| From: | Neil Clark neil.clark@**********.com |
|---|---|
| Subject: | [OTing underway] what the heck is magic, anyway? [was: Re: fox special: when MetaBeings attack!] |
| Date: | Mon, 15 Feb 1999 20:41:09 -0500 |
I was about to send off what I thought was an good "yes" suggestive
argument, concerning mostly the capabilities of ASIST technology. but, I
decided the whole question of this rests on another question, one that seems
pretty impossible to answer.
what they heck *is* magic, anyway? ... is it an intangible force that
most of us are dead to? is it an aspect of the universe mundanes are tuned
out to by nature? if so, how far removed is magic from the domain of normal
human (mundane) comprehension?
for instance, it's not impossible to imagine what it would be like to
perceive as a bat, via ultrasound. no color, but heavy emphasis on
textures. density of an object would be obvious, because of how it absorbed
your sonic emissions. non-reflective materials would be foggy, faded, and
fuzzy. a room with too much material, too reflective, could be
overwhelming, confusing, kinda like too much light (glare).
on the other hand, what would it be like to be a being of energy, living
in the depths of space where triangles don't necessarily have 180degrees,
zipping around and through black holes--where most rules of the universe
hopelessly break down, feeding off I dunno...dark matter? granted I'm a
high school student who hasn't even taken physics yet, so I don't know what
the heck I was just talking about in that question, but the point was I
tried for something that would be hard to imagine. and my point of points
was,
how close can we come to imagining this magic? as I said, seeing with
ultrasound isn't that bad. shadowrunners can don ultrasound goggles. this
isn't quite the same as [ultrasound.data-->brain evolved to compute
ultrasound.data]...in fact it's more like [ultrasound.data...converted to
optical.data-->brain evolved to compute optical.data]. but though it's not
quite the same thing both ways, ultrasound and (our)light spectrum vision
are pretty analogous, so not much is lost in the translation. we can safely
say, I think, that it's easy to approximately "know" what it's like to
experience things from a bat's "eyes".
but, but, but... how possible would it be to convert magical sensations
to something the rest of the 5 senses can process? I mean, it would be
possible, but how close a translation could be done?
...,
hehe, I was wondering about the feeling I was getting that my "argument"
wasn't going anywhere, then I remembered, all I'm doing is spouting a
million questions.
so I guess, what this does to the issue to me is: you could try to
convert magical experiences into mundane-understandable experiences, but it
all depends on how close magic is to the universe we're used to, and how
accurately you could analo-gize it.
******
a thousand apologies if any of you find what I wrote painfully-long,
incomprehensible, philosopher's babble...I can get like that sometimes when
I start writing, occasionally.
if you thought my letter was interesting, thoughts please? I'm realize
this is going off-topic a bit, but I think the unresolvable issue of "what
the heck is magic, anyway?" is interesting.
--Neil
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