Terry Pratchett - The Science of Discworld

by Terry Pratchett

  The modules aren’t separate. They share nerve cells, they over­lap, they’re not necessarily a well-defined region in the brain - any more than ’Vodafone’ is a well-defined region of the telephone net­work. According to Daniel Dennett, they are like a collection of demons, operating by ’pandemonium’. They all shout, and at any given instant, whoever shouts loudest wins (quite a lot of the Internet has borrowed this design).

  Modern humanity has built a culture around those modules an idea that we’ll explore later - and in so doing has subverted them to new purposes. The module for spotting lions has become, in part, a module for reading Discworld books. The module for sensing bod­

  ily movement has, in part, turned into one for doing certain kinds of mathematics - those parts of mechanics where a physical ’feel’ for the problem may well be precisely that. Our culture has rebuilt our minds, and our minds have in turn rebuilt our culture, over and over again, in each generation.

  Such a radical restructuring must have simpler precursors. A key step towards the human mind was the invention of the nest. Before there were nests, baby organisms could carry out only very limited experiments in behaviour. If every time you try out a new game you get gobbled up by a python, novelty will not carry a pre­mium. In the comfort and relative safety of the nest, however, the error part of trial-and-error is no longer automatically fatal. Nests let you play, and play lets you explore the phase space of possible behaviours and find new, sometimes useful, strategies. Further along the same path lies the family, the pack, and the tribe, with cer­tain shared behaviours and mutual protection. Meerkats, a kind of mongoose, have an intricate tribal structure, and take turns doing the dangerous (because more exposed) job of Lookout.

  Humans have turned such tactics into a global strategy: adults devote huge amounts of time, energy, food, and money to the task of bringing up their children. Intelligence is both a consequence of this brilliantly successful strategy, and a cause.

  The Dean would be well advised to take this link between family life and intelligence into account. He’s trying to educate the apes by the direct route (R ... O ... C ... K ...) but all they have on their tiny minds is S-E-X. Many school teachers will sympathize ... but if only he realized that sexual bonding is a major factor in humanoid family life, and family life engenders intelligence ,..

  Bonobos are the perfect model for the Dean’s sex-mad apes. They are promiscuous in the extreme, making use of sex where we would be content with a smile and a wave or a gentlemanly hand­shake. Female bonobos have serial sex with dozens of males, or with females, almost in passing; the males do likewise. Adults engage in sexual activities with children, too. It all seems very casual. It helps bond the tribe. For them it seems to work fine,

  Ordinary chimps are promiscuous by the standards of orthodox human morality, though probably no more than many humans are. Pairs of males and females will disappear together for a few days, and then form new partnerships ... Humans generally mate for life (a term meaning ’until we get fed up’) and one reason is the enor­mous amount of effort that a human couple must put into raising the kids. Sex helps to cement the parental relationship, encouraging each parent to trust the other. This .may be why, even in an allegedly sexually relaxed age, most people see extramarital flings as a form of betrayal - and why, despite that, the erring partner is more often than not allowed back into the family fold.

  It’s not surprising that we have sex on the brain: our brains have been moulded by sex. The Dean should let sex take its course, for intelligence will surely follow ... You just have to think on the scale of Deep Time. There’s no rush.

  THIRTY-NINE

  OOK: A SPACE ODYSSEY

  RINCEWIND SAT IN A CORNER of the High Energy Magic building. It was deserted at the moment. News had got around that the project was really being ended this time, and wizards had drifted away to lunch.

  The round world spun in its protective globe and also, by means of a physics only a wizard might understand, in a space that was infinite only on the inside.

  ’Poor old bloody place,’ he said, to the world in general. ’Never really stood a chance, did you.’

  ’Ook.’

  It was a small grunt, from the other side of the huge room. Rincewind wandered over, and found the Librarian peering into the omniscope.

  ’Oh, they’ve got sticks now,’ said Rincewind, looking down at a ragged party of apes. ’And a lot of good it’ll do them, too.’

  ’Ook?’

  ’The lizards had sharp shells on the end of theirs, and are they around today? I don’t think so. And the crabs were doing well. Even the blobs were trying to make a go of things. There were some bear sort of things that looked promising. Doesn’t matter. One winter the snow doesn’t melt, next thing there’s a two-mile wall of ice lam­inating you to the bedrock. Or there’s a funny light in the sky and then you’re trying to breathe burning water.’ He shook his head wearily. ’Nice place, though. Nice colours. Particularly good hori­zons, once you get used to them. Lots of dullness, punctuated by short periods of death.’

  ’Ook?’ said the Librarian.

  ’Well, maybe they do look a bit like you,’ said Rincewind. ’Most of the lizards looked a bit like the Bursar. Maybe it’s just coincidence. Everything has to look like something, after all. As above, so below.’

  In the omniscope, some distance behind the ape clan, something lean and powerful was tracking them in the long grass.

  ’Eeek!’

  The Librarian thumped on the desk.

