Technology vs Magic

There's no practical difference between a flamethrower and a fire wand, it's all a weird distinction used to move conflict.

>Electric applications existed before the electron was discovered.
False equivalence.
You can make an electric circuit without knowing what an electron is.
You cannot build a computer without having an understanding of electromagnetism or what the computer parts are supposed to do.

You know what we call bodily growths that are not following the general purpose and blueprint of the body?
Cancer.

>symbolism
Symbolic of what?
Sure you can relatively easily support a body closing wounds. But that won't help you regrow lost limbs or organs.

Magic is based on the spiritual revelation of living things to achieve a unique result from personal meditation, study, and emotion and seemingly reflects that persons growth and life experience. This makes the effects of magic seem arbitrary, lawless, and incorporeal. younger individuals can be guided to personal revelations but the effect that such revelations will have on their magic is not predictable. You can't teach someone to throw a fireball since the exact method of doing so is unique to everyone and the same results may never be reached. Some revelations are just as likely to absolutely stunt a person's magical ability as it is to magnify it tenfold.

Science is based on discoveries of the world that are constant, unchanging, and reliable. They exist the same regardless of how an individual views them (Unless were talking quantum physics). You can teach someone to create a chemical mixture and the results will be the same every time, providing they do it just as you tell them. These results can not be changed unless some quality of the process is changed, and that change will have a predictable result.

Now there is a popular mix of these two abilities. People with lots of life experience who have discovered a fair amount of magical ability and are curious on the effects of their magical revelations on the constant facts of the scientific world. These are Alchemists. Alchemy can be incredibly dangerous and resource consuming, because magic at it's heart is arbitrary, and applying arbitrary effects on a possibly volatile substance to see what will happen is probably going to make something explode, or create gold, or spawn spiders. Who knows.

>You cannot build a computer without having an understanding of electromagnetism
Yes, you actually can. Or have you not heard of mechanical analog computers?

Fact is, you can perform a 'technological ritual', like a chemical synthesis formula, without actually understanding the underlying principles.

The systems use guided autoassembly structures, like reaction enthalpy.

Even in your healing example, I can administer stem cells without knowing specifically what they're going to do. THEY know what they're going to. There are healing/clotting accelerants in real life.

I can name an equal number of books where that isn't true, and several movies as well.

Good luck with your testable and repeatable magic in Harry Potter - if that was the case, the Invisibility Cloak, the Philosopher's Stone, and the Elder Wand wouldn't be unique items.

>what is magic is a subjective force based on the intellect, understaing, and indivuality of the creator/mage/caster that cannot be objectively quantified due to it's ephemaral nature being based on the power inherent to the creator of the magic?
Then you'll probably never have radios because all those different humans are all broadcasting unpredictable background noise into the air.
You'll probably never have implants because the bodies will reject them for reasons that go beyond the understanding of the scientists.

The first plastic surgeries happened at the end of the middle ages. Back then people didn't understand blood types yet. Somebody got another bloke's nose. The second bloke died. The nose was rejected by the first guy's immune system and died as well.
The scientific community deduced that the nose was still attached to the original owner's body in some way and that's why it died.
They were unable to make progress in a field they were competent in because they were lacking basic information on how human bodies work.

>But that won't help you regrow lost limbs or organs.
Why not? Because you need science to understand those parts? You're wrong, of course, and symbolic representation of the function of organs that has nothing to do with science has existed for millennia before the advent of modern medicine.

Old, worn and boring. In any setting with magic science would study that just like it studies any other facet of reality. Hell, there can be a good deal of research done on the subject even if magic doesn't exist, see reality for an example.

And once science produces knowledge, that is then applied to solving problems, giving us technology.

That something is difficult to study doesn't mean it isn't subject to scientific study. You'd think quantum physics would have been a clue about that. And if we can't currently get to a quantitative understanding, then we'll go for qualitative to begin with.

If the practitioners mental state is key to the workings of magic, then the study of magic will simply include a large amount of psychology, but even then there would be plenty for the physicists to do, because as long as magic produces any physical effect, that effect can be measured to hell and back.

>much GM leeway is needed.

An RPG system is by necessity a quite limited model of the "reality" it wishes to portray, sicne the writers, GM and players must be able to handle it. Reality has no such issues, it doesn't need to come up with rules, remember them, or roll bucketful of dice, it simply exists according to its nature.

>Good luck with your testable and repeatable magic in Harry Potter
>What is stupefy?

How the fuck can Harry Potter attend a wizarding school if the magic isn't testable and repeatable? No user, what you just did there was hand Drs. Dunning and Kreuger more evidence, sadly.

>Or have you not heard of mechanical analog computers?
That's not the point and you know it.

>you can perform a 'technological ritual',
Right, but you cannot adapt that ritual to the circumstances if you don't understand the circumstances. You cannot fine-tune it. You cannot aim to connect nerve ends if you don't know that those even exist.

>THEY know what they're going to.
Do they?

Cue the science=magicfags going "REEEEEEEEEEEEE" at you.

A symbol has only meaning if there is somebody to read it.
That implies an intelligent entity as described in the original post.

>has existed for millennia
And didn't help anybody regenerate lost limbs.

>Do they?
Yes they do. Pluripotential cells have their own processing metrics to differentiate.
>You cannot aim to connect nerve ends if you don't know that those even exist.
Except I can, because I can aim to restore limb function by applying the aforementioned pluripotential cells. Again, you cannot omit the 'magic' having its own processing power to fulfill more general wishes. The human body's own healing factor already DOES that, provably.

>Pluripotential cells have their own processing metrics to differentiate.
They are getting signals and transform themselves according to those signals. Who is going to give them those signals?
Which part of the body remembers all the lost cells?

>Which part of the body remembers all the lost cells?
All of them ya git, what is DNA?

When you figure out how creatures can regenerate limbs in real life, you can figure out how 'magic' can make that happen without the wizard memorizing the genetic code himself.

>Pluripotential cells have their own processing metrics to differentiate.
According to this research it really depends on which cells you start with that makes them "decide" what they are going to do.
mcmaster.ca/opr/html/opr/media/main/NewsReleases/StemcellsknowwheretheywanttogoMcMasterresearchers.htm
So, how does the wizard know which stem cells to produce?

>creatures