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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7056137" data-attributes="member: 4937">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."</blockquote>

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