The Science of Discworld II - The Globe tsod-2

by Terry Pratchett

  'Especially the way one of the Stibbonses has just laid out the other one with a left hook,' said the other Rincewind. 'An unusual skill in a man of his education.'

  'Doesn't give you a lot of confidence, I admit. Toss a coin?' 'Yes, why not ...' They did so.

  'Fair enough,' said the winner. 'Nice to have met me.' He picked his way delicately across the groaning bodies and the last couple of struggling wizards, sat down in the centre of the circle of light, and pulled his hat as far down over his head as possible.

  A moment later he became, very briefly, a six-dimensional knot and became untied again on a wooden floor in a library.

  'Well, that was relatively painful,' he murmured, and looked around. The Librarian was sitting on his stool. The wizards were around Rincewind, looking amazed and, in some cases, slightly bruised. Dr Dee was watching them with concern.

  'Oh dear, I see it did not work,' he said, and sighed. 'It never works for me, either. I will instruct the servants to fetch some food.' When he'd gone, the wizards looked at one another. 'Did we go?' said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. 'Yes, but we came back at the same time,' said Ponder.

  He rubbed his chin.

  'I can remember everything,' said the Archchancellor. 'Amazin'! I was the one that got left behind and the one that—'

  'Let's just not talk about it, shall we?' said the Dean, brushing his robe.

  There was the sound of a muffled voice trying to make itself heard. The Librarian opened his paw.

  'Attention please. Attention please,' said Hex.

  Ponder took the sphere.

  'We're listening.'

  'Elves are approaching this property.'

  'What, here? In broad daylight?' said Ridcully. 'On our damn world? While we're actually here?

  The nerve!'

  Rincewind looked out of the window on to the drive below.

  'Is it me,' said the Dean, 'or has it got colder?'

  A carriage was rolling up, with a couple of footmen trotting along beside it. It was a fine one, by the standards of the city. There were plumes on the horse. And everything about it was either black or silver.

  'It's not just you,' said Rincewind, backing away from the window.

  There were sounds at the front door. The wizards heard the distant voice of Dee, and then the creak of the stairs.

  'Brethren,' he said, pushing open the door. 'There appears to be a visitor for you downstairs.' He gave them a worried smile. 'A lady.'

  16. FREE WON'T

  What is the biggest source of danger for any organism? Predators? Natural disasters? Fellow organisms of the same species, who constitute the most direct competition for everything?

  Sibling rivals, who compete even in the same family, the same nest? No. The biggest danger is the future.

  If you've survived until now, then your past and present offer no dangers, or at least no new dangers. That time you broke your leg and it didn't heal very well left you vulnerable to lions, but the attack is still going to come, if at all, in the future. You can't do anything to change your past -unless you're a wizard -but you can do something to change your future. In fact, everything you do changes your future, in the sense that the nebulous space of future possibilities starts to crystallise out into the one future that actually happens. If you are a wizard, able to visit the past and change that, too, you still have to think about how a range of possibilities crystallises out into just one. You still march forward into your own personal future along your own personal timeline; it's just that, when seen from the perspective of conventional history, that timeline zigzags a lot.

  We are committed to a view of ourselves as creatures that exist in time, not just in an ever- changing present. That is why we are fascinated by stories of time travel. And by stories about the future. We have established elaborate methods to foretell the future, and find ourselves at the mercy of deep-seated concepts such as Destiny and Free Will, which relate to our place in time and our ability to change the future -or not. However, we have an ambivalent attitude to the future. In most respects, we think that it is pre-determined, usually by factors beyond our control.

  Otherwise, how could it be predicted? Most scientific theories of the universe are deterministic: the laws give rise to only one possible future.

  To be sure, quantum mechanics involves unavoidable elements of chance, at least according to the orthodox attitude of nearly all physicists, but quantum uncertainty fuzzes out and 'decoheres'

  as we move from the microscopic world to the macroscopic one, so on a human scale nearly everything that matters is again deterministic from the physical point of view. That doesn't mean that we know ahead of time what's going to happen, though. We have seen that two features of the workings of natural laws, chaos and complexity, imply that deterministic systems need not be predictable in any practical sense. But when we start to think about ourselves, we are utterly certain that we are not deterministic at all. We have free will, we can make choices. We can choose when to get out of bed, what to eat for breakfast, whether or not to put the radio on and listen to the news.

  We're not so certain that animals have free will. Do cats and dogs make choices? Or are they merely responding to innate and unchangeable 'drives'? When it comes to simpler organisms like amoebas, we find it difficult to conceive of them choosing between alternatives; though when we watch them through a microscope, we get a strong feeling that they know what they're doing.

  We're happy to believe that this feeling is an illusion, a silly piece of anthropomorphism, investing human qualities in a tiny bag of biochemicals; no doubt the amoeba is responding, deterministically, to chemical gradients in its environment. But it doesn't look deterministic because of the aforementioned get-outs, chaos and complexity. In contrast, when we make a choice, we have the overwhelming impression that we could have chosen to do something else.

  If that wasn't possible, then it wasn't really a choice.

