So we should be suspicious of the belief that we can know what it feels like to be a dog. In 1974 the philosopher Thomas Nagel published a famous essay ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ in the Philosophical Review, in which he made the same point. We can imagine what it is like to be a human who is behaving – superficially at least – like a bat, but we have no idea what it feels like to the bat, and it is questionable whether human knowledge can ever extend in such a direction.
We probably get bats wrong anyway. We know that bats use echo-location to sense their surroundings, much as a submarine uses sonar. The bat or submarine emits sharp pulses of sound, and hears the returning echoes. From those, it can ‘compute’ what the sound must be bouncing off. We naturally assume that the bat responds to echoes in the same kind of way that we would: it hears them. We naturally expect the qualia of bat echo-location to be similar to the human qualia evoked by sound-patterns, of which the richest example is music. So we imagine the bat flying along to the accompaniment of incredibly rapid rhythms played on bongo drums.
However, this could be a false analogy. Echo-location is the main sense of a bat, so the ‘correct’ corresponding sense of a human is its main sense, which is sight, not hearing. The August 1993 edition of Nature has a picture of a bat on the cover, with the words ‘How bats’ ears see’. This refers to a technical article, by Steven Dear, James Simmons and Jonathan Fritz, who discovered that the neurons in the part of the bat’s brain that processes returning echoes are connected together in a very similar way to those in the human visual cortex. In terms of neural architecture, it looks very much as if the bat’s brain uses the echoes to build up an image of its surroundings. Analogously, today’s submarines use computers to turn a series of echoes into a three-dimensional map of the surrounding water. Figments of Reality developed this point to give a partial answer to Nagel’s question:
[In effect] bats see with their ears, and their sonar qualia might well be like our visual ones. Intensity of sound might come over to the bat as a kind of ‘brightness’, and so on. Possibly the bat’s sonar qualia ‘see’ the world in black and white and shades of grey, but they could also pick up and render vivid various more subtle features of sound reflections. The closest analogy in humans is texture, which we sense by touch, but the bat could sense by sound. Soft objects reflect sound less well than hard ones, for instance. So bats may well ‘see’ textured sound. If so – and here our analogy is intended only as a very rough way to convey the idea – the sonar quale for a soft surface might ‘look’ green to the bat’s mind, that for hard ones might look red, that for liquid ones like a colour only bees can see, and so on …
On Roundworld, such statements are no more than guesswork, supported by analogies of neural architecture. On Discworld, witches know what it feels like to be a bat, or a dog, or a beetle. And Angua the werewolf smells in colours, which is very close to our suggestion that bats hear in images and ‘see’ textures. But even on Discworld, the witches do not actually feel what it is like to be a bat. They feel what it is like to be a human who has ‘borrowed’ the sensory organs and neural processing equipment of a bat. It may feel quite different to be a bat when a witch is not hitching a free ride on its mind.
Even though we can’t be certain what it feels like to be an animal, or another person, the attempt has several uses. As we said, the ability involved here is empathy: being able to understand what another person feels like. We’ve already seen that this is an important social skill, and that the same ability, deployed in a different way for a different purpose, gives us a chance to detect that someone else is lying to us. If we put ourselves inside their heads and realise that what they are saying is different from what we believe they are thinking, then we suspect them of lying.
The word ‘lie’ has negative overtones, deservedly so, but what we’re talking about here can be constructive as well as destructive, and often is. For the purposes of the present discussion, a lie is anything contrary to the truth, but it’s not at all clear what ‘the truth’ is, or even whether there is only one of it, as the word ‘the’ would seem to indicate. When two people have a row, it is generally impossible for either of them, or anyone else, to figure out exactly what really happened. Our thoughts are tainted by perceptions. This is unavoidable, because what we think of as being ‘real’ is what our minds make of what comes from the sense organs: fudged, tuned, and mangled by a succession of interpretations by different bits of brain, plus some wallpaper additions. We never know what is really out there around us. All we know is what our minds construct from what our eyes, ears and fingers report.
Not to put too fine a point on it, those perceptions are lies. The vivid universe of colour that our brain derives from the light that falls on our retinas does not really exist. The redness of a rose is derived from its physical features, but ‘being red’ is not a physical feature as such. ‘Emitting light of a certain wavelength’ gets closer to being a physical feature. However, the vivid redness that we ‘see’ does not correspond to a specific wavelength. Our brains correct the colours of visual images for shadows, light reflected on to parts of the image by other parts of a different colour, and so on. Our sensation of redness is a decoration added to the perception by our brain: a quale. So what we ‘see’ is not an accurate perception of what is there, but a mental transform of a sensory perception of what is there.
To a bee, that same uniformly red rose may look very different, with obvious markings. The bee ‘sees’ in ultraviolet, a wavelength outside our range of perceptions. The rose emits a whole distribution of wave-lengths of light; we see a small part of that, and call it reality. The bee sees a different part and responds to it in its own beelike way, using the markings to land on the flower and collect nectar, or to dismiss it from consideration and fly on to the next possibility. Neither the bee’s perception, nor ours, is the reality.
