 Hemetics cost to much |
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 Apr 11 2005, 06:16 AM
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#51
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Immoral Elf  Group: Members Posts: 15,247 Joined: 29-March 02 From: Grimy Pete's Bar & Laundromat Member No.: 2,486  |
Because Psions are also manipulating the world through mana, but are deluding themselves by thinking that that are not, and merely using their minds. Since they are placing a self-imposed limitation on their abilities, this should be reflected somehow. |
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Apr 11 2005, 06:24 AM
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#52
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Midnight Toker Group: Members Posts: 7,686 Joined: 4-July 04 From: Zombie Drop Bear Santa's Workshop Member No.: 6,456 |
Really, if you changed the term "mana" to "universal psychic energy waves" everything about magic is perfectly compatable with psionics.
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Apr 11 2005, 06:26 AM
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#53
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Immoral Elf Group: Members Posts: 15,247 Joined: 29-March 02 From: Grimy Pete's Bar & Laundromat Member No.: 2,486 |
My point is that other magical traditions acknowledge an outside influence when it comes to magic. Doing so allows them the leeway to accomplish more than would be possible for those that think they are just using the power of their minds.
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Apr 11 2005, 06:31 AM
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#54
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Moving Target Group: Members Posts: 351 Joined: 17-February 05 Member No.: 7,093 |
Hermetics acknowledge and outside influence? One that can't be ascribed to the Universal Unconscious, or 'Universal psychic energy waves' as hyzmarca suggested?
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Apr 11 2005, 06:37 AM
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#55
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Decker on the Threshold Group: Dumpshocked Posts: 2,922 Joined: 14-March 04 Member No.: 6,156 |
Even worse are the shamans, who think that they're not even the ones doing magic, but it's just their totem doing it all and they're asking *it* to do magic. Should they be penalized too?
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Apr 11 2005, 06:53 AM
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#56
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Immoral Elf Group: Members Posts: 15,247 Joined: 29-March 02 From: Grimy Pete's Bar & Laundromat Member No.: 2,486 |
By outside influence, I am refering to the existance of magic and mana. Both Hermetics and Shamans acknowledge that magic and mana exist, though they manipulate it in different ways. Psionics refuse to admit the existance of magic and mana, or if they do accept it, refuse to acknowledge that what they do has any relationship to it. In that way, they are limiting themselves to only what they perceive to be possible using the power of their minds alone. |
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Apr 11 2005, 06:55 AM
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#57
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Immoral Elf Group: Members Posts: 15,247 Joined: 29-March 02 From: Grimy Pete's Bar & Laundromat Member No.: 2,486 |
Shamans do not think that their Totem is doing the actual magic. They may believe that their Totems influence the manner in which their magic operates, but the Shamans are still the ones that are performing the actual magic. As for being penalized, well they are. Some things are harder for certain Shamans to do, just as some are easier. Some Shamans are even proscribed from using magic, or even performing other activities, in certain ways. |
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Apr 11 2005, 08:22 AM
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#58
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Moving Target Group: Members Posts: 351 Joined: 17-February 05 Member No.: 7,093 |
Actually, Fortune, I'd suggest that it's a case-by-case basis for all of this. Hermetics don't see magic in very different terms from a mathemetician thinking of numbers, or a physicist thinking of the law of gravity. That's the Hermetic outlook, magic is like a science, so it's not some outside force influencing you, it's you influincing energy via a faculty you possess (similar to musculature, but willpower based) to produce a certain effect. The energy basis is called mana, and it is very easily converted into other types of energy by flexing that willpower muscle in certain predetermined specific ways.
