Game of Thrones and Philosophy
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10. Martin, A Game of Thrones, p. 11.
11. Keep in mind that the Others and the wights are not the same. The Others are a demon race who can reanimate corpses; the animated corpses are the wights. The Others can be killed by dragonglass, but not by fire, while the opposite is true of the wights. Adding to the confusion is that the wildlings often refer to the Others as “White Walkers.”
12. Think of it this way: The laws of nature aren’t “added on” after the fact to objects, like, say, the laws of chess (or I could’ve said cyvasse). You can take a chess piece and use it in some other way (as a paperweight, for example) where it’s no longer obeying the laws of chess. But you can’t do the same for water, or for a particular brain state.
13. Martin, A Game of Thrones, p. 565.
Chapter 10
MAGIC, SCIENCE, AND METAPHYSICS IN A GAME OF THRONES
Edward Cox
In Westeros and beyond, before the beginning of A Game of Thrones, magic has been disappearing.1 The dragons, the children of the forest, and the Others are gone. They live only in tales told to the young. In this way Westeros is like our world. There seems to be little place for magic or the supernatural in our world, and even the long-held belief in immaterial souls is threatened by the advance of physical science. Yet magic returns to Westeros. Part of the appeal of fantasy in general, and A Game of Thrones in particular, is the idea that there might be room left in the world for a sense of wonder, for things that escape the net of explanation in terms of the physical sciences. There is room in our world for the wonders of science. But is there room for the wonder of magic, or at least for nonphysical things?
Let’s Get Physical
Physicalism is the philosophical view that there are only physical things. Is physicalism true, or are there ghosts, immaterial souls, or other nonphysical things? These are questions of metaphysics—questions about the fundamental nature of reality. Science can help us answer such questions. A fantasy novel can’t give us answers, but it can help us imagine ways in which the world might differ if physicalism were to be false.
So let us reason like maesters and begin by getting clear on our concepts. A more precise definition of physicalism includes two ideas. First, everything that exists is physical. That means there are no immaterial souls, minds, or vital forces. Second, everything about the world depends on arrangements of this physical stuff. It may not be obvious why this second claim is necessary for a statement of physicalism, so consider this example: Imagine that there are two people who are completely physically identical. When speaking of duplicates, I do not mean twins, but physical duplicates down to the exact arrangement of the molecules making up their bodies. According to the first of the two statements of physicalism, these two bodies won’t be made up of any nonphysical parts, but it is still possible that they could differ in other ways. For example, one exact duplicate might be happy while the other is sad, or one could be conscious and the other asleep. If only the first part of the statement of physicalism were true, some features, or properties, as philosophers call them, of the world might differ without there being any difference in the physical stuff that makes them up. The second claim, that everything about the world is determined by the arrangement of physical stuff in it, emphasizes the dependence of everything on the physical world. For one identical person to be happy and the other sad, there would have to be a corresponding difference in their brain chemistry; they could not have identical atoms in all the same locations while being in a different mental state.
Now that we have a definition of physicalism, we can try to decide whether it is true in our world or in Westeros. One way of trying to show that physicalism is true is by arguing that only physical things could have any effect. Consider, therefore, these two statements:
1. For something to exist, it must have an effect of some kind.
2. Every physical effect has only a physical cause.
Before trying to decide whether these claims are true, we should show how they support physicalism. Let’s start by considering what must be the case for something to be a cause, to have any effect at all. For something to have an effect, it must either have a physical effect or a nonphysical effect. So, when Jaime Lannister pushes Bran out the window of the First Keep in Winterfell, perhaps ironically, he attributes his action to his love for Cersei.2 According to our statement 2, if Jaime’s love causes the physical damage to Bran’s body, by means of his physical pushing and Bran’s physical body falling, then Jaime’s love must be a physical state, presumably some brain state. So, if the first alternative is true, that Jaime’s love causes a physical effect, then that emotion must itself be physical as well.
On the other hand, we might think that Jaime’s brain state causes the physical pushing, the physical falling, and ultimately the physical damage to Bran’s body, but Jaime’s love is something else, something nonphysical. Then, we might ask, if Jaime’s love is not a physical state of his brain, what is there for it to do? The only remaining possibility appears to be that it has some nonphysical effect. For instance, it might affect some nonphysical state of Bran’s. But how this would work is a mystery.
It seems more likely that, given what we know through empirical studies, anything that affected Bran’s nonphysical mind—assuming for the moment that there are such things—would have to do it by affecting his brain. We know that our conscious experiences, for example, are affected by drugs, alcohol, and blows to the head; our mental states are altered by the chemical changes that occur in our brains. So in our example, assuming that Bran’s mind is nonphysical, if Jaime’s love is to have an effect on it, we can best explain this by describing how it affects Bran’s brain. We would then be left to conclude either that Jaime’s love did nothing (which is ruled out by statement 1), or that it somehow affected Bran’s brain. But, by statement 2, for Jaime’s love to have that physical effect, it must be physical. Therefore, love, and everything else, has to be physical.
