[General Battuta]

I hate solipsism

When has this thread ever discussed solipsism?

[NGTM-1R]

*sigh* What I meant to ask was, how much of it was Vishnan fabrication/deception/simplification and how much was Sam himself?

Considering what we know of the Vishnan's, the answer may be "all/none" at the same time. They're certainly skilled at manipulating perception, but that just means they're also going to be skilled at telling you what you want to hear.

[MikeRoz]

This, presumably. I refuse to read it because I'm dangerously prone to ontological dread.

Why? Why would you do that? Click that link and you won't be doing anything else for about 6 hours.

[Meneldil]

Also, why is 'topologically dense physics in subspace' any better than 'magic'? That's really just a better class of technobabble, unless the closure of physics in subspace is equal to subspace.

How is 'subspace' better than 'magic'?

Then how is magic worse than subspace?

I feel where you're coming from, but what I'm trying to say is that if you push it far enough, everything could count as SF. I mean, it's not that there's anything mystical about Harry Potter style magic wands, it's just that a Phoenix's naturally high midichlorian count facilitates various quantum phenomena which interact with the subspace in a particularly serendipitous manner. (Sounds far-fetched, I know, but with enough effort one ought to be able to technobabble it into something at least as consistent as Star Trek's teleporter!)

So yeah sufficiently advanced technology cannot be distinguished from magic and vice versa, but that doesn't mean science fiction cannot be distinguished (however fuzzily) from fantasy, or that some parts of an SF universe cannot be considered fantastical in nature. To a first approximation I'd say it is a difference in style rather than substance; I don't have the vocabulary to express it better, but I'll hope you'll recognize what I'm trying to describe, and I think that could be what some of the people commenting are saying: not "this can't be science", but rather "this doesn't sound and feel like science".
I guess that as the story progresses that part will sound more and more like science, and challenging the naive presumptions about how science works for vastly more advanced beings is part of the Blue Planet's value, but I don't think parts of AoA will ever completely lose their "mystic feel".

[General Battuta]

A lot of things don't sound and feel like science until you understand them. All kinds of natural phenomena were explained by mysticism four hundred years ago. To this day you get magical thinking in the lay understanding of the mind and consciousness: people believe that being disintegrated by a transporter beam would kill them, or that there's something acausal about free will.

When the mechanism is unclear, intuitive, wooly reasoning tends to take over. In WiHR2 you'll see an organizational approach to the Nagari process very different from AoA.

[Luis Dias]

I honestly believe that desintegration is usually followed by "death", for all the evidence I have about that process, and although I'm quite at ease accepting the completely naturalistic and causal explanation of the mind as a very distinct possibility, I do not necessarily follow from "possible" to "inevitable". Just as technology apparently becomes magic in a sufficiently wide gap, so can the process that we call "mind" or "free will" actually be quite unbelievable to most neuroscientists if such "truth" was revealed today*. Had we told Newton about Quantum Mechanics, he would have laughed at you not "unbelieving" but completely and utterly convinced that you were just trolling his ass off, no matter how amazing your reasoning would be.

* Let us remind ourselves that many scientists even today seem hellbent at not accepting the non-classical reality of the quantum, the abandonment of any "objective reality" that it entails and dwell nervously on "interpretations" and "corrections" that are always promising a return to the softer and not-dreaded world of classicism.

Let us remind ourselves as well about amazingly talented Lord Kelvin warning every scientist in the 19th century that physics (and chemistry) was pretty much solved, only small details had to be figured out.

[General Battuta]

We had a pretty badass discussion about this on IRC yesterday, it was fun.

(But please, please, please let's not do it again here)

[Luis Dias]

Ah well. I seem to login to IRC only when people are discussing shenanigans.

[Meneldil]

To this day you get magical thinking in the lay understanding of the mind and consciousness: people believe that being disintegrated by a transporter beam would kill them, or that there's something acausal about free will.

K, right, if you're saying we should expect characters in-game to sometimes react to advanced technology with mysticism, then that's a good point, and it accounts for a part of "fantasy-style discourse" I think people were commenting on.



As for Newton, I think that's a bit unfair. You can't just tell someone about quantum mechanics, you'd need say a 2-3 years course if you want "no matter how amazing your reasoning would be" part of your sentence to be true.

[The Dagger]

If you could tell Newton about quantum physics, you could only show him that your model fits your experiences better. You can't prove him you're right.  Science is not more than a set of rules to understand the universe around us. We choose the most representative and simpler set as the current paradigm. That's all. Even quantum mechanics are only an intellectual abstraction. The quantum is NOT a reality. Sometimes we forget that those abstractions are only artificial constructions and are limited as we are. You could show Newton that your set of rules works best, but you couldn't tell him that they are real. And you sure have to be very cautious to extrapolate your rules into other fields.

In any case, after the next science paradigm shift, what we now know may be seen as incomplete and ridiculous. So any extrapolation of current scientific knowledge is unreliable. And even if we get to the point of having a theory of everything, the problem still remains. No mathematical construction we may use to explain and predict the behaviour of the universe can justify itself, so, there must be some kind of meta-physic behind it. As Stephen Hawkings wrote: "What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?".

