Modern Sci-Fi - the enslavement of scientific reality to religious delusion

:: But to get back to the original point, how does this differ from FTL,
:: teleportation, and so on? One can handwave about wormholes and
:: spacetime bubbles and such, and mechanisms now unknown for
:: manipulating same, but then one can handwave about bio-eeg or fifth
:: (or nth) forces or other now-unknown mechanisms for manipulating same.
::
:: They really seem quite similar, in terms of unrealistic-ness.

: Howard Brazee
: Maybe because one fantasy is by SF fans wishing for a SF future - the
: other fantasy is more pervasive that all children have had. We think
: our fantasies are more mature.

So... Vinge's Zones of Thought are more mature than Schmitz's Hub?

But OK, that's an interesting point. The in-group vs out-group
sharing of tropes and all. Nevertheless, I point out that the
in-group here has embraced telepathy, and the out-group has always
embraced various forms of 7-league boots. So while interesting,
it still doesn't convince me to treat them differently.


Wayne Throop http://sheol.org/throopw

Joe Strout wrote:

No, I don't buy that. People have been claiming psychic abilities for
eons, and EVERY TIME they have been challenged by a scientist to
reproduce them under controlled conditions, they have failed (within
statistical expectations).

Sorry, but this is simply false. Scientists have been signing off on
the psychic abilities of one person or another since Sir Wiiliam
Crookes signed off on the alleged powers of Florence Cook and D. D.
Home, the levitating medium. Sometimes it has been under what is
claimed to have been strictly controlled laboratory conditions; for
example, Gary
Schwartz, who got into the peanut-rolling flame war with James Randi
over who had agreed to be on the panel to review his work, claims that
his experiments have been strictly controlled.

Anybody who could actually do this, and
prove it, would be an instant celebrity, but there is no such person.

Sure, a person like that could get their own TV show and become a
celebrity like John Edward.

Indeed, the reverse transcriptase story is an excellent example of how
if a phenomenon DOES exist, the researchers who discover it document it,
advance their careers, and pretty soon everybody knows about and accepts
it. This is what WOULD HAVE happened if psychic phenomena were real.
But it has not happened, because they are not real.

That's one argument. The other is that claiming to have made such a
discovery generates instant disbelief in a majority of scientists and
the whole idea gets tossed in the trashbin before being considered.
Sometimes the claims are so far out even psychic researchers largely
won't buy it as even possible, such as the claim the of the Scole
researchers of having apparently achieved video contact with other
dimensions.

My point is, a lot of really, really wierd stuff gets claimed by
scientists, and it rarely seems to be definitively sorted out. It isn't
proven to the degree that everyone has to accept it whether they want
to or not, but in most cases it isn't disproven either. It just
accumulates over the years, the decades, the centuries--because it's
been more than a century now this has been going on, and nothing ever
seems to change.

Basically, it's the question of Humean skepticism. Hume made the
argument that you should *never* believe in miracles, since an
alternative explanation will always be more plausible. If you extend
this from miracles to the really, really weird, a Humean will always
find for instance an elaborate fraud more plausible, unless the
evidence becomes too overwhelming. But for some reason, scientists keep
claiming the really weird. Saying scientists do not claim really weird
stuff and have not been continually claiming really weird stuff for a
long time now is burying your head in the sand. The question is more
interesting than that.

In any case, it's got to be good for sf. There is so much latitude in
the high weirdness some scientists come out with from time to time that
simply moaning that it's impossible and shouldn't be allowed in science
fiction seems awfully feeble to me. If you want to write a science
fiction story about contact with blue aliens from another dimension, I
say go for it. Don't let someone try to beat you down and claim it has
to be classed as fantasy.

On Thu, 14 Sep 2006 21:28:48 GMT, in a place far, far away,
(Wayne Throop) made the phosphor on my monitor glow
in such a way as to indicate that:

:: Biology is magic?

: Joe Strout
: No, claiming biology can do things that we know it can't do is magic.

And claiming that machines can do things we know they can't do
should be just as much magic, no more, no less. Yet science fiction
abounds in FTL and reactionless drives and heisenberg compensators,
and nobody blinks an eye. Go figure.

This is an interesting discussion (particularly because I can see both
sides of the argument). There seem to be different ideas about the
laws in play here. Technology has to obey laws of physics (which
we're not sure that we totally have a handle on yet, so there are
potential SF loopholes) while some (llike Joe) think that telepathy
that isn't based on hardware has to obey laws of biology, which some
(again, like Joe) think to be well understood and immutable.

