Hemetics cost to much Options

[Guest_Crimsondude 2.0_*]

Well, I have made quite a few references lately to wishing to be able to set people on fire...

[Critias]

"Lately?"

[Guest_Crimsondude 2.0_*]

Okay, so for the entire time you've known me. But that's only, what, 1/3 of my lifetime?

[Ellery]

You know that they did (or didn't) compensate for various sources of interference by looking at what controls they're running, but we don't see any controls because the books don't give flavor text like that (or flavor text that shows them doing much of anything else scientific).

[Guest_Crimsondude 2.0_*]

I know there's a sentence in there somewhere that makes sense.

[Eyeless Blond]

[Ellery]

Magic needs to be approached with a level of rigor that is rarely done in psychology. (In those cases where it is, we sometimes learn some pretty interesting things....)

For example, let's suppose that you are interested in the difference between the force an object feels when levitated and the apparent force applied to it based on its mass and acceleration. This is pretty simple to investigate: you ask a bunch of different people to levitate an object that has a bunch of inertial sensors in it and move it along a path that is well-monitored by cameras and/or laser interferometers or whatever is appropriate for the speed and scale of motion you're interested in. Anyone else can replicate the same experiment in other places.

Let's suppose that you want to classify how fast someone can levitate an object. Same thing--easy to measure a distribution of speeds and get an idea of how this covaries with initiation, the spell formula, and so on.

Suppose you want to measure the maximum heat transfer from a fireball spell. You create a giant heat sink with good line-of-sight access and put it in a room-sized calorimeter.

Suppose you want to quantify the effect of background count on magical casting. You start with a process that occasionally fails (e.g. creating a very weak physical barrier), and see how the failure rate changes with different background conditions.

And so forth and so on. Measuring magical ability really isn't that different from measuring human athletic ability--we know, or could know, all kinds of things about force generation, precision, endurance, and so on; plus, we know all kinds of things that impact these factors. You can measure magical ability just like you can measure lung capacity or reaction time.

The nice thing about magic in SR, from a scientific standpoint, is that magic is fairly reliable, and effects appear in seconds. This makes the topic much more addressable experimentally than, say, child psychology that tries to link specific types of domestic abuse with usage of specific illicit drugs.

Because of this, I'd expect watcher conjuring and normal spellcasting to be much better understood than ritual magic, enchanting, and hermetic conjuring, which in turn would be much better understood than the acquisition of new metamagics, the process of awakening, and the developmental basis of magical activity.

[Eyeless Blond]

[RunnerPaul]

[Ellery]

My point here is that major parts of thaumaturgy are just as hard of a science as physiology and biophysics--human involvement doesn't need to mess everything up.

My point earlier was that despite the claim to the contrary in published materials, the community of renewed hermetics is almost certainly not the same as the community of people doing this research.

You don't need to present piles of magical research findings complete with control experiments and experimental design in SR materials, even as fluff. That's excessive. But I would like to shown rather than told that it is going on (even if only with a few glimpses), and that it's not impossible simply because, "Wow! It's Magic!"

At a more philosophical level, one of the reasons I like SR is because it is set on Earth in the near future--which means that learning about our planet now, current events, and recent history is helpful for playing a game! That's a neat trick: you can be rewarded by having fun for learning that which can be useful and relevant background information in daily life, but often seems like a drag to learn. Of course, you don't want to make it so people have to consult piles of textbooks to play a game. That would just drag down the game. But it's nice to have games that encourage but do not force the development of other useful skills. That's why I'd also like them to encourage understanding of the scientific method. (One should not hit people over the head with it. Just have bits of scientific method peeking through in case people care to look. The results of research have a huge impact on our society today and yet most people don't have a clear idea of how and why it works, or what science is all about--certainly not if you watch movies anyway.) And dice-based gaming often rewards an understanding of probability, which is also healthy.

So if you can make a game setting richer while benefitting the players and having the setting make more sense, why not do it?

[Eyeless Blond]

That's great for something like cyberware or simsense-related technology, which *are* meant to have roots in modern-day science, technology, and engineering, but why should it be so for magic? As I've been saying time and again, magic *is* different from contemporary physics. The whole nature of the effects of magic necessitate the existence of an outside interference--namely, the mage/shaman/hougan/etc who created the effect--which simply isn't true with the hard sciences today*, and opens you up to all kinds of decoupling with the outside environment, though the mage himself, which messes with experiments in huge ways. Should these problems be glossed over, ignored, in favor of rewarding those of us with science degrees and background?

