Terry Pratchett - The Science of Discworld II - The Globe

We learn to appreciate stories as children. The child's mind is quick and powerful, but uncontrolled and unsophisticated. Stories appeal to it, and adults rapidly discovered that a story can put an idea into a child's head like nothing else can. Stories are easy to remember, both for teller and listener. As that child grows to adulthood, the love of stories remains. An adult has to be able to tell stories to the next generation of children, or the culture does not propagate. And an adult needs to be able to tell stories to other adults, such as their boss or their mate, because stories have a clarity of structure that does not exist in the messiness of the real world. Stories always make sense: that's why Discworld is so much more convincing than Roundworld.

Our minds make stories, and stories make our minds. Each culture's Make-a-Human kit is built from stories, and maintained by stories. A story can be a rule for living according to one's culture, a useful survival trick, a clue to the grandeur of the universe, or a mental hypothesis about what might happen if we pursue a particular course. Stories map out the phase space of existence.

Some stories are just entertainment, but even those usually have a hidden message on a deeper, possibly more earthy, level -as with Rumpelstiltskin. Some stories are Worlds of If, a way for minds to try out hypothetical choices and imagine their consequences. Word-play in the Nest of the Mind. And some of those stories have such a compelling logic that narrative imperative takes over, and they transmute into plans. A plan is a story together with the intention of making it come true.

Inside Roundworld, as it sits in its glass globe within the confining walls of the library of Unseen University, our story is coming to its climax. Will Shakespeare has written a play (it is, of course, A Midsummer Night's Dream), a play that the elves believe will consolidate their power over human minds. The narrative of this play has collided with Rincewind's mental model of what he wants to do, and the flying sparks have ignited a plot. How will it all end? That is one of the compulsive aspects of a story. You'll just have to wait and see.

We have seen how history unfolds an emergent dynamic, so that even though everything is following rigid rules, even history itself has to wait and see how it all turned out. Yes, everything is following the rules, but there is no short cut that will take you to the destination before the rules themselves get there. History is not a story that exists in a book, the fatalistic 'it is written'.

It is a story that makes itself up as it goes along, like a story that someone is reading and you are listening to. It is being written ...

Philosophically, there ought to be a big difference between a story that is already written, and one that is being created word by word as you read it. The one is a story whose every sentence is predetermined; not only can there be only one possible outcome, but the outcome is already

'known'. The other is a story whose next sentence does not yet exist, whose ending in unknown even to the storyteller. You are reading the first kind of story, but while we were writing it, it was the second kind of story. In fact, it started out as a totally different story, but we never wrote that one at all. The philosophers realised long ago that it is no easy matter to determine which kind of story fits our world. If we had the ability to run the world again, we might discover that it does different things on the second occasion, and if so, the history of the universe would be a story that unfolds as it goes, not one already committed to paper.

But this doesn't look like a feasible experiment.

Our fascination with stories lays us open to a variety of errors in our relationship with the outside world. The rapid spread of rumours, for instance, is a tribute to how our love of a juicy story overcomes our critical faculties. The mechanism is precisely the one that the scientific method tries very hard to protect us against: believing something because you want it to be true. Or, for some rumours, because you fear it could be true. A rumour is one example of a more general concept, introduced in 1976 by Dawkins in The Selfish Gene. He came up with this notion in order to be able to discuss an evolutionary system that was different from the Darwinian evolution of organisms. It is the meme. The associated subject of 'memetics' is science's attempt to comprehend the power of story.

The word 'meme' was coined by deliberate analogy with 'gene', and 'memetics' with 'genetics'.

Genes are passed from one generation of organisms to the next; memes are passed from one human mind to another human mind. A meme is an idea that is so attractive to human minds that they want to pass it on to others. The song 'Happy Birthday to You' is a highly successful meme; so, for a long time, was Communism, though that was a complicated system of ideas, a memeplex. Ideas exist as some cryptic pattern of activity in brains, so brains, and their associated minds, provide an environment in which memes can exist and propagate. Indeed, replicate, for when you teach a child to sing 'Happy Birthday to You', you don't forget the song yourself. The Hedgehog Song is an equally successful Discworld meme.

As the home computer spread across the globe, and became inextricably wired into the Internet's extelligence, an environment was created that gave birth to an insidious silicon-based form of meme: the computer virus. All viruses so far seem to have been written deliberately by humans, although at least one turned out to be a far more successful replicator than its designer had intended, thanks to a programming error. 'Artificial life' simulations using evolving computer programs are often run inside a 'shell' that isolates them from the outside world, because of the unlikely but possible evolution of a really nasty computer virus. The world's computer network is certainly complex enough to evolve its own viruses, given enough time.

Memes are mind-viruses.

In The Meme Machine, Susan Blackmore says that 'Memes spread themselves around indiscriminately without regard to whether they are useful, neutral, or positively harmful to us.'

The song 'Happy Birthday to You' is mostly harmless, although it is just about possible to see it as an insidious piece of propaganda for global commerce if you're that way inclined. Advertising is a conscious attempt to unleash memes; a successful advertising campaign starts to build its own momentum as it spreads by word of mouth as well as overt TV or newspaper ads. Some advertising is beneficial (Oxfam, say) and some is manifestly harmful (tobacco). In fact, many memes are harmful, but still propagate very effectively: among them are the chain-letter and its financial analogue, pyramid selling. Just as DNA propagates without having any conscious intentions of its own, so memes replicate without having conscious objectives. The people who set the memes loose may have had overt intentions, but the memes themselves don't. Those that perform well, leading human minds to pass them on in quantity, thrive; those that do not, die out, or at best live on as small, isolated pockets of infection. The spread of a meme is much like the spread of a disease. And just as you can protect yourself against some diseases, by taking the right precautions, you can also protect yourself against becoming infected with a meme. The ability to think critically, and to question statements that rest on authority instead of evidence, are quite effective defences.

This is our message to you. You need not be a victim of the power of story, like Vorbis the Quisitor, smitten by an earthbound tortoise, the Wrath of Om. You can be a Granny Weatherwax, sailing through story-space like a master navigator, attuned to every breath of narrative wind (and a lot of it is, mark you), tacking against the gale like a maverick, avoiding the Shoals of Dogma and the Scylla and Charybdis of Indecision ...