I don't have a strong opinion, one way or the other, but we need to
figure out how to cut the argument down to its essentials if it's to
be resolved (and it may in fact not be resolvable).

(Wayne Throop) wrote in :

So again... I don't see why you think FTL is more plausible than
telepathy.

More plausible, no, you're right. It's really not. There's at least a
couple of mathematical models that make FTL _travel_ a little less
ridiculous, if you only have a high school physics understanding of
relativity, and look at it through rose colored glasses, but it's still
not really more plausible.

What is is, literarily speaking, is more *necessary*. There are lots and
lots of good stories you can tell without telepathy, but far less that
you can tell without FTL travel. SF without interstellar travel is
depressing, rather more often than not.

Plus, we have *far* more experience with people who claim to have various
psychic abilities, but who simply cannot - ever - back up their claims.
And the averger person understands such claims better, at least to the
extent of being able to call bull**** on them. Rather more people have
claimed to to be able to talk to the dead, or read minds, or predict the
future - specific claims - than have claimed to have a spaceship that can
travel to Alpha Centauri within our lifetime. If more people made the
latter claim, most people would be better equipped to call bull**** on
them, as well.

But in the end, I suspect that more people will accept FTL as science
fiction than telepathy simply because a story with FTL is easier to read
_as_ science fiction than a story with telepahy.

--
"So there is no third law of Terrydynamics."
-- William Hyde
Terry Austin

(Wayne Throop) wrote in :

:: Biology is magic?

: Joe Strout
: No, claiming biology can do things that we know it can't do is magic.

And claiming that machines can do things we know they can't do
should be just as much magic, no more, no less. Yet science fiction
abounds in FTL and reactionless drives and heisenberg compensators,
and nobody blinks an eye. Go figure.

Just out of curiosity, on the FTL subject, how do you feel about the
various mathematical models that suggest there might possibly be some way
to pull if off?

--
"So there is no third law of Terrydynamics."
-- William Hyde
Terry Austin

h (Rand Simberg) wrote in
:

On Thu, 14 Sep 2006 21:28:48 GMT, in a place far, far away,
(Wayne Throop) made the phosphor on my monitor glow
in such a way as to indicate that:

:: Biology is magic?

: Joe Strout
: No, claiming biology can do things that we know it can't do is magic.

And claiming that machines can do things we know they can't do
should be just as much magic, no more, no less. Yet science fiction
abounds in FTL and reactionless drives and heisenberg compensators,
and nobody blinks an eye. Go figure.

This is an interesting discussion (particularly because I can see both
sides of the argument). There seem to be different ideas about the
laws in play here. Technology has to obey laws of physics (which
we're not sure that we totally have a handle on yet, so there are
potential SF loopholes) while some (llike Joe) think that telepathy
that isn't based on hardware has to obey laws of biology, which some
(again, like Joe) think to be well understood and immutable.

I don't have a strong opinion, one way or the other, but we need to
figure out how to cut the argument down to its essentials if it's to
be resolved (and it may in fact not be resolvable).

Do you really think that *any* agrument over what is science fiction and
what is fantasy is *ever* resolvable?

--
"So there is no third law of Terrydynamics."
-- William Hyde
Terry Austin

Gene Ward Smith wrote:

Sorry, but this is simply false. Scientists have been signing off on
the psychic abilities of one person or another since Sir Wiiliam
Crookes signed off on the alleged powers of Florence Cook and D. D.
Home, the levitating medium. Sometimes it has been under what is
claimed to have been strictly controlled laboratory conditions; for
example, Gary
Schwartz, who got into the peanut-rolling flame war with James Randi
over who had agreed to be on the panel to review his work, claims that
his experiments have been strictly controlled.

Uhhh, what?

Are you saying that there's some flaw here because some scientists
mistakenly declared some psychic phenomena as real even though they
weren't? That's covered by another part of the scientific method --
reproducibility.

That's one argument. The other is that claiming to have made such a
discovery generates instant disbelief in a majority of scientists and
the whole idea gets tossed in the trashbin before being considered.
Sometimes the claims are so far out even psychic researchers largely
won't buy it as even possible, such as the claim the of the Scole
researchers of having apparently achieved video contact with other
dimensions.

