Now here’s the question—and yes, it is a little unkind, but I think it needs to be asked: Presumably most readers of these novels see themselves in the protagonist’s shoes, fantasizing about their own acquisition of sorcery. Wishing for magic. And, barring improbable demographics, most readers of these novels are not scientists.
Born into a world of science, they did not become scientists. What makes them think that, in a world of magic, they would act any differently?
If they don’t have the scientific attitude, that nothing is “mere”—the capacity to be interested in merely real things—how will magic help them? If they actually had magic, it would be merely real, and lose the charm of unattainability. They might be excited at first, but (like the lottery winners who, six months later, aren’t nearly as happy as they expected to be), the excitement would soon wear off. Probably as soon as they had to actually study spells.
Unless they can find the capacity to take joy in things that are merely real. To be just as excited by hang-gliding, as riding a dragon; to be as excited by making a light with electricity, as by making a light with magic . . . even if it takes a little study . . .
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not dissing dragons. Who knows, we might even create some, one of these days.
But if you don’t have the capacity to enjoy hang-gliding even though it is merely real, then as soon as dragons turn real, you’re not going to be any more excited by dragons than you are by hang-gliding.
Do you think you would prefer living in the Future, to living in the present? That’s a quite understandable preference. Things do seem to be getting better over time.
But don’t forget that this is the Future, relative to the Dark Ages of a thousand years earlier. You have opportunities undreamt-of even by kings.
If the trend continues, the Future might be a very fine place indeed in which to live. But if you do make it to the Future, what you find, when you get there, will be another Now. If you don’t have the basic capacity to enjoy being in a Now—if your emotional energy can only go into the Future, if you can only hope for a better tomorrow—then no amount of passing time can help you.
(Yes, in the Future there could be a pill that fixes the emotional problem of always looking to the Future. I don’t think this invalidates my basic point, which is about what sort of pills we should want to take.)
Matthew C., commenting on Less Wrong, seems very excited about an informally specified “theory” by Rupert Sheldrake which “explains” such non-explanation-demanding phenomena as protein folding and snowflake symmetry. But why isn’t Matthew C. just as excited about, say, Special Relativity? Special Relativity is actually known to be a law, so why isn’t it even more exciting? The advantage of becoming excited about a law already known to be true, is that you know your excitement will not be wasted.
If Sheldrake’s theory were accepted truth taught in elementary schools, Matthew C. wouldn’t care about it. Or why else is Matthew C. fascinated by that one particular law which he believes to be a law of physics, more than all the other laws?
The worst catastrophe you could visit upon the New Age community would be for their rituals to start working reliably, and for UFOs to actually appear in the skies. What would be the point of believing in aliens, if they were just there, and everyone else could see them too? In a world where psychic powers were merely real, New Agers wouldn’t believe in psychic powers, any more than anyone cares enough about gravity to believe in it. (Except for scientists, of course.)
Why am I so negative about magic? Would it be wrong for magic to exist?
I’m not actually negative on magic. Remember, I occasionally try to write fantasy stories. But I’m annoyed with this psychology that, if it were born into a world where spells and potions did work, would pine away for a world where household goods were abundantly produced by assembly lines.
Part of binding yourself to reality, on an emotional as well as intellectual level, is coming to terms with the fact that you do live here. Only then can you see this, your world, and whatever opportunities it holds out for you, without wishing your sight away.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I’ve found no lack of dragons to fight, or magics to master, in this world of my birth. If I were transported into one of those fantasy novels, I wouldn’t be surprised to find myself studying the forbidden ultimate sorcery—
—because why should being transported into a magical world change anything? It’s not where you are, it’s who you are.
So remember the Litany Against Being Transported Into An Alternate Universe:
If I’m going to be happy anywhere,
Or achieve greatness anywhere,
Or learn true secrets anywhere,
Or save the world anywhere,
Or feel strongly anywhere,
Or help people anywhere,
I may as well do it in reality.
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1. Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad (London: Corgi Books, 1992).
206
Mundane Magic
I think that part of the rationalist ethos is binding yourself emotionally to an absolutely lawful reductionistic universe—a universe containing no supernatural things such as souls or magic—and pouring all your hope and all your care into that merely real universe and its possibilities, without disappointment.
There’s an old trick for combating dukkha where you make a list of things you’re grateful for, like a roof over your head.
So why not make a list of abilities you have that would be amazingly cool if they were magic, or if only a few chosen individuals had them?
For example, suppose that instead of one eye, you possessed a magical second eye embedded in your forehead. And this second eye enabled you to see into the third dimension—so that you could somehow tell how far away things were—where an ordinary eye would see only a two-dimensional shadow of the true world. Only the possessors of this ability can accurately aim the legendary distance-weapons that kill at ranges far beyond a sword, or use to their fullest potential the shells of ultrafast machinery called “cars.”
