Terry Pratchett - The Science of Discworld II - The Globe

To a child, the world does work like magic. Later in life, we wish that we could go on like that, with our 'wishes coming true' [23] Years ago, Jack wrote a book called The Privileged Ape about just this tendency. What he wanted to call it -and should have, but the publisher got cold feet - was The Ape That Got What It Wanted. (When it gets it, of course, it no longer wants it.) . So we design our shops, our webpages, our cars to fit this truly 'childish' view of the world.

Coming home in the car and clicking the garage open, clicking the infrared remote to open or lock the car, changing TV channels - even switching on the light by the wall switch - are just that kind of magic. Unlike our Victorian forebears, we like to hide the machinery and pretend it's not there. So Clarke's dictum is not at all surprising. What it means is that this ape keeps trying, with incredible ingenuity, to get back into the nursery, when everything was done for it. Maybe other intelligent/extelligent species will have a similar helpless early life, which they will attempt to compensate for or relive through their technology? If so, they will 'believe in magic', too, and we will be able to diagnose this by their possession of 'please' and 'thank you' rituals.

We can see this philosophy surviving into adulthood in different human cultures. In 'adult' stories like the Arabian Nights, an assortment of djinni and other marvels grant the heroes' wishes by magical means, just like those child-wishes coming true. Many 'romantic' adult stories have the same kind of setting, as do many fantasy tales. Fairness demands we add that, contrary to popular opinion, modern fantasy stories don't; it's hard to get much tension in a plot when anything is possible at the snap of a wand and so the practice of 'magic' therein tends to be difficult, dangerous and to be avoided wherever possible. Discworld is a magical world -we can hear the thoughts of a thunderstorm, for example, or the conversation of dogs -but magic in the pointy hat sense is very seldom used. The wizards and witches treat it rather like nuclear weaponry: it does no harm for people to know you've got it, but everyone will be in trouble if it gets used. This is magic for grown-ups; it has to be hard, because we know there's no such thing as a free goblin.

Unfortunately, adult beliefs about causality are usually contaminated by the less sophisticated wish-fulfilment philosophy that we carry with us from the tinkly magic of our infancies. For example, scientists will object to alternative theories on the grounds that 'if that was true, we wouldn't be able to do the sums'. Why do they think that nature cares whether humans can do the sums? Because their own desire to do the sums, which lets them write papers for learned journals, contaminates their otherwise rational view. There's a feeling of feet being stamped; the Almighty should change Her laws so that we can do the sums.

There are other ways to set up beliefs about causality, but they are difficult for creatures immersed in their own cultural assumptions: nearly everything that an adult human being is required to do is either made magical by technology, or it is to do with another human being, serving or being served.

These management, leadership and aristocracy issues have been handled very differently in different societies. Feudal societies have baronial class, who are in many respects allowed to remain in the nursery personas by being surrounded by servants and slaves and other parent- surrogates. Rich people in more complex societies, a high-status people in general (knights, kings, queens, princesses, Mafia bosses, operatic divas, pop idols, sports stars) seem to have set societies around them that pander to their needs in a very child-pampering way. As our society has become more technical, more and more of us, right down to the lowest status levels of society, have come to benefit from the accumulating magic of technology. Supermarkets have democratised and validated the provision of all we could want to each of our child-natures. The child-magic has been appropriated by more and more adults, through technology, and the legitimate kind, the 'wonder of nature' magic, has lost out.

In the mid-seventeenth century there was a philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, who derived from the synthetic Renaissance position, and from his criticism of Descartes' publications, a wholly new view of causality. He was one of several figures who bridged the Renaissance and helped engender the Enlightenment. He developed his critical view of his own Jewish cultural authorities into a new rational view of universal causality. He rejected Moses' hearing God's voice, and angels, and lots more 'occult' thinking, particularly early cabbalism [24] A system of mystic beliefs based on the Jewish Kabbala. ; he took the naive magic out of his own religion. He was a lens-grinder, an occupation that requires the persistent checking of performance against reality. So he put in the artisan's view of causality, and he took out the magic of God's word. The Jewish community in Amsterdam excommunicated him. They'd learned about that from the Catholics, but it didn't translate very well into Jewish practice, even of those times.

Spinoza was a pantheist. That is, he believed there is a little bit of God in everything. His main reason for believing this was that if God were separate from the material universe, then there would be an entity greater than God, namely, the entire universe plus God. It follows that Spinoza's God is not a being, not a person in whose image humanity can be made. For this reason, Spinoza was often considered to be an atheist, and many orthodox Jews still view him that way. Despite this, his Ethics makes a beautiful, logically argued case for a particular type of pantheism. In fact, Spinoza's viewpoint is almost indistinguishable from that of most philosophically inclined scientists, from Newton to Kauffman.

Before Spinoza, even his supposed predecessors like Descartes and Leibniz had God moving things in the World by the power of his Voice: magic, child-thinking. Spinoza introduced the idea that an overarching God could run the universe without being anthropomorphic. Many modern Spinozans see the set of rules, devised, described or attributed by science to the physical world, as the embodiment of that kind of God. That is to say, what happens in the material world happens that way because God, or the Nature of the Physical World, constrains it to do so. And out of that come ideas resembling narrativium instead of magic and wish-fulfilment.

A Spinozan view of child development sees the opposite of wish-fulfilment. There are rules, constraints, that limit what we can do. The child learns, as she grows, to modify her plans as she perceives more of the rules. Initially, she might attempt to cross the room assuming that the chair is not an obstacle; when it doesn't move out of her way, she will feel frustration, a 'passion'. And throws a paddy. Later, as she constructs her path to avoid the chair, more of her plans will peaceably, and successfully, come to fruition. As she grows and learns more of the rules -God's Will or the warp and woof of universal causation -this progressive success will produce a calm acceptance of constraints: peace rather than passion.

Kauffman's At Home in the Universe is a very Spinozan book because Spinoza saw that we do indeed make our home, with the reward of peace and the discipline of passion and its control, each of us in their own universe. We fit the universe as a whole, we evolved in it and of it, and a successful life is based on appreciating how it constrains our plans and rewards our understanding. 'Please' and 'thank you' have no place in Spinozan prayer. That view melds the artisan with the philosopher, the tribal respect for tradition with the barbarian virtues of love and honour.