The curious thing about the human belief in narrativium is that once humans evolved on the planet, their beliefs started to be true. We have, in a way, created our own narrativium. It exists in our minds, and there it is a process, not a thing. On the level of the material universe, it's just one more pattern of buzzing electrons. But on the level of what it feels like to be a mind, it operates just like narrativium. Not only that: it operates on the material world, not just the mental one: its effects are just like those of narrativium. Generally our minds control our bodies sometimes they don't, and indeed sometimes it's the other way round, especially during adolescence -and our bodies make things happen out there in the material world. Within each person there is a 'strange loop', which confuses the mental and material levels of existence.

This strange loop has a curious effect on causality. We get up in the morning and leave the house at 7.15 because we have to get to work by 9 o'clock. Scientifically, this is a very bizarre form of causality: the future is affecting the past. That doesn't normally occur in physics (except in very esoteric Quantum things, but let's not get distracted). In this case, science has an explanation.

What causes you to get up at 7.15 is not actually your future arrival at work. If in fact you fall under a bus and never make it to work, you still got up at 7.15. Instead of backwards causality, you have a mental model, in your brain, which is your best attempt to predict the day ahead. In that model, realised as buzzing electrons, you think that you ought to be at work by nine. That model, and its expectation of the future, exists now, or more accurately, a short time in the past.

It is that expectation that causes you to get up instead of lying in and having a well-deserved snooze. And the causality is entirely normal: from past to future by way of actions taking place in the present.

So that's all right then. Except that when you think of it, the causality is still very strange. A few electrons, buzzing in ways that are meaningless from the outside of the brain in which they reside, lead to a coherent action by a 70-kilogram lump of protein. Well, at that time in the morning it's not a very coherent lump of protein, but you understand what we mean. That's why we call this very creative piece of confusion a strange loop.