The Science of Discworld

by Terry Pratchett

  Once you've got that facility, it's a relatively short step to the ability to do specific kinds of processing that happen to be useful — that happen to offer survival value. All you need is the standard Darwinian selection procedure. Anything that's got that ability survives, anything that hasn't, doesn't. The ability to process incoming information in ways that extract an interesting feature of the outside world, react to it, and thereby make it easier to evade a predator or to spot food, gets reinforced. The brain's internal architecture comes from a phase space of possible structures, and evolution selects from that phase space. Put those two together and you can evolve structures in the brain that have specific functions. The brain's surroundings certainly influence the development of the brain.

  Do animals have minds? They do to some extent, depending on the animal. Even simple animals can have surprisingly sophisticated mental abilities. One of the most surprising is a funny creature called a mantis shrimp.

  It's like the shrimps you put inside a sandwich and eat, except that it's about 5 inches (12 cm) long and it's more complex. You can keep a mantis shrimp in a tank, as part of a miniature marine ecology. If you do, you'll find that mantis shrimps cause havoc. They tend to destroy things — but they also build things. One thing they love building is tunnels, which they then live in. The mantis shrimp is a bit of an architect, and it decorates the front of its tunnel with bits and pieces of things — especially bits and pieces of what it has just killed. Hunting trophies. It doesn't like to have just one tunnel — it's discovered that if you have one tunnel with one entrance, that's more correctly known as a 'trap'. So it likes to have a back entrance too — and more. By the time it's been in the tank for about two months, it's riddled the entire tank with tunnels, and you find it sticking its head out at one end or the other without seeing it pass between.

  Years ago, Jack used to have a mantis shrimp called Dougal.* Jack and his students discovered that they could set Dougal puzzles. They would feed it shrimps and it would come out and grab the shrimp. Then they would put the shrimp inside a plastic container with a lid and after a little while Dougal would like to take the lid off the container and eat the shrimp. And then they put an elastic band around the container to hold the lid on, and Dougal would learn to take the band off and open the container and eat the shrimp. And after a while if they stuck a shrimp in on its own, you could almost see the mantis shrimp coming out and looking disappointed: 'They haven't set me a puzzle, this is no fun, I don't want to play this game!' And it would take a long look at the shrimp and then go back into its tunnel without grabbing it.

  Although we can think of no way to prove this, everyone got the strong impression that the shrimp was developing a little bit of a mind. Its brain had the potential to do so, and humans had provided it with the kind of context that would help it develop that potential. Wild mantis shrimps don't go out and play with elastic bands, because those aren't part of their environment, but if you give them that kind of stimulus, you change them. Because we've got minds, we also have the capacity to create a little bit of mind in a lot of other creatures.

  Mind is a process, or a network of processes, going on inside the brain. It needs a certain amount of interaction with other minds in order to get anywhere. There isn't an evolutionary feedback loop that would train an incipient mind and make it develop unless it was getting somewhere. So where does such a loop occur? Human beings are part of a reproductive system — there are a lot of us, and we keep breeding new ones. In consequence, a large part of the environment of any human being is other human beings. In many ways this is the most important part of our environment, the part we respond to most deeply. We have all sorts of cultural systems, such as education, that exploit exactly this feature of our environment to develop the kind of mind that fits into the existing culture and helps to propagate it. So the context for an individual mind, as it evolves, is not that mind — it's lots of other minds. There is a com-plicit feedback loop between the entire collection of minds, and that of each individual.

  Human beings have taken this process to such an extreme that part of that feedback loop has escaped from our control and is now outside us. In a sense, it has a mind of its own. This is extelligence, and we can't do without it. A lot of what makes us human is not passed on genetically — it is passed on culturally. It is passed on by the tribe, it is passed on through rituals, by teaching, by things that link brain to brain, mind to mind. Your genetics may make it possible for you to do this, it may make you better or worse at it than others, but genes don't actually encode the information that gets passed on. This process is the 'Make-a-Human-Being-Kit'. Each culture has devised a technique for putting into the minds of the next generation what it is that will make them put it into the minds of the generation after that — a recursive system that keeps the culture going. Lies-to-children often feature prominently.

  We are running into problems doing this today, because old-style tribal cultures, even national cultures, are becoming intermingled with an international culture. This leads to clashes between what used to be separate cultures, triggering their breakdown. Go into any city in the world and you see adverts for Coca-Cola. Global commerce has put things into various cultures that are different from what they would have developed of their own accord. Coca-Cola does not have a huge influence on the Make-a-Human-Being-Kit, though, so it's acceptable to most cultures. On the whole, you don't find religious fundamentalists complaining about the existence of a Coca-Cola bottling factory in their country (well, you do, but generally because it's just a way of saying 'USA out!') However, if some fast-food chain in Islamic or Jewish countries was trying to sell porkburgers, there'd be plenty of protests.

