now, the Chair of Indefinite Studies.
‘What? I’m on your side, you damn fool!’ he said.
‘You can’t be! You made such a good target!’1
The Dean raised his staff. Instantly, half a dozen orange and blue blobs exploded all over him as other hidden wizards let loose.
Archchancellor Ridcully wiped paint out of his eyes.
‘All right, you fellows,’ he sighed. ‘Enough’s enough for today. Time for tea, eh?’
It was so hard, he reflected, to get wizards to understand the concept of ‘team spirit’. It simply wasn’t part of wizardly thinking. A wizard could grasp the idea of, say, wizards versus some other group, but they lost their grip when it came to the idea of wizards against wizards. Wizard against wizards, yes, they had no trouble with that.
They’d start out as two teams, but as soon as there was any engagement they’d get all excited and twitchy and shoot other wizards indiscriminately. If you were a wizard then, deep down, you knew that every other wizard was your enemy. If their wands had been left unfettered, rather than having been locked to produce only paint spells – Ridcully had been very careful about that – then this forest would have been on fire by now.
Still, the fresh air was doing them good. The University was far too stuffy, Ridcully had always thought. Out here there was sun, and bird-song, and a nice warm breeze—
—a cold breeze. The temperature was plunging.
Ridcully looked down at his staff. Ice crystals were forming on it.
‘Turned a bit nippy all of a sudden, hasn’t it?’ he said, his breath tingling in the frigid air.
And then the world changed.
Rincewind, Egregious Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography, was cataloguing his rock collection. This was, these days, the ground state of his being. When he had nothing else to do, he sorted rocks. His predecessors in the post had spent many years bringing back small examples of cruel or unusual geography and had never had time to catalogue them, so he saw this as his duty. Besides, it was wonderfully dull. He felt that there was not enough dullness in the world.
Rincewind was the least senior member of the faculty. Indeed, the Archchancellor had made it clear that in seniority terms he ranked somewhat lower than the things that went ‘click’ in the woodwork. He got no salary and had complete insecurity of tenure. On the other hand, he got his laundry done free, a place at mealtimes and a bucket of coal a day. He also had his own office, no one ever visited him and he was strictly forbidden from attempting to teach anything to anyone. In academic terms, therefore, he considered himself pretty lucky.
An additional reason for this was that he was in fact getting seven buckets of coal a day and so much clean laundry that even his socks were starched. This was because no one else had realised that Blunk, the coal porter, who was far too surly to read, delivered the buckets strictly according to the titles on the study doors.
The Dean, therefore, got one bucket. So did the Bursar.
Rincewind got seven because the Archchancellor had found him a useful recipient of all the titles, chairs and posts which (because of ancient bequests, covenants and, in one case at least, a curse) the University was obliged to keep filled. In most instances no one knew what the hell they were for or wanted anything to do with them, in case some clause somewhere involved students, so they were given to Rincewind.
Every morning, therefore, Blunk stoically delivered seven buckets to the joint door of the Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography, the Chair of Experimental Serendipity, the Reader in Slood Dynamics, the Fretwork Teacher,2 the Chair for the Public Misunderstanding of Magic, the Professor of Virtual Anthropology and the Lecturer in Approximate Accuracy … who usually opened the door in his underpants – that is to say, opened the door in the wall whilst wearing his underpants – and took the coal happily, even if it was a sweltering day. At Unseen University you had budgets, and if you didn’t use up everything you’d been given you wouldn’t get as much next time. If this meant you roasted all summer in order to be moderately warm during the winter, then that was a small price to pay for proper fiscal procedures.
On this day, Rincewind carried the buckets inside and tipped the coal on the heap in the corner.
Something behind him went ‘gloink’.
It was a small, subtle and yet curiously intrusive sound, and it accompanied the appearance, on a shelf above Rincewind’s desk, of a beer bottle where no beer bottle had hitherto been.
He took it down and stared at it. It had recently contained a pint of Winkle’s Old Peculiar. There was absolutely nothing ethereal about it, except that it was blue. The label was the wrong colour and full of spelling mistakes but it was mostly there, right down to the warning in tiny, tiny print: May Contain Nuts.3
Now it contained a note.
He removed this with some care, and unrolled it, and read it.