Shamanism sees magic as something wholly different, and some of them likely do beleive that their totem is the one doing the magic for them. Look at 'Miracle' magic. It's not heavily penelized for them thinking that they're just a 'conduit' for some higher being. This isn't magic, they don't think there's mana, yet they do it anyway. A Psionicist would work just like any other magician, maybe more like a shaman to reflect their focus on mental stuff. They beleive that by using a willpower-based faculty in certain specific, predetermined ways, they can produce effects in the world by manipulating some form of ambient psychic energy that mainstream media just likes to call 'mana'. To a psionicist, EVERY magic user is a psionicist, they just refuse to acknowledge it in favor of some mystical mumbo-jumbo. The hermetics are just a little closer to the truth than the shamans, but still deluded by fantasy novels and childish imaginings. Magicians, of course, see psionicists as magicians who deny what they're doing is magic. See where we're going here? We say it's magic because it looks like magic, but it doesn't have to be magic. And magic, by any other name, can still lightning-bolt your ass. |
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Apr 11 2005, 08:59 AM
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#59
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Mr. Johnson Group: Dumpshocked Posts: 2,587 Joined: 25-January 05 From: Berkeley, CA Member No.: 7,014 |
Of course, this depends on each particular Hermetic mage. There are some Hermetics who literally think of magic like numbers (Pythagoreans), and some Hermetics who are like violinists (People who recognize the reproducible scientific principles behind their production of "music", but see their "performance" of magic as a very real and personal artform). The majority of Hermetics will see magic as a science, and there are some who are wrapped up in the trappings of academia (Renewed Hermeticism... compare to the modern lab researcher), some who believe in the traditions and empiric science of old (Classic Hermeticism... compare to Aristotleans and the observational science done by field workers), and some who are more "open-minded" scientists (Unified Magic Theory... compare to Steven Jay Gould, anthropologists, and other philosophy-heavy fields). As far as shamans, I'm sure there are many that believe that magic is reproducible, that repeated "experiments" will produce the same results, and that science as a whole is valid. Not all shamans are stuck with a "personal relationship with Jesus Chr... erm, I mean, Owl." Many choose religious trappings, some choose an adversarial "Id-Ego-Superego"-type relationship with their totem (the totem is both the angel AND devil on the shoulder), some even think of their totems as simply ineffable nebulous beings that are far away and have somehow granted them powers, and that's as far as their relationship goes. There's a lot of leeway when determining how magic and the character interrelate, and it is a major part of an Awakened character's development. |
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Apr 11 2005, 09:21 AM
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#60
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Moving Target Group: Members Posts: 351 Joined: 17-February 05 Member No.: 7,093 |
Exactly
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Apr 11 2005, 09:30 AM
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#61
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Moving Target Group: Members Posts: 778 Joined: 6-April 05 Member No.: 7,298 |
As a scientist, I object strenuously to classifying Hermetics as scientists. They most assuredly are not portrayed that way, even though it is suggested they should be scientific in outlook. Hermetics, as described in various sourcebooks, are much more akin to philosophers and 20th century psychologists. There are hypotheses and factions and various different world views and so on. Look at all the incompatible views listed in the European Magic section of SotA:64! This is very reminiscent of the divisions between consequentialists and rule-based moralists, between Freudians and non-, and so on. Magic shouldn't be inaccessible to scientific inquiry--it's right there, to be experimented with, and given that we as players have rules about how magic works, presumably there are rules to be discovered, and presumably academic magicians at universities all across the Sixth World are making these discoveries and publishing their findings. And when a hypothesis is shown to be powerful and useful for predicting observations and the outcome of experiments, then scientific hermetics would essentially all provisionally accept it without quarrel. It just doesn't show up in the sourcebooks that way. So I assume that Hermetic mages are, for the most part, actually more like academics in the arts, humanities, and social sciences--they have a mathematically-inspired set of descriptions for their magic, but they're not actually using that mathematics to power their spells (otherwise you'd require a mathematics knowledge skill to be a Hermetic mage). It's just an analogy. I'd love to see a treatment of the scientific side of magic somewhere, at some point. But if the authors don't have a strong background in the experimental sciences, they're probably going to miss the point and sound like a bad stereotype; it's hard to write about something you don't know. So for the time being, I'm happy with only seeing the arts and humanities side of academic magic. One more thing:
