Mage: The Ascension, Technocracy and science

[fectin]

Michelson-Morley was looking for Aethral current. It was the nail in Aether's coffin, but wasn't used for that until much later. There were still ether experiments going on until at least the 1930s.

The Technocracy was supposed to have removed the aether from reality, but reality was already giving results consistent with a world that lacked the aether before that. That's the problem.

Michelson-Morley wasn't entirely incompatible with aether. It just showed that the world was not spinning relative to the aether at the speed it was spinning relative to the sun. That was weird, but still explainable (aether spins with the world as other fluids do, aether flows slower through denser matter, etc.).

[CCarter]

There was nothing offensive about Mage. The idea that reality is shaped according to belief is a philosophical concept and one that is kinda cool at that.

What kind of pro-intellectual idea could you come up that would be just as cool as the paradigm idea?

Also, it is my personal belief that thopught the game hardly explains it, technocratic and sleeper science cant coexist. That is, technocratic sceince wont work if enough people dont believe in it and might break down. Thats why technocrats have teleporting limos and mankind has regular cars.

I'm not sure I've got enough virulent hate to do the topic justice, but the same idea - belief reshaping reality - is one that you see IRL, particularly in people saying stuff like "god exists if you believe he does!", or people with occult interests.
If someone has that idea they lose the capacity to realize they can ever be wrong, or any interest in questioning, because they think that if they believe anything hard enough, that makes it true...its a major stepping stone to stupid, because giving it credit as a legitimate philosophy means anyone who likes the idea of never being wrong can bolster what's basically the ostrich-with-head-in-sand mental defense of "NOT LISTENING! NO YOUR RONG. I CAN't SEE hOW but YOUR RONG BUT YOU ARE! AND YOU"RE MEAN AND I HATE YOU!" by letting them quote some philosphers on the subject for legitimacy and perhaps side-track the subject into discussing Plato's influence on quantum physics or whatever, rather than actually learning anything, and perhaps make some snide digs about how much you like Ayn Rand (even though you you maybe haven't read much of her philosophy except maybe some Sword of Truth novels) since you believe that reality is actually you know, real.

...so yeah anyone who can do this rant better - go for it

[virgil]

That, and it could easily be explained as record-alteration by the Technocracy. They 'disprove' aetheric theory by fabricating evidence which supposedly existed before they decided to drop it to spite the Sons of Ether. Either that, or the earlier experiments were when aetheric theory was still young and thus not fully integrated into Sleeper society (so still not fully 'real'); they'd keep the results covered up if they hadn't decided to excise the theory from public acceptance.

[Xenologer]

The Technocracy was supposed to have removed the aether from reality, but reality was already giving results consistent with a world that lacked the aether before that. That's the problem.

Which means there must be some sort of objective reality that isn't affected by the conspiratorial efforts of the Technocracy to research it into existence, but somehow also consensually-built reality, and here's where things get hairy because we're not actually supposed to think about any of this. We're just supposed to accept that science=magic and scientists=wizards and priests and isn't that edgy and fascinating.

In reality (actual reality where things happen because they're happening and not because the Five Jew Empirimancers have researched them into existence), this is an old idea perpetuated by anti-intellectuals and quack "doctors" since ever. If all it's supposed to have going for it is that it's edgy and innovative, it doesn't even have that.

[fectin]

Personally, I hate what it does to ethics most of all, even more than I hate anti-intellectualism.

[Orion]

Could you make it work by saying there's a "default" reality, which happens unless you believe strongly in something else? It would still be offensive, fo course, but maybe slightly less illogical.

[CCarter]

Hmm...what's wrong with the ethics again?

Also, I completely forgot at least one whole class of "belief = reality" zealots: all the self-help gurus who are off selling 100,000 copies of "Affirm yourself into having a massive house and five girlfriends!" by convincing people that if they believe in the bounty of the universe, they'll somehow get lots of stuff.

[Orion]

Hmm...what's wrong with the ethics again?