Then he stared at the thing beside the beer bottle. It was a glass globe, about a foot across, and contained, floating within it, a smaller blue-and-fluffy-white globe.
The smaller globe was a world, and the space inside the globe was infinitely large. The world and indeed the whole universe of which it was part had been created by the wizards of Unseen University more or less by accident, and the fact that it had ended up on a shelf in Rincewind’s tiny study was an accurate indication of how interested they were in it once the initial excitement had worn off.
Rincewind watched the world, sometimes, through an omniscope. It mostly had ice ages, and was less engrossing than an ant farm. Sometimes he shook it up to see if it would make it interesting, but this never seemed to have much of an effect.
Now he looked back at the note.
It was extremely puzzling. And the university had someone to deal with things like that.
Ponder Stibbons, like Rincewind, also had a number of jobs. However, instead of aspiring to seven, he perspired at three. He had long been the Reader in Invisible Writings, had drifted into the new post as Head of Inadvisably Applied Magic and had walked in all innocence into the office of Praelector, which is a university title meaning ‘person who gets given the nuisance jobs’.
That meant that he was in charge in the absence of the senior members of the faculty. And, currently, this being the spring break, they were absent. And so were the students. The University was, therefore, running at near peak efficiency.
Ponder smoothed out the beer-smelling paper and read:
TELL STIBBONS GET HERE AT ONCE. BRING LIBRARIAN. WAS IN FOREST, AM IN ROUNDWORLD. FOOD GOOD, BEER AWFUL. WIZARDS USELESS. ELVES HERE TOO. DIRTY DEEDS AFOOT.
He looked up at the humming, clicking, busy bulk of Hex, the University’s magical thinking engine, then, with great care, he placed the message on a tray that was part of the machine’s rambling structure.
A mechanical eyeball about a foot across lowered itself carefully from the ceiling. Ponder didn’t know how it worked, except that it contained vast amounts of incredibly finely drawn tubing. Hex had drawn up the plans one night and Ponder had taken them along to the gnome jewellers; he’d long ago lost track of what Hex was doing. The machine changed almost on a daily basis.
The write-out began to clatter and produced the message:
+++ Elves have entered Roundworld. This is to be expected. +++
‘Expected?’ said Ponder.
+++ Their world is a parasite universe. It needs a host +++
Ponder turned to Rincewind. ‘Do you understand any of this?’ he said.
‘No,’ said Rincewind. ‘But I’ve run into elves.’
‘And?’
‘And then I’ve run away from them. You don’t hang around elves. They’re not my field, unless they’re doing fretwork. Anyway, there’s nothing on Roundworld at the moment.’
‘I thought you did a report on the various species that kept turning up there?’
‘You read that?’
‘I read all the papers that get circulated,’ said Ponder.
‘You do?’
‘You said that every so often some kind of intelligent life turns up, hangs around for a few million years, and then dies out because the air freezes or the continents explode or a giant rock smacks into the sea.’
‘That’s right,’ said Rincewind. ‘Currently the globe is a snowball again.’
‘So what is the faculty doing there now?’
‘Drinking beer, apparently.’
‘When the whole world is frozen?’
‘Perhaps it’s lager.’
‘But they are supposed to be running around in the woods, pulling together, solving problems and firing paint spells at one another,’ said Ponder.
‘What for?’
‘Didn’t you read the memo he sent out?’
Rincewind shuddered. ‘Oh, I never read those,’ he said.
‘He took everyone off into the woods to build a dynamic team ethos,’ said Ponder. ‘It’s one of the Archchancellor’s Big Ideas. He says that if the faculty gets to know one another better, they’ll be a happier, more efficient team.’
‘But they do know one another! They’ve known one another for ages! That’s why they don’t like one another very much! They won’t stand for being turned into a happy and efficient team!’
‘Especially on a ball of ice,’ said Ponder. ‘They’re supposed to be in woods fifty miles away, not in a glass globe in your study! There is no way to get into Roundworld without using a considerable amount of magic, and the Archchancellor has banned me from running the thaumic reactor at anything like full power.’
Rincewind looked again at the message from the bottle.
‘How did the bottle get out?’ he said.
