Terry Pratchett - The Globe

These two worldviews are not mutually contradictory, for they are worldviews of two different worlds. Yet, thanks to the interconnectedness of L-space, each world illuminates the other.

The strange duality between Roundworld and Discworld parallels another: the duality between Mind and Matter. When Mind came to Roundworld, a very remarkable change occurred.

Narrative imperative appeared in Roundworld. Magic came into existence. And elves, and vampires, and myth, and gods. Characteristically, all of these things came into being in an indirect and offbeat way, like the relationship between rules and consequences. Things didn't exactly happen because of the power of story. Instead, the power of story made minds try to make the things in the story happen. The attempts were not always successful, but even when they failed, Roundworld was usually changed.

Narrative imperative arrived on Roundworld like a small god, and grew in stature according to human belief. When a million human beings all believe the same story, and all try to make it come true, their combined weight can compensate for their individual ineffectiveness.

There is no science in Discworld, only magic and narrativium. So the wizards put science into Discworld in the form of the Roundworld Project, as detailed in The Science of Discworld. With elegant symmetry, there was no magic or narrativium in Roundworld, so humans put them there, in the form of story.

Before narrative imperative can exist, there has to be narrative, and that's where Mind proved decisive. The imperative followed hard on the heels of the narrative, and the two complicitly coevolved, for as soon as there was a story, there was someone who wanted to make it come true.

Nonetheless, the story beat the compulsion by a nose.

What makes humans different from all other creatures on the planet is not language, or mathematics, or science. It is not religion, or art, or politics, either. All of those things are mere side effects of the invention of story. Now it might seem that without language there can be no stories, but that is an illusion, brought about by our current obsession with recording stories as words on paper. Before there was a word for 'elephant' it was possible to point at an elephant and make evocative gestures, to draw an elephant on the cave wall and add spears flying towards it, or to mould a model of an elephant from clay and act out a hunting scene. The story was as clear as day, and an elephant-hunt would follow hard on its heels.

We are not Homo sapiens, Wise Man. We are the third chimpanzee. What distinguishes us from the ordinary chimpanzee Pan troglodytes, and the bonobo chimpanzee Pan paniscus, is something far more subtle than our enormous brain, three times as large as theirs in proportion to body weight. It is what that brain makes possible. And the most significant contribution that our large brain made to our approach to the universe was to endow us with the power of story. We are Pan narrans, the storytelling ape.

Even today, five million years since we and the other two species of chimpanzee went our separate evolutionary ways, we still use stories to run our lives. Every morning we buy a newspaper to find out, so we tell ourselves, what is happening in the world. But most things that are happening in the world, even rather important ones, never make it into the papers. Why not?

Because newspapers are written by journalists, and every journalist learned at their mother's knee that what grabs newspaper readers is a story. Events with zero significance for the planet, such as a movie star's broken marriage, are stories. Events that matter a great deal, such as the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) as propellants in aerosol cans of shaving-cream, are not stories. Yes, they can become stories, and in this case do when we discover that those selfsame CFCs are destroying the ozone layer; we even have a title for the story, The Ozone Hole. But nobody knew or recognised there was a story when shops first started selling aerosol cans, even though that was the decisive event.

Religions have always recognised the power of a good story. Miracles run better at the box- office than mundane good actions. Helping an old lady across the road isn't much of a story, but raising the dead most certainly is. Science is riddled with stories. In fact, if you can't tell a convincing story about your research, nobody will let you publish it. And even if they did, nobody else would understand it. Newton's laws of motion are simple little stories about what happens to lumps of matter when they are given a push -stories only a little more precise than 'if you keep pushing, it will go faster and faster'. And 'Everything moves in circles', as Ponder would insist.

Why are we so wedded to stories? Our minds are too limited to grasp the universe for what it is.

We're very small creatures in a very big world, and there is no way that we could possibly represent that world in full, intricate detail inside our own heads. Instead, we operate with simplified representations of limited parts of the universe. We find simple models that correspond closely to reality extremely attractive. Their simplicity makes them easy to comprehend, but that's not much use unless they also work. When we reduce a complex universe to a simple principle, be it The Will of God or Schrodinger's Equation, we feel that we've really accomplished something. Our models are stories, and conversely, stories are models of a more complex reality. Our brains fill in the complexity automatically. The story says 'dog' and we immediately have a mental picture of the beast: a big, bumbling Labrador with a tail like a steam-hammer, tongue lolling, ears flopping.75 Just as our visual system fills in the blind spot.

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.