Philosophers are a contentious bunch, and not all of them agree with every assertion from the previous paragraph, but we can use some illustrations from A Game of Thrones to see why those assertions are nonetheless likely to be true. Let’s start with the idea that everything that exists has to have an effect. The reason to think this claim is true is that if something existed and had no effect, we would have no reason to believe in it. For example, one of the reasons Maester Luwin believes the Children of the Forest no longer exist is that they never seem to do anything. No one in the Seven Kingdoms has seen the Children of the Forest or been affected by them in any way for thousands of years. It is the fact that they don’t do anything that leads people to doubt whether they are real. Admittedly, we are assuming that to know something or to have reason to believe in something, it would have to have an effect. While there might be other ways of knowing, if we tried to imagine something that not only did not do anything but could not do anything at all, we would have to wonder why anyone would believe in it. We could never disprove the existence of something that never does anything, but its existence would be completely unknowable. So statement 1 looks like a reasonable thing to believe.
The main reason to believe statement 2 has to do with the success of science in explaining the world in physical terms. And we also have reason to believe the second part of our definition of physicalism—that everything that happens in the world depends on the arrangement of the underlying physical stuff that makes it up—based on the perceived authority of the physical sciences. That means we should talk a little about what science is and how it can tell us about reality.
Science, in the actual world, can tell us a lot about what sorts of things exist and what sorts of things do not exist. In fantasy novels such as A Game of Thrones, magic limits the possibility of comprehensively explaining everything in terms of physical things and forces, and the laws governing them. Fantasy novels show different ways things could be, and the happenings in Westeros can serve to expand our view of the way things are, and the wa
ys in which these things relate to one another.
Science in A Game of Thrones
There is an organized system of knowledge of the natural world in A Game of Thrones, but it is not a topic much discussed in the books. The maesters, the closest equivalent to scientists in Westeros, are highly respected as knowledgeable advisers to rulers. Each maester is a generalist, with knowledge of medicine, politics, engineering, and warfare. The maesters’ expertise is practical, but to have such applied knowledge, they must have theoretical knowledge underlying it.
Although not all of the science in George R. R. Martin’s world resembles that of our world, the maesters’ knowledge shows that some of it does. For example, the maesters know to boil wine to clean wounds, and so it is likely that there are microorganisms that cause infections in Martin’s world.3 In addition, the maesters’ understanding of physical forces allows them to construct the Wall and the elaborate pulley system that brings people and goods into the Eyrie.4 So there are likely to be laws of motion and physical force much like our own.
There also appear to be biological units, perhaps genes, that explain the heritability of physical characteristics. For example, by reading The Lineages and Histories of the Great Houses of the Seven Kingdoms, With Descriptions of Many High Lords and Noble Ladies and Their Children,5 and following up on Robert Baratheon’s bastard children, Eddard Stark discovers that the Baratheons always give birth to black-haired children. “Always [Stark] found the gold yielding before the coal.”6 This indicates that something at least similar to actual-world genetics operates in Westeros.7 In a similar vein, we see that children of the Starks and Tullys inherit coloration and facial structure from one side of the family or the other. Indeed, we discover that some of the Starks—for example, Arya Stark, Jon Snow, and Lyanna Stark, Eddard’s sister—have longer faces than other members of the family.8 These facts suggest there are units of inheritance that offspring take from their parents and that these units explain how traits are passed down from one generation to the next.
It is even possible that some of what the inhabitants believe to be sorcery might simply be advanced technology. The folded steel of Valyrian blades, reputed to be the product of sorcery, may be simply the result of advanced sword-making techniques such as those practiced by medieval Japanese swordsmiths.9 These scientific and technological facts suggest a world operating in many respects according to the same principles and made up of the same constituents as our own. If this evidence were all that was available, we might conclude that physicalism was true in Westeros.
Magic and Causation
These examples show that there is some reason to think that all the features of Westeros are determined by arrangements of physical stuff. The more complete scientific explanations in terms of physics, chemistry, and biology become, the more likely it is that the world depends on these physical things. However, magic might limit these scientific explanations and show how things could have different effects even if all the arrangements of physical stuff were the same.
We now come to the evidence for the principle that everything depends on the constituents of the physical world. What would it mean for some of the features of the world not to depend on the arrangements of physical stuff underlying them? It would mean that a change could occur without any change occurring in the physical stuff. That does not seem plausible, and one illustration from A Game of Thrones can help show this.