Not all uses of the mind are equal. A martial artist uses their mind to control their limbs to hurt people in much more efficient and deadly ways than an average untrained person does--even one who has gotten into a number of fights. Someone who meditates is typically better at calming their mind and body than someone who just takes a deep breath and repeats "everything's okay!" to themselves as fast as they can. The crawl is a more efficient stroke for swimming than the butterfly. Similarly, the psionic moniker doesn't work as well, apparently, for getting the brain to do whatever it needs to do to cause a spell to be cast. |
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Apr 11 2005, 09:59 AM
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#62
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Mr. Johnson Group: Dumpshocked Posts: 2,587 Joined: 25-January 05 From: Berkeley, CA Member No.: 7,014 |
Keep in mind that much of what is "seen" in the sourcebooks is what the average Shadowrunner on the streets see. They don't see the theoretical hermetic mundanes who do groundbreaking work in theory that that they can neither observe nor experiment on. They don't see the academic mages who write papers on "Effects of Sorcery Manipulation on a field of Gravitons: Initial trials using the Hardinger method" or for a more canon title, "On the Relationship between Mana and Nuclear Energy". Also, the Paradigm section in SOTA:2064 deals with all of the factions of Hermeticism that are NOT Renewed Hermeticism... the Aristotleans, the empiric observers, the math whizzes, etc. The whackos, basically (although they are whackos with Big Guns™). The classic "egghead" mage (not to be confused with Classical Hermeticism) is someone who writes grant proposals to the government or corporation, repeats experiments on some arcane (both meanings) hypothesis, types up an abstract, cites his sources and methods, and then publishes his results, hoping to get a nod from a prominent journal. This is also the hermetic that DOESN'T get a spotlight in Shadowrun, simply because it's so plainly divorced from the style of roleplaying that Shadowrun offers. We don't play roleplaying games to be nuclear physicists... we play roleplaying games to shoot high-powered weapons and drop nukes.
This is actually explicitly stated that way in SOTA:2064, in the form of Renewed Hermeticism (the paradigm that the majority of North America and corporations practice). But the paradigm section shows all of the paths that are NOT Renewed Hermeticism. |
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Apr 11 2005, 10:15 AM
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#63
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Decker on the Threshold Group: Dumpshocked Posts: 2,922 Joined: 14-March 04 Member No.: 6,156 |
Ah, but the ones you describe *are* scientists; they're just not Newton-era, Age of Reason scientists. They follow the "science" of the ancient Greeks--thus why they call themselves "Hermetics" which is derived from the greek god Hermes--which is closer to the first half of the "modern" scientific method. Basically they observe and make hypotheses, but they don't make it to the experiment stage and thus don't try to conclusively prove anything. It's a really strange and disjointed concept to the real scientists of the world, but they honestly believe that the act alone of observing something determines it's validity. Anyway, I'm not suggesting that "real" magical scientists don't exist. I'm just saying that there is room in the magical community for both kinds of hermetics: the observational kind and the scientific kind. You probably just hear about the observational kind more because they're doing the stupid flashy stuff while the scientific ones are doing all the important research and development of new metamagics/theories. :)
Heh, and you don't think scientists squabble? Take a look at Albert Einstein and Neils Bohr in the 1920s-30s. They spent over a decade and a half bickering over the "correct" interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Bohr championed the famed Copenhagen Interpretation, which you are no doubt familiar with being a scientist, while Einstein detested it and refused to accept the idea, even though he couldn't come up with a counter theory (one of their debates is where his famed quote, "God does not play dice with the universe!" came from.) So yes, scientists do bicker. Not so much over the facts, but over how those facts are interpreted. (Edit): The problem, essentially, is when scientists leave the realm of readily confirmable facts they start getting into theory, and thus philosophy, and thus Holy Wars. :) And I'd hazard a guess that it's the same way in SotA '64, though I've not read the book yet. I'd really like to though; those Pythagoreans sound fascinating. :)
