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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 9505128" data-attributes="member: 71699">In the imaginary worlds about which we are speaking they "the ineffable gods caused it" has the same truth value as any other piece of fiction: it's an utterance we can know to be false and pretend to be true.Explicable fictional magic has no better truth value than inexplicable magic in fiction. At least not on grounds of any argument put forth so far. There was no consulting detective named Sherlock Holmes, but we can pretend there was. The species of snake that twined down the bell pull was one that isn't capable of doing so in the real world (it's a constrictor), but we can (and most folk do) pretend that it can. Inexplicable powers that intervene in the goings on of the world may well not exist in our real universe, but they are as true as Holmes or that snake in any fictional universe that includes them.To my reading dualistic metaphysics has prevailed for most of human history. One common form is belief in an ultimately inexplicable being (God) who intervenes in our universe. It's possible that you are taking my arguments as attempts to justify or prove that sort of thing to be really true outside of imaginary worlds. I'm not saying that: rather I am saying that "magic" as presented in games like D&D is just refluffed technology, and that an alternative approach that would be more like what magic was historically on Earth would need to contain inexplicable elements that would lead to unpredictability. I'm not defending that as true, I'm defending it as - were we to imagine it for our fictional world - truer to what magic historically was.One way to consider that from your perspective might be to see that I'm saying that magic was historically nonsensensical, so that if we are to imagine magic as magic in our games it ought to be nonsensical in our imaginary world as well! That magic ought to be the antithesis of science: not predictably repeatable.</blockquote>

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