The Science of Discworld II

rules. However, it is astonishingly difficult to look at the rules and understand what their consequences will be. Those consequences are emergent. The wizards discovered this to their cost, as every attempt to do something straightforward in Roundworld – like creating life or jump-starting extelligence – went seriously awry.
    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 co-evolved, 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