From: tal691@huxley.anu.edu.au (Tonio Loewald)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.misc
Subject: Re: hard and soft sf
Date: 16 Dec 92 07:27:42 GMT
Organization: Australian National University
NNTP-Posting-Host: 150.203.2.12

The "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" line
has always ticked me off, but not because it was necessarily wrong as written
(or spoken) but how it was interpreted.

There's a very nice scene in _All of Me_ (Steve Martin, Lily Tomlin...) where
the guru is playing with the flush toilet and the phone rings. So he flushes
the toilet and it rings again. A few minutes later, he hears the phone ringing
again, so he rushes to the bathroom to flush the toilet.

The toilet is advanced technology (by this guy's standards) and he doesn't
understand it. So is the phone. And the two are quite likely indistinguishable
from magic to him. He thinks that there is some link between toilet and phone,
and would be a little surprised if flushing the toilet, say, didn't cause the
phone to ring...

My point is this: magic and technology are completely distinct to their
PRACTITIONERS because magic doesn't work and has a set of protective
belief structures built around it that stop people from losing faith in
it when it fails, of the form:
1) it worked, but we failed to perceive its operation
2) we stuffed up the conjuration process
3) we have angered the gods/spirits/whatever and that's why it failed

To labour the point I'll give a common contemporary example:

Your computer isn't working. You go to the shop to ask for it to be fixed.
They decide it's a virus, format your hard disk, sell you a virus killer
utility, and your computer works for several hours before the problem
recurs.

For the person at the computer shop, the computer is like magic. He/she
waves wands at it, hoping to have some effect which, if the wand fails
can be explained by her/his protective belief structures...


But to a real "practitioner" -- ie. someone who knows about computers --
problems can be successfully diagnosed and repaired. If the magician
attempts a "spell" and it fails, there are belief structures to
deal with failure. If technology fails, the technologist can diagnose
and cure the problem (or at least diagnose it).

There are still technological problems that we cannot handle, but
advancing technology tends to solve them (perhaps finding others).
Thus a sufficiently advanced technology will in some sense be EVEN
FURTHER from magic than an insufficiently adanced technology.

Now maybe the quoted person (A.C.Clarke?) meant "from stage magic"
or "from D&D magic" (where spells always succeeds and generally
produce dramatic effects that defy the laws of physics). Both
of these statements are debateable: stage magic SIMULATES the
defying of the laws of physics, but can be distinguished even
by members of American Skeptics from high technology. D&D magic
requires counter-intuitive, non-causal activities to produce
its effects (as do most magics in fiction and so on) which can
probably be avoided with technology.

Sigh


Tonio


-- 
Tonio Loewald | tal691@huxley.anu.edu.au | Life is short. Be nice.
"You can lie/You can cry/For all the good it'll do you, you can
die/But when it's done/And the police come/And they lay you down
for dead/Just remember what I said" (Paul Simon-not the senator)