Magic

[osprey_archer]

A quick run through on the Nature of Reality According to Philosophers. Realist philosophy posits the reality has some objective existence, while idealist philosophy posits that reality is a mental construct—a coagulation of subjective ideas in the brain of the viewer.



My first thought was to have the idealist system be heavily illusion-based, while the realist system actually transmogrifies physical objects, but really that’s too intuitive and boring and also doesn’t really dig into the philosophical implications of the system. No; really, the systems ought to work the other way around.

If everything is just an illusion, after all, then changing the physical world is as simple as changing a thought; whereas something that is objectively real has to be physically changed, which is more difficult.

Of course this begs the question why anyone would bother joining the realism school, given that the idealist school seems to be able to do anything it likes.

However, this can be gotten around. Perhaps the effects of the idealist school last only as long as the mage thinks about the spell. Not necessarily in the forefront of her mind, but humming away in the back of it at least. Maybe it goes away if she falls asleep, or at very least if she dies.

I can just imagine idealist mages “killing” people, then dying themselves, at which point all these seemingly dead people revive in their coffins and die again, slow agonizing deaths. Idealist mages are evidently a psychotic.

Although presumably there would be a way to tell idealist spells from realist, so you would know whether to bury the body or put it in an above-ground crypt so you can check it periodically for signs of life. Or figure out a way to lock the crypt from the inside so that the revived not-corpse can let herself out.

I’m just going to call this state shoonthree. It would make a really awesome basis for a story. A girl, a slightly autistic mage-in-training (Lea, let’s call her), wakes up after being dead for a really long time, and she wants to find out WHY and WHERE and HOW, and she ends up concluding that time itself is only an illusion so she can travel through it.

But! Lea is chased by a member of the Order of Verity (read: the Inquisition. Except cool! And not psychotic!) who has to arrest her for reckless endangerment of the continuum of time. Except the Verity girl nearly gets arrested once she’s back in Lea’s time because she so obviously doesn’t belong. But she’s read lots of historical romances about the time period so she pretends to be a super-spy.

And then Lea goes all Einsteinian and starts manipulating SPACE, too, (because time and space are connected, but these people are still doing pure Newtonian physics and don’t know that) and leads Miss Verity on a wonderful interworld chase!

It’s like a spy movie, except with magic. Just think of the possibilities! They could go EVERYWHERE. Tortall! Remalna! Pern! Torchwood! Star Trek! Obernewtyn! *bounces* It would be so exciting!

But I have other projects to finish first.

Comments

[ochre54.livejournal.com]

So lj just ate my super-long post. :/ grr.

I will say things in bits cause I have not got the energy to do it all over.

Point the first - the idealism/realism thing is kind of like the cyberpunk dilemna with reality vs. virtual reality. And the VR is basically limited by your skills as a programmer (and presumably money and connections) but otherwise, the programmer is their own God in a world that can be every bit as real as the real world. The cool thing about the magic, though, is that you have to plug in to use the VR and the real world can avoid it. The idealists have much more opportunity to interact with the realists when there is magic involved - how are you supposed to avoid things happening in front of your face?

I'll skip my next point for a second - how about a middle ground between the illusions and the reality where the things you change illusively go on to mutate on their own. A little bit of magical inertia, if you will.

I think the spy thing is awesome also, and I think it'll be an awesome eye-opener for someone to run after someone unconstrained by anything but their own imagination. The possibilities are amazing.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I haven't read anything cyberpunk--I've always gotten the impression that it tended to be dystopian, and 1984 cured me of any desire to read dystopias ever again. Is it as dystopian as all that?

I suspect idealist spells are unstable, partly because of the whole magical inertia thing and partly because people have bad memories so the spells mutate in their own minds and do strange and funky things.

It would be kind of odd and cool, actually, if idealist spells--which seem to give the practitioner great control over the world, given that the world is all in her head--actually tend to end up making the practitioner feel even more out of control than realist mages or non-mages. Their dreams and their magic start seeping together, their spells twist and morph, the worlds they have created spawn horrors they didn't know they could imagine...

And then other people have to deal with the effects of these out-of-control spells. No wonder the realists and idealists don't like each other; the idealists give magic a bad name.

It's beginning to make sense that the Order of Verity would consider idealist magic something that needs strict control.

[ochre54.livejournal.com]

I keep thinking of how the idealism would make you have absolutely no sense of morality - there are no consequences to their actions. People mean nothing. Limits mean nothing.

But on the other side, they can imagine so much that is good. If we're to go with the idealist as a hippie, for instance, there would be peace and love and psychedelic colours (ok, so maybe the colour scheme is only good in the 70s). But people with unrealistic goals - or no realistic way of reaching them - suddenly have a way of making them instantly possible.

Maybe you have to learn it? Like reading? Instead of having it instinctively. So people under a certain age kind of have to put up with not having any magic. So sucky for them.