In Chapter 24 we explained that our minds select what they perceive in more ways than just passively ignoring signals that our senses can’t pick up. We fine-tune our senses to see what we want them to see, hear what we want them to hear. There are more nerve connections going from the brain to the ear than there are from the ear to the brain. Those connections adapt the ear’s ability to perceive certain sounds, maybe by making it more sensitive to sounds that could represent danger and less sensitive to sounds that don’t really matter much. People who are not exposed to certain sounds as children, when their ears and brains are being tuned to pick up language, cannot distinguish them as adults. To the Japanese, the two phonemes ‘l’ and ‘r’ sound identical.
The lies that our senses tell us are not malicious. They are partial truths rather than untruths, and the universe is so complicated, and our minds are so simple in comparison, that the best we can ever hope for is half-truths. Even the most esoteric ‘fundamental’ physics is at best a half-truth. Indeed, the more ‘fundamental’ it becomes, the less true it gets. It is therefore no surprise that the most effective method we have yet devised for passing extelligence on to our children is a systematic series of lies.
It is called ‘education’.
We can hear the hackles rising even as we write, as quantum signals echo back down the timelines from future readers in the teaching profession turning to this page. But before hurling the book across the room or sending an offended e-mail to the publisher, ask yourself just how much of what you tell children is true. Not worthy, not defensible: true. At once you’ll find yourself on the defensive: ‘Ah, yes, but of course children can’t understand all of the complexities of the real world. The teacher’s job is to simplify everything as an aid to understanding …’
Quite so.
Those simplifications are lies, within the meaning we are currently attaching to that word. But they are helpful lies, constructive lies, lies that even when they are really very wrong still open the door to a better understanding next time round. Consider, for example, the sentence ‘A hospital is a place where people are sent so that the
doctors can make them better’. Well, no sensitive adult would wish to tell a child that sometimes people go into hospital alive and come out dead. Or that often it’s not possible to make them better. For a start, the child may have to go into hospital at some stage, and too big a dose of truth early on might make it difficult for the parents to persuade them to do so without making a fuss. Nonetheless, no adult would consider that sentence to be an accurate statement of what hospitals are really about. It is, at best, an ideal to which hospitals aspire. And when we justify our description on the grounds that the truth would upset the child, we are admitting that the sentence is a lie, and asserting that social conventions and human comfort are more important than giving an accurate description of what the world is about.
They often are, of course. A lot depends on context and intention. In Chapter 4 of The Science of Discworld we called these helpful untruths and half-truths ‘lies-to-children’. They must be distinguished from the much less benevolent ‘lies-to-adults’, another word for which is ‘politics’. Lies-to-adults are constructed with the express purpose of concealing intentions; their aim is to mislead. Some newspapers tell lies-to-adults; others do their best to tell truths-to-adults, although they always end up by telling adult versions of lies-to-children.
In the twenty-fifth Discworld novel The Truth, journalism comes to the Disc, in the form of William de Worde. His career begins with a monthly newsletter sent to various Discworld notables, usually for five dollars each month, but in the case of one foreigner for half a cartload of figs twice per year. He writes one letter, and pays Mr Cripslock the engraver in the Street of Cunning Artificers to turn it into a woodcut, from which he prints five copies. From these small beginnings emerges Ankh-Morpork’s first newspaper, when de Worde’s ability to sniff out a story is allied to the dwarves’ discovery of movable type. It is rumoured that the dwarves have found a way to turn lead into gold – and since the type is made of lead, in a way they have.
The main journalistic content of the novel is a circulation battle between de Worde’s Ankh-Morpork Times, with its banner ‘THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE’, and the Ankh-Morpork Inquirer (THE NEWS YOU ONLY HEAR ABOUT). The Times is an upmarket broadsheet, running stories with headlines like ‘Patrician Attacks Clerk With Knife (He had the knife, not the clerk)’, and checking its facts before publishing them. The Inquirer is a tabloid, whose headlines are more of the ‘ELVES STOLE MY HUSBAND’ kind, and it saves money by making all the stories up. As a result, it can undercut its upmarket competitor when it comes to price, and the stories are much more interesting. Truth eventually prevails over cheap nonsense, however, and de Worde learns from his editor Sacharissa a fundamental principle of journalism:
‘Look at it like this,’ said Sacharissa, starting a fresh page. ‘Some people are heroes. And some people jot down notes.’
‘Yes, but that’s not very—’
Sacharissa glanced up and flashed him a smile. ‘Sometimes they’re the same person,’ she said.
This time it was William who looked down, modestly.
‘You think that’s really true?’ he said.
She shrugged. ‘Really true? Who knows? This is a newspaper, isn’t it? It just has to be true until tomorrow.’
Lies-to-children, even the broadsheet newspaper sort, are mostly benign and helpful, and even when they are not, they are intended to be that way. They are constructed with the aim of opening a pathway that will eventually lead to more sophisticated lies-to-children, reflecting more of the complexities of reality. We teach science and art and history and economics by a series of carefully constructed lies. Stories, if you wish … but then, we’ve already characterised a story as a lie.