It makes living in denial no longer sad and pathetic, but instead heroic and virtuous.

[DoNotFeedTheHipsters]

I'm not sure I've got enough virulent hate to do the topic justice, but the same idea - belief reshaping reality - is one that you see IRL, particularly in people saying stuff like "god exists if you believe he does!", or people with occult interests.
If someone has that idea they lose the capacity to realize they can ever be wrong, or any interest in questioning, because they think that if they believe anything hard enough, that makes it true...its a major stepping stone to stupid, because giving it credit as a legitimate philosophy means anyone who likes the idea of never being wrong can bolster what's basically the ostrich-with-head-in-sand mental defense of "NOT LISTENING! NO YOUR RONG. I CAN't SEE hOW but YOUR RONG BUT YOU ARE! AND YOU"RE MEAN AND I HATE YOU!" by letting them quote some philosphers on the subject for legitimacy and perhaps side-track the subject into discussing Plato's influence on quantum physics or whatever, rather than actually learning anything, and perhaps make some snide digs about how much you like Ayn Rand (even though you you maybe haven't read much of her philosophy except maybe some Sword of Truth novels) since you believe that reality is actually you know, real.

So I the D&D is basically the equivalent of Mein Kampf for implying that your priest can bring you back from the dead, is what you're saying.

Damn all these fictional universes that include things that aren't factual!

[Username17]

No, having a fantasy world where the rules are different is not the same as having a world where there aren't any rules until you believe that there are. Even a setting where clapping if you believe in fairies can heal injured fairies isn't fucked up in that way.

The oMage paradigm system makes all answers to all questions equally valid. The entire premise is that education, research, and investigations of all sorts are worse than pointless. That faith is a virtue and open mindedness is a sin.

A premise that "there are ghosts" or something else that is counterfactual to the real world we live in isn't like that. Because that's just a premise. Actual reactions to that world would be consistent with real world scientific investigation - there are just ghosts on top of that.

oMage holds up not listening to teachers and people you talk to, not reading books about how the world works, not investigating phenomena yourself, and in all other ways avoiding learning anything or acceding to truth in any form, as a GOOD thing. It's disgusting.

-Username17

[TheFlatline]

No, having a fantasy world where the rules are different is not the same as having a world where there aren't any rules until you believe that there are. Even a setting where clapping if you believe in fairies can heal injured fairies isn't fucked up in that way.

The oMage paradigm system makes all answers to all questions equally valid. The entire premise is that education, research, and investigations of all sorts are worse than pointless. That faith is a virtue and open mindedness is a sin.

A premise that "there are ghosts" or something else that is counterfactual to the real world we live in isn't like that. Because that's just a premise. Actual reactions to that world would be consistent with real world scientific investigation - there are just ghosts on top of that.

oMage holds up not listening to teachers and people you talk to, not reading books about how the world works, not investigating phenomena yourself, and in all other ways avoiding learning anything or acceding to truth in any form, as a GOOD thing. It's disgusting.

-Username17

From the traditions point of view, yes. They want society afraid of the dark and superstitious and generally ignorant, because it lets mages work magic without fearing paradox.

The Technocracy believes by codifying *all* of reality, there won't be any more boogey men, life will be controllable, and the people who want you ignorant so they can exercise special powers will go the way of the dodo.

[DoNotFeedTheHipsters]

If your metric is that the cosmology of a fictional world implicitly exhorts its readers to believe that thing about the real world, then yes, you ought to criticize DND for implying that killing people and worshipping your deity hard enough will give you magic powers. It's absolutely ludicrous to find this offensive, unless you also hate any Universe with God-like beings that grant favour to their worshippers, or any other retarded extrapolation you make from a fantasy setting basic construction to the real world.

Find me a single source where the WoD writers state flat-out that real-life science is bad and that Reality is just a consensus and maybe you'll have a point. But even if you did, they didn't say that through their game (which was, remember, a fantasy game, where people played Steampunk magicians fighting Men In Black with rayguns).

