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lowkey13
Guest
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D&D 5E Poor Old Mystic The AD&D Legacy Trampled On!!!!
- Thread starter Zardnaar
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Celebrim
Legend
That the joke is not strictly speaking true is part of my point, and to the extent that he was doing more than joking or that people don't take that aphorism as being merely simplification of a larger and more complex idea and instead run with it as a veritable fact, then it supports my thesis rather than detracts from it.
Clarke was frequently guilty of magical thinking and not understanding fundamental differences between science and magic, particularly when it came to Clarke's own wishful thinking about human destiny.
Actually, the 10th century had almost no witchcraft trials. It was the official doctrine of the Church at the time that witchcraft was simply superstition, and whenever possible in the 10th century (and prior to that even) the Catholic Church had tried to shut down witchcraft trials and criminal prosecution associated with it. The Witch scare didn't get into full swing until the Renaissance and Early Modern period, and was associated with development of 'expert manuals' on witchcraft - the codification of old superstition into easily distributed pseudo-science that had the appearance of being the result of learning.
Similar myths about the 10th century concern the idea that they didn't bathe. That is again something that started after the Medieval period. They actually had lots of bath houses in the Medieval period, continuing the Roman tradition.
But, those are just quibbles. To your larger point, yes, if I brought say a lap top back to the 10th century, most observers would assume that it was some sort of magic - and probably black magic, rather than any sort of 'natural science' (at the time, a phrase used almost synomonously with magic). But that tells you more about the perspective of illiterate people living in an age before science was formalized as a methodology of investigation than it does anything about the truth of Clarke's law. In fact, if actual magic was to be performed today, the vast majority of viewers would assume that it was just some sort of technological or scientific trickery because their biases would be to assume magic wasn't a thing. If someone with 10,000 years more advanced technology was to do something with that technology in front of modern observers, we'd assume it was technology. More to the point, educated literate observers would be able to ask questions about it that allowed them to distinguish based on the answers whether it was science and technology or magic. Some of those answers might be hard to believe, or even astounding, but there is a big difference between science answers and non-science answers.
You have to understand that there is a big difference between knowing some facts about the physical universe and knowing no facts about the physical universe.
Sure. But it is nonetheless very obvious when a writer is actually deeply knowledgeable in the area of the science he's discussing and is making his best effort to conform to what is known about the universe. He might be wrong about the known unknowns, and he might completely miss the implications of the unknown unknowns, but he won't contradict the known knowns. For example, he won't actually violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics without explaining how the apparent violation works, and he won't actually make use of energy without plausible mechanisms for generating it and a reasonable understanding of the implications of wielding that much energy. Consider the lightsaber for its violation of all of that, as the amount of energy stored in that handle is enough to level a small continent, and yet you can turn the darn thing off without it instantly evaporating. Where does the energy come from? 'Kyber Crystals' are an obviously magical answer, and distinguishable from science.
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Azzy
ᚳᚣᚾᛖᚹᚢᛚᚠ (He/Him)
How about "Gnostic"?
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lowkey13
Guest
*Deleted by user*
Celebrim
Legend
First of all, that's argument from authority. Second of all, I haven not in fact 'trashed him'. He is in fact a Grand Master of science fiction, but what I have been discussing here is not what he ought to be judged on as an author of fiction, which is the quality and skill of his story telling. I have in other forums given his story-telling high praise. But the high praise with which we honor his story telling has nothing to do with what I'm discussing now. "He's a super-honored story teller so his observation is true", doesn't cut it.
I think you may be again the one misunderstanding what I'm getting at.
What you miss is that this is a story that the medieval Alchemists were sufficiently literate to actually understand and recognize as science as they understood it. In other words, if they saw you transforming lead into gold, they would be able to investigate it sufficiently to recognize that it was not magic, and would be able to - if they were able to query you regarding how it was done - recognize it as advanced science rather than magic. For example, you would be able to explain to them the structure of an atom - something that they had no idea existed even though some of them suspected that atoms existed, they defined them as indivisible and assumed all things they observed were chemical compounds. But this answer you gave would in fact be recognizably scientific, and give them an explanation that would be immediately revelatory regarding why their own methodology was failing. They then might inquire of you how you went about moving or adding bits of an element to a different element, and your explanation would then explain why you did or didn't bother doing it depending on how expensive your technology made energy.