  We therefore model ourselves as free agents making choice after choice against the background of a complex and chaotic world. We are aware that any threat to our existence -or anything desirable -will come from the future, and that the free choices we make now can and will affect how that future turns out. If only we could foresee the future, we could work out the best choices, and make the future happen the way we would like, and not the way the lions would like. Our intelligence gives us the ability to construct mental models of the future, mostly simple extrapolations of patterns that we have noticed in the past. Our extelligence collects these models, and welds them together into religious prophecies, scientific laws, ideologies, social imperatives ... We are time-binding animals, whose every action is constrained not just by the past and present, but also by our own anticipations of the future. We know that we can't predict the future very accurately, but a prediction that works only some of the time is, we feel, better than none. So we tell ourselves and each other stories about the future, and we use those stories to run our lives.

  Those stories form part of the extelligence, and they interact with other elements in it, such as science and religion, to create a strong emotional attachment to belief systems or technology that can help us navigate into that uncertain future. Or claim to do so, and can convince us that the claim is valid, even if it's not. In many religions, enormous respect is paid to prophets, people so wise, or so in tune with the deity, that they know what the future will bring. The priests gain respect by predicting eclipses and the turn of the seasons. Scientists gain rather less respect by predicting the movements of the planets, and (less effectively) tomorrow's weather. Whoever controls the future controls human destiny.

  Destiny. That's a strange concept in a creature that believes it has free will. If you can control the future, then the future cannot be fixed. If it is not fixed, then there is no such thing as destiny.

  Unless, perhaps, the future converges on the same events, whatever you do. There are many stories with this theme, of which the most famous is 'Appointment in Samara
' (parodied in The Colour of Magic), when a man's efforts to escape Death only bring him to the very place where Death is waiting.

  We entertain contradictory beliefs about the future. That's not such a surprise: we're not the most logically consistent of creatures. We tend to apply logic locally, within narrow limits, and when it suits us. We're very bad at applying it globally, setting one of our cherished beliefs up against another and looking for the inconsistencies. But we are especially inconsistent when it comes to dealing with the future.

  Paradoxically, free will is the last thing you want if you're tribal. You're caught in the matrix of

  'Everything that isn't mandatory is forbidden', and there is simply no room for free will. On the one hand, such an existence is very secure; but on the other, punishments and rewards are just as mandatory as everything else if your sins are found out. Your personal responsibility is only to obey the rules.

  You can still tell yourself stories about the future, but they involve very narrow choices. 'Shall I attend the ritual meal tonight and leave early to say my evening prayers, or shall I stay for the communal prayers like everybody else?' Even in a tribal system, a lot of cheating goes on, because we're human. 'Well, now ... If I leave early, then I can drop by Fatima's tent, and my wives won't know about it ...'

  Plenty of sins are possible, even in a tribal society, and in reality ones that survive allow a little flexibility. If, say, you forget to fast on the Holy Day and someone sees you eating, and you genuinely thought it was tomorrow, or an enemy told you that it was tomorrow, or you had been made to think it was tomorrow because an enemy had cast a curse upon you ... then some skilful pleading might mitigate your punishment.

  The natural and attractive option is always to blame others; it is unbearable to know that you have brought the punishment upon yourself. If you can't see how anyone else can be blamed for material reasons, then blame them for cursing you. Blame Fatima for being attractive and willing, blame an enemy who lied to you. 'Luck' is not available as a concept in a tribal society, because Allah knows everything, Jehovah is omniscient: the natural response is fatalistic acceptance of whatever they throw your way[48]. If you are to attain heaven, so be it; if your fate is to be flung into the everlasting fires, then that is the Will of God, to which you are subservient.

  The best you can do, as a peasant-level tribesman, is to find out what is in store for you, what is Written in the Book.

  Maybe you don't really want to know what's in the Book, but monkey curiosity overcomes fear, and in any case you can't change what's Written and it might just be nice. So you go to the old lady in the forest who can read tealeaves, or (today) to the iridologist or the spiritualist medium.

  And all of these alleged ways to foresee the future have a very revealing common feature. They interpret the small-and-contingent into the large-and-important.

  Just like the Roman general spilling the guts of a ram on to the ground before the battle, so that the small-and-complicated can mirror a forthcoming battle that will be large-and-complicated, tealeaves and hand-lines are small-and-complicated, and 'must' therefore encode your complicated future. The kind of magic that is being invoked here is an unexpressed homology, which on some level we all believe in because we use it all the time. The stories that we construct in our minds are small-and-complicated, and they really do mirror the large-andcomplicated things that happen to us. The Concise Lexicon of the Occult lists 93 methods of divination, from aeromancy (divination by the shapes of clouds) to xylomancy (divination by the shapes of twigs). All but four of them employ the small-and-complicated to predict the largeand- complicated; their materials include salt, barley, wind, wax, lead, onion sprouts (that one's called 'cromniomancy'), laughter, blood, fish guts, flames, pearls, and the noises made by mice

  ('myomancy'). The other four involve invoking spirits, calling up demons, or talking to gods.