Hex printed:
+++ I did that. I still maintain a watch on Roundworld. And I have been developing interesting procedures. It is now quite easy for me to reproduce an artefact in the real world +++
‘Why didn’t you tell us the Archchancellor needed help?’ sighed Ponder.
+++ They were having such fun trying to send the bottle +++
‘Can’t you just bring them out, then?’
+++ Yes +++
‘In that case—’
‘Hold on,’ said Rincewind, remembering the blue beerbottle and the spelling mistakes. ‘Can you bring them out alive?’
Hex seemed affronted.
+++ Certainly. With a probability of 94.37 per cent +++
‘Not great odds,’ said Ponder, ‘But perhaps—’
‘Hold on again,’ said Rincewind, still thinking about that bottle. ‘Humans aren’t bottles. How about alive, with fully functioning brains and all organs and limbs in the right place?’
Unusually, Hex paused before replying.
+++ There will be unavoidable minor changes +++
‘How minor, exactly.’
+++ I cannot guarantee reacquiring more than one of every organ+++
There was a long, chilly silence from the wizards.
+++ Is this a problem? +++
‘Maybe there’s another way?’ said Rincewind.
‘What makes you think that?’
‘The note asks for the Librarian.’
In the heat of the night, magic moved on silent feet.
One horizon was red with the setting sun. This world went around a central star. The elves did not know this and, if they had done, it would not have bothered them. They never bothered with detail of that kind. The universe had given rise to life in many strange places, but the elves were not interested in that, either.
This world had created lots of life. Up until now, none of it had ever had what the elves considered to be potential. But this time, there was definite promise.
Of course, it had iron, too. The elves hated iron. But this time, the rewards were worth the risk. This time …
One of them signalled. The prey was close at hand. And now they saw it, clustered in the trees around a clearing, dark blobs against the sunset.
The elves assembled. And then, at a pitch so strange that it entered the brain without the need to use the ears, they began to sing.
1 And in this short statement may be seen the very essence of wizardly.
2 This one was apparently the result of a curse some 1,200 years ago by a dying Archchancellor, which sounded very much like ‘May you always teach fretwork!’
3 Lord Vetinari, the Patrician and supreme ruler of the city, took proper food labelling very seriously. Unfortunately, he sought the advice of the wizards of Unseen University on this one, and posed the question thusly: ‘Can you, taking into account multi-dimensional phase space, meta-statistical anomaly and the laws of probability, guarantee that anything with absolute certainty contains no nuts at all?’ After several days, they had to conclude that the answer was ‘no’. Lord Vetinari refused to accept ‘Probably does not contain nuts’ because he considered it unhelpful.
DISCWORLD RUNS ON magic, Roundworld runs on rules, and even though magic needs rules and some people think rules are magical, they are quite different things. At least, in the absence of wizardly interference. This was the main scientific message of our last book, The Science of Discworld. There we charted the history of the universe from the Big Bang through to the creation of the Earth and the evolution of a not especially promising species of ape. The story ended with a final fast-forward to the collapse of the space elevator by which a mysterious race (which could not possibly have been those apes, who were only interested in sex and mucking about) had escaped from the planet. They had left the Earth because a planet is altogether too dangerous a place to live, and had headed out into the galaxy in search of safety and a long-term chance of a decent pint.
The Discworld wizards never found out who the builders of the space elevator on Roundworld were. We know that they were us, the descendants of those apes, who’d brought sex and mucking about to high levels of sophistication. The wizards missed that bit, although, to be fair, the Earth had been in existence for over four billion years, and apes and humans were present only for a tiny percentage of that time. If the entire history of the universe were compressed to one day, we would have been present for the final 20 seconds.
Quite a lot of interesting things happened on Roundworld while the wizards were skipping ahead, and now, in this present book, the wizards are going to find out what those things were. And of course they’re going to interfere, and inadvertently create the world we live in today, just as their interference in the Roundworld Project inadvertently created our entire universe. It has to work like that, doesn’t it?
That’s how the story goes.
Seen from outside, as it sits in Rincewind’s office, the entire human universe is a small sphere. Large quantities of magic went into its manufacture and, paradoxically, into maintaining its most interesting feature. Which is this: Roundworld is the only place on Discworld where magic does not work. A strong magical field protects it from the thaumic energies that surge around it. Inside Roundworld, things don’t happen because people want them to or because they make a good narrative: they happen because the rules of the universe, the so-called ‘laws of nature’, make them happen.
