Similarly, we change our own rules as we develop.
There are always several superficially different, non-overlapping descriptions of any complex system, and one way to deal with a complex system is to collect these descriptions and choose appropriate ones for different ways of influencing its behaviour.1 An amusingly simple example can be seen in many French and Swiss railway stations and airports: a sign that says
LOST PROPERTY
OBJETS TROUVÉS
The French means ‘found objects’. But we don’t think that this is a case of the English losing objects and the French finding them. It’s two descriptions of the same situation.
Now look at a baby in a pram, throwing its rattle out on to the pavement for Mummy, or child-minder, or indeed passers-by, to retrieve. We probably think that the child is not coordinated enough yet to keep its rattle within reach: we think ‘Lost Property’. Then we see Mummy give the rattle back to the child, to be rewarded with a smile, and we think ‘No, it’s more subtle: there is a baby teaching its mother to fetch, just as we adults do with dogs’. Now we think ‘Objets Trouvés’. The baby’s smile is itself part of a complex, reciprocal system of rewards that was set up long ago in evolution. We watch babies ‘copy’ the smiles of parents – but no, it can’t be copying, because even blind babies smile. Anyway, copying would be immensely difficult: from anywhere on the retina, the undeveloped brain must ‘sort out’ a face with a smile, then work out which of its own muscles to work to produce that effect, without a mirror. No, it’s a pre-wired reflex. Babies reflexly react to cooing sounds and to pre-wired recognition of smiles; an upwardly-curved line on a piece of paper works just as well. The ‘smile’ icon rewards the adult, who then tries hard to keep the baby doing it. The complex interactions proceed, changing both participants progressively.
They can be analysed more easily in unusual situations, such as sighted children with ‘signing’ parents, perhaps deaf or dumb, but occasionally as part of a psychological experiment. For example in 2001 a team of Canadian researchers headed by Laura Ann Petitto studied three children, about six months old, all with perfect hearing but born to deaf parents. The parents ‘cooed over’ the babies in sign language, and the babies began to ‘babble’ sign language – that is, make a variety of random gestures with their hands – in return. The parents used an unusual and very rhythmic form of sign language, quite unlike anything they would use to adults. Similarly, adults speak to babies in a rhythmic sing-song voice, and between the ages of about six months and a year the babies’ babble takes on properties of the parents’ specific language. They are rewiring and ‘tuning’ their sense organs, in this case the cochlea, to hear that language best.
Some scientists think that babbling sounds is just random opening and closing of the jaw, but others are convinced it is an essential stage in the learning of language. The use of special rhythms by parents, and the spontaneous ‘babbling’ with hand-movements when the parents are deaf, indicate that the second theory is closer to the mark. Petitto suggests that the use of rhythm is an ancient evolutionary trick, exploiting the natural sensitivities of the young child.
As the child grows, its complex interaction with surrounding humans comes to produce wholly unexpected results: what we call ‘emergent’ behaviour, meaning that it is not overtly present in the behaviour of the components. Where two or more systems interact like this, we call the process a complicity. The interaction of an actor with an audience can build up a wholly new and unexpected relationship. The evolutionary interaction of blood-sucking insects with vertebrates paved the way for protozoan blood parasites that cause diseases like malaria and sleeping-sickness. The car-and-driver behaves differently from either alone (and car-and-driver-and-alcohol is even less predictable). Similarly, human development is a progressive interaction between the child’s intelligence and the culture’s extelligence: a complicity. This complicity progresses from simple vocabulary-learning to the syntax of little sentences and the semantics of fulfilling the child’s needs and wants and the parents’ expectations. The beginning of storytelling then becomes an early threshold into worlds that our kin the chimpanzees know not of.
The stories that all human cultures use to mould the expectations and behaviour of the growing child use iconic figures: always some animals, and then status-figures of the culture (princesses, wizards, giants, mermaids). These stories sit in all our minds, contributing to our acting, our acting-out, our thinking, our predicting what will happen next, as caveman or cameraman. We learn to expect outcomes of particular kinds, frequently expressed in ritual words (‘And they all lived happily ever after’ or ‘So it all ended in tears’).2 The stories that have been used in England over the centuries have changed in complicity with the changing culture – making the culture change, and responding to those changes, like a river changing its path across a wide flood-plain that it has itself built. The Grimm Brothers and Hans Christian Andersen were but the last of a long series, with Charles Perrault accumulating the Mother Goose tales around 1690; there were many collections before that, especially some interesting Italian groupings and retellings for adults.
The great advantage we all get from this programming is very clear. It trains us to do ‘What if …?’ experiments in our minds, using the rules that we’ve picked up from the stories, just as we picked up syntax by hearing our parents talking. These stories-of-the-future enable us to set ourselves in an extended imagined present, just as our vision is an extended picture reaching much further out in all directions than the tiny central part to which we’re paying attention. These abilities enable each of us to see ourselves as being set in a nexus of space and time; our ‘here’ and ‘now’ form only the starting place for our seeing ourselves in other places at other times. This ability has been called ‘time-binding’, and has been seen as miraculous, but it seems to us that it is the culmination (for now) of an entirely natural progression that starts from interpreting and enlarging vision or hearing, and from ‘making sense’ in general. The extelligence uses this faculty, and hones and improves it for each of us, so that we can use metaphor to navigate our thoughts. Pooh Bear getting stuck, and unable to exit with dignity because he ate too much honey, is precisely the kind of parable that we carry with us to guide our actions, as metaphor, from day to day. So are Biblical stories, with all their lessons for life.