  To many tribal innocents, other people sometimes seem to have access to different little stories that they can make relevant to your life, like 'Your fate is written on your hand' or 'The dead communicate with me and they know all'. So people of that inclination can convince you, with a bit of flummery, that they know your future, and they can produce convincing large stories which you interpret as your fate.

  There is a deep paradox in our attitude to personal free will. We want to know what the future will be in order to make a free choice that protects us against it. So we think of the future of everything outside us as being deterministic, which is why the gypsy or the medium or the dead can know what it is going to be. Nevertheless, we think of our own future as involving free choices. Our free will lets us choose to consult the gypsy, who then convinces us that we have no choice: for example, that the life-line on our palm determines when we will die. So our actions betray a deep-seated belief that the laws of the universe apply to everything except us.

  The biggest wholesale business that preys on our convictions and confusions about free will in a powerful and often cruel universe, is astrology. Astrologers claim authority from Ancient Egypt, from Paracelsus and Dee, from Ancient Wisdom of all kinds including the Hindu Vedas and other Eastern literature. Let us review the appeal of astrology in the light of narrativium.

  Astrologers have an immense following, and they have managed to pick up on both tribal and barbarian stories. They have the counter-scientific story for the civilised culture, able to attract both the tribal and barbarian aspects of our foolishness. They really do believe that the future, for each of us, is influenced by our time of birth[49]. They time it to the second.

  What seems to be important to them is against which starry background (the Zodiac) we view the planets in our own solar system. As we move from intra-uterine life to the hands of the midwife, doctor, partner, our lives are determined from then on by astral forces. This strange belief is supported by so many people, who turn to the 'Your Stars' pages first in their daily newspaper, that we should seek some explanation within our 'story' framework. What is the story of our futures that is implicit in the control of our lives by the positions of the stars? As opposed, say, to the medical staff who, at the time of our birth, probably had more gravitational influence upon us[50] than the planet Jupiter was having?

  Well, the stars are obviously very numinous, powerful. They're up there wheeling over us. At least, they were when we were shepherds, staying out all night, but most civilised folk now don't know why the Moon changes its shape, let alone why or where the pole star is. Yes, all right, you do, and it's not surprising. Others don't, and don't think what they don't know is worth knowing.

  They have a vague feel for a few of the constellations, especially the Big Dipper (or Great Bear), but they don't know that those stars are not near to each other, but merely appear to be in that formation when viewed from Earth, and then only for a short time, astronomically speaking.

  Most people don't entertain astronomical thoughts, so why are the stars so heavily involved in our most potent stories? Perhaps because, in our nursery stories, the celestial sphere gives a context, a primitive animistic one in which Moon and Sun take protagonist parts? We don't find that persuasive. Perhaps it is because the power of the stars entered our cultural stories back in the time when everyone could see the clear night sky, and has hung on. Or perhaps it is the jargon of the Zodiac-mongers, with their gypsy fortune-teller use of language to give received certainty to the most nebulous of prophecies. We've never heard anyone say, after reading the newspaper's astrology columns, 'Right, then, they're totally wrong today, no more astrology for me!'

  There are others playing the same card, from Pyramidologists to Ancient Astronaut promoters to Flying Saucers Will Save Us visionaries to Rosicrucians. Regular UFO enthusiasts and Loch Ness monster photographers are much less dangerous. We focus on the prophets: those who, like followers of Nostradamus's prophecies or astrology, must believe that all the little contingencies add up to a grand pattern of the human future and that Fate rules us all.

  T
his is the tribal interpretation of the feeling of free will: it is an illusion, for God already knows our futures. Kismet (the word comes from the Turkish 'qismet' and Arabic 'qisma') rules.

  Moreover -a neat twist that gives power over people as well as their money -whether you will be a beetle or a king in the next turn of the cosmic wheel is determined by the balance that you have achieved in this life. This is equally out of your control, in practice, but you can escape to an inner life, making it as far as possible irrelevant to the vicissitudes that attack your outer self, and thereby avoid beetlehood in your next incarnation.

  That apparent escape again depends on our ability to construct stories about our future. Here, our future divides, with the soul taking one direction under our own control and freed from the control of powerful others, while the body is manifestly bowed by slavery, starvation, or torture.

  Hundreds of millions have found comfort in that apparent control of their futures, following the story of their spiritual selves and denying the pains of the material self.

  In the Buddhist literature and practice, something close to that transcendence seems to be achievable. If you believe in fate, or the nearby concept of karma, then wisdom can consist only in foreseeing events, training your spiritual self to accept what happens, and teaching others to do the same. Some authority will provide your map of material events, but your destiny cannot be avoided by fighting it. Your only option is to lead a disciplined spiritual life, guided by stories of previous successes in this quest, notably the Buddha, and to entertain hopes of leaving the Wheel of Life altogether, to exist as a spiritual presence with all ties to the material severed.

  This nirvanic view of heaven is not for those who enjoy the material ride too much to want to get off the bus. And the paradoxical nature of the prophetic predictions -of all prophetic predictions