Back to the magic and science debate: those two are just interpretations that allow us to understand the world around us. They all came to be from the observation of the world and (unproved) logical induction. Science uses elegant equations, complex models and universal constants. Magic builds itself on the cultural background of a group of people. They are both axiomatic and biased. I know I'm being too critic to science but I wanted to stress that scientists tend to overplay their hand.

So, what justifies BP canon to be considered fictional future science and not fictional magic? Only the social convention that generally considers magic unsystematic and unbound by current scientific models. BP metarules are quite systematic and even plausible in today's scientific paradigm. But that is subjective.

[General Battuta]

I generally agree, but I think you're missing one important thing about science - it's not just an elegant descriptive model, it makes predictions about things we don't know. That's how science separates itself from mathy mythology.

[Luis Dias]

Those two posts above missed the point about Newton. Currently we have not a comprehensive theory of the mind, nor anyone who could explain it to us. Of course that if we had those, then we would accept it for it was easily testable, so on and so on. The thing here is that we only have very simplistic "ideas" about what it can be, what kind of patterns we might find in such a theory, and so on. So imagine that a guy from the future gets here and says the equivalent of Battuta or any other folk going to Newton and just say "Hey look pal, particles are also waves, and we can't ever determine both their speed and position accurately, and spooky entanglement exists, and objective histories are a sham, and and and". You'd immediately laugh at the guy.

That was the point.

[General Battuta]

Yeah, but I think by this point we've successfully put a few constraints on any theory of consciousness: it'll obey causal closure and it'll be purely physical. We have no reason to believe that consciousness alone has some kind of exemption from these (so far) universal rules.

[Luis Dias]

I won't belabor the point, just want to point out that science itself depends upon the objectification of whatever it is that it is studying, and that objectifying the very observer, the very Subject might lead to a lot of paradoxes, counter-intuitive truths, and dead ends. I have long wondered if this objectification of the subject isn't something entirely impossible, a notion that people like Dennett just handwave away, saying that we shouldn't really care if we are able to model a "real consciousness" or a "zimbo" (something that acts exactly like as if it has a consciousness). However, we do experience ourselves and this subjectivity is possibly unexplainable.

[Meneldil]

In any case, after the next science paradigm shift, what we now know may be seen as incomplete and ridiculous.

What we now know is already seen as incomplete, because we see it is, but it will hardly ever be fair to call it ridiculous.
For example, Newtonian physics is two paradigm shifts behind and the only thing that's ridiculous about it is how incredibly strong it's predictive power is.

No mathematical construction we may use to explain and predict the behaviour of the universe can justify itself, so, there must be some kind of meta-physic behind it.

But that's unsurprising. After all, mathematics can hardly justify itself either - it's unclear what that may even mean, but it is a theorem of mathematics that for interpretations which would now be considered reasonable it isn't true.
If you want to take things to the extreme, in the end no form of human inquiry is impervious to a sufficiently obtuse form of epistemological skepticism. And you always need a meta-theory: in case of science that's at least the philosophy of science.

So imagine that a guy from the future gets here and says the equivalent of Battuta or any other folk going to Newton and just say "Hey look pal, particles are also waves, and we can't ever determine both their speed and position accurately, and spooky entanglement exists, and objective histories are a sham, and and and". You'd immediately laugh at the guy.

Ok, but why wouldn't I? I mean, people tell me all kinds of **** on a daily basis.
If that hypothetical person can explain to me the mathematical model behind his new theory and convince me its consistent and has general relativity and quantum mechanics as limiting cases, I'd have hopefully stopped laughing. But even if that's possible, it would take years.

[Luis Dias]

And so would anyone with a brain. Thing is, no one does that today because such knowledge does not exist. Thus we can reasonably posit that the "final" theory of the mind may well sound abso****ing ridiculous if "dumbed down" to our present level of understanding of it. That is, it will possibly be super counter-intuitive. And thus, we may all proclaim with fanfare and so on that it's all "materialistic", that it is well "established" this and that, and we may well be making just another Kelvin here.

[Meneldil]

Of course; sorry if I was interpreting your first post too literally.
And I agree with what you're saying, but I'll add that it's important to keep in mind that an improvement of a scientific theory, whatever it may be, must include the former theory as some kind of a limiting case, and that makes things somewhat less arbitrary.

[Apollo]

A lot of things don't sound and feel like science until you understand them. All kinds of natural phenomena were explained by mysticism four hundred years ago. To this day you get magical thinking in the lay understanding of the mind and consciousness: people believe that being disintegrated by a transporter beam would kill them, or that there's something acausal about free will.

When the mechanism is unclear, intuitive, wooly reasoning tends to take over. In WiHR2 you'll see an organizational approach to the Nagari process very different from AoA.

You know, I wonder if anything could truly be magical. It seems like it would have to be completely unrestricted by the laws of physics; otherwise it would be perfectly normal (from a physics standpoint).

Even psychic powers would probably be scientific.

[redsniper]

Well.... yeah. There's no such thing as magic. Anything that happens is happening within the laws of nature.

[Apollo]

Wait, doesn't that mean that all fantasy is actually soft sci-fi?