  Extelligence has become so powerful and so influential that nowadays one generation's culture may be radically different from the previous generation's culture. Second-generation immigrants often have an even worse problem, a culture clash. They've grown up in the 'new' country, and they've absorbed how that country works. They speak the language far more fluently than their parents ever can, but they've still got to please their parents. When they're at home, they have to behave in the manner of their original culture. But when they're at school, they have to live in the new culture. This makes them feel distinctly uncomfortable, and that can break the cultural feedback loop. Once the loop is broken, parts of the culture cease to be transmitted to the next generation: they drop out of the Make-a-Human-Being-Kit.

  In this sense, extelligence is out of our control. It escaped our control when it became reproductive: extelligence being used to copy (bits of) extelligence.

  The key step was the invention of printing. Prior to written language, extelligence was passed on by word of mouth. It still lived in people's minds: it was what the wise men and women of the village, the old people, knew. And all the while extelligence resided in human memories, it couldn't grow, because one person can remember only so much. When you could write things down, extelligence expanded a bit, but there is only so much that you can write down by hand. And it can't spread very far. So mostly you get things like the Egyptian monuments — the history of some particular ruler, his greatest battles, excerpts from the Book of the Dead ...

  Another important but apparently mundane function of writing in human society is taxes, accounts, keeping track of property. These sound dull compared with the list of battles, but a growing society needs something better than an old man's memory of 'who owns what' and 'who paid how much'. The list was a great invention.

  With printing came the possibility of disseminating information far more widely, and in quantity. Within a few years of printing becoming established in Europe there were fifty million books in existence, which means more books than people. Printing was a very slow procedure in those days, but nonetheless there were lots of printing presses, and you could sell whatever you printed, so there were plenty of pressures that encouraged printing to flourish. And then complicity really set in, because what's on a piece of paper can come ba
ck and bite you in the ankle. The rulers started putting constitutional rights and obligations down on paper, to protect their own position: once it's down on paper that the king has certain rights and obligations, then the paper can always be referred to later, and used as an argument.

  But what the kings didn't realize, to start with, is that when they put their rights and obligations down on paper, they were implicitly constraining their own actions. The citizens could read what was on the paper too. They could tell if their king was suddenly assuming rights or obligations that were not on the piece of paper. The whole effect of law on human society started to change when you could write the law down, and anyone who could read could see what the kw was. This didn't mean that the kings always obeyed the kw, of course, but it meant that when they disobeyed it, everyone knew what they were doing. That had a big effect on the structure of human society. One minor aspect of it is that we always appear to be nervous of people who write things down ...

  At that point, extelligence and intelligence began to interact complicitly. Once an interaction becomes complicit, there's no way for an individual to control it. You can push things out into the extelligence, but you can't predict what influence they will have. What's out there is growing in a way that may be mediated by human beings, but — for example — the people printing books were largely printing them independently of their contents. Early on, anything in print would sell.

  All words had power. But written words had a lot more. They still do.

  So far we've talked as if extelligence is a single unified external thing. In some sense it is, but what is actually important is the interface between extelligence and the individual. This is a very personal feedback loop: we meet selections from extelligence through our parents, the books we read, the teachers who teach us, and so on. This is how the Make-a-Human-Being-Kit works, this is why we have cultural diversity. If we all responded to the same pool of extelligence in exactly the same way, we would all be the same. The whole system would suddenly become a kind of monoculture rather than a multiculture.

  Human extelligence is currently going through a period of massive expansion. Much more is becoming possible. Your interface to extelligence used to be very predictable: your parents, teachers, relatives, friends, village, tribe. That allowed clusters of particular kinds of subculture to flourish, to some extent independently of the other subcultures, because you never got to hear about the others. Their world view was always filtered before it got to you. In Whit, lain Banks describes a strange Scottish religious sect, and children who grow up in this sect. Even though some members of the sect are interacting with the outside world, the only important influences on them are what's going on within the sect. Even by the end of the story the character who has gone into the outside world and interacted with it in all sorts of ways has one idea in mind and one only — to become the leader of the sect and to continue propagating the sect's views. This behaviour is typical of human clusters — until extelligence intervenes.

  Today's extelligence doesn't have a single world view, like a sect does. It doesn't really have a world view at all. Extelligence is becoming 'multiplex', a concept introduced by the science-fiction writer Samuel R. Delany in the novel Empire Star. Simplex minds have a single-world view and know exactly what everyone ought to do. Complex minds recognize the existence of different world views. Multiplex ones wonder how useful a specific world view actually is in a world of conflicting paradigms, but find a way to operate despite that.

  Anyone who wants to can get on the Internet and construct a webpage about UFOs, telling everybody who accesses that page that UFOs exist, they're out there in space, they come down to Earth, they abduct people, they steal their babies ... They do all these things and it's absolutely definite, because it's on the web.