At least, that was a reasonable way to describe things … until human beings evolved. At that point, something very strange happened to Roundworld. It began, in various ways, to resemble Discworld. The apes acquired minds, and their minds started to interfere with the normal running of the universe. Things started to happen because human minds wanted them to. Suddenly the laws of nature, which up to that point had been blind, mindless rules, were infused with purpose and intention. Things started to happen for a reason, and among these things that happened was reasoning itself. Yet this dramatic change took place without the slightest violation of the same rules that had, up to that point, made the universe a place without purpose. Which, on the level of the rules, it still is.
This seems like a paradox. The main content of our scientific commentary, interleaved between successive episodes of a Discworld story, will be to resolve that paradox: how did Mind (capital ‘M’ for ‘metaphysical’) come into being on this planet? How did a Mindless universe ‘make up its own Mind’? How can we reconcile human free will (or its semblance) with the inevitability of natural law? What is the relation between the ‘inner world’ of the mind and the allegedly objective ‘outer world’ of physical reality?
The philosopher René Descartes argued that the mind must be built from some special kind of material – ‘mind-stuff’ that was different from ordinary matter, indeed undetectable using ordinary matter. Mind was an invisible spiritual essence that animated otherwise unthinking matter. It was a nice idea, because it explained at a stroke why Mind is so strange, and for a long time it was the conventional view. Nevertheless, today this concept of ‘Cartesian duality’ has fallen out of favour. Nowadays only cosmologists and particle physicists are allowed to invent new kinds of matter when they want to explain why their theories totally fail to match observed reality. When cosmologists find that galaxies are rotating at the wrong speeds in the wrong places, they don’t throw away their theories of gravitation. They invent ‘cold dark matter’ to fill in the missing 90 per cent of the mass of the universe. If any other scientists did that kind of thing, people would throw up their hands in horror and condemn it as ‘theory saving’. But cosmologists seem to get away with it.
One reason is that this idea has many advantages. Cold dark matter is cold, dark and material. Cold means that you can’t detect it by the heat radiation that it throws off, because it doesn’t. Dark means that you can’t detect it by the light that it emits, because it doesn’t. Matter means that it’s a perfectly ordinary material thing (not some silly invention like Descartes’ immaterial mind-stuff). Having said that, of course, cold dark matter is totally invisible, and it’s definitely not the same as conventional matter, which isn’t cold and isn’t dark …
To their credit, the cosmologists are trying very hard to find a way to detect cold dark matter. So far, they’ve discovered that it does bend light, so you can ‘see’ lumps of cold dark matter by the effect they have on images of more distant galaxies. Cold dark matter creates mirage-like distortions in the light from distant galaxies, smearing them out into thin arcs, centred on the lump of missing mass. From those distortions, astronomers can re-create the distribution of that otherwise invisible cold dark matter. The first results are coming in now, and within a few years it will be possible to survey the universe and find out whether the missing 90 per cent of matter really is there, cold and dark as expected, or whether the whole idea is nonsense.
Descartes’ similarly invisible, undetectable mind-stuff has had a very different history. At first, its existence seemed obvious: minds simply do not behave like the rest of the material world. Then, its existence seemed obvious nonsense, because you can chop a brain into pieces, preferably after ensuring that its owner has previously departed this world, and look for its material constituents. And when you do, there’s nothing unusual there. There’s lots of complicated proteins, arranged in very elaborate ways, but you won’t find a single atom of mind-stuff.2
We can’t yet dissect a galaxy, so for now cosmologists can get away with their absurd invention of a face-saving new material. Neuroscientists, trying to explain the mind, have no such luxury. Brains are much easier to pull apart than galaxies.
Despite the change in current conventional wisdom, there remain a few diehard dualists who still believe in special mind-stuff. But today, nearly all neuroscientists believe that the secret of Mind lies in the structure of the brain, and even more importantly, in the processes that the brain carries out. As you read these words, you experience a strong sense of Self. There is a You that is doing the reading, and thinking about the words and the ideas they express. No scientist has ever dissected out the bit of the brain that contains this impression of You. Most suspect that no such bit exists: instead, you feel like You because of the overall activity of your entire brain, plus the nerve fibres that are connected to it, bringing it sensations of the outside world and allowing it to control the movement of your arms, legs and fingers. You feel like you, in fact, because you are busily being You.