It sounds to me like you're saying that the difference between psionicists and other mages is trainning, that a psion is not as good a spellcaster as a mage in the same way that a random mook on the street is not as good a fighter as a trainned martial artist. That seems to ring hollow to me, because psions have the same access to Magical Skill ranks as other magic characters. Indeed, the only difference between psions and other magic users is that they believe that their powers comes from them excersizing their will on the world, as opposed to, um, their Totem working through them? But that doesn't make sense, because hermetics don't generally acknolage totems either. In fact, if you actually read some of the drivel the modern-day hermetics spew out, you see there are lots of references to "higher consciousness" and philosophies of transcendence. |
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Apr 11 2005, 10:27 AM
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#64
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Mr. Johnson Group: Dumpshocked Posts: 2,587 Joined: 25-January 05 From: Berkeley, CA Member No.: 7,014 |
One analogy that I like to compare to Hermetic Magic is Modern Medicine. Although all physicians in the US receive pretty much the same training in the accredited medical schools, not all physicians are equal. You have the academics who publish papers, perform experiments on grants, and are entirely divorced from the patient population (most of these people are MD, PhD), but whose results have far-reaching and important consequences (consider Vioxx, Bextra, and other COX-2 inhibitors). You have the ED docs and family docs who are in the trenches, treating the patient and doing practical good, sometimes going against their "training" when experience teaches them to do something better. You have the surgeons, and all the surgery subspecialties, "artists" and "craftsmen" who can do a few things, but do them well, and do such delicate work on the human body. You have the specialists, the hospitalists, the doctors who perform their work under controlled circumstances and a rotating patient population(every lab and radiology test can be considered an experiment, in a hospital). You have the pathologists, who receive the same training as family doctors and surgeons, but do work that is incredibly different. You have the forensic medical inspectors, another practical application of medicine that does not deal with patients. You also have the "fringe schools", the chiropractors, the osteopaths, and the other schools that are desperately trying to get recognition for the services that they provide, which in many cases are very similar in both effect and outcome as the "classically" trained doctor (I once worked under an osteopath family physician, and I could see no difference in the way he practiced medicine as other preceptors I've worked for).
All of these "paradigms" are part of Modern Medicine, and all of them are based in science (the fringe schools are debatable, but they do produce results). Such is the diversity of Hermetic Magic as well. |
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Apr 11 2005, 10:38 AM
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#65
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Moving Target Group: Members Posts: 158 Joined: 4-August 02 Member No.: 3,064 |
Urgh. The last thing that would benefit SR's magic system is to introduce a Wizard/Cleric divide between hermetics and shamans, *especially* one where hermetics are automatically the blat spellcasters while shamans have to be healing/protective focussed. |
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Apr 11 2005, 10:48 AM
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#66
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Moving Target Group: Members Posts: 778 Joined: 6-April 05 Member No.: 7,298 |
Eyeless, where do you get your information on the classic egghead mage if not from the sourcebooks? I've never really seen a description like the one you gave. Every time there is one sentence that suggests this, there are four more that contradict it. For example:
Let's go through all the ways in which this is non-scientific. Firstly, there's no mention of empirical testing and a search for universal truth. Second, it's a method of gaining magical power, not a method of explaining the nature of magic (although it incidentally is supposed to do that). Third, these theories are contradictory and yet still work for the mages who believe them. And fourth, it's all cultural anyway, just like with shamen. This doesn't look like much of a science to me. Maybe that's what the author thought sciences look like, but if so, I contend that they thought wrong :P hahnsoo, the analogy with medicine isn't a bad one. First, I would point out that medicine is not a science, but rather a trade. Medicine uses the results of science, but very often all it does it remember that something works without knowing why. There may be lots of theories about it (all of them probably wrong, since there are many ways to be wrong and not many ways to be correct), but the bottom line is that it works, and that's why it's done. For example, the mechanism by which SSRIs impact depression is a great mystery. But Hermetics seem to have even less agreement on what causes what than