Magic just misunderstood energy?

Hmm.

O...kay.

This is the first, and probably the last time I'm going to talk about this subject on this board publicly, as a number of people here already think I'm dotty enough.

I've done weird stuff and had weird stuff happen after that seemed to be eerily connected.

Does it work consistently? no...Are they connected?:shrug:

It seems as if I take a flock of Butterfly Effects and shoo them in random directions. And sometimes...things happen.

Or in one rather spectacular case , fail to happen.

I felt the trailer was under threat...at the time I was living in it with my Mom, her annoying boyfriend (now ex) and my little brother.

This conviction grew in my mind for two more days: the house was really under threat. So I burnt a candle, entered a light trance and warded the trailer.

The day after that, a tornado missed the trailer by about thirty feet, vacuuming my neighbor's roof off, and completely clearing the neighbor across the street's lot. His trailer, shed and carport were vanished as if they'd never been. (The fragments ended up in a treeline over a mile away.)

My mom had just pulled into the driveway and was sitting in her car, too afraid to move. The boyfriend and my brother were home-and watched the roof get peeled very neatly from the top of the trailer house next door.
I was out getting car parts-had I been home, my car would have gotten damage from heavy debris rained on it.

Did I have an effect on where the tornado went? who knows?
Was I having a premonition? yes, but what about all those false premonitions I also have?
Should I practice this stuff more often? It seems to help my mental state, if nothing else...
Like I said...all sorts of weird unknowns there. And to claim to know things I don't...well, this isn't like pulling a lever. Far too easy to self-delude about what effects you're having, if any.
My gray file of unknowns is a very large thing.
 
takethewarhome said:
I think so. I think that "magic" was a misnomer established by primitive peoples for what we know today to be energy. Thoughts?
Click to expand...

Vick's Magical Elixir of Healing
Eliminates the symptoms from "Satan's yearly wintertime plague upon mankind"
Comes in either licorice or cherry flavor

st_nyquil_f.jpg
 
Vick's Magical Elixir of Healing
Click to expand...

The nighttime, sniffling, sneezing, aching, fever, stuffy head, runny nose, might as well REALLY knock it back with a 100-proof whiskey on the rocks because your butt isn't going ANYWHERE after a shot of Vick's Nyquil...:p

(Personally I like chucking down a couple caffeine pills, 800 milligrams of ibuprofen, and a 12-hour pseudoephedrine-the behind the counter one. Then I go to work. If I'm going to be miserable, I want to get paid to be miserable.)
 
Tiassa said:
Mayhaps.

I found I was enjoying this: two sorcerers, who had to be dying to investgate one of the more remarkable discoveries in the history of magical philosophy, and they were just going to have to wait.

—Steven Brust​

To call what he's referring to a "science" would be inappropriate. That is, were it a science, instead of calling it "amorphia", they would call it what it is. And, in this case, I'm not sure what it is, aside from saying it's the common element or energy of all things in the Universe. Raw, unshaped, and supposedly uncontained, for containing it is to define it, and in defining it one makes it something.

In the first microseconds after the Big Bang, the Universe was a primordial something that would eventually settle into the elements we know today.

That stuff. That's amorphia. And, yes, a contained river of amorphia on a world where the stuff isn't supposed to exist, since the fact that it exists anywhere in the Universe is a paradoxical fluke ....

Er, anyway. Yeah, if it was a science, one would inquire differently, and the answers would have different terms, parameters, and implications.

And what manipulates the amorphia to create sorcery—the Imperial Orb—would be called what it really is, an incredibly powerful quantum computer designed and implemented by someone who had no idea what a computer is.

(See, that's the whole secret to understanding what's going on in Brust's universe; before he was a novelist, he was a computer programmer, and the one thing I've found consistently in twenty-five years worth of books is that if you look at it like a video game, everything starts to make sense.)

Within the sorcery of that fantasy universe, there is, indeed, a science. But that science has no idea what it really is.

It's kind of a paradox, and kind of not.

But, in the end, sure, it works. And the society would have followed a much different route if it regarded "magical science" instead of "magical philosophy".

Knowing how to twist the proverbial knobs and get the desired result? That's their magical science. Do this, do that, get a psiprint (photograph). Do this, do that, and you can talk psionically with someone miles away (telephone). Do this, do that, you can teleport (travel). Do this, do that, you can set someone on fire (flame thrower).

What we would call science? It would want to know exactly what amorphia is, how it works, how it interacts with kyrancteur and necrophia—specifically, we would identify the parameters of its existence in the Universe, and go from there.

Yes, I admit their sorcery would be nice, but you can't take it with you. That is, if we had a Greater Sea of Chaos and Imperial Orb on Earth, I might be able to tap the power from the moon. But I couldn't from Mars. (If you leave the Dragaeran empire itself, the effect of the Orb fades to nothing, and one loses that particular sorcerous ability.)

If those processes were scientifically identified, one could calculate the possibility of reproducing the effects anywhere in the Universe. Practically, it makes a hell of a difference what we call it, as there is a fundamental relationship between how we perceive something and how we define it.

(A note for my more scientifically-inclined neighbors: Yes, fantasy and fiction are excellent illustrative tools, as long as one is not doctrinally bound to perceive and calculate according to crippling literalist constraints.)
Click to expand...

What I meant to say was:

:m::shake::zzz:

But I deliberately withheld the first two, since it would have been too obvious, but then again, I overestimated my opponent.
 
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