Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Sean Mirrsen]

@Sean M.: I don't know what did the universe throw at you to make you believe that it's laws can be circumvented, and are actually breakable. For one, the example with aluminium you provided does not prove that. If anything, it's repeatability proves that it's a hard law of the universe itself. Surprisingly, the conclusion you draw from it is the very definition of magic I was describing - it's the power which can "circumvent" laws of physics.

Oh, you're getting through alright. We just have our own nomenclature.

See, the aluminium example proves something important - nothing we know about the universe to be true, is necessarily completely true. "Magic" can circumvent known laws of the universe - conservation of energy, E=MC Hammer, etc. These are the laws we've worked out over the years, but the universe undoubtedly has a lot of stuff we don't know. That's what I've been saying all along - magic is everywhere, and the parts of everywhere that we can explain are governed by science or technology. However, magic, being an integral part of the universe, can't bypass the actual laws of the universe, the ones we know nothing about. The laws that govern magic's existence. We don't know any of those laws yet, or maybe we do know, but we don't know that we know them, etc, etc. All we know is that there's 42 of them.

[Il Palazzo]

Well, I disagree with the second part of your post, andrea. If for the sake of the argument we assume that fantasy novels describe alternative universes, then I argue that what ever is possible in those alternate worlds and not in ours due to difference in physical laws, shouldn't be called magic either. Not even if the AU's people can shoot fireballs from their fingertips, as long as they do it according to this particular universe's laws.
Yes, some fantasy authors go to great lenghts to explain the "how" of what looks like magic from our perspective, but as long as the final point of their argumentation is "because it's possible due to different laws of physics", then it shouldn't be called magic. You could say that It's not my business to tell people what to call magic, but I find this clarification necessary to resolve this topic's challenge. Not to mention that it'd be nice if people didn't use the same word for defining what now reached three different ideas.
So let's not call magic what can be called unknown, or undiscovered.
Let's not call magic what can be logically derived from given universe's laws of physics, however exotic they could be.
Let's define magic as something that is: a)able to alter the world's existence, it's universal laws if you want, b)it's chaotic and unpredictable, differentiating it from just a "higher level" of universal laws.

Do note, that this definition does not require of an author to abandon logic when describing his universe. As I've shown you earlier, when describing Babylonian's cosmogony(which is really just one of many similar ones), existence of magic can be, and historically had been, logically justified. Just keep in mind that the final reason for it's existence does not, as with technology-magic, lie within laws of the universe, but within the philosophy behind world's creation.

@Sean M.: yeah, the nomenclature needs being sorted out for a meaningfull conversation.

[Neruz]

Except of course that things like conservation of energy or the speed of light are not actually laws of the Universe. They are constructs man has built to try and explain why things work the way they do; they are laws of Man; and this is why they're not always right.

[andrea]

I suppose I'll have to drop out of the conversation then, we have different ideas of what magic is an arguing is futile, since magic doesn't actually exist so we can find no proof either way.

[Sean Mirrsen]

I disagree with b). Magic is an integral part of the universe. In a way, it is the universe.

Actually, scrap that. Magic could just as well alter the laws of the universe governing the existance of matter or magic, but that would be covered by universal laws, and we don't know what the laws in our universe are. Another universe can have magic be limited to discovered laws.

Bottom line: Magic is the Universe itself, and it can do what the Universe allows it to do. I personally don't believe the Universe was created by any sort of entity, I think it just happens to exist. It always was, and always will be, even if all stars and planets dissolve back into individual quibs of energy. A system as complex as the Universe may well have attained a form of sentience over the millenia, forming set patterns and reactions, but gods are, after all, only explanations given by the humans to those patterns and reactions.

[Il Palazzo]

@andrea: Eh, hold on. I'm not trying to tell you what the magic "really is", to force on you my perception of it or tell you that you're soo damn wrong and I'm not.
I'm trying to narrow the definition of magic to what would be relevant to the topic. We can't use your definition here, because then there can be no "technology versus magic" at all.

@Sean: I really don't see how what you call magic is different from technology then.

[RAM]

conservation of energy, E=MC Hammer, etc.

Heh, I love how you said that with a straight face!

magic doesn't exist, because if it existed it could eventually be explained and used, at which point it would no longer be magic.

Which is why it resolves down to Technology A versus Technology B, which is stupid dumb. What we need is to find possibilities for magic which would genuinely be magical for those who understood them. I tried to come up with a few possibilities earlier, but they were not that convincing...

World of darkness, for example, could theoretically be reduced to a technological level. (disclaimer: I don't actually know anything much about WoD, this is all completely hypothetical) Lets say that after studying the abilities of mages with various specific brain injuries one can ascertain the elements that power 'magic'. Lets say you discover that you lack the ability to artificially produce a 'brain' but can stimulate the generation of magical energies. You could set up an array of people being stimulated in this way, use focusing abilities to direct them all onto the same point, then suddenly flash them all an image of a high velocity fist. The fist then forms at the foal point and possesses a high velocity which immediately projects it away from its origin and into Cthulu's face...
What we need is something that fundamentally ignores the technological constraints, then we will have something genuinely different to compare technology with...