“Binocular vision” would be too light a term for this ability. We’ll only appreciate it once it has a properly impressive name, like Mystic Eyes of Depth Perception.
So here’s a list of some of my favorite magical powers:
Vibratory Telepathy. By transmitting invisible vibrations through the very air itself, two users of this ability can share thoughts. As a result, Vibratory Telepaths can form emotional bonds much deeper than those possible to other primates.
Psychometric Tracery. By tracing small fine lines on a surface, the Psychometric Tracer can leave impressions of emotions, history, knowledge, even the structure of other spells. This is a higher level than Vibratory Telepathy as a Psychometric Tracer can share the thoughts of long-dead Tracers who lived thousands of years earlier. By reading one Tracery and inscribing another simultaneously, Tracers can duplicate Tracings; and these replicated Tracings can even contain the detailed pattern of other spells and magics. Thus, the Tracers wield almost unimaginable power as magicians; but Tracers can get in trouble trying to use complicated Traceries that they could not have Traced themselves.
Multidimensional Kinesis. With simple, almost unthinking acts of will, the Kinetics can cause extraordinarily complex forces to flow through small tentacles and into any physical object within touching range—not just pushes, but combinations of pushes at many points that can effectively apply torques and twists. The Kinetic ability is far subtler than it first appears: they use it not only to wield existing objects with martial precision, but also to apply forces that sculpt objects into forms more suitable for Kinetic wielding. They even create tools that extend the power of their Kinesis and enable them to sculpt ever-finer and ever-more-complicated tools, a positive feedback loop fully as impressive as it sounds.
The Eye. The user of this ability can perceive infinitesimal traveling twists in the Force that binds matter—tiny vibrations, akin to the li
fe-giving power of the Sun that falls on leaves, but far more subtle. A bearer of the Eye can sense objects far beyond the range of touch using the tiny disturbances they make in the Force. Mountains many days travel away can be known to them as if within arm’s reach. According to the bearers of the Eye, when night falls and sunlight fails, they can sense huge fusion fires burning at unthinkable distances—though no one else has any way of verifying this. Possession of a single Eye is said to make the bearer equivalent to royalty.
And finally,
The Ultimate Power. The user of this ability contains a smaller, imperfect echo of the entire universe, enabling them to search out paths through probability to any desired future. If this sounds like a ridiculously powerful ability, you’re right—game balance goes right out the window with this one. Extremely rare among life forms, it is the sekai no ougi or “hidden technique of the world.” Nothing can oppose the Ultimate Power except the Ultimate Power. Any less-than-ultimate Power will simply be “comprehended” by the Ultimate and disrupted in some inconceivable fashion, or even absorbed into the Ultimates’ own power base. For this reason the Ultimate Power is sometimes called the “master technique of techniques” or the “trump card that trumps all other trumps.” The more powerful Ultimates can stretch their “comprehension” across galactic distances and aeons of time, and even perceive the bizarre laws of the hidden “world beneath the world.”
Ultimates have been killed by immense natural catastrophes, or by extremely swift surprise attacks that give them no chance to use their power. But all such victories are ultimately a matter of luck—it does not confront the Ultimates on their own probability-bending level, and if they survive they will begin to bend Time to avoid future attacks.
But the Ultimate Power itself is also dangerous, and many Ultimates have been destroyed by their own powers—falling into one of the flaws in their imperfect inner echo of the world.
Stripped of weapons and armor and locked in a cell, an Ultimate is still one of the most dangerous life-forms on the planet. A sword can be broken and a limb can be cut off, but the Ultimate Power is “the power that cannot be removed without removing you.”
Perhaps because this connection is so intimate, the Ultimates regard one who loses their Ultimate Power permanently—without hope of regaining it—as schiavo, or “dead while breathing.” The Ultimates argue that the Ultimate Power is so important as to be a necessary part of what makes a creature an end in itself, rather than a means. The Ultimates even insist that anyone who lacks the Ultimate Power cannot begin to truly comprehend the Ultimate Power, and hence, cannot understand why the Ultimate Power is morally important—a suspiciously self-serving argument.
The users of this ability form an absolute aristocracy and treat all other life forms as their pawns.
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207
The Beauty of Settled Science
Facts do not need to be unexplainable to be beautiful; truths do not become less worth learning if someone else knows them; beliefs do not become less worthwhile if many others share them . . .
. . . and if you only care about scientific issues that are controversial, you will end up with a head stuffed full of garbage.
The media thinks that only the cutting edge of science is worth reporting on. How often do you see headlines like “General Relativity Still Governing Planetary Orbits” or “Phlogiston Theory Remains False”? So, by the time anything is solid science, it is no longer a breaking headline. “Newsworthy” science is often based on the thinnest of evidence and wrong half the time—if it were not on the uttermost fringes of the scientific frontier, it would not be breaking news.
