Science of Discworld III

has himself lashed to the mast, while all his sailors plug their ears with wax so they cannot hear the Sirens. The vital issue for Dennett is that humans, and on this planet probably only humans, have evolved several stages beyond the observing-and-reacting that even quite advanced animals do. We observed ourselves and others observing, so got more context to embed our behaviour in – including our prospective behaviour. Then we developed a tactic of labelling good and bad imaginary outcomes, just as we labelled our memories with emotional tags. We, and some other apes – perhaps also dolphins, perhaps even some parrots – developed a ‘theory of mind’, a way to imagine ourselves or others in invented scenarios and to anticipate the associated feelings and responses. Then we learned to run morethan one scenario: ‘But on the other hand, if we did so-and-so, the lion couldn’t get us anyway …’, and that trick soon became a major part of our survival strategy. So with Odysseus … and fiction … and particularly that dissection of hypothetical alternatives that we call a time-travel story.
    In our minds, we can hold many possible histories, just as Mead showed that every discovery about today implies a different past leading up to it. But whether there is any sense in which the universe has several possible pasts (or futures) is a much more difficult question. We’ve argued that popularisations of quantum indeterminacy, particularly the many-worlds model, have got confused about this. They tell us that the universe branches at every decision point, whereas we think that people have to invent a different mental causal path, a different explanatory history, for each possible present or future.
    Antonio Damasio has written three books: Looking for Spinoza, Descartes’ Error , and The Feeling of What Happens . These are popular accounts of what we know about the important attributes of our minds. He has documented our discoveries, now that we can use various experimental techniques to ‘watch the brain thinking’ and see how the different parts of the brain are involved in what we feel about the things we think. We tend to forget that our brains are continually interacting with our bodies, which supply the brain with stance-determining hormones for longer-term behaviour, and mood-changing emotion-provoking chemicals for short-term modulation of our intentions and feelings, directing our thoughts.
    According to these books, the result of having lived with a brain which we think we direct using a kind of tiller, but which actually is continually affected by cross-winds, occasional storms, rain and warm sun that provokes us into lazy days, is that we have evolved a series of memories with different flavours. Or, the result of having livedwith a brain that we think we direct using a kind of automobile steering wheel and foot controls, but whose route is actually continually affected by long-term goals that change (‘Let’s go to a hotel, not to Auntie Janie’s again ’), short-term road signs and other traffic, is that we have evolved a series of memories with different flavours. Or, each of us has a personal history which we explain internally by feelings attached to emotional memories, so we have evolved a series of memories with different flavours.
    Damasio has imported emotional biasing into how we think about our own intentions, choices, other people, memories, and prospective plans. He claims that this is what emotion is ‘for’, and most psychologists now agree that emotionally labelled memories are the effect of having a brain whose interaction with its body paints emotions on to memories and intentions.
    We habitually assume that real physical history, and particularly social history, works the same way as our own personal histories, with events labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’… but it doesn’t. It’s misleading to think of the Big Bang, for example, as an explosion like a bomb or a firework, seen from outside . The whole point of the Big Bang metaphor is that at the moment the universe was born, there was no outside. More subtly, perhaps, we tend to think of the birth of the universe in the same way that we think of our own birth, or even our conception.
    Real history, post whatever the Big Bang ‘really’ was, relies on the accumulation of countless tiny sequences of cause-and-effect. As soon as we begin to think about what any of these sequences looks like, taking it out of the context