The science teacher explains the colours of the rainbow in terms of refraction, but slides over the shape of the rainbow and the way those colours are arranged. Which, when you come to think of it, are more puzzling, and more what we want to know about when we ask why rainbows look like they do. There’s a lot more to the physics than a raindrop acting as a prism. Later, we may develop the next level of lie by showing the child the elegant geometry of light rays as they pass through a spherical raindrop, refracting, reflecting, and refracting back out again, with each colour of light focused along a slightly different angle. Later still, we explain that light does not consist of rays at all, but electromagnetic waves. By university, we are telling undergraduates that those waves aren’t really waves at all, but tiny quantum wave-packets, photons. Except that the ‘wave-packets’ in the textbooks don’t actually do the job … And so on. All of our understanding of nature is like this; none of it is Ultimate Reality.
TWENTY-SEVEN
LACK OF WILL
THE WIZARDS WERE NEVER QUITE CERTAIN where they were. It wasn’t their history. History gets named afterwards: The Age of Enlightenment, the Depression. Which is not to say that people sometimes aren’t depressed with all the enlightenment around them, or strangely elevated during otherwise grey times. Or periods are named after kings, as if the country was defined by whichever stony-faced cut-throat had schemed and knifed his way to the top, and as if people would say, ‘Hooray, the reign of the House of Chichester – a time of deep division along religious lines and continuing conflict with Belgium – is now at an end and we can look forward to the time of the House of Luton, a period of expansion and the growth of learning! The ploughing of the big field is going to be a lot more interesting from now on!’
The wizards had settled for calling the time they’d arrived ‘D’ and, now, they were back there, in some cases quite suntanned.
They had commandeered Dee’s library again.
‘Stage One seemed to have worked quite well, gentlemen,’ said Ponder Stibbons. ‘The world is certainly a lot more colourful. We do seem to have, er, assisted the elves in the evolution of what I might venture to call Homo narrans, or “Storytelling Man”.’
‘There’s still religious wars,’ said the Dean. ‘And still the heads on spikes.’
‘Yes, but for more interesting reasons,’ said Ponder. ‘That’s humans for you, sir. Imagination is imagination. It gets used for everything. Wonderful art and really dreadful instruments of torture. What was that country where the Lecturer in Recent Runes got food poisoning?’
‘Italy, I think,’ said Rincewind. ‘The rest of us had the pasta.’
‘Well, it’s full of churches and wars and horrors and some of the most amazing art. Better than we’ve got at home. We can be proud of that, gentlemen.’
‘But when we showed them the book the Librarian found in L-space, of Great Works of Art with the full colour pictures …’ mumbled the Chair of Indefinite Studies, as if he had something on his mind but wasn’t certain how to phrase it.
‘Yes?’ said Ridcully.
‘… well, it wasn’t actually cheating, was it?’
‘Of course not,’ said Ridcully. ‘They must have painted them somewhere. Some other dimension. Something quantum. A parallel eventuality or something with that sort of a name. But that doesn’t matter. It all goes round and round and it comes out here.’
‘But I think we said too much to that big chap with the bald head,’ said the Dean. ‘The artist, remember? Could’ve been the double of Leonard of Quirm? Beard, good singing voice? You shouldn’t have told him about the flying machine that Leonard built.’
‘Oh, he was scribbling so much stuff no one’ll take any notice,’ said Ridcully. ‘Anyway, who’ll remember an artist who can’t get a simple smile right? The point is, gentlemen, that the fantastic imagination and the, er, practical imagination go hand in hand. One leads to the other. Can’t separate them with a big lever. Before you can make something, you have to picture it in your head.’
‘But the elves are still here,’ said the Lecture in Recent Runes. ‘All we’ve done is do their work even better! I don’t see the point!’
‘Ah, that’s Stage Two,’ said Ponder. ‘Rincewind?’
‘What?’
‘You’re going to talk
about Stage Two. Remember? You told us you wanted to get the world to the right stage?’
‘I didn’t know I had to make a presentation!’
‘You mean you don’t have any slides? No paperwork at all?’
‘Paperwork slows me down,’ said Rincewind. ‘But it’s obvious, isn’t it? We say Seeing is Believing … and I thought about that, and it’s not really true. We don’t believe in chairs. Chairs are just things that exist.’
‘So?’ said Ridcully.
‘We don’t believe in things we can see. We believe in things that we can’t see.’
‘And?’
‘And I’ve been checking this world against L-space and I think we’ve made it the one where humans survive,’ said Rincewind. ‘Because now they can picture gods and monsters. And when you can picture them, you don’t need to believe in them any more.’
After a long silence the Chair of Indefinite Studies said, ‘Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed how many huge cathedrals they’ve been building on this continent? Big, big buildings full of wonderful craftsmanship? And those painters we talked to have been very keen on religious paintings …’
‘And your point is …?’ said Ridcully.
‘It’s just that this has been happening at the same time as people have been really taking an interest in how the world works. They’re asking more questions. How? and Why? and questions like that,’ said the Chair of Indefinite Studies. ‘They’re acting like Phocian but without going mad. Rincewind seems to be suggesting that we’re killing off the gods of this place.’
The Science of Discworld II Page 32