Scientific controversies are problems so difficult that even people who’ve spent years mastering the field can still fool themselves. That’s what makes for the heated arguments that attract all the media attention.
Worse, if you aren’t in the field and part of the game, controversies aren’t even fun.
Oh, sure, you can have the fun of picking a side in an argument. But you can get that in any football game. That’s not what the fun of science is about.
Reading a well-written textbook, you get: Carefully phrased explanations for incoming students, math derived step by step (where applicable), plenty of experiments cited as illustration (where applicable), test problems on which to display your new mastery, and a reasonably good guarantee that what you’re learning is actually true.
Reading press releases, you usually get: Fake explanations that convey nothing except the delusion of understanding of a result that the press release author didn’t understand and that probably has a better-than-even chance of failing to replicate.
Modern science is built on discoveries, built on discoveries, built on discoveries, and so on, all the way back to people like Archimedes, who discovered facts like why boats float, that can make sense even if you don’t know about other discoveries. A good place to start traveling that road is at the beginning.
Don’t be embarrassed to read elementary science textbooks, either. If you want to pretend to be sophisticated, go find a play to sneer at. If you just want to have fun, remember that simplicity is at the core of scientific beauty.
And thinking you can jump right into the frontier, when you haven’t learned the settled science, is like . . .
. . . like trying to climb only the top half of Mount Everest (which is the only part that interests you) by standing at the base of the mountain, bending your knees, and jumping really hard (so you can pass over the boring parts).
Now I’m not saying that you should never pay attention to scientific controversies. If 40% of oncologists think that white socks cause cancer, and the other 60% violently disagree, this is an important fact to know.
Just don’t go thinking that science has to be controversial to be interesting.
Or, for that matter, that science has to be recent to be interesting. A steady diet of science news is bad for you: You are what you eat, and if you eat only science reporting on fluid situations, without a solid textbook now and then, your brain will turn to liquid.
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208
Amazing Breakthrough Day: April 1st
So you’re thinking, “April 1st . . . isn’t that already supposed to be April Fool’s Day?”
Yes—and that will provide the ideal cover for celebrating Amazing Breakthrough Day.
As I argued in The Beauty of Settled Science, it is a major problem that media coverage of science focuses only on breaking news. Breaking news, in science, occurs at the furthest fringes of the scientific frontier, which means that the new discovery is often:
Controversial;
Supported by only one experiment;
Way the heck more complicated than an ordinary mortal can handle, and requiring lots of prerequisite science to understand, which is why it wasn’t solved three centuries ago;
Later shown to be wrong.
People never get to see the solid stuff, let alone the understandable stuff, because it isn’t breaking news.
On Amazing Breakthrough Day, I propose, journalists who really care about science can report—under the protective cover of April 1st—such important but neglected science stories as:
BOATS EXPLAINED: Centuries-Old Problem Solved By Bathtub Nudist
YOU SHALL NOT CROSS! Königsberg Tourists’ Hopes Dashed
ARE YOUR LUNGS ON Fire? Link Between Respiration And Combustion Gains Acceptance Among Scientists
Note that every one of these headlines are true—they describe events that did, in fact, happen. They just didn’t happen yesterday.
There have been many humanly understandable amazing breakthroughs in the history of science, that can be understood without a PhD or even a BSc. The operative word here is history. Think of Archimedes’s “Eureka!” when he understood the relation between the water a ship displaces, and the reason the ship floats. This is far enough back in scientific history that you don’t need to know fifty other discoveries to understand the theo
ry; it can be explained in a couple of graphs; anyone can see how it’s useful; and the confirming experiments can be duplicated in your own bathtub.
Modern science is built on discoveries built on discoveries built on discoveries and so on all the way back to Archimedes. Reporting science only as breaking news is like wandering into a movie three-fourths of the way through, writing a story about “Bloody-handed man kisses girl holding gun!” and wandering back out again.
And if your editor says, “Oh, but our readers won’t be interested in that—”
Then point out that Reddit and Digg don’t link only to breaking news. They also link to short webpages that give good explanations of old science. Readers vote it up, and that should tell you something. Explain that if your newspaper doesn’t change to look more like Reddit, you’ll have to start selling drugs to make payroll. Editors love to hear that sort of thing, right?
On the Internet, a good new explanation of old science is news and it spreads like news. Why couldn’t the science sections of newspapers work the same way? Why isn’t a new explanation worth reporting on?
But all this is too visionary for a first step. For now, let’s just see if any journalists out there pick up on Amazing Breakthrough Day, where you report on some understandable science breakthrough as though it had just occurred.
April 1st. Put it on your calendar.
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209
Is Humanism a Religion Substitute?
For many years before the Wright Brothers, people dreamed of flying with magic potions. There was nothing irrational about the raw desire to fly. There was nothing tainted about the wish to look down on a cloud from above. Only the “magic potions” part was irrational.
Rationality- From AI to Zombies Page 84