The realists could be equally awful - except you seem to have them well in hand already with strict regulations. I'd imagine changing everything physically would have unhappy side effects as well - think of all the damage you could do by making an inbalance. Too many of one animal and suddenly there's a pest control problem. At least if it's not real, you can wish it away.

For fun cyberpunk, try "Snowcrash" by Neal Stephenson. Has bits about futuristic libraries! If nothing else, though, the first chapter would be awesome on its own as a short story.

Oh... ok, so more from my eaten comment: dead ringers! People who died in the good ole days when there wasn't enough burial room later got dug up for the purpose of coffin reuse. There were sometimes scratch marks on the lids of the coffins - people would wake up and try to claw their way out. (Later this was attributed to drinking alcohol from lead-tainted tankards). To stop this from happening, they'd attach bells on the fingers of the dead people and set someone on graveyard watch to make sure the newly-dead weren't just comatose.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I think the idealism probably is absolutely hell on morality--nothing seems quite real anymore, especially after you've worked a lot of magic.

There are some limits on idealism--you have to be able to impose this version of reality on other people, too, which takes a lot of energy. So making the entire world a land of peace and love is right out.

It's also probably easier to make changes that people expect. Making the world psychedelic colors clashes with their sense of reality, whereas making grass green (when it had been brown from a drought, say) causes much less resistance.

I'm not sure how much mind-control potential I'm going to give them--love spells and that sort of thing--I think they've got enough power already that giving them any more will throw the story out of whack. Now I just need a good philosophical reason...

You do have to learn magic, but it's more like learning engineering or medicine or something difficult like that.

I think the realists are less likely to run amok; they just have a lot less scope for especially magical mayhem, although they must sometimes use their magic for mundane crimes.

[anait.livejournal.com]

I read this a few days ago and got really excited, because there were so many insanely cool ideas here that I hardly knew where to start-- you started off with a fantastic one, then threw in another awesome one, and finished with something else completely different and equally fantastic. I felt like my head was running amok with all the possibilities, so it was hard to think of something to say!

I love your idea of the idealist-mage to end all idealists, who is so in tune with the ability to imagine the impossible and therefore do it magically, that she is bending the fabric of space and time (it's much like Neo 'The One' in The Matrix, come to think of it). And the Order of Verity is a kickass idea. So much fun.

I read the comment thread, and also loved the idea that the limit of idealist magic is the same thing that makes it so incredible-- the imagination and the mind. It's both a gift, and, because humans have the ability to imagine the most amazing things and the most nightmarish (consciously or subconsciously), a curse. Your bit about dreams and nightmares taking control of the mage's consciously imagined workings rang true to me.

Just one more thought. I've always liked the idea that magic is the combination of imagination and willpower, and those are the only things that determine a mage's ability. So a weak mage is one with a poor imagination or someone who doesn't want the magic to work badly enough (or isn't strong-willed enough to control their own powerful workings)-- and those mages are the ones that need spells. Spells are magical catalysts, like the catalysts in chemical reactions, which aren't changed in the reaction themselves, but facilitate it by providing a different path of lower energy through which the reaction can take place: it's more efficient and more controlled; less prone to wild explosions of heat and energy being let off. So spoken-word/object-using spells are limiters of the shape of the mage's energy, to help it along in a pre-determined path to reach it's final form. They make sure that only as much energy as is needed for the spell's final form is taken from the mage, so they don't get burned out. It's efficient, and there are no magical 'detours' (side-reactions) because of the mage directing the spell poorly through thought, so it's more reliable.

This would also be the way to go for group magic, where many mages using the same spell would amplify all that power along the one pre-determined path, so that there's no giant explosions or draining of mages, as people's ideas, strength levels and egos clash.

Whereas the most imaginative and strong-willed mages would hardly ever use spells-- it's like training wheels-- safer, but you can't go very fast with them on. They'd just imagine something and go for it. So your mage, Lea, would be at the extreme end of these kinds of idealist mages.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I suspect that the idealist mage teachers attempt to impress on their students that working sans spells is a VERY, VERY bad idea--if even the spells can twist out of shape if they're infused with sufficient imagination, working something out of pure magic can probably create something appalling and explosive.

My analogy here is that magic is like painting. Spells are like realistic paintings, not so much in that you're copying anything (although I guess you are just repeating a working created by someone else) but in that you have to learn realism before you can break the rules well. Moving beyond the spells is like becoming an impressionist or a cubist--you can change the look of the world a lot more, but there's also a higher chance that your painting/magic working will just go splat.

Unlike painting, though, I think there's an optimum imagination level for magic. An overactive imagination leads to spells warping themselves. The stronger your will, the more imagination you can probably have before it's too much.

some types of imaginations that are more useful than others, though. You know how some people write novels by just diving in and seeing what happens? Just imagine the havoc that magic worked through such a thought process could cause. More left-brained idealist mages would create less impressive but more stable workings.

I don't think the idealists can work group magic, though; no matter how constrictive they try to make the spell, there will still be some disharmony between their minds.