Mind is a process carried out within a brain made of perfectly ordinary matter, in accordance with the rules of physics. It is, however, a very strange process. There is a kind of duality, but it is a duality of interpretation rather than of physical material. When you think a thought – about, let us say, the Fifth Elephant that slipped off the back of Great A’Tuin, orbited in an arc of a circle and crashed on to the surface of the Discworld – the same physical act of thinking that thought has two distinct meanings.
One of them is straightforward physics. In your brain, various electrons are surging to and fro in various nerve fibres. Chemical molecules are combining together, or breaking up, to make new ones. Modern sensing apparatus, such as the PET scanner,1 can reconstruct a three-dimensional image of your brain, showing which regions are active when you are thinking about that elephant. Materially, your brain is buzzing in some complicated way. Science can see how it is buzzing, but it can’t (yet) extract the elephant.
That’s the second interpretation. From inside, so to speak, you have no sensation of those buzzing electrons and reacting chemicals. Instead, you have a very vivid impression of a large grey creature with flappy ears and a trunk, sailing improbably through space and crashing disastrously to the ground. Mind is what it feels like to be a brain. The same physical events acquire a totally different meaning when viewed from the inside. One task of science is to try to bridge the gap between those two interpretations. The first step is to figure out which bits of the brain do what when you think a particular thought. To reconstruct, in fact, the elephant from the electrons. That’s not yet possible, but every day brings it a step closer. Even when science gets there, it will probably not be able to explain why your impression of that elephant is so vivid, or why it takes exactly the form that it does.
In the study of consciousness there is a technical term for what a perception ‘feels like’. It is called a quale (pronounced ‘kwah-lay’, not ‘quail’), a figment that our minds paint on to their model of the universe in the way that an artist adds pigment to a portrait. Such qualia (plural) paint the world in vivid colours so that we can respond more quickly to it, and, in particular, respond to signs of danger, food, possible sexual partners … Science has no explanation of why qualia feel like they do, and it’s not likely to get one. So science can explain how a mind works, but not what it is like to be one. No shame in that: after all, physicists can explain how an electron works, but not what it is like to be one. Some questions are beyond science. And, we suspect, beyond anything else: it is easy enough to claim an explanation of these metaphysical problems, but just as impossible to prove you’re right. Science admits it can’t handle these things, so at least it’s honest.
At any rate, the science of the mind (small ‘M’ now because we’re not talking metaphysics) addresses how the mind works, and how it evolved, but not what it’s like to be one. Even with this limitation, the science of the brain is not the whole story. There is another important dimension to the question of Mind. Not how the brain works and what it does, but how it came to be like that.
How, on Roundworld, did Mind evolve from mindless creatures?
Much of the answer lies not inside the brain, but in its interactions with the rest of the universe. Especially other brains. Human beings are social animals, and they communicate with each other. The trick of communication made a huge, qualitative change to the evolution of the brain and its ability to house a mind. It accelerated the evolutionary process, because the transfer of ideas happens much faster than the transfer of genes.
How do we communicate? We tell stories. And that, we shall argue, is the real secret of Mind. Which brings us back to Discworld, because on Discworld things really do work the way human minds think they do on Roundworld. Especially when it comes to stories.
