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Sunday, October 07, 2012

Futurology's "If Magic Were Real" Paradox

Yes, if magic were real it would be possible to create all sorts of magical artifacts that do all sorts of magical things and magically solve all of our problems, but if magic were real there also would be no need to have artifacts to do anything anyway and we would have no problems to solve. So, if you have to introduce all sorts of "if magic were real" stipulations about controlled navigation and energy consumption and mass protection in order to make a paper that faintly suggests something like faster than light traversal phenomena may sometimes be possible seem to suggest as well that Star Trek starship warp drives are also possible (and because possible somehow "therefore" plausibly on the way -- dood, excellent!) the question is: why delay the introduction of your "if magic were real" stipulations so long? After all, if you are just going to rely on "if magic were real" anyway, then why not start that way? Winkle your nose like Samantha on Bewitched, cross your arms and blink-nod like Jeannie in I Dream of Jeannie, flick your stick like Harry Potter at Hogwarts and you can be anywhere, anywhen, anyhow. True, you won't be able to bamboozle anybody into thinking you are engaging in some sort of sophisticated scientific dialogue that way -- but you aren't after all. You'll just be indulging in fanboy fanwanking that has little to do with actual science, theory, or policy. And there's nothing wrong with that, and there can be plenty that is edifying about that, so long as don't forget that science fiction isn't science, wanking isn't policy-making, and fandoms aren't movements.

9 comments:

Summerspeaker said...

I suspect we'd have plenty of problems in any magical situation that preserved individuality and agency. Even were we all able recreate reality with a word - the author's prerogative made physical - politics and social relations would remain with us. Fictional magics are never so powerful. If nothing else, they're constrained by the plot.

Dale Carrico said...

Aren't you actually exemplifying the phenomenon to which the post alludes? If you want to pretend that magic is real what's to stop you from pretending magic eliminates all problems?

The magic is being introduced in futurological pseudo-scientific subcultural-solidarizing wish-fulfillment fantasizing precisely to treat real problems as non problems. This nonsensical move is not rendered more serious or more scientific by then introducing intermediary limits and problems into the magical universe after the fact -- although such gestures constitute quite a bit of what passes for the "technical" aspects of futurological discourse with which the rubes get bamboozled.

Now, literary magical universes usually allude to the problems of the real world either by creating allegorical expressions of them in magical terms or by symptomatically disavowing them through magical violations. Futurological pseudo-science is definitely susceptible to literary and cultural analysis on such figural and symptomatic terms (I do this all the time of course), but the whole problem is that futurologists want to insist that what they are doing is science or science policy not science fiction, that what they are is serious political organizing or movement politics not sfnal fandom enthusiasm.

I repeat again as I have so often done that to the extent that futurology is just an sfnal fandom conscious of so being I find it more or less harmless and even congenial to a point -- though my own sfnal enthusiasms tend to be less drearily about straight white guy cardboard cutouts grasping the chrome dildo of "hard sf" reductionism than one finds in transhumanoid and singularitarian precincts generally speaking imho. But, you know, let a bazillion flowers bloom. Just don't pretend a science fiction fandom is science, is science policy, is philosophy of science or philosophizing more generally, or a political movement.

Incanur said...

As I wrote, your definition of magic as the ability to do absolutely anything without even conceptual limits (see below) conflicts with the vast majority of existing representations of the magical. I of course disagree with your entire premise - that's almost a given these days, right? - but I'm particularly annoyed by your invocation of fiction. Magic doesn't work like you claim in any of the universes you cite. Harry Potter, for example, certainly can't just wave a wand and fix all the problems. Potterverse magic can't even create food.

Even with the most limitless magic out there, the conceptual dilemma of perfection remains. Solving all the problems requires a mammoth definitional task. What are all the problems? What does solving each one look like? Saying "I snap my fingers and make everything perfect" only works if you can stop there and don't have to describe the details.

Dale Carrico said...

The invocation of fiction was yours (assuming "Icanur" is "Summerspeaker"), so if you are annoyed by that you have only yourself to blame.

About literary texts in which magic appears I wrote: literary magical universes usually allude to the problems of the real world either by creating allegorical expressions of them in magical terms or by symptomatically disavowing them through magical violations. Did you actually read my response to you? The simplified view you are ascribing to me is hard to square with what I actually said.

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure you understand the original post. Again, I simply don't think it makes much sense to pretend that something we cannot do and have no reason to think we can ever do (like create nonbiological superintelligent supercapable servile agents or non-fatal teleportation devices or faster than light starship warp drives or upload immortalization technologies) becomes more plausibly doable just because somebody decides to stipulate other things we cannot do on which they imagine those larger things might depend for whatever reason (it's not as if any of this is testable at any level or anything) are doable even though they aren't either. And I don't think there is anything particularly serious or useful or plausible or progressive or scientific about such stipulations, any more than would be the bald stipulation that the larger thing we obviously cannot do is something we can just because you say so.

When you say, "I of course disagree with your entire premise," I can't be sure what premise you mean and I'm not sure what that "of course" is about either. I would actually assume that you would agree with the overabundant majority of beliefs I take to be true. That we are capable of communication at all implies this after all, strictly speaking.

I think you need to ask yourself why you spend so much time railing against me when according to your own values there are countless other people far more devoted to your destruction and the destruction of everything you claim to care about than me. If this is your idea of flirtation, you are seriously failing.

Summerspeaker said...

The invocation of fiction was yours

So Samantha, Jeannie, Harry Potter are friends of yours who can be anywhere, anywhen, anyhow at a whim? If so, you should introduce me.

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure you understand the original post.