In fact, I'll go a step further, and claim that it is this very attitude--that magic cn be performed independent of belief and emotional background--that creates psionicists. That's kinda what a psionicist is, isn't he: someone who denies the truly fantastic aspects of magic and concentrates on explainnations like some sort of selective decoupling of complex wavefunctions due to special observer status, or some other such mundane nonsense? I'd say that's where the limit on his power comes from: by refusing to acknolege that a significant part, if not the majority, of the power and effects of magic come directly from the inherently illogical sides of the (meta)human creator of the effects, he puts blinders over much of his power, limiting himself to what he feels the limitations of his power ought to be. It would be interesting to find out that all these "scientific" hermetics are in a constant struggle to tear down those exact limitations that they feel bearing down on them, and as a result seem to outsiders to be going beyond the scope of true science.

*-This actually glosses over some very important conclusions of modern physics, but those have been extensively discussed by many people already and don't need to be brought up again.

[mfb]

not true. psionicists are, or can be, as mystical as any shaman.

the whole point of the scientific method is that you use it regardless of the subject matter. you use it when testing how safe a new seatbelt is, you use it when you're classifying orchids in south america, you use it when trying to determine exactly how much mana it takes to light a piece of paper on fire--and if it takes different people different amounts of mana, you use it to determine why.

[Raskolnikov]

Science is not a group of people wearing labcoats and talking on cellphones while writing numbers on chalk boards.

It is not physics, chemestry, or technology.

Science is a method.

Someone who eskews technology can be a scientist if they follow the method when they look for answers in the world around them. They will just be limited by the tools they have available.

There is no such thing as science versus nature. The two are not opposing factors. Science does not stand on one side trying to demystify everything and cover it in chrome and wires. Nature is not some fantastic thing that should never be understood.

The real beauty of natue and natural phenomena comes from understanding them. Magic is a natural phenomena in Shadowrun. It's a part of the world and humanity should strive to understand it. Saying that it's fantastic and thus beyond science demonstrates a lack of understanding.

I am, frankly, getting tired of watching this thread recieve posts stating that lack of understanding is mystical and wonderful somehow. Understanding is key to the beauty of man. Watch a thunderstorm, the pretty lights are neat, but it is much more beautiful when you understand the processes involved, the energy transfer of those electric archs, and the evolution of the complex air mass that is a storm.

Nothing is inherently illogical. Even when things are totally random, once this is determined, they can be modeled. Magic is no different.

Child-like wonderment is for children. It is a -sad- fact that scientists are rare, and I talk not of Shadowrun.

[audun]

[Raskolnikov]

A spell is cast, it influences the physical world, either directly or through manipulation of another body. Ergo, it is not a subjective occurance.

[blakkie]

[mfb]

unmeasured, but not necessarily unmeasurable. the point, here, isn't that the hermetics haven't found all the answers, it's that they don't seem to be looking.

[blakkie]

[BitBasher]

[blakkie]

[Raskolnikov]

It seems the definition of subjective is not clear:

"Proceeding from or taking place in a person's mind rather than the external world"

Magic is not subjective. The reason for magic may be subjective. One person may thing they have magic -because- Dog gives it to them, another may thing they have magic -because- God does. The practice of magic, however, is an external, measurable action.

If one wishes to study the effects of a ball hitting a bick wall it matters little what one uses to launch it into the wall so long as I can make that mechanism reliable. It has been noted earlier that this is possible in SR irrespective of the tradition of the mage.

Subjective delvers can speak all night about why Thor, Apollo, Cat, Gia, or Quantum Waveflux allows magic to exist without producing a testable hypothosis. Such conversation is not without merit, but it's not science.

The pracice of magic an external action which can be measured, tested, and examined. A shaman, hermetic, wujen, and hougan can spend their days analyzing the effects and consequences of magic in action. They don't have to think their magic comse from the sun or a mysterious chrome god. They can hold varying opinions of the subjective aspect of life and still do science.

Renewed hermeticism claims to be doing science, but they are not. They appear to be just another group who have a collective mythos as to the why of magic. Good for them, that's great, but they shouldn't be calling themselves scientists.

[Ellery]

The scientific method is just a rigorous way to pay attention to reality. The cases where other methods are useful (subjective, intuitive, or whatever you want to call them) are typically cases where it's difficult to apply the rigor that the scientific method calls for.

In the case of magic, I've already given examples of how it could be studied rigorously, and specified which areas rigorous study is difficult. Neither "magic is subjective!" nor "magic is fantastic, unmeasured, and unmeasurable!" is a sensible counterargument to the claim that magic can be studied rigorously. I have given explicit examples of how one would measure magical phenomena in an objective way.

[Guest_Crimsondude 2.0_*]

[blakkie]

By your reasoning beauty is objective as well. I see something beautiful to me. I pop wood. A light on a strain gauge installed earlier blinks on. Presto, beauty is objective?

[Eyeless Blond]