Holy books like the Bible and the Koran take this ability one giant step further. The Biblical prophets do, wholesale, what each of us has been programmed to do retail for our own life and those of our own nearest and dearest. The prophets predicted what would happen to everybody in the tribe if they continued their current behaviour, and thereby changed that behaviour. This was a step on the way to those modern prophets who predict The End Of The World some time soon. They seem to feel that they have perceived a trend, a constraint in the universe, that the rest of us have not understood, and whose properties are directing the universe along some undesirable or calamitous path. Though they don’t usually mean ‘universe’, they mean ‘my world and nearer ones’. So far they haven’t been right. But we would not be here to write these words if they had been, which is another anthropic issue, but not a very important one because they have been wrong rather often. They predict what will happen If This Goes On; but, increasingly it seems, This doesn’t Go On for very long because it’s unexpectedly replaced by a new This.
We all think that we can become better prophets with practice. We all think we have a clever way to build ‘the road not taken’ into our experience. Then we invent time travel, at least in our imaginations. We all want to go back to the beginning of that argument with the boss, and do it right this time. We want to unravel the chain of causality that led to boring edge people. We want to avoid the bad effects of elves but retain the good ones. We want to play pick-and-mix with universes.
However, despite their emphasis on prophecy, monotheist faiths have real trouble with multiple futures. Having simplified their theology down t
o one God, they also tend to believe that there can be only one ‘right way to heaven’. The priests tell the people what they must do, and at least while the religion is fresh the priests are fine examples. This is what gets you to heaven, they say: no adultery, no murder, no failure to give a tithe to the Church, and no undercutting the other clergy for indulgences. Then the gateway to heaven becomes ‘strait’, narrower and narrower, until only the blessed and the saints can get in without spending time in some purgatory or other.
Other religions, notably extreme versions of Islam, promise heaven as the reward for a martyr’s death. These ideas are more closely associated with barbarian views of the future than tribal ones: paradise, like Valhalla for the Norse heroes, will be full of the hero’s rewards, from perpetually renewed women to ample food and drink and hero’s games. But they are also associated, as they were not in the more purely barbarian Norse legends, with a belief in fate, in the will of a god that nothing can avoid or deny. This is the other way for authority to force obedience: the promise of ultimate reward is a very persuasive story.
Barbarians, for whom honour, glory, power, and love, dignity, bravery are the meaningful concepts, get plus points for denying authority and shaping events to their own desires. They have, among their gods and heroes, the mischievous unpredictable ones like Lemminkainen and Puck.
Barbarian nursery stories, like their sagas, laud the hero. They show how luck is associated with particular attitudes, especially a pure heart that does not seek immediate or ultimate reward. There is frequently a test of this purity, from helping a poor blind cripple, who turns out to be a god in disguise, to curing or feeding a desperate animal, who comes to your aid later.
The agents in many of these stories are supernatural – out of the order of things, magical and causeless – ‘people’, such as fairies (including fairy queens and fairy godmothers), avatars of the gods, demons, and djinni. People, especially heroes or aspiring heroes (such as Siegfried, but also Aladdin), attain control over these supernatural beings with the assistance of magic rings, named swords, spells, or merely by their own inner nobility. This changes their fortunes, and luck comes to be on their side; they win battles and bouts against long odds, they climb tall mountains, they kill immortal dragons and monsters. No tribal thinker would even dream of stories like these. For them, fortune favours the well-prepared.
Man is forever inventive, and we have stories that counter even the most heroic tales: the Sidh, the seven-foot-tall elves of Lords and Ladies and old Irish folklore, the Devil who buys your soul and has you at his mercy even if you repent, the Grand Vizier, James Bond’s opponents.
What is interesting in our discussion of stories here is the characters of these anti-heroes. They don’t have any. Elves are the High Folk, but they don’t have lives of their own; they are simply portrayed as being antithetic to what people, especially heroes, want to do. We don’t care about the human aspects of James Bond’s iconic enemies: they are always portrayed as being mindlessly cruel, or avid for power without responsibility and without having to overcome obstacles. They are ciphers, they don’t have creative personalities, and they don’t learn. If they did, one of them would have shot James Bond dead with a simple gun many years ago, after learning what happens to those who put their trust in laser beams and circular saws. They’d remove his watch first, too.
Rincewind would characterise the elves as ‘edge fairies’. They don’t tell stories to themselves or, rather, they keep telling the same old story.
