The Science of Discworld II - The Globe tsod-2 Read online

  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 Rene 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 mindstuff[4].

  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[5], 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 im
portant 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 is[6] 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[7]. 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 cou
ld 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.