Or maybe you're right, and Mage was telling us not to trust men with rayguns. I dunno. It could be that the entire point of the Technocracy was to create an antagonist that had multiple layers of depth to it both morally and aesthetically so that it would be an interesting villain that was different from most RPG villains at that time.

[Username17]

Find me a single source where the WoD writers state flat-out that real-life science is bad and that Reality is just a consensus and maybe you'll have a point.

Here, I'll throw in another:



-Username17

[TheFlatline]

If your metric is that the cosmology of a fictional world implicitly exhorts its readers to believe that thing about the real world, then yes, you ought to criticize DND for implying that killing people and worshipping your deity hard enough will give you magic powers. It's absolutely ludicrous to find this offensive, unless you also hate any Universe with God-like beings that grant favour to their worshippers, or any other retarded extrapolation you make from a fantasy setting basic construction to the real world.

Find me a single source where the WoD writers state flat-out that real-life science is bad and that Reality is just a consensus and maybe you'll have a point. But even if you did, they didn't say that through their game (which was, remember, a fantasy game, where people played Steampunk magicians fighting Men In Black with rayguns).

Or maybe you're right, and Mage was telling us not to trust men with rayguns. I dunno. It could be that the entire point of the Technocracy was to create an antagonist that had multiple layers of depth to it both morally and aesthetically so that it would be an interesting villain that was different from most RPG villains at that time.

Only one tradition of the 9 in Mage was steampunk. The rest had various paradigms of magic that ruled out every other paradigm of magic, even though multiple paradigms obviously exist.

The Technocracy was illustrated as the big bad guys because they A. Wanted to exterminate mages and other "reality deviants" who didn't fit in with their paradigm and B. They wanted to codify reality so that their "magic" (called Enlightened Science by the spooks) worked but no other magic worked. They set about this by very, very slowly convincing society to embrace their paradigm and reject the traditions as hokey.

However, they also portrayed the Technocracy as 1984's Big Brother, mind control, and the nazi eugencis all rolled into one in the core book.

It's important to realize that all WOD games portray you as the bad guy. Vampires are parasites, Garou flip out and kill entire restaurants when someone gives them a hamburger with tomatoes and they ordered no tomatoes, and mages want the world to remain ignorant and superstitious because science, knowledge, and concrete knowledge of the cosmos makes it harder for mages to be special. Changelings merge with human souls and partially obliterate them, and wraiths refused to let go of life and now have this personality in their skull that will ultimately destroy them and in the mean time destroy everything the wraith holds dear to them that still exists in the skinlands.

The antagonists in oWOD games would nominally be the "good guys" if they didn't have it wrong either. The Sabbat fight the elders and resist the jihad bullshit as much as they can, but they treat humans literally as cattle and revel in their bestial nature. The Wyrm in Werewolf is literally part of creation and destroying it would be more cataclysmic than losing to it, but it's gone mad and is corrupting instead of decaying. The Technocracy generally wants to make things better, but has no room for any alternate viewpoint and doesn't respect the individual unless the individual is exceptional.

However, the science-is-bad paradigm in Mage is best explored in Horizon and the deep umbra. Basically, the further out in space you get, the farther away you get from the "gravity well" of consensual reality, and the easier it is to do magic/enlightened science. The Void Engineers in the Technocracy literally blast off in rocket ships and head to Saturn where they stop alien invasions with squads of space marines equipped with plasma rifles. I am not shitting you on this, that's precisely what the Void Engineers do in the book.

But the point is, from a magical standpoint, science is bad, because it inhibits any magic except for that which conforms to the "scientific" paradigm. The further away you get from the Technocracy's influence, the easier magic becomes. Magic in Mage (which is written from the Traditions POV) is a good thing, and not a supremely narcissistic act, which it should be. After all, you're intentionally saying "between reality and having my way, reality is going to lose."