Discworld runs on magic, and magic is indissolubly linked to Narrative Causality, the power of story. A spell is a story about what a person wants to happen, and magic is what turns stories into reality. On Discworld, things happen because people expect them to. The sun comes up every day because that’s its job: it was set up to provide light for the people to see by, and it comes up during the day when people need it. That’s what suns do; that’s what they’re for. And it’s a proper, sensible sun, too: a smallish fire not very far away, which goes over and under the Disc, incidentally but entirely logically causing one of the elephants to lift a leg to let it pass. It’s not the ridiculous, pathetic kind of sun that we have – absolutely gigantic, infernally hot, and nearly a hundred million miles away because it’s too dangerous to be near. And we go round it instead of it going round us, which is crazy, especially since what every human being on the planet sees, other than the visually impaired, is the latter. It’s a terrible waste of material just to make daylight …
On Discworld, the eighth son of an eighth son must become a wizard. There’s no escaping the power of story: the outcome is inevitable. Even if, as in Equal Rites, the eighth son of an eighth son is a girl. Great A’Tuin the turtle must swim though space with four elephants on its back and the entire Discworld on top of them, because that’s what a world-bearing turtle has to do. The narrative structure demands it. Moreover, on Discworld everything that there is3 exists as a thing. To use the philosophers’ language, concepts are reified: made real. Death is not just a process of cessation and decay: he is also a person, a skeleton with a cloak and a scythe, and he TALKS LIKE THIS. On Discworld, the narrative imperative is reified into a substance, narrativium. Narrativium is an element, like sulphur or hydrogen or uranium. Its symbol ought to be something like Na, but thanks to a bunch of ancient Italians that’s already reserved for sodium (so much for So). So it’s probably Nv, or maybe Zq given what they’ve done to sodium. Be that as it may, narrativium is an element on Discworld, so it lives somewhere in the Disc’s analogue of Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic table. Where? The Bursar of Unseen University, the only wizard insane enough to understand imaginary numbers, would doubtless tell us that there is no question: it is the umpty-umpth element.
Discworld narrativium is a substance. It takes care of narrative imperatives, and ensures they are obeyed. On Roundworld, our world, humans act as if narrativium exists here, too. We expect it not to rain tomorrow because the village fair is on, and it would be unfair (in both senses) if rain spoiled the occasion.
Or, more often, given the pessimistic ways of our country folk, we expect it to rain tomorrow because the village fair is on. Most people expect the universe to be mildly malevolent but hope it will be kindly disposed, whereas scientists expect it to be indifferent. Drought-struck farmers pray for rain, in the express hope that the universe or owner thereof will hear their words and suspend the laws of meteorology for their benefit. Some, of course, actually believe just that, and for all anyone can prove, they could be right. This is a tricky question, and a delicate one; let us just say that no reputable scientific observer has yet caught God breaking the laws of physics (although of course He might be too clever for them) and leave it at that for the moment.
And this is where Mind takes centre stage.
The curious thing about the human belief in narrativium is that once humans evolved on the planet, their beliefs started to be true. We have, in a way, created our own narrativium. It exists in our minds, and there it is a process, not a thing. On the level of the material universe, it’s just one more pattern of buzzing electrons. But on the level of what it feels like to be a mind, it operates just like narrativium. Not only that: it operates on the material world, not just the mental one: its effects are just like those of narrativium. Generally our minds control our bodies – sometimes they don’t, and indeed sometimes it’s the other way round, especially during adolescence – and our bodies make things happen out there in the material world. Within each person there is a ‘strange loop’, which confuses the mental and material levels of existence.
This strange loop has a curious effect on causality. We get up in the morning and leave the house at 7.15 because we have to get to work by 9 o’clock. Scientifically, this is a very bizarre form of causality: the future is affecting the past. That doesn’t normally occur in physics (except in very esoteric Quantum things, but let’s not get distracted). In this case, science has an explanation. What causes you to get up at 7.15 is not actually your future arrival at work. If in fact you fall under a bus and never make it to work, you still got up at 7.15. Instead of backwards causality, you have a mental model, in your brain, which is your best attempt to predict the day ahead. In that model, realised as buzzing electrons, you think that you ought to be at work by nine. That model, and its expectation of the future, exists now, or more accurately, a short time in the past. It is that expectation that causes you to get up instead of lying in and having a well-deserved snooze. And the causality is entirely normal: from past to future by way of actions taking place in the present.
So that’s all right then. Except that when you think of it, the causality is still very strange. A few electrons, buzzing in ways that are meaningless from the outside of the brain in which they reside, lead to a coherent action by a 70-kilogram lump of protein. Well, at that time in the morning it’s not a very coherent lump of protein, but you understand what we mean. That’s why we call this very creative piece of confusion a strange loop.