Neither science nor magic are completely nebulous ideas, and even the medieval alchemists weren't completely naive regarding them.
What actually is true though is that had you BS'd the medieval alchemists with a magical explanation or a pseudo-scientific explanation, they would have had no way of recognizing that they were being BS'd, and would have taken your explanation as 'scientific' in so far as they understood it. And if they had suspected they were being BS'd, they'd have no good way to actually guess regarding how, and would have likely gone off on tangents based on their own false understanding. So there is a sense in which Clarke is speaking to a real and universal ignorance - how do we tell pseudo-science from science if sufficiently advanced science might as well be gibberish to us? But there is also certain features that a magical explanation will have that scientific explanations will not have.
So even that might be a transient situation that depends on the medieval alchemists in their own understanding not having yet separated to the two concepts. It's possible that the more advanced the society gets, the less indistinguishable science and magic become.
Yes, but here is where Clarke is wrong - things don't work like that. Clarke makes the unwarranted assumption that if technology advances sufficiently, anything becomes possibly in the same way that with magic anything becomes possible. And this assumption is unsupported by science and veers off into magical thinking. Science in no way guarantees that man will be uplifted to some future imagined god-like state where anything is possible. Or if you would like, it's possible that for a given sufficiently advanced society, no more advanced society is possible. Moreover, that hard limit is not guaranteed to be remotely in the future.
How familiar are you with Clarke's canon, since you've evidenced admiration for him? Can I start discussing stories without fearing I'm giving unwarranted spoilers?
Why? There are lots of good reasons to believe no level of technology will ever allow lightsabers in the form they are presented, and more to the point, the explanation given for how they work is a magical one - postulating the existence of Unobtainium, that is a material which we have every reason to believe is impossible given the observed natural laws.
It's not an error. While the story may be nominally set in the past, if only because it adopts the language of a 'fairy tale' to begin it, the tropes and technologies on display like interstellar travel, advanced AI, and energy weapons are - if they are possible at all - in our own future. It's thus reasonable to discuss things like lightsabers in the context of "sufficiently advanced" technology, rather than some sort of primitive technology of some past era.
To pull this even remotely back on topic, it is an error to assume that if technology advances sufficiently, anything we imagined was true becomes possible. For example, it is an error to assume - as so much of 1950's and 1960's era science fiction assumed - that eventually sufficient science would show that psychic claims were real and could be harnessed. I like Clarke's three laws for striking a suitable note of skepticism, but we ought to be skeptical of them as well. There are things that we can now say with reasonable certainty to be impossible, and if we are going to speculate as to how the impossible might be accomplished, we can recognize if such claims are based on magic or on science. Science and magic are not indistinguishable, even if science and gibberish sometimes are. But unless you actually believe magic is real, you can assume that any real explanation - even if it sounds like gibberish - won't sound like magic.
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TheCosmicKid
Hero
I think you may be overinterpreting Clarke's aphorism. There's no guarantee in there that I can see, no promise that anything is possible. The functions of my smartphone would seem "magical" to an observer from 1917. He can probably guess with confidence that it's a product of human technology rather than sorcery -- heck, we can say he's H. G. Wells himself, has a utopian outlook that makes Clarke look like Harlan Ellison, and is ecstatic to see this evidence of the triumphal march of science into the future. But he'd have no idea how any of it worked. If in fact it were the product of sorcery and his optimism about science were misplaced, he would be none the wiser. It would thus be "indistinguishable from magic".
And I think it's reasonable to believe that there will be some technologies from 2117 that would have this same effect on us. Not everything will be possible, of course, but there will probably be some possibilities that we can't imagine. Let's say we encounter a teleporter. We'd have no clue how they did it. It could be magic, and we wouldn't be able to tell. But it's probably a safe bet that's a product of science, because science has a pretty good track record for blowing our minds and expanding our possibilities, and magic as far as we know doesn't even exist. Or maybe there are no teleporters in 2117. Maybe teleporters are truly impossible. But if not a teleporter, there's probably still going to be something that amazes us. You raise the possibility of hitting a scientific ceiling, and to be sure, we can never know if we will someday, but it's probably not a mere century away.