[TheWorid]

EDIT: Eliminated text to remove possible inaccurate accusation.

[FatR]

However, they also portrayed the Technocracy as 1984's Big Brother, mind control, and the nazi eugencis all rolled into one in the core book.

Not only in the core book. Guide to the Technocracy, to which fanboys still wank on, states that, by default, agents and employees of Technocracy are brainwashed. Well, unless they have PCs glow, in which case brainwashing part supposedly can be skipped. But still, this is an organization, that will mindrape you with technobabbled magic as its default procedure. And if they had enough resources, they would have done it to every human on Earth.

[fectin]

Hmm...what's wrong with the ethics again?

It makes living in denial no longer sad and pathetic, but instead heroic and virtuous.

That too. But to believe that reality is malleable in any way that matters, you pretty much have to believe that all views have some validity. That inherently rejects any sort of moral absolute. That leads to (less extreme versions of) "rape is only bad from your perspective".

[tzor]

That too. But to believe that reality is malleable in any way that matters, you pretty much have to believe that all views have some validity. That inherently rejects any sort of moral absolute. That leads to (less extreme versions of) "rape is only bad from your perspective".

I’m not sure how one can go from defining the laws of the universe to morality. Never the less, I’ll go along with this for the moment and tie it in at the end. If one does believe in “relative” reality (and I would assume this would be a combination of the conscious and subconscious mind) then the world around any one given person is a combination of a plethora of varying degrees of “relative” realities each vying with and interfering with each other. (That could be one good description of “paradox” the rejection of your reality by the will of the subconscious majority in a primitive subconscious manner.) What qualifies as an “observer” and thus a broadcaster of this “relative” reality is as open ended as the notion of “relative” reality itself. Never the less, the local region conforms to the common denominators of the collective “relative” realities around it. Thus there is a “norm” (or the common average) which, although not constant over all time, is generally not prone to sudden changes over short periods of time.

I am reminded of that old star trek episode where Spock insists that the bullets are not real and McCoy worries that if they even had a single doubt that they were not real, the bullets would kill them.

So let’s tie this back together. So we have this “collective” reality and we also have the “subconscious” reality. What does this have to do with morality? (I thought I said I have no clue.) But it does have those elements. What is “rape” from the collective perspective? What is “rape” from the “subconscious” perspective? Even when it’s all “relative” it doesn’t mean it’s not all “related.”

[fectin]

I'm not sure I follow, because it seems like you're giving a rather good explanation of my point.
If that's not the case, I'll put up a real defense this evening.

[TheFlatline]

So let’s tie this back together. So we have this “collective” reality and we also have the “subconscious” reality. What does this have to do with morality? (I thought I said I have no clue.) But it does have those elements. What is “rape” from the collective perspective? What is “rape” from the “subconscious” perspective? Even when it’s all “relative” it doesn’t mean it’s not all “related.”

I'll pose this philosophical question:

What do you think the morality would be of an entity who was so narcissistic and full of hubris that s/he could flat break the laws of reality just be digging their heels and saying "no"? Which is what WoD mages do.

[CCarter]

It's absolutely ludicrous to find this offensive, unless you also hate any Universe with God-like beings that grant favour to their worshippers, or any other retarded extrapolation you make from a fantasy setting basic construction to the real world.

Well the whole idea behind, say "literature" is that books are trying to tell you something on some level. RPG writers may or may not deliberately include their themes (I can't definitely determine that the Mage writers had occult beliefs, though they certainly read up on it) but certainly such themes are there and just by being present they're glorifying retardness, quite as much as including a ton of murdering and raping could be seen as glorifying sociopathy. And again, this is more of a problem than in D&D because IRL people have these sort of beliefs. There are plenty of RPGs that have magic without it being questionable.

As far as D&D goes if there's a bad theme in D&D its the racial themes - drow elves, gully dwarves etc.