Those mental models are stories, simplified narratives that correspond in a rough-hewn way to aspects of the world that we consider to be important. Note that ‘we’: all mental models are infected with human biases. Our minds tell us stories about the world, and we base a great many of our actions on what those stories say. Here, the story is ‘the person who arrived at work late and was fired from their job’. That story alone will lever us out of bed at an unearthly hour, even if we get on well with the boss and fondly imagine that the story doesn’t apply to us. In other words, we make up our world according to the stories that we tell ourselves, and each other, about it.
We build minds in our children that way, too. The Western child is brought up on stories like the time Winnie the Pooh went to Rabbit’s house, ate too much honey and got stuck in the entrance hole on the way out.4 The story tells us not to be too greedy; that terrible things will happen to us if we are. Even the child knows that Winnie the Pooh is fiction, but they understand what the story is about. It doesn’t lead them to avoid pigging out on honey, and it doesn’t make them worry about getting stuck in the doorway when they try to leave the room after having eaten too much dinner. The story isn’t about literal interpretations. It’s a metaphor, and the mind is a metaphor machine.
The power of narrativium in Roundworld is immense. Things happen because of it that you would never expect from the laws of nature. For example, the laws of nature pretty much forbid an Earthbound object suddenly leaping up into space and landing on the Moon. They don’t say it’s impossible, but they do imply that you could wait a very long time indeed before it happened. Despite this, there is a machine on the Moon. Several. They all used to be down here. They are there because, centuries ago, people told each other romantic tales about the Moon. She was a goddess, who looked down on us. When full, she caused werewolves to change from humans into animals. Even then, humans were quite good at doublethink; the Moon was clearly a big silver disc, but, at the same time, she was a goddess.
Slowly those tales changed. Now the Moon was another world, and by harnessing the power of swans we could fly there in a chariot. Then (Jules Verne suggested) we could get there in a hollowed-out cylinder fired by a giant gun, located in Florida. Finally, in the 1960s, we found the right kind of swan (liquid oxygen and hydrogen) and the right kind of chariot (several million tons of metal) and we flew to the Moon. In a hollowed-out cylinder, launched from Florida. It wasn’t exactly a gun. Well, actually it was in a basic physical sense; the rocket was the gun and it went along for the ride, firing burnt fuel in place of a bullet.
If we’d not told ourselves stories about the Moon, there would have been no point in going there at all. An interesting view, maybe … but we ‘knew’ about the view only because we had told ourselves scientific stories about images sent back by space probes. Why did we go? Because we’d been telling ourselves that we would, one day, for several hundred years. Because we’d made it inevitable and introduced it into the ‘future story’ of a great many people. Because it satisfied our curiosity, and because the Moon was waiting. The Moon was a story waiting to be finished (‘First human lands on the Moon!’), and we went there because the story demanded it.
When Mind evolved on Earth, a kind of narrativium evolved alongside it. Unlike the Discworld variety of narrativium, which on the Disc is just as real as iron or copper or praseodymium, our variety is purely mental. It is an imperative, but the imperative has not been reified into a thing. However, we have the sort of mind, that respond to imperatives, and to many other non-things. And so it feels to us as if our universe runs on narrativium.
There is a curious resonance here, and ‘resonance’ is definitely the word. Physicists tell a story about how carbon forms in the universe. In certain stars there is a particular nuclear reaction, a ‘resonance’ between nearby energy levels, which gives nature a stepping-stone from lighter elements to carbon. Without that resonance, so the story goes, carbon could not have formed. Now, the laws of physics as we currently understand them involve several ‘fundamental constants’, such as the speed of light, Planck’s constant in quantum theory, and the charge on an electron. These numbers determine the quantitative implications of the physical laws, but any choice of constants sets up a potential universe. The way that a universe behaves depends on the actual numbers that are used in its laws. As it happens, carbon is an essential constituent of all known life. All of which leads up to a clever little story called the Anthropic Principle: that it’s silly for us to ask why we live in a universe whose physical constants make that nuclear resonance possible – because if we didn’t, there’d be no carbon, hence no us to ask about it.
The story of the carbon resonance can be found in many science books, because it creates a powerful impression of hidden order in the universe, and it seems to explain so much. But if we look a little more closely at this story, we find that it is a beautiful illustration of the seductive power of a compelling but false narrative. When a story seems to hang together, even consciously self-critical scientists can fail to ask the question that makes it fall apart.
