I enjoy “hard” science fiction, meaning stories based on believable science rather than on fantasy. Some years ago I skimmed one of Terry Pratchett’s “Diskworld” books and thought it was fantasy, full of magic, and not of interest to me. Some years later I happened across the “Science of Diskworld” series of books co-authored by Pratchett and two brilliant scientists, the mathematician Ian Stewart and the reproductive biologist Jack Cohen.
In these books a Pratchett Diskworld story is interleaved, chapter by chapter, with Stewart and Cohen’s witty but ultimately profound observations about science.
And that’s when I finally realized (duh!) that Pratchett’s stories are not really fantasy at all, but brilliantly done humorous explorations of ideas and concepts in science and philosophy, using the magic in Diskworld as a foil for the scientific method.
In
The Science of Diskworld II: The Globe the authors introduce “narratvium”. Narrativum is an element in Diskworld that gives events their story.
Humans love stories.
In fact, human minds organize everything into a story, or narrative imperative. That’s what, for example, feeds conspiracy theories.
Something awful happens and there doesn’t appear to be any reason for it, so we construct a plausible conspiracy theory to explain it, and then believe our theory because it is so logical and believable (just as we constructed it).
We organize everything about our lives and our world into plausible stories, filling in the gaps with assumptions and changing or forgetting the inconvenient parts that don’t fit so that the story hangs together and is believable, whether it is true or not. Stewart and Cohen wryly suggest our species ought to have been named
pans narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.
Why is this observation important? Because in fact there is always a great deal we don’t know or understand about the world and events around us, so the stories we create are always wrong to some degree, if not wholly. But because they hang together so well, just as we fashioned them, we tend to believe them anyway.
This is not a defect we should or can train ourselves out of. It is simply the way we are wired, and it serves useful purposes. It seems likely that stories provide the mental scaffolding upon which our minds can hang facts and memories and later retrieve them. Memory courses often teach people to remember names and faces and facts by associating them with something else, and plausible stories are one of those things one can remember and associate other things with.
And in fact a scientific theory is really nothing more than a plausible story we have constructed to explain the facts and data we have accumulated to date. In science, we keep changing and adjusting the story as we get new data, in hopes that we are getting closer to the truth. In most fields people don’t do that – they just keep believing the old story and try to ignore the new data if it doesn’t fit. In fact, humans hate to give up a good story, especially if they created it.
But what is important here is that we should always be aware that just because we have constructed an appealing and plausible story about something, that doesn’t mean it is correct. In fact, given the fallibility and limited knowledge of humans, it probably is at best a very rough approximation to the truth and at worst completely off the wall. It’s a well known trick in the intelligence field to feed one’s opponents misinformation as a plausible story – the strength of this approach is that if one’s opponent detects any inconsistencies in the story, they are very likely to simply adjust the story in their minds to fit their preconceptions, rather than to question the whole story. And con men know that a good story is an essential tool to drawing in the mark.
So just because a story or an explanation seems plausible, or fits what we would like to believe, that doesn’t mean we should believe it. In the real world, because of our imperfect knowledge, accurate stories will have lots of gaps and ill-fitting parts and vague sections and inconsistencies. If the story all hangs together too neatly, distrust it.
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