  ’Sorry. It’s not up to me. "Live and let live", you know that’s always been my motto. Well, "let me live", really, but that’s almost the same thing.’

  Hands waving wildly over his head, which only happened when he was really in a hurry, the Librarian ran out of the room.

  Rincewind caught him up as he entered the main building, and then trotted along after him as the ape wound his way through the university’s less salubrious regions, the realm of broom cupboards, old storerooms and the studies of the very much lesser members of staff. Even using all the shortcuts, it still took quite a while to reach the office of the Egregious Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography, with the name ’Rincewind’ written on it in chalk.

  The orangutan flung the door back and knuckled purposefully towards the big stack of boxes.

  ’Er ... that’s the rock collection,’ said Rincewind. ’Er ... I was filing them ... er ... they belong to the University, I really don’t think you should be throwing them out like that -’ ’Ook!’

  The Librarian straightened up, bearing aloft a couple of large rocks that Rincewind recognized as noduley, sharp, brittle, unfriendly rocks.

  ’Er ... why are you ...’ Rincewind began.

  The Librarian walked across to the Luggage and gave it a kick. The lid opened obediently, and the rocks were thrown inside. The ape went back for more flints.

  ’Er ...’ said Rincewind, but left it at that. This did not seem to be a time to raise objections.

  He had to run after the Librarian and the Luggage all the way back to the High Energy Magic Building. By the time he got there, the ape was pounding heavily on one of HEX’s keyboards.

  Rincewind tried again.

  ’Er ... should you be ...’

  He was interrupted by the rattle of the machine’s writing device.

  It spelled out: +++ New Suit Parameters Accepted +++

  On the far side of the room, where the skeletal virtually-there suits flicked on the verge of non-existence, one changed shape. The shoulders widened. The arms grew longer. The legs shortened ­

  +++ Adjustment Complete. On You It Looks Good +++

  Rincewind backed away as the Librarian, cradling a large flint nodule in each arm, stepped in the magic circle and began to shim­mer as the suit enclosed him.

  ’You’re not going to interfere, are you?’ said Rincewind.

  ’Ook?’

  ’No, no, that’s fine, fine, no problem at all,’ said Rincewin
d. It is never wise to argue with an ape holding a rock. ’It’s about time someone did.’

  The Librarian flickered, and became a ghost in the air.

  Rincewind stood alone in the empty room, whistling nervously. In its alcove, HEX began to sparkle, as it always did when it was try­ing to allow a wizard to interact with the project.

  ’Blast!’ said Rincewind at last, striding over to the suits. ’He’s bound to muck it up ...’

  Lightning fried the evening sky, turning it purple and pink.

  Above the little hollow in the cliff, where the tribe clustered and flinched, a sleek black shadow moved like an extension of the night. It wasn’t hurrying. Dinner wasn’t going anywhere. When the light­ning faded its eyes gleamed for a while.

  Something grabbed its tail. It spun around, snarling, and a fist extended on the end of a very long arm hit it right between the eyes, lifting it off the ledge.

  It landed heavily on the ground, jerked for a moment, and lay still.

  The ape horde scattered around the rocks, screaming, and then stopped to look back.

  The big cat didn’t move.

  Another bolt of lighting hit the ground nearby, and a dead tree exploded into flame. Against the violet corona of the storm, red in the light of the burning tree, a huge figure stood holding a large stone in the crook of each arm.

  As Rincewind said, it was a vision you were unlikely to forget.

  * * *

  Rincewind couldn’t eat here. Well, not in the usual, definitive way. He thought he could probably manipulate lumps of food into his mouth, but since the food would technically remain in a different universe to his, he was afraid it might drop straight through him, to general embarrassment and the puzzlement of spectators.

  Besides, he didn’t feel like flame-grilled leopard.

  The Librarian had been working furiously. He’d turned the area into a boot camp for people who were barely upright and wouldn’t know what to do with a boot anyway. The apemen had taken to fire quite quickly, after a few misdirected attempts to eat it or have sex with it, and several of them had progressed to setting fire to them­selves.

  They’d learned cookery, too, initially on one another.

  Rincewind sighed. He’d seen species come, and he’d seen them go, and this one could only have been put on the world for enter­tainment value. They had the same approach to life as clowns, with the same touch of cheerful viciousness.

  The Librarian had progressed to lessons in flint-knapping, using the flints brought in via the Luggage. They’d certainly picked up the idea of hitting rocks against other rocks, or anything else in range. Sharp edges intrigued them.

  Finally Rincewind wandered over to the Librarian and tapped him on the shoulder.

  ’We’ve been here all day,’ he said. ’We’d better get back.’

  The orangutan nodded, and stood up. ’Ook.’

  ’You think it’ll work?’

  ’Ook!’

  Rincewind looked back at the apemen. One of them was indus­triously hacking at the corpse of the cat again.

  ’Really? But they’re just like ... hairy parrots.’

  ’Eek ook.’