[tzor]

What do you think the morality would be of an entity who was so narcissistic and full of hubris that s/he could flat break the laws of reality just be digging their heels and saying "no"? Which is what WoD mages do.

Hard to say ... when the collective morality of the world around you likes goodness and light (if only at the subconscious level) it can be hard to resist ... at least a little. That's the problem of relative reality, there are so many of them and only one of you.

[fectin]

Okay, so. Lets take the Holocaust. Not because Godwin bombs are fun, because that's pretty unequivocal. By assertion: The Holocaust was bad. Ethics and morality can admit shades of gray, this was black.

- Under a consensual reality, if Germany won, the Holocust would not have been bad. Approximately "the victors write the history books," but instead the victors get to rewrite history. That's pretty sick.

- Even today, a consensual reality paradigm says that murdering 12 million people was only bad because the majority agrees that it was. I find that line of thought somewhat repugnant.

- Even assuing that morality/ethics is some transcendant entity that is fixed and beyond fiddling with (or with different mechanism, but identical effects that the concept lives entirely in my mind), it is strictly unpossible for the Germans (specific ones, not the general case) to have done something wrong, especially to 12 million people. They died because they wanted to, or they died because enough other people believed they should, which means (accepting the premises again), that it was actually proper that 12 million people be executed.

- Final alternative is that the holocaust is essentially a post-facto creation. That basically goes into crazyland any way you look at it (we've been slandering WWII Germany/a bunch of people were created for the express purpose of dying horribly/etc.).

None of these are attractive options, and they basically all reduce to relative moralities.

[TheFlatline]

Okay, so. Lets take the Holocaust. Not because Godwin bombs are fun, because that's pretty unequivocal. By assertion: The Holocaust was bad. Ethics and morality can admit shades of gray, this was black.

- Under a consensual reality, if Germany won, the Holocust would not have been bad. Approximately "the victors write the history books," but instead the victors get to rewrite history. That's pretty sick.

- Even today, a consensual reality paradigm says that murdering 12 million people was only bad because the majority agrees that it was. I find that line of thought somewhat repugnant.

- Even assuing that morality/ethics is some transcendant entity that is fixed and beyond fiddling with (or with different mechanism, but identical effects that the concept lives entirely in my mind), it is strictly unpossible for the Germans (specific ones, not the general case) to have done something wrong, especially to 12 million people. They died because they wanted to, or they died because enough other people believed they should, which means (accepting the premises again), that it was actually proper that 12 million people be executed.

- Final alternative is that the holocaust is essentially a post-facto creation. That basically goes into crazyland any way you look at it (we've been slandering WWII Germany/a bunch of people were created for the express purpose of dying horribly/etc.).

None of these are attractive options, and they basically all reduce to relative moralities.

Just to really be obnoxious, I'll point out that, as far as historical morality, we *do* live in a consensual history.

Counter-example to the holocaust. Stalin during his reign had 3-4 times as many people murdered in the Soviet Union than in the holocaust. However, he was an ally of the states and the communist scare hadn't started yet, so it's glossed over in history in favor of Germany.

It wasn't until the last 30-40 years that hundreds of years of what the US did to Native Americans was considered bad.

Colonialism for hundreds of years was thought to be a good thing and now it's looked down on with distaste.

So yes, if Germany had won WW2 I imagine the holocaust wouldn't be the absolute black evil we see it to be. We probably wouldn't even know about it to be perfectly frank.

[fectin]

Right. I totally get that. But my examples work just as well at the time, with perfect information.

But there is an absolute truth for what happened in Russia, and smallpoxing Indians isn't good "because we're the good guys." Sometimes a lesser evil really is the best choice available, and evil means can accomplish good ends (justify is a separate question). The world is complex, and sadly dwelling on the horrible things that happened before is still just navel gazing.

None of that makes purging the Kulaks less bad though.

Colonialism is more complex, but I think it would only cloud the issue here.

Also, further discussion may be a bit too strong of a thread derail. Unless anyone is really offended, I plan to let this rest here.