[Torg] Penicillin aside

[Travis James Hall]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: torg-bounces at justintimeadventures.com 
> [mailto:torg-bounces at justintimeadventures.com] On Behalf Of 
> Stephen John Smoogen
> Sent: Sunday, 28 February 2010 3:53 AM
> To: torg at justintimeadventures.com
> Subject: Re: [Torg] Penicillin aside
> 
> Ok lets take a world that could be Our Earth as an example. I would
> assume that magic and spiritual have always been mind-numbingly low.
> At that point I would have no argument that Tech and Social are the
> only aspects that guide how things progressed. In fact it would color
> any scientist looking at other worlds on how things progressed and how
> they HAVE to progress.
> 
> However in a world where Magic or Spirit is higher but not so high
> that it is a common occurrence this would color things differently. If
> a tool is believed to be magical or governed by spirits then the
> possibility energy between the tool and person are governed as much by
> another axiom as tech.

No. The determining factor concerning the governing axiom is how the tool
achieves the effect. The existence of a belief does not indicate that the
Spiritual axiom governs the tool. If there is a natural process being
harnessed to produce an effect, that's Tech. There can also be a Spiritual
or Magical tool at work, but the Tech tool remains a Tech tool.

> In fact if the spiritual energy is high enough
> etc it might be that the curative properties of penicillin only work
> when the proper spirits are called suppressing any technological axiom
> tool usage.

By standard Torg metaphysics, axioms do not suppress the effects of other
axioms. Tech tools do not stop working just because of belief in an
associated Spiritual tool. The Spiritual axiom does not and never can govern
the use of technology.

At least, not directly. If there is a belief that spirits will prevent
healing when not properly appeased, a Spiritual tool could step in to
prevent a Tech tool from working. However, this is indirect, one tool
working against another, not the axiom stepping across the boundaries
directly, and it also requires an awfully high Spiritual axiom to work,
because generally such effects would have to occur without the performance
of any ritual or other invocation, and that sort of thing is pretty high up
the Spiritual axiom chart. (And it would also work no matter how high the
Tech axiom got.)

And I say all of this as somebody who has previously written about how nice
it would be to have more multi-axiom tools. It's not like I'm opposed to
crossing the lines of definition. It's just that we need to know what the
definitions are if we aren't going to have a huge mess of inconsistencies
and special cases.

> The reasoning for my take on Core Earth was that its world had a much
> higher magic/spiritual in its past so how that affected things are
> where things become squishy.

Higher Magic and Spiritual axioms in the past mean that more Magical and
Spiritual tools would have worked, not that less Tech tools would have
worked, or would have required Magical or Spiritual usage.

And besides, the recorded usages of bread mould to treat or prevent
infection in wounds are only from a half century or so before the actual
discovery of penicillin. I would have thought that the ages of incredible
Magical and Spiritual feats would have been considerably before that.

> And travis I said it was an out there thought... not something that
> needed a long email about how it was unreasonable.

You know I'm not against "out there" thinking. Amongst my first posts to the
list were speculations concerning cosms with different laws of
nature/physics. You can produce a cosm where eating mouldy bread has a
healing effect due to Spiritual processes, and eating it without using the
faith and ritual aspects of the tool won't work.

But doing so requires different laws of nature to operate in that world. It
means that the development of true penicillin cannot evolve from the
precursor discoveries. It might still occur, but it would have to come about
in another way. The earlier usages of moulds are not pre-cursor discoveries
at all.

Travis Hall