{"id":4952,"date":"2019-05-20T05:00:10","date_gmt":"2019-05-20T12:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/?p=4952"},"modified":"2019-05-20T12:13:36","modified_gmt":"2019-05-20T19:13:36","slug":"mark-reads-the-science-of-discworld-iii-chapter-15-chapter-16-part-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/2019\/05\/mark-reads-the-science-of-discworld-iii-chapter-15-chapter-16-part-i\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Reads &#8216;The Science of Discworld III&#8217;: Chapter 15 \/ Chapter 16, Part I"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the fifteenth and sixteenth chapters of <i>Darwin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Watch<\/i>, the wizards contend with the nature of causality. Intrigued? Then it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s time for Mark to read <i>The Science of Discworld III<\/i>.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>First off: RIP to me mispronouncing \u00e2\u20ac\u0153causality\u00e2\u20ac\u009d like fifty times in the early Discworld videos. R I P.<\/p>\n<p><b>Discworld<\/b><\/p>\n<p>The Auditors. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the <i>Auditors<\/i> who are behind this?<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>The chapter title gave me the answer, but it took the entirety of chapter fifteen for me to get the WHY. Because on the surface, it made no sense. What exactly did the Auditors have against the people of Roundworld? Why interfere and why do it in this specific way?<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>The fifteenth chapter builds to the answer of those questions, and it does so by demonstrating the complicated nature of causality. And while I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll get into that a bit more in the Roundworld section, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s clear that the wizards are struggling with the events that apparently cause Darwin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s timeline to be shifted. And there are <i>thousands<\/i> of these such moments, spread across his lifetime and probably some moments before he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s even born. (We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve seen at least one of them on the page!)<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>So, the wizards pop off into Roundworld, armed with simple instructions to do seemingly mundane things, and as they do so, Darwin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s timeline is corrected piece-by-piece\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 right up until Rincewind. Oh, Rincewind. Of <i>course<\/i> his mission would get interrupted like this! But it made me wonder: did the Auditors intervene in any of the other attempts to disrupt Darwin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s past? My guess is that they didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t, and in this case, it was a rogue Auditor (a very dangerous thing, mind you) who took it upon themselves to try to fix things. See, the Auditors don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t like to be obvious, and this <i>was<\/i> obvious, so I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m thinking it was a mistake. One they might pay for dearly in the future! Regardless, the evidence is there, and we know that the Auditors <i>hate<\/i> humanity (and life forms in general, but especially humans), what better way to get rid of them than start a long con? Because that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s basically what this is! By derailing Darwin, humans eventually stay on Roundworld too long and never get to the point where they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re supposed to leave Earth, and then POOF! Extinct.<\/p>\n<p>MESSED UP, Y\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ALL.<\/p>\n<p><b>Roundworld<\/b><\/p>\n<p>So: we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got a grand scheme in place to wipe out humanity over the course of multiple centuries, and this ends up being the means by which Cohen and Stewart discuss what causality and changing history actually entails. (GNU Jack Cohen.) And obviously, this is a hard subject to talk about because we can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t, like\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 test it? There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no real way to demonstrate what changing history actually does! However, I really appreciated that the authors guided the reader through this lesson by grounding us first in the fictional world. Today, I learned what a consistent invention and an inconsistent invention is, and those are SUPER GREAT TERMS for someone like me, who at some point is going to write the kind of speculative fiction that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll make me think about these sort of things.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>From this point, though, I got to learn about divergence and the theory that some scientists hold that our universe is <i>constantly<\/i> diverging into new universes based on every action taken by every party imaginable. (Which got me thinking about how many universe diverged from my own based on every word that I typed into this application, and it took a whole ten seconds for my brain to feel like it was going to short-circuit, so I stopped that <i>real<\/i> quick.) But I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m more inclined to believe the theories that Stewart and Cohen bring up, namely that:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>If live is \u00e2\u20ac\u02dceasy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 to originate (and the evidence does look that way) then this isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t an exercise in going back and killing your grandfather, or if it is, your grandfather is a vampire and doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t <i>remain<\/i> killed. If live is easy to invent, then preventing it happening once, or a million times, will make no difference in the long run. The same process that generated it will happen again.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And those of us who are genre fans have seen ideas like this play out in the realm of stories. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m thinking namely of <i>Doctor Who<\/i>, where certain things are a fixed point in time, and no matter what you try to do to change them, time has a way of repairing itself. Which isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t really what this is discussing, but more that, given a certain set of rules, there are certain inevitabilities, parochial themes and evolutions that are bound to occur. (\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Large-scale themes,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d as called by the text.)<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00c2\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>So, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m expecting that the second half of this chapter will largely address what is at the end of the first section: How does causality actually work? If it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153thin string, a linear chain of events, link following link following link,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d then what is it? And do our actions change the course of history, or are they blips of nothing in a deep ocean of time?<\/p>\n<p>https:\/\/youtu.be\/EN8LOgV6CVs<\/p>\n<p><b>Mark Links Stuff<\/b><\/p>\n<p>&#8211; <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.markoshiro.com\/blog\/2019\/5\/7\/the-anger-is-a-gift-trade-paperback-is-out-today\">The paperback edition of my debut, ANGER IS A GIFT, is now OUT!<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0<\/strong><strong>If you&#8217;d like to stay up-to-date on all announcements regarding my books, <a href=\"http:\/\/eepurl.com\/ey636\">sign up for my newsletter<\/a>! DO IT.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the fifteenth and sixteenth chapters of Darwin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Watch, the wizards contend with the nature of causality. Intrigued? Then it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s time for Mark to read The Science of Discworld III.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[451],"tags":[560,463,248,559],"class_list":["post-4952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-discworld","tag-gnu-jack-cohen","tag-mark-reads-discworld","tag-terry-pratchett","tag-the-science-of-discworld-3"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4952"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4952\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/markreads.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<!-- WP Super Cache is installed but broken. 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