Don't Use Clarke's Third Law to Retcon the Arts Part 2
It's the aliens.
To quickly recap, I had noticed people on here declaring prior fictional works that include magic as a theme as now equally being about technology because of their discovery of Clarke’s third law. Their claims. Read this first:
The issue is not that one cannot find parallels between magic or technology, or observe in a story, one character having disproportionate power over another, which I suspect is what they actually mean.
The problem is throwing Clarke’s third law at prior fictional works—some of them hundreds of years old—to make this particular claim, that the two are indistinguishable in fiction; that works about magic can now be nominated as being about technology. Any inappropriate, illiterate and destructive qualities of this assertion go hand in hand with the fact their claim is not actually there in the way they assume it is.
In their world, “indistinguishable”—meaning to the receiver—is fudged to assume “indistinguishable perpetually in every frame.”
In part one we discussed how they would simply have to omit all privileged frames that don’t favour the meme, only upholding the position of the receiver of the magic in making their claim.
Overwriting the Writer
They only way they can get round this is to overwrite the writer’s (creator’s) intentions with their own, turning the creator and everyone else in the story into their preferred ignorant receiver, endlessly pushing everything to a convenient point where their meme cannot be questioned (probably conflating their need to apply this with Clarke’s third law itself which appears unfalsifiable). Essentially they would have to claim that no frames—including the audience’s— are in fact ever sufficiently privileged.
And as they have already ignored everything else up to this point, in their mind—one has to imagine— if the original creator in their work describes magic, he actually didn’t know what he meant or wasn’t up on Clark’s law at the time he wrote it.
He could have been describing something he didn’t understand, which could have been advanced technology, which in most cases it would have to be staggeringly advanced, and quite possibly beyond any possible technology (which we’ll discuss later).
Similarly, it is implied within Clarke’s third law that this sufficiently advanced technology to pull off these feats can be hidden from the receiver. Again, we are going to come back to this point later as it needs its own special discussion. But for now, it’s so advanced that it hides itself every time even from the wielder.
You can see the problems here building up.
If the creator was ignorant of Clark’s third law or some similar line of thought, or lived in an era long before Clarke, then he could only mean magic.
If he chose magic over technology, then he made a specific choice of one over the other.
At the same time, these are fictional works, they belong to the arts; coming from imagination, from folk lore, from other arts, from imprinted archetypes, from our ancestral genetics.
Chances are, in their depictions of magic, creators are not describing reality or something they have experienced directly themselves which means it’s a mistake to consider them receivers ignorantly conveying what they saw. The creators are, for all intents and purposes, God.
This brings up a very important further point here, yet again, probably worthy of its own section, that is the meaning of magic, as opposed to the meaning of technology. And those two things happen to not be indistinguishable.
Our hypothetical meme claimer would, despite all these problems, still have to claim the creator’s intentions on this no longer matter. But if they don’t matter then neither does anyone’s, or anything.
So in that case, perhaps their next line would be the wielder thought he was doing magic, but he might have been given access to technology by advanced aliens or human time travelers, or he himself was a technological mirage created by the aliens.
But you can see where this is going. By the same token the entire story could be a dream, a secret coded message or a psychotic delusion.
And if that’s the case—and by a far lower threshold of stupidity—science fiction stories could equally be about magic.
I haven’t read his extrapolations, one assumes this is not what Clarke meant, however if the two are indistinguishable to the omnipresent naïve receiver, and the claim of indistinguishability is reinforced by anything in the theorist’s mind, or nothing at all, then it must follow the other way too. But that’s never usually asserted. The assertions are always in one direction.
They “know” it’s technology in the science fiction context, but don’t know it’s magic in the other. One assumes they take the science fiction writer as “enlightened” and writing truthfully, while the magic writer as ill informed or lying.
This bias towards the possibility of technology could be summarised as a kind of inverse of Clark’s third law:
Magic is speculated to be of equal possibility as technology to people unaccustomed to magic and accustomed to technology.
or
There’s a tendency to speculate magic as technology post Clarke’s third law, but not the other way round.
or
There’s a tendency to claim prior works through more modern perspectives to suit modern sensibilities, regardless of whether they are a good fit or override the intentions of the creator or undermine the work, or rewrite the bounds and context they were made in.
And there are many other examples of this last one we might think of. It’s like superimposing a kind of political correctness onto the past, demanding the past comply with myths that uphold this zeitgeist, today.
But as they have already lied about the receiver, there’s no reason to listen to more of their nonsense.
There is no reason to privilege their extrapolations of Clark’s third law over the creator, or second guess the creator other than to seek to uphold a stupid meme.
If the original creator describes magic, that’s what he means. It’s been distinguished. Accept what he means, or accept nothing in the arts. You might as well make up your own story in your head.
or send me your bitcoins: bc1qy2gdzdqxeunvex3875kf6nuguvxrvmmhcfyz3k