[andrea]

Il palazzo, you got my post wrong:I don't think you are trying to force anything but I just won't have much to say if we decide to speak about magic that works in the way you described.
In my mind, the whole debate is useless, since it would be science A vs science B, and instead of fighting they should merge. If we take any different direction, it is not my place to talk.

But as sean said, magic can do what universe allows it to do. I don't think it would be able to bend anything. laws of thermodynamics maybe, but that is just a bunch of words we use to describe a behavior.

[Neruz]

To be fair, i feel i should add that 'God' is just Magic with a different name and a Human face. To things we do not understand, we ascribe God, or Magic, depending on one's personal beliefs.

Both concepts serve as ways to explain things we do not understand. They don't actually do so of course, but they sound like they do, which makes everyone feel better.

[andrea]

yes... God is tricky. Gods like greek gods, can fit in my world view: eventually, they will be explained and they still have to work in-universe
creators gods like christian God however are a bit harder... if they created the universe in the first place, then they are not limited by it. but then, where did they stay before? in another universe, created by another God and so on?

bah. that is why I don't care if there is a God or not... I'll just behave well and take the risk.
Still, it would be nice to know if he exists.

[Il Palazzo]

But both gods and the God, as well as existentialist, atheistic cosmology are not that much different when analysed from that perspective.
You say that what confounds you about the God of Judaistic kind, is his primal being, his out-of-universe existence. See, Greek-type gods while not being themselves primal, have a source from which they sprang, in the case of Greeks, Chaos - equally mystifying in it's eternal and apparently source-less existence. Then the god-less Big Bang cosmogony: there is the question of whence did the damn thing exploded from, and what was before. Sure you can hypotesise that the creation of black hole collapsing in an alternate universe created ours, but it's the same as saying that the world which rests on top of four elephants, in turn rests on the giant turtle, which in turn rests... and so on.
Every cosmogony(I'm using this word too much) needs to somehow cover this gaping hole at the begining of things, and every one is equally hard to swallow. In this sense, every story about universe's creation is the same.
I'd still advise not to try and equate magic with God, the same as we shouldn't compare those whith the "it just happend" reasoning of atheistic point of view. The philosophical implications of each one are too great and diverse to just bundle them up together. For one, there can be no magic(with my definition, yes) where is God(with capital G) or where universe "just" came into being, same as the "absolute good" can only exist in the presence of God.

[andrea]

the primal God doesn't confuse me, but it is annoying because the possibility of it being outside of the universe puts it beyond analysis. How am I supposed to even try to make theories if I can't even know what is his environment, or his substance? ( or her, or it. don't really care about the gender of G/god).

It is truly annoying because up until souls, heavens and hell I can find something. But God is supposed to be creator of the whole universe, so he is beyond that . Which means that , being a being of this universe, I can't say anything about him, or how he works, what he is.
Which is annoying, very annoying.

[Il Palazzo]

Well, what I was saying, you're bound to be similarly annoyed no matter what sort of belief system you'll acknowledge. Monotheism isn't really in any way special in this sense.

[andrea]

I would prefer the "it just happened" path, but it seem a bit too empty.

After a while, I just came to the conclusion that the best I can do is just give up on any religion, atheism included, and just behave in the best way I can. Time for religion will come when I am older, or when I am dead.

I see it in this way: if no god exists, and I am just dead after I die, then at least I did something useful in life for the specie as a whole.
If a god exists, the chances of me picking the correct god are terribly tiny and since I can't hope in god appearing in front of me, and I am not good at faith, the best I can do is act according to what I feel is right. I wouldn't follow a religion if I felt it was wrong anyway, would I?

long story short, there is no real need to care about higher beings.

maybe it is better to keep gods away from this thread... I am taking the discussion in wrong places.

[Sean Mirrsen]

The Multiworlds 'verse found explanation by seating the (rather poorly-named, in retrospect) Highest Command at the hub of the Multiverse, in the seventh dimension. They periodically appeared in various universes, taking various forms, but nobody really knows how they look, as noone's ever been to the seventh dimension. The basic idea is that three dimensions denote a "timeslice" of a universe's existence, the fourth dimension is a line representing an entire unique universe, beginning to end, five dimensions allow a 'verse to "branch out", representing all possible variations of one universe since its creation (due to quantum instability or whatever), six dimensions allow for a multitude of possible universe creation scenarios, and the seventh dimension is where the Commanders are, surrounded by an infinite sphere of universes. Nobody knows whether it's the Commanders that create new universes or they pop up by themselves, it's just been proven by experiment that these other universes exist. It's not belief-based, since the Commanders' existence is pretty much a fact (they appeared on more than one occasion to sort out conflicts or generally have fun), but nobody understands how the hell do the Commanders do what they do. However, even they always obey the laws of the universe they're in when they appear. One notable occasion had a Commander playfully blow up an oversized space battleship the size of Uranus (no, really - and I'm russian, so that joke didn't apply) with an appropriately oversized lightning bolt. That doesn't really prove much in-universe, since he could have just as well been doing it for fun, but they never made matter disappear into nothingness or ignore planetkiller-class plasmaguns (like on the mentioned battleship), even if being clearly irritated, annoyed, or even hurt by the opposition.