  A prominent astronomer was giving a talk about life on other planets and the possibility of aliens. He made out the scientific case that somewhere out in the galaxy intelligent aliens might exist. At that point a member of the audience put his hand up and said 'we know they exist: it's all over the Internet.'

  On the other hand, you can access another page on the Internet and get a completely different view. On the Internet, the full diversity of views is, or at least can be represented. It is quite democratic; the views of the stupid and credulous carry as much weight as the views of those who can read without moving their lips. If you think that the Holocaust didn't actually happen, and you can shout loud enough, and you can design a good web page, then you can be in there slugging it out with other people who believe that recorded history should have some kind of connection with reality.

  We are having to cope with multiplexity. We're grappling with the problem right now: it's why global politics has suddenly become a lot more complicated than it used to be. Answers are in short supply, but one thing seems clear: rigid cultural fundamentalism isn't going to get us anywhere.

  There was a television programme called The Magic Roundabout. One of the characters was a dog called Dougal, which looked a bit like a hairbrush. Mantis shrimps have the same general form, though not with hair.

  FORTY-FIVE

  THE BLEAT GOES ON

  EXTELLIGENCE BLOOMED, faster than HEX could create extra space in which to apprehend it. It reached the seas and spread out across the continents, left the surface of the world, spun webs across the sky, reached the moon ... and went further, as intelligence sought things to be intelligent about.

  Extelligence learned. Among many other things, it learned to fear.

  The HEM filled up again as the wizards returned, unsteadily, from lunch.

  'Ah, Rincewind,' said the Archchancellor. 'We're looking for a volunteer to go into the squash court and shut down the reactor, and we've found you. Well done.'

  'Is it dangerous?' said Rincewind.

  'That depends on how you define dangerous,' said Ridcully.

  'Er ... liable to cause pain and an imminent cessation of respiration,' suggested Rincewind. 'A high risk of agony, a possible deficit of arms and legs, a terminal shortness of breath —’

  Ridcully and Ponder went into a huddle. Rincewind heard them whispering. Then the Archchancellor turned, beaming.

  'We've decided to come to a new definition,' he said. 'It is "not as dangerous as many other things". I beg you pardon ...' He leaned over as Ponder whispered urgently in his ear. 'Correction, "not as dangerous as some other things". There. I think that's clear.'

  'Well, yes, you mean ... not as dangerous as some of the most dangerous things in the universe?'

  'Yes, indeed. And among them, Rincewind, would be your refusal to go.' The Archchancellor walked over to the omniscope. 'Oh, another ice age,' he went on. 'Well, that is a surprise.'

  Rincewind glanced at the Librarian, who shrugged. Only a few tens of thousands of years could have passed down there. The apes probably never knew what squashed them.

  There was a lengthy rattle from HEX's write-out. Ponder walked over to read it.

  'Er ... Archchancellor? HEX says he's found advanced intelligence on the planet.'

  'Intelligent life? Down there? But the place is a snowball again!'

  'Er ... not life, sir. Not exactly.'

  'Hang on, what's this?' said the Dean.

  There was, thin as a thread, a ring around the world. Spaced at regular distances were tiny dots, like beads, and from them more tiny lines descended towards the surface.

  So did the wizards.

  Wind howled across the tundra. The ice was only a few hundred miles away, even here at the equator.

  The wizards faded into existence, and looked around them.

  'What the hell happened here?' said Ridcully.

  The landscape was a welter of scars and pits. Roads were visible where they had buckled up through the snow, and there were the ruins of what could only have been buildings. But half the horizon was filled with what looked very much like an etiolated version of one of the giant shellfish proposed by the Lecturer in Recent Runes. It must
have been several miles across at the base, and extended upwards beyond the limit of vision.

  'Did any of you do this?' said Ridcully accusingly.

  'Oh, come on,' said the Dean. 'We don't even know what it is.'

  Beyond the tangle of broken roadways the snow blew across deep trenches gouged out of the ground. Desolation reigned.

  Ponder pointed towards the huge pyramid.

  'Whatever we're looking for, it's in there,' he said.

  The first thing the wizards noticed was the mournful bleating noise. It came and went in a regular way, on-off, on-off, and seemed to fill the entire structure.

  The wizards wandered onwards, occasionally getting HEX to move them to different places. Nothing, they agreed, made much sense. The building was mostly full of roadways and loading docks, interspersed with massive pillars. It creaked, too, like an old galleon. They could hear the groaning noises, echoing far above. Occasionally, the ground trembled.

  It was clear that important things happened in the centre. There were tubes, hundreds of feet high. The wizards recognized cranes, and failed to recognize huge engines of unknown purpose. Cables thick as a house rose into the darkness above.

  Frost sparkled off everything.

  Still the bleat went on.

  'Look,' said Ponder.

  Red words flashed on and off, high in the air.

  '"A-L-A-A-M",' the Dean spelled out. 'I wonder why it's doing that? They seem to have invented magic, whoever they are. Getting letters to flash like that is quite difficult to do.'