Here’s how the story goes. Carbon is created in red giant stars by a rather delicate process of nuclear synthesis, called the triple-alpha process. This involves the fusion of three helium nuclei.5 A helium nucleus contains two protons and two neutrons. If you fuse three helium nuclei together, you get six protons and six neutrons. That, as it happens, is a carbon nucleus.
All very well, but the odds on such a triple collision occurring inside a star are very small. Collisions of two helium nuclei are much more common, though still relatively rare. It is extremely rare for a third helium nucleus to crash into two that are just colliding. It’s like paintballs and wizards. Every so often, a paintball will go splat! against a wizard. But you wouldn’t bet a lot of money on a second paintball hitting him at the exact same moment. This means that the synthesis of carbon has to take place in a series of steps rather than all at once, and the obvious way is for two helium nuclei to fuse, and then for a third helium nucleus to fuse with the result.
The first step is easy, and the resulting nucleus has four protons and four neutrons: this is one form of the element beryllium. However, the lifetime of this particular form of beryllium is only 10-16 seconds, which gives that third helium nucleus a very small target to aim at. The chance of hitting this target is incredibly small, and it turns out that the universe hasn’t existed long enough for even a tiny fraction of its carbon to have been made in this way. So triple collisions are out, and carbon remains a puzzle.
Unless … there is a loophole in the argument. And indeed there is. The fusion of beryllium with helium, leading to carbon, would occur much more rapidly, yielding a lot more carbon in a much shorter time, if the energy of carbon just happens to be close to the combined energies of beryllium and helium. This kind of near-equality of energies is called a resonance. In the 1950s Fred Hoyle insisted that carbon has to come from somewhere, and predicted that there must therefore exist a resonant state of the carbon atom. It had to have a very specific energy, which he calculated must be about 7.6 MeV.6
Within a decade, it was discovered that there is a state with energy 7.6549 MeV. Unfortunately, it turns out that the combined energies of beryllium and helium are about 4 per cent higher than this. In nuclear physics, that’s a huge error.
Oops.
Ah, but, miraculously, that apparent discrepancy is just what we want. Why? Because the additional energy imparted by the temperatures found in a red giant star is exactly what’s needed to change the combined energy of beryllium and helium nuclei by that missing 4 per cent.
Wow.
It’s a wonderful story, and it rightly earned Hoyle huge numbers of scientific brownie-points. And it makes our existence look rather delicate. If the fundamental constants of the universe are changed, then so is that vital 7.6549. So it is tempting to conclude that our universe’s constants are fine-tuned for carbon, making it very special indeed. And it is equally tempting to conclude that the reason for that fine-tuning is to ensure that complex life turns up. Hoyle didn’t do that, but many other scientists have given into these temptations.
Sounds good: what’s wrong? The physicist Victor Stenger calls this kind of argument ‘cosmythology’. Another physicist, Craig Hogan, has put his finger on one of the weak points. The argument treats the temperature of the red giant and that 4 per cent discrepancy in energy levels as if they were independent. That is, it assumes that you can change the fundamental constants of physics without changing the way a red giant works. However, that’s obvious nonsense. Hogan points out that ‘the structure of stars includes a built-in thermostat that automatically adjusts the temperature to just the value needed to make the reaction go at the correct rate’. It’s rather like being amazed that the temperature in a fire is just right to burn wood, when in fact that temperature is caused by the chemical reaction that burns the wood. This kind of failure to examine the interconnectedness of natural phenomena is a typical, and quite common, error in anthropic reasoning.
In the human world, what counts is not carbon, but narrativium. And in that context we wish to state a new kind of anthropic principle. It so happens that we live in a universe whose physical constants are just right for carbon-based brains to evolve to the point at which they create narrativium, much as a star creates carbon. And the narrativium does crazy things, like putting machines on the Moon. Indeed, if carbon did not (yet) exist, then any narrativium-based lifeform could find some way to manufacture it, by telling itself a really gripping story about the need for carbon. So causality in this universe is irredeemably weird. Physicists like to put it all down to the fundamental constants, but it’s more likely an example of Murphy’s law.
But that’s another story.