three. video. id: the Outsider. later tonight.

[crypdick]

[ It's traditional, when asking simple, broad questions to the Network to do so in a text post but that's not nearly melodramatic enough for the Outsider.

He's in the desert in the outskirts of Jeopardy, night has fallen and he's looking not at the communicator but up at the stars. There's some faeries nearby he's bribed to leave him alone with pizza, but they make it cold enough you can see his breath glittering on the air. ]

The places you come from are varied, where even the things that you take for granted may be different here, or for other imPorts. Even this reality is changing week to week.

With that in mind, I have a question for you.

[ Now he turns to look at the comm, eyes empty and black. He tilts his head. ]

What do you think makes a god a god?

(( And regular reminder that if you respond with video, you are completely free to include a vision for him to see if you want! ))

Comments

[hatestrashcans]

Well that's bullshit. Nothing is 'beyond the laws of reality', it just means that the way we think of the laws are wrong. By that definition, in the Dark Ages penicillin would've been magic.

I mean, I guess we could Arthur C. Clarke things.

[crypdick]

A separate reality then, with differnet laws, outside time and weaving through time.

I do not come from your world, little natural philosopher. The history of Earth is foreign to me, and the things you take for granted do not always apply.

[ Which is partly relevant to the discussion and partly a pointed sideways remark on how he doesn't get those references. ]

[hatestrashcans]

Well, yeah. Obviously. Doesn't make anyone a God: Just able to do and understand things humans can't. Sort of like how there's a physical limit on how quickly a human can run but other species can go faster. It doesn't mean they're magic, just better than humans at some things.

I like 'natural philosopher'. It sounds way more classy than 'giant nerd'.

Arthur C. Clarke said: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." the idea being if we can't even speculate on how something works, we as humans are likely to term it magic.

[crypdick]

In my experience, which is vast, magic is not technology. But it is called that because humans have little idea of how it works. But if they have no other word for something other than magic, then how is it distinguishable from what one would call real magic?

At a certain point isn't the distinction arbitrary? Or is it the most important distinction one could make?

[hatestrashcans]

[ He takes this as a serious question and considers it. ]

I suppose it would be like the square and rectangle thing. Logic. You know, how every square is a rectangle but not every rectangle is a square? So all sufficiently advanced technology is magic, but not all magic is sufficiently advanced technology?

I guess it would depend on why you're asking the question. If you're a human who's trying to figure stuff out, it'd be a really important distinction. If you're just trying to categorize, it'd be arbitrary.