This is the same kind of nonsense as scientists having a vested interest
in not learning anything new. We heard it about relativity, we heard it
about quantum mechanics ... except when something _works_, it doesn't
matter what the "scientific establishment" thinks. If it works, it will
get accepted. Even if the old fuddy duddies don't buy it, the new
generation will. It doesn't really matter what they think. It just
matters that it's detectable and reproducible.

The reason that psychic phenomena are not considered accepted as real is
because no one has done an adequate job of demonstrating that they are
real. In fact, lots and lots and lots of work has been done to
demonstrate that they _aren't_ real.

Could someone turn around tomorrow and come up with a reproducible
experiment in laboratory conditions that demonstrates they are real?
Sure. But nobody's holding their breath. If they do, however, and it
is a real phenomenon, then it will become accepted. That's how science
works.

--
Erik Max Francis && && http://www.alcyone.com/max/
San Jose, CA, USA && 37 20 N 121 53 W && AIM, Y!M erikmaxfrancis
If you turned right / You turned left / Or if you just walked out
ahead -- Anggun

Bill Steele wrote:
In article . com,
"TBerk" wrote:

No psychic phenomenon has ever been scientifically verified on even the
remotest
level - no remote viewing, no telepathy, no telekinesis - NONE of it.


But _I_ didn't write that line above, in fact MY post was refuting the
basic idea.



The real criterion for science fiction is not "proven to be possible"
but "not proven to be impossible."
snip
And don't get me started on the energy storage requirements for
hand-held phasers.

I'd have much more suspension of disbelief if they separated them into
two basic camps;

- Hand held weapons that didn't 'shoot' energy (as in a laser beam that
can cut a hole in a door) so much as disrupted biological systems
(therefore needing a lot less energy) &

- Ship based weapons with a big 'ol Atomic Pile (or warp engine, etc)
to power it.

For number one I submit the Star Trek phaser as an example; sometimes
it's set to stun and this makes some sense. Sometimes it is set to kill
and this too makes some sense. But sometimes it seems to set up a
disintegration in the person being fired upon.

Hmmm, OK. How about it produces a region of disintegration that once
finished left behind everything outside of maybe a three foot sphere-
maybe a section of the floor or bulkhead is consumed, perhaps extended
legs and/or arms are left behind.

OTOH- there is the original poster's seemingly tunnel vision based view
of Psi based phenomena associated with Religious Myth and so on and so
on.

Subjective, Objective. There is a difference. 'Suspension of Disbelief'
in dealing with Fiction and having good story telling aided by a
somewhat factual base in reality vs. demonizing something based on your
own personal, well, Demons is something else altogether.


TBerk
wandering far a field, yes, but enjoying the roses along the way....

Wayne Throop wrote:

Nope. Sorry. Don't see it. Sure, the cases are *distinct*, and the
exact reasons to be skeptical have different histories, but these don't
make one any less worthy of being called "science fiction" than the other,
presuming it's presented reasonably. I've given examples where I think
telepathy *has* been presented, as science fiction, reasonably. If you
think those are "magic" or "fantasy"... well, everbody's their own
humpty dumpty I suppose. Me just as much as thee.

Surely there are things that you would think of as fantasy or magic or
scientifically ridiculous, right? I mean, if someone insisted he could
turn into a bat and fly away wouldn't you think that was a ridiculous
magical claim?

So isn't this purely about a subjective dividing line between "so
scientifically implausible as to merit ridicule" (magic) and "not known
to be the case but it's remotely plausible that technology could make it
happen" (science fiction)?

I don't see how someone claiming that they naturally can shoot laser
beams out of their eyes doesn't fall into the former camp, not the
latter. There is no vaguely plausible biological mechanism that could
cause this to happen, especially one only a few mutations away from _H.
sapiens_. Biology or not, it's just plain not serious.

--
Erik Max Francis && && http://www.alcyone.com/max/
San Jose, CA, USA && 37 20 N 121 53 W && AIM, Y!M erikmaxfrancis
If you turned right / You turned left / Or if you just walked out
ahead -- Anggun

On Wed, 13 Sep 2006 22:19:43 -0700, wrote:

Ah, well, that does make more sense. Because I was thinking that a
group of deaf people would probably be very good at reading emotional
expressions. But, it ruins the punchline of it being because she
could hear, seems to me.

It didn't, because the author described how she was so intuitive, not
me.