doctors do, and anyway, doctors aren't scientists. So I reiterate that I would like, eventually, to see the supposedly scientific Hermetic mages actually acting scientific. There are people who are researching the long-term changes in the brain as a result of exposure to SSRIs, in order to collapse all the theories into one correct explanation. But if magic works because mages have all these wrong theories, then the scientific thing to do is to study the relationship between belief in a theory and invocation of magic--and come up with a correct explanation that encompasses all of that. That's what the real goal is, scientifically--understanding. The goal is not to come up with your own little theory to let you use magic better. It's to explain how incorrect theories assist with magical ability, and how connections with totems do, and so on. (As well as exploring the boundaries of what is possible, classifying what effects spells have, and so on.) And I've not seen that adequately addressed in any published SR material--they just say it's science and then demonstrate why it's not. |
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Apr 11 2005, 11:11 AM
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#67
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Mr. Johnson Group: Dumpshocked Posts: 2,587 Joined: 25-January 05 From: Berkeley, CA Member No.: 7,014 |
Healing is the trade. Medicine in the science. You can do Medicine without doing an ounce of healing (think of the Nazi War Crimes... medicine without healing, there). You can practice healing without any Medicine, if you so choose. It's a profession, but it's definitely science. To say otherwise implies a lack of understanding of Modern Medicine and the way medicine is taught in the US. I hate to say outright "You're wrong," believe me. But read anything on PubMed lately, and you'll see over a billion examples of Medical science. Doctors ARE scientists, some of them primarily academic scientists, some of them purely empirical scientists who work on a case-by-case (in this case, patients) basis, some of them are more healers than scientists but still have been trained in the basic theories of medicine. I will admit, your average family physician doesn't care a lick about the science behind it, but if you give them a journal article on the Framingham study of Heart treatment, they can decipher it and understand the science. The average Hermetic mage in the context of Shadowrunning is NOT a practicing scientist, this is true, and the material written on them reflects that. But Renewed Hermeticism is science applied to magic, even if a Hermetic Mage who is blasting folks with manaballs isn't exactly applying the scientific method in all that he lives and breathes.
The majority of the people doing this research are doctors. About half of them are neurologists, and the other half are either MD PhD neurologist/neuroscience or other non-medicine fields. And try to tell me that you can get all your information about SSRIs without the help of a pathologist, who is also an MD. |
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Apr 11 2005, 11:25 AM
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#68
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Mr. Johnson Group: Dumpshocked Posts: 2,587 Joined: 25-January 05 From: Berkeley, CA Member No.: 7,014 |
Another example (but by no means, a perfect one) is the missive on pp 36-37 of SOTA: 2063, which discusses symbolic linking (edit: Or is it Severing?). It reads very much like a discussion section of a scientific paper, with sources and very limited conjecture pertaining to the topic (although all the "dry bits" were edited out according to the Shadowtalk).
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Apr 11 2005, 11:58 AM
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#69
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Decker on the Threshold Group: Dumpshocked Posts: 2,922 Joined: 14-March 04 Member No.: 6,156 |
Okay, that second part--exploring boundries--is definately something mages do; in fact the whole process of Severing from SotA '63 comes from just that, studying boundries. But the first one... how do you even start with that? You're basically trying to quantify belief, scientifically analyze religion. How do you experiment with someone's belief system, change it under controlled laboratory conditions? Is that possible? Most scientists I know--or at least people *I* think of as scientists--don't spend all or even a significant part of their time making any kind of search for universal truth. Most of them are just trying to publish their next paper, to make that little baby step to expand the body of knowledge on a given subject. You seem to have a very high-minded and narrow view of what science is, which I find slightly disturbing considering your claim of being a scientist. Personally, I'm an analytical inorganic chemist. I deal with nitty-gritty details on the analysis and classification side of things all day long, and tend to stay away from the larger all-encompasing grand unifying theories, which I leave to the crackpot physicists who wear ties and sandals when giving lectures and the even weirder philosophers who spend their non-lecturing time being one of the many crazies that mumble incoherently to themselves near Sather Gate (UC Berkeley grad here :D). It makes sense to me that many hermetics are spending less of their time trying to quantify the magic population's religious beliefs regarding their magic in some attempt to find some "Religion of Maximum Magical Potency", and are focusing more on what can actually be done with magic. But then, maybe I'm not a scientist either, so maybe I don't count. I'm just a chemist. |