I understand you just fine. As you may remember, I argue magic, science fiction, and reality blur significantly. You employ harder borders and binaries than I find tenable. I recognize your argument here as reasonable and acknowledge it has merit even though I think it overdrawn. Dick Pelletier makes an excellent target for you critique and I appreciate that somebody's doing it. My complaint here, as I said, is your depiction of fictional magic as limitless. That's not how it works and would make for pretty bad fiction by conventional standards.

If this is your idea of flirtation, you are seriously failing.

That's what I do best.

Dale Carrico said...

You employ harder borders and binaries than I find tenable.

I strongly doubt that's true, but whatever. As a pragmatist I regard all beliefs, even reasonably warranted ones, as contingent. As a post-structuralist I regard literal language as the provisional orchestration of the play of signifiers in salience in the service of a plurality of beliefs, always in a way that imposes costs even when it confers benefits. As a queer theorist, I regard sex-gender as a literalizing language through which patriarchy (stratified by the policing of race, class, ability, sanity, morphology, etc) polices material-semiotic hierarchies that systematically denigrate that which is produced and assigned feminine in respect to that which is produced as masculine, and that through living otherwise and connecting otherwise we mobilize the figurative dimensions of that language to resist that policing and render it more capacious. I am not even averse to the Burroughsian suggestion that this figurative dimension in every language might be well described as a "magical universe" and that all artists, indeed all people when they are being artists, inhabit it. This is what I teach my students in critical theory classes at any rate, and have done, hundreds upon hundreds of them, for seventeen years now. All this is to say, you don't know dick about me, and when you pretend that not buying into patriarchy or correspondence theories of truth absolves you of responsibility for trying to be helpful or voting or owning up to beliefs you publish in the world of which you are a part whether you like it or not, well I still say that's just bullshit narcissism on your part.

Dick Pelletier makes an excellent target for you critique and I appreciate that somebody's doing it.

Then, you don't obviously disagree with my whole premise but agree with its actual thrust, contrary to your earlier assertion?

Dale Carrico said...

My complaint here, as I said, is your depiction of fictional magic as limitless. That's not how it works and would make for pretty bad fiction by conventional standards.

I don't know if you are assuming I regard "I Dream of Jeannie" or "Bewitched" as good fiction, also I don't know if it really is true that there are any specified or consistent limits to magic as they operate in those magical universes, nor do I know that it really actually is true that magic always only operates with limits in such narratives, that that's always only "how it works" -- the magical universe of Christian theology posits an omnipotent god after all and even refuses to grant that logical limits that seem to be imposed by omniscience and omnibenevolence are limits even when we can't grasp that logically.

Not to hammer this point endlessly, but I elaborated how magical literary universes stand in relation to the real world of the authors who write them, and I said magic tends to stand in them in allegorical or symptomatic relation with the problems of that world. Again, I don't know how that is a claim which implies limitlessness. It is a claim that reminds us we cannot specify in advance WHAT the limits of specific instances of magical thinking will be, anymore than we can generalize about laws that will inevitably govern magical literary universes, precisely because the magic is functioning to express, circumvent, disavow, or represent limits as they are subjectively or positionally experiences or suffered.

Once more, with feeling: In the futurological piece I lampooned, I pointed out how recourse was made to the magical subliming away of real-world problems (energy demands, survivability) one technical level removed from a foregrounded claim (teleportation on the way!) as a way to make something we cannot do seem more like something we can. Teleportation remains magic, not science, rendered superficially scientific in the article in question, by displacing the magical stipulations onto intermediary supportive claims. I said if you are just going to end up making a case based on treating magic as real anyway, you might as well just own up to it. Of course, Pelletier won't do this because he doesn't want to admit the Robot Cult is a faith-based organization peddling pseudo-scientific fraud and marketing hype to the rubes.

Summerspeaker said...

I strongly doubt that's true, but whatever.

I mean specifically on the question of magic/science and fiction/reality. In terms of this debate, it's question about the utility of thought experiments. If we could do x, what would the implications be? That's a basis for much science fiction, and I agree transhumanist/Singularitarian musings at least approximate the genre. I disagree that science fiction should be strictly segregated from serious business.

I am not even averse to the Burroughsian suggestion that this figurative dimension in every language might be well described as a "magical universe" and that all artists, indeed all people when they are being artists, inhabit it.

This I like.

Then, you don't obviously disagree with my whole premise but agree with its actual thrust, contrary to your earlier assertion?

That may be fair. I was trying to just discuss fiction and not get draw into this debate. I view the situation in terms of probabilities rather than your clear magic/real divide. By my assessment, Pelletier's claims are sufficiently improbable as to warrant thick disclaimers at a minimum. We roughly concur on the political effects of Pelletier's enthusiasm. I consider these political effects - that is, support for staying the course on industrial capitalism because innovation is bound to save us! - more interesting than the question of truth/lie, though Pelletier's certainty and invocation of SCIENCE! are so egregious that they demand an answer.

On the subject limits to popular fiction, magic can customarily do whatever the plot demands within the conventions of the genre, but it virtually never has the ability to solve all the problems. To the contrary, writers tend to be invested in preserving problems. They either give half-baked excuses for why magic/magical tech hasn't transformed society or ignore the issue altogether. Superhero comic constitute the extreme example of this. Techno-wizardry and cosmic tricks can save the universe but everybody still goes back to work after the crisis. Problems don't get solved; implications aren't explored. (The Christian God apparently also has an aversion to solving problem except in Heaven.) Literary science fiction - especially hard sf - takes a different approach and explores implications.

Dale Carrico said...

All you have to do to "not get drawn into this debate" is stop debating. As for your claim that Pelletier's nonsense should come with disclaimers, er, yes. Yes, it should. Robot Cultism as "thought experiment," there, that's a rich one. Hey, you wanna buy the Brooklyn Bridge. Howzat for a thought experiment? Ey, weah savin' the Yooniverse heah, youz guyz!