  ’Well ... yes. That’s true.’ Rincewind took a final look at the horde. Two of them were squabbling over the meat. Monkey see, monkey do ...

  ’I’m glad it was you who said that,’ he said.

  Less than a Discworld second had passed by the time they returned. By the time they looked in the omniscope, several fires were already visible on the night side of the world.

  The Librarian looked pleased. ’Oook,’ he said.

  Progress means smoke. But Rincewind was not entirely con­vinced. Most of the fires were forests.

  FORTY

  EXTEL OUTSIDE PROGRESS MEANS SMOKE ... The human race has certainly made a lot of progress over the years, then. How did we do that? Because we’re intelli­gent, we’ve got brains. Minds, even. But other creatures are intelligent - dolphins, especially. And all they seem to do is enjoy themselves in the sea. What have we got that they haven’t?

  Many discussions of the mind treat it essentially as a question about the architecture of the brain. The viewpoint is that this deter­mines what brains can do, and then the various things that we associate with minds

  -the difficult problems of free will, con­sciousness andintelligence - come out of neurophysiology. That’s one approach. The other common one is to view the problem through the eyes of a social scientist or an anthropologist. From this viewpoint the mind’s capabilities are pretty much taken as ’given’, and the main questions are how human culture builds on those capabilities to create minds able to think original thoughts, feel emotions, have concepts like love and beauty, and so on. It may seem that between them these two approaches pretty much cover the territory. Link them, and you have a complete answer to the question of mind.

  However, neurophysiology and culture aren’t independent: they are ’complicit’. By this we mean that they have evolved together, each changing the other repeatedly, and their mutual coevolution built on the unpredictable results of that ongoing interaction. The view of culture building on, and changing, brains is incomplete, because brains also build on, and change, culture. The concept of complicity captures this recursive, mutual influence.

  We call the brain’s internal capabilities Intelligence’. It is con­venient to give a similar name to all of the external influences, cultural or otherwise, that affect the evolution of the brain - and with it, the mind. We shall call these influences extelligence, a term that HEX has picked up thanks to once-and-future computing. Mind is not just intelligence plus extelligence - its inside and out­side, so to speak. Instead, mind is a feedback loop in which intelligence influences extelligence, extelligence influences intelli­gence, and the combination transcends the capabilities of both.

  Intelligence is the ability of the brain to process information. But intelligence is only part of what is needed to make a mind. And even intelligence is unlikely to evolve in isolation.

  Culture is basically a collection of interacting minds. Without individual minds you can’t have a culture. The converse is perhaps less obvious, but equally true: without a shared culture, the human mind cannot evolve. The reason is that there is nothing in the envi­ronment of the evolving mind that can drive it towards self-complication - becoming more sophisticated - unless that brain has something else fairly sophisticated to interact with. And the main sophisticated thing around to interact with is minds of other people. So the evolution of intelligence and that of extelli­gence are inextricably linked, and complicity between them is inevitable.

  In the world around us are things that we, or other human beings, have created - things which play a similar role to intelli­gence but sit outside us. They are things like libraries, books, and the Internet - which from the viewpoint of exteiligence would be better named the ’Extranet’. The Discworld concept of ’L-space’ -library-space - is similar: it’s all one thing. These influences, sources not just of information but of meaning, are ’cultural capital’. They are things that people put out into the culture, which can then sit there, or even reproduce, or interact in a way that individuals can’t control.

  The old artificial intelligence question: ’Can we create an intel­ligent machine?’ viewed the machine as a once-off object in its own right. The problem, people assumed, was to get the machine’s architecture right, and then program intelligent behaviour into it.

  But that’s probably the wrong approach. Of course, it is certainly conceivable that the collective extelligence of all the human beings interacting with that machine could put a mind into it - and in par­ticular endow it with intelligence. But it seems much more likely that, unless you had a whole community of machines interacting with each other and evolving, providing the requisite extelligence too, then you wouldn’t be actually able to structure the Ant Country of the neural connections of the machine in a way that could gen­erate a mind. So the story of the mind is one
of complicity and emergence. Indeed, mind is one of the great examples of complic­ity.

  The internal story of the development of the mind can be summed up as a series of steps in which the key ’player’ is the nerve cell A nerve cell is an extended object that can send signals from one place to another Once you’ve got nerve cells you can have net­works of nerve cells; and once you’ve got networks, then a whole pile of stuff comes along free of charge. For example, there is an area of complexity theory called ’emergent computation’. It turns out that when you evolve a network - randomly chosen networks, arbitrary networks, not constructed with specific purposes - they do things. They do something, which may or may not seem mean­ingful; they do whatever it is that that network does. But you can often look at what that network does, and spot emergent features. You discover that even though its architecture was random, it evolved the ability to compute things. It carries out algorithmic processes (or something close to algorithmic processes). The ability to do calculations, computations, algorithms seems to come free of charge once you’ve invented devices that send signals from one place to another and react to those signals to send new signals. If you allow evolution you don’t have to work hard to create the abil­ity to do some kind of processing.

  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.