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Apr 11 2005, 12:17 PM
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#70
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Mr. Johnson Group: Dumpshocked Posts: 2,587 Joined: 25-January 05 From: Berkeley, CA Member No.: 7,014 |
From SR3, the description of the Hermetic tradition:
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Apr 11 2005, 04:42 PM
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#71
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Immortal Elf Group: Members Posts: 11,410 Joined: 1-October 03 From: Pittsburgh Member No.: 5,670 |
you're misinterpreting. ell isn't talking about some kind of quasi-mystical Universal Truth. she's talking about facts and theories which are universally true, as far as can be tested. when you write those papers, do you just throw in whatever results you got the first time you ran experiment X, or do you try experiment X in circumstances A, B, and C to test your hypotheses? if you're doing the latter, you're looking for universal truths. as for how you study religion and belief, i have no idea. but the fact is, it's only ever been tried once (UMT), and even then, the results aren't universally applicable--a dog shaman can't switch to UMT and summon elementals. regardless, hermetics can't really be classified as scientists of magic, because none of them really seem to be trying to figure out where magic comes from or how it works--they seem satisfied figuring out how to perform their own style of magic, without much delving into the underlying theory. |
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Apr 11 2005, 05:37 PM
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#72
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Moving Target Group: Members Posts: 778 Joined: 6-April 05 Member No.: 7,298 |
Maybe I'm not explaining my position particularly well, or maybe people are happy to classify fly fishing as a science because some people have done scientific studies of fish behavior.
Doctors get scientific training, certainly. There are practicing doctors who simultaneously do science (e.g. who are involved in clinical trials), and there are M.D.s who do research and don't practice medicine. Treating patients is, for the most part, not particularly scientific unless you consider any place where you apply science in order to achieve an effect to be a science. The more science doctors use in their treatment of patients the better, in my opinion, since they'll get better results. The dictionary definition (Random House Unabridged) of science starts with:
I am not considering definition (7) here when deciding whether or not to grant that Hermeticism as typically defined is scientific in nature, because then you include things like golf and fly fishing and so on (and probably shamanism, in the sixth world, too). I am using the narrower definition encompassed by (1) and (2), and there is an awful lot of medicine that doesn't quite count. I was going to give some examples, but this is getting too long, and I'm not really concerned with medicine but rather with Hermeticism. (For what it's worth, Random House defines the medicine as "the art or science of restoring or preserving health", which is perfectly okay by me--my point is that there is a lot of art to it, and as an analogy to Hermeticism, we've seen in published works a lot of the art side, and not much to do with the science side.) Hermeticism fails to live up to this description as presented because it doesn't actually deal with facts or truths, at least as presented so far. It deals with what-works-for-me. That can be systematically arranged, but it's not about the operation of general laws because other Hermetics (let alone shamans) can operate with contradictory laws and they still get results. They also seem a little short on the observation and experimentation aspects of science, and rather more like philosphers when they try to come up with explanations (i.e. think about a problem a lot rather than do a bunch of experiments). Likewise, astrology fails to live up to this prediction because it doesn't appear to deal with facts or truths and is pretty short on experimental verification. Hermeticism is like astrology in its structure and detail and theories--except it does work, very obviously, even though it's not working for the reasons that the practitioners think (because they believe contradictory reasons). Note that modern astrology fits the SotA:63 description you quoted pretty well, except for the "research the laws of magic" part. But again, for every half-sentence that makes it look like there's science going on here, there are four that make it look like there isn't. ("There are nearly as many versions of these theories as there are mages.")