Celebrim
Legend
You need to take the three laws as a set, and in particular you need to look at how people interpret them.
Clarke's first law says, "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." So imagine how this plays out in practice. Regardless of what inane question you ask the learned person, and regardless of how sound his reasoning is, if he says that can't be done, the questioner can always cite Clarke's Law as evidence that the learned person is wrong and the ignorant questioner is right. This greatly contributes to pseudo-science, and as I'll show - belief in magic. Now, I don't know whether that was Clarke's intent or not, and I'd personally always taken Clarke's three laws as amusing exaggeration of something that is true, exaggerated for marketability. But the fact is that people do take them literally, and even as "things that go without saying".
Clarke's second law "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.", ends up being interpreted in practice as, "All limits will be eventually over come." Of the three, I believe this is the one Clarke believed most literally because the idea suffuses all of his fiction. Clarke continually writes as if there was no limit to human capability and that eventually technology and knowledge would over come everything. Even when humanity finds limits in his stories, they are then guided past these limits by various alien messiahs and alien gods. Which the brings us to the third law.
The most familiar of the three laws is, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." You want to limit that meaning to be, "Given any sufficiently advanced technology, you'll have no idea how it works." But that's not what it says literally, and it's not how its interpreted in practice. In practice, the law is interpreted as, "A sufficiently advanced society will possess magic." Think about how many science fiction stories and TV shows you've seen where the end state of highly advanced societies is portrayed as having psychic abilities - psychic healing, telepathy, telekinesis, invocations, etc. You have this guy who wakes up from his cryostasis 1000 years after and there are all these flower children sitting around seemingly primitive, but actually having magic. That's reinforcement of Clarke's third law, and you even find it in Clarke's own stories. I mean practically every Clarke story ends with magic being real.
Marvelous is not the same as magical. Inexplicable is not the same as magic. Magic has a history and has reoccurring ideas in it and makes certain predictions about the world. It's not just anything you don't understand. I'd claim that the problem was Clarke didn't understand what magic was, except that Clarke repeatedly utilizes it in his story telling. For example, magic says that things that resemble other things influence those other things. This is called 'sympathetic magic' and its a reoccurring theme in all the world's magical traditions. Rhino's horn helps your male genitalia become rigid. Why? Because of course it does, rhino's horns are hard and rigid. When the cargo cults of the Pacific ideas started building airstrips, they weren't stupid enough to believe that the things that they were building were copies of what they had seen. But they did believe that if they looked sufficiently like them that they would work under a theory of sympathetic magic. So utilizing sympathetic magic is one way you can recognize whether something is the product of science or magic, and one way even if you don't know a lot of science you can tell science from pseudo-science. And we could go on and on here, and discuss the role of willpower in magic, in discussing the assumption of hidden power of the human brain, non-localized laws, anima, and so forth, but the point is that magic has its own theories.
Again, if you read Clarke the end state of his stories is usually 'some sort of magic'. I don't know if he just meant this to be a marker of something that would seem unbelievable to the reader, or whether he really believed technology would get there, but he certainly encouraged people to believe that technology would get there. And the same is true of Heinlein, Asimov, Silverburg and most of the Golden Age science fiction Grand Masters. Magic is present ultimately as higher technology garnered through some gnostic science.
I don't. I reject one of the principle ideas that started in the 1950's, and that was the idea that progress was exponential. I reject both the negative fearful claims of that - say 'Future Shock' - and the positive utopian claims of the Golden Age authors. I believe that the long term progress line is linear, and that invariably, people imagine that it is exponential by focusing on very new emergent technologies that are in the process of maturing. The truth is, individual technologies don't even follow linear progress. It's worse than that. Emergent technologies follow a logarithmic curve. "Moore's Law" if you actually bother to graph the line, describes a logarithmic rather than an exponential curve. The longer the time that transpired since the birth of computing, the slower the time span between doubling of computational power. Once we get out of the initial emergent phase, and get into the long tail, growth will be almost flat.