It is natural to think of stories as resting on language, but the causality probably works the other way round. Gregory Bateson, in his book Mind and the Universe, devotes several chapters to human languages and how we use them to think. But his start on the subject is a beautiful mistake. He starts by looking at an ‘outside’ view of language, a kind of chemical analogy. Words, he says, are obviously the atoms of language, phrases and sentences the molecules, atoms in combination. Verbs are reactive atoms, link nouns together, and so on. He discusses paragraphs, chapters, books … and fiction, that he claims, very persuasively, is the ultimate triumph of human language.
Bateson shows us a scenario where an audience is watching a murder on stage, and nobody runs to phone the police. And then he goes into another mode, addressing his readers directly. He tells them that he felt that he’d done a really good job on the introduction to language, so he rewarded himself with a visit to the Washington Zoo. Almost the first cage inside the gate had two monkeys playing at fighting, and as he watched them, the whole beautiful edifice that he had written turned upside down in his mind. The monkeys had no verbs, no nouns, no paragraphs. But they understood fiction perfectly.
What does this tell us? Not just that we can rewrite that scene with the boss in our minds. Not even that we can go and see her, and discuss what happened. Its most important implication is that the distinction between fiction and fact sits at the base of language, not at the pinnacle. Verbs and nouns are the most rarefied of abstractions, not the original raw material. We do not acquire stories through language: we acquire language through stories.
1 Until we had really good fast computers, and had learned a little bit about how to model the complexity of ecosystems or companies or bacterial communities, most of us practised the reductionist trick of looking for the bits we thought we could understand and modelling those. Then we hoped we could put these separate bits together to understand the whole thing. We were nearly always wrong.
2 As G.K. Chesterton pointed out, fairy tales are certainly not, as modern detractors of the fantasy genre believe, set in a world ‘where anything can happen’. They existed in a world with rules (‘don’t stray from the path’, ‘don’t open the blue door’, ‘you must be home before midnight’, and so on). In a world where anything could happen, you couldn’t have stories at all.
FIFTEEN
TROUSER LEG OF TIME
IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT, magic moved on silent feet.
One horizon was red with the setting sun. This world went around a central star. The elves did not know this. If they had done, it would not have bothered them. They never bothered with detail of that kind. The universe had given rise to life in many strange places, but the elves were not interested in that, either.
This world had created lots of life, too. None of it had ever had what the elves considered to be potential. But this time …
It had iron, too. The elves hated iron. But this time, the rewards were worth the risk. This time …
One of them signalled. The prey was close at hand. And now they saw it, clustered in the trees around a clearing, dark blobs against the sunset.
The elves assembled. And then, at a pitch so strange that it entered the brain without the need to use the ears, they began to sing.
‘Chmmmmph!’ said Archchancellor Ridcully, as a heavy body landed on his back and clamped a hand over his mouth, forcing him back down into the long, dewy grass.
‘Listen very carefully!’ hissed a voice in his ear. ‘When you were small, you had a one-eared toy rabbit called Mr Big Pram! On your sixth birthday your brother hit you on the head with a model boat! And when you were twelve … do the words “jolly lolly” ring a bell?’
‘Mmph!’
‘Very well. I’m you. There’s been one of those temporal things Mister Stibbons is always goin’ on about. I’m taking my hand away now and we’ll both quietly crawl away without the elves seeing us. Understand?’
‘Mmp.’
‘Good man.’
Elsewhere in the bushes the Dean whispered into his own ear: ‘Under a secret floorboard in your study—’
Ponder whispered to himself: ‘I’m sure we both agree that this should not really be happening …’
In fact the only wizard who did not bother with concealment was Rincewind, who tapped himself on the shoulder and evinced no surprise at seeing himself. In his life he had seen far more unusual things than his own doppelganger.
‘Oh, you,’ he said.
‘’fraid so,’ he said glumly.
‘Was it you that turned up just now to tell me I should hold my breath?’
‘Er … possibly, but I think I’ve been superseded by me.’
‘Oh. Has Ponder Stibbons being talking about quantum again?’
‘You got it in one.’
‘Another mess up?’
‘More or less. It turns out stopping the elves is a really bad idea.’
‘Typical. Do we both survive? There’s not much room in the office, what with all the coal—’
‘Ponder Stibbons says we may end up remembering everything, because of residual quantum infraction, but we’ll sort of be the same person.’
‘Any big teeth or sharp edges involved?’
‘Not so far.’
‘Could be worse, then, all things considered.’
In pairs, the wizards assembled as quietly as they could. Apart from Ridcully, who seemed to quite enjoy his own company, they tried not to look at their doppelgangers; it’s quite embarrassing being in the company of someone who knows everything about you, even if that person is yourself.
A few feet away, with the suddenness of lightning, a pale circle appeared on the grass.
‘Our transport is here, gentlemen,’ said Ponder.
One of the Deans, who was standing well apart from the other Dean, raised his hand.
‘What happens to the ones of us that stay behind?’ he said.
‘It won’t matter,’ said Ponder Stibbons. ‘They’ll vanish the moment we do, and the ones of us who end up in the, er, other trouser leg of time will have the memories of both of us. I think that’s right, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ said Ponder Stibbons. ‘A pretty good summation for the layman. So, gentlemen, are we ready? One of everyone, into the circle now, please.’
The Science of Discworld II Page 17
