How do we communicate? We tell stories. And that, we shall argue, is the real secret of Mind.

Which brings us back to Discworld, because on Discworld things really do work the way human minds think they do on Roundworld. Especially when it comes to stories.

Discworld runs on magic, and magic is indissolubly linked to Narrative Causality, the power of story. A spell is a story about what a person wants to happen, and magic is what turns stories into reality. On Discworld, things happen because people expect them to. The sun comes up every day because that's its job: it was set up to provide light for the people to see by, and it comes up during the day when people need it. That's what suns do; that's what they're for. And it's a proper, sensible sun, too: a smallish fire not very far away, which goes over and under the Disc, incidentally but entirely logically causing one of the elephants to lift a leg to let it pass. It's not the ridiculous, pathetic kind of sun that we have - absolutely gigantic, infernally hot, and nearly a hundred million miles away because it's too dangerous to be near. And we go round it instead of it going round us, which is crazy, especially since what every human being on the planet sees, other than the visually impaired, is the latter. It's a terrible waste of material just to make daylight

...

On Discworld, the eighth son of an eighth son must become a wizard. There's no escaping the power of story: the outcome is inevitable. Even if, as in Equal Rites, the eighth son of an eighth son is a girl. Great A'Tuin the turtle must swim though space with four elephants on its back and the entire Discworld on top of them, because that's what a world-bearing turtle has to do. The narrative structure demands it. Moreover, on Discworld everything that there is6 exists as a thing.

To use the philosophers' language, concepts are reified: made real. Death is not just a process of cessation and decay: he is also a person, a skeleton with a cloak and a scythe, and he TALKS