I've got some examples to discuss but I don't have the time. More later perhaps.
For now, Celebrim's Observation, "In most science fiction stories about a sufficiently advanced society, the author will assume they've developed psychic powers and the audience will generally suspend less belief to buy that, than they will the technology."
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TheCosmicKid
Hero
That is my basic thesis here, and if I'm not mistaken, it seems to be [MENTION=6799753]lowkey13[/MENTION]'s as well.
In this case, the interpretation is actually a direct contradiction of the law.
Are you just objecting to the prevalence of the trope that psi is a real and scientifically masterable phenomenon? I mean, yes, I agree with you, that's factually incorrect, and it can sometimes be annoying when it's taken for granted in hard SF. And yes, there is a functioning ouija board in Childhood's End. But I really don't think that the Third Law is referring to psi at all. Psi is seldom described as a "technology", just for starters. Insofar as psi appears too much in SF, that's not an application or even a misapplication of the Third Law -- it's something else entirely. Now, if we were talking about stuff like brain-implanted telephones imitating telepathy and voice-activated computers imitating invocations, that would be the Third Law in action. But seeing as how we can say "Siri, what's the weather forecast?" right now, I can't agree that these possibilities are so implausible as to make the Law objectionable.
I'm getting a "no true Scotsman" vibe off of your approach to magic. Which is strange, since we both agree that there is no such thing as "true magic" at all. I fundamentally disagree with you: magic is anything you don't understand. As I said, we can easily imagine that my smart phone is the product of sorcery if we don't have the scientific context to know how it works, even though it doesn't behave particularly sympathetically.
You will note that I compared 1917 to 2017 to 2117. If you actually bother to graph the line, it is linear.
Yes, we're about to hit a ceiling on the power of integrated circuits due to physical limitations -- if they get much smaller, they're going to draw too much power per square millimeter and start melting themselves. However, we also know that the human brain can do its thing on just 20ish watts of power. This is one area where we know that the current physical limitation on our technology is not a hard ceiling on what is possible.
Again, you're giving off the impression that you're really just complaining about psi, and again, I don't think Clarke's Third Law is about psi at all.
To the list of previous mystics, I'd like to add the Al-Qadim priest kit. They were essentially clerics outside the regular religious structure, and were able to learn weapons other than those normally allowed to clerics for twice the number of proficiencies (for those who joined in in 2000 or later: in AD&D you needed to get proficiency in each individual weapon type, e.g. footman's mace, longsword, light crossbow, and depending on class you'd start out with 1-4 of those proficiencies and get one more every 3-6 levels). They would also get bonus proficiency in Religion and one other skill appropriate for the meditation they needed to do to regain spells, e.g. dancing, star-gazing, or whatever. If they were unable to perform that skill, they would not be able to regain spent spells. Finally, priests belonging to more established religious orders were likely to dislike mystics, giving them a penalty to reaction rolls when dealing with these.
So, which ones do we have now? I think these are in chronological order, though it's possible that Arabian Adventures pre-dates Complete Wizard's Handbook.
So, which ones do we have now? I think these are in chronological order, though it's possible that Arabian Adventures pre-dates Complete Wizard's Handbook.
- A class from a 1982 issue of Dragon Magazine, which I know nothing about.
- The Mystic monster/NPC that's all about unarmed combat from the D&D Master rules, later adapted to a proper PC class for the Rules Cyclopedia.
- The Wizard kit from the Complete Wizard's Handbook.
- The Priest kit from Arabian Adventures, meant for dervish-types.
- The Wizard kit from Red Steel, which is very similar to the Complete Wizards one. This one also has a psionic variant.
- The Priest class from Faiths & Avatars, with a focus on charms, nature, herbalism, and candle magic.
- The Dragonlance 3.5e class, essentially a variant of the Favored Soul. Based on the class from Dragonlance 5th age System.
- The 5e version of the psion.
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