When Jafer Flowers and Othor are reanimated and attack the Night’s Watch, their bodies appear to undergo some sort of physical transformation in order for them to be animate. It is very unlikely that something could be physically exactly the same as a corpse and act as Dead Othor did. Put simply, corpses cannot walk, see, or be cut into pieces and continue to fight. Given the ordinary physical, chemical composition of a human body, there does not seem any way that it could do these things while in the same physical state as ordinary dead matter. We do indeed find this to be the case given the physical differences between their bodies and other, more normal corpses. As Samwell Tarly notes, the bodies of Dead Othor and Flowers do not smell like other bodies and have not decayed as ordinary flesh would.10 In order for them to be reanimated, it appears there must be some change in the underlying material structure or organization of their physical bodies. Another way of putting this idea is that Dead Othor and Flowers cannot be wights, or the walking dead, without some change in their physical bodies. If you recall, this is the second part of our definition of physicalism, that every feature of the world depends on arrangements of physical stuff.11
Let’s now see what support there is for our statement 2, that every physical effect has a physical cause. If statement 2 is true, then given what’s been argued so far, physicalism seems to be true as well. So, what reason is there to think that this principle is true?
In our world, statement 2 is supported by achievements in the physical sciences. As scientists discovered laws of physics, chemistry, biology, and the neurosciences that appeared to explain events independent of immaterial minds, souls, or life forces, it suggested that nothing outside the physical could have any effect on the physical world. The physical sciences seem to provide complete explanations for the events in our world. But what would a world in which the physical sciences were not complete in this way be like?
Science and Magic in Westeros
In Westeros, magic limits the methods of science in discovering the truth. Maester Luwin, the maester of Winterfell, believes there is no magic, and that the children of the forest, and the Others, no longer exist.12 The science of the maesters is actually quite useful, and the maesters themselves, given the evidence available to them, might reasonably believe that by following scientific principles, they will eventually discover all the facts about the world around them. But in Westeros, science fails to perceive certain important aspects of reality in that world, in particular, the existence of magic. Magic is based on apparently unrepeatable events or phenomena and would thus forever escape discovery by the maesters’ science.
For example, Daenerys’s perception of warmth in her dragon eggs is not available to others. She feels them as warm, nearly hot, and comes to believe that they are ready to hatch if they can be placed in a hot enough fire; but Ser Jorah Mormont attests that the eggs feel cool to the touch.13 In another case, Bran’s mystical perception, his ability to see things far distant in his dreams, is not available to anyone else. Yet we know these are not mere dreams because he sees his mother on a ship in the Bite, Sansa crying herself to sleep, and other things that he could not have otherwise known.14 The fact that both Bran and Rickon Stark dream that their father has returned suggests that some real knowledge has been given to them, magically.15 Their knowledge is real, but until the raven arrives with news of Eddard Stark’s death, not everyone could know it. Although the effects of magic sometimes become public knowledge, some aspects of magical occurrences remain private.
The elusive nature of these magical events raises the question of whether supernatural events could occur in our world. Given the inability of science to discover phenomena that are perceivable by only one individual, there might be magic in our world that cannot be discovered by scientific means. Evidence can never disprove the existence of this kind of magical occurrence. But until someone can demonstrate the reality of such events, it would not be wise to believe in them until they have publicly discernible effects.
It is not necessary that magic be unpredictable or incomprehensible. In some fantasy worlds, supernatural entities are discoverable and explainable using scientific methods. Magic in such a world consists of perfectly comprehensible forces or supernatural agencies that operate according to general principles and laws. In Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series,16 the One Power operates in predictable ways according to principles that can be used to explain and predict events in the world; in Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind,17 at least some magic follows rules that one can learn and apply in a laboratory. The most extreme form of a sc
ientifically comprehensible system of magic is the world Lyndon Hardy, a physicist, depicted in his novel Master of the Five Magics.18 These fantasy worlds differ from ours not so much because they cannot be understood scientifically, but because they reveal different fundamental forces at play in those universes. Science may reveal a reality in our world that is purely physical, but the reality that science discovers in other worlds might be quite different.
Magic and Metaphysics
What, then, does magic have to do with the nature of reality? There are only a few explanations for how magic works. It might be that magic simply alters the laws of physics without adding nonphysical forces or things. However, I think that if magic is a force or feature of the world, then it has to be a nonphysical one. If magic were physical, then it would have to follow the laws of physics. One possibility is that magic is governed by a different set of physical laws without additional forces, and thus there would be no need for anything nonphysical. But a world with different physical laws would not necessarily be a world with magic. Magic, I think, involves some violation of physical laws, and some kind of nonphysical thing.19
Just as people once thought that there were vital forces—basic life forces that could not be explained in terms of anything physical—magic might involve nonphysical forces that operate directly on the physical world. Or, magical principles might change some basic physical principles or laws of nature. Thus magic would produce a change in the physical world by something not fully explainable in physical terms.