Eyeless, by "universal truth" I simply mean something that is not relative to belief. As a chemist, do you find that stuff works for you but not for anyone else who believes different things about chemistry? Maybe TMF is a good solvent for you, because you have a certain set of beliefs about solubility, but ethanol is better for your coworker because she has different beliefs. I don't think so! Hm, mfb seems to have done a better job explaining my point than I have. Oops. It is hard to study religion scientifically because religion isn't supposed to do anything. You don't disqualify something as a religion because its adherants can't fly, or somesuch. However, in SR, magic does do something, and that makes it eminently more testable. For example: you can't heal an injury more than once. Why not? What counts as healing? Are there any exceptions? What counts as an injury? Does what counts as an injury and healing vary between practitioners? To what state is one returned when one "heals"? In the aftermath of cosmetic surgery, is the surgery undone, or does the healing take place like normal? Etc. etc. etc.. These are all things that can be addressed experimentally in a way that is essentially independent of magical tradition. I'm sure there are Hermetics (and for that matter, shamen!) in the Sixth World who are doing just such experiments and publishing papers on the results. But I haven't actually seen much about these experiments. Can you derive magical power from them? Who knows--the topic isn't really addressed. Can you wield magical power in an analytical tradition without having to believe a bunch of untested theories that contradict other people's theories? That topic isn't addressed either. So Hermetics seem to me as though they get their power from philosophy (in the sense that their ideas are internally consistent but not necessarily strongly grounded in reality), not from science. Maybe there is a branch of Hermeticism that actually uses science, but then again, maybe not. I've not found any source material that says one way or another. So, as I said, I'd like to see these topics addressed--Street Magic or SR4 would be fine places to do it--but only if the authors have enough familiarity with the nature and practice of science, because I think the authors have tried before, but have not deeply understood the distinction between scientific knowledge and other sources of knowledge and types of thinking. |
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Apr 11 2005, 10:15 PM
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#73
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Decker on the Threshold Group: Dumpshocked Posts: 2,922 Joined: 14-March 04 Member No.: 6,156 |
That happens to be true in chemistry, but only because chemicals have an existence independent of my perception. Magic is different. Magic is in fact impossible to divorce from the thoughts and perceptions of those who practise it; magic literally does not exist in a vacum. :D This is actually why magic is difficult to analyze experimentally; you can't yet decouple magic from the humans who practise it. Thus any truly important studies into the nature of magic must necessarily deal with studying (meta)humans as individuals or groups. You end up with the same fundamental problem with experimentation that the behavioral psychologists do, whom I note you also don't believe are scientists probably for this very reason.
Again, I still think you're being too strict as to what constitutes a "pure" scientist. To ask a rhetorical question. what religion to you most identify with? If you actually have an answer to that question, including "atheist", "agnostic", or "I don't know," then you're not a scientist, at least not by the strict definition you seem to be giving. The ability to even contemplate religion as it currently stands is impossible, because the factual, purely experimental evidence in favor of any religion does not and cannot exist. Every time you go beyond pure, experimentally-proven facts you are no longer dealing with science, but rather philosophy, and at that point the "truth" becomes far less about what can be proven, but becomes what works for you personally.
Hermetics are (meta)human, just like everyone else. They will have personal philosophies that go beyond what can be scientifically proven, simpley because the body of knowledge does not--and I believe cannot, though I'm not sure if Godel's Incompleteness Theorm applies to science--describe the whole universe. Besides, who wants to read a sciencific journal about magic? How many articles have you read from the academic journal Science, for instance? Do you want them to reprint stuff like that into your game books? :) |
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Apr 11 2005, 10:29 PM
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#74
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Neophyte Runner Group: Members Posts: 2,086 Joined: 26-February 02 Member No.: 364 |
Barring of course, free spirits and critters with the sorcery power. The catch being, the scientific community's wavering stance on whether or not spirits are just the result of magically active beings subconiously imprinting their psyche on the manascape. The other catch being, would you really trust what a dragon has to tell you about the nature of magic? |
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Apr 11 2005, 10:29 PM
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#75
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Running Target Group: Members Posts: 1,032 Joined: 6-August 04 Member No.: 6,543 |
Well, it seems that the idea of fluff being important to the cost of items no longer matters...Now, let's bring up something easy, what does it mean to be human?
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Lo-Fi Version | Time is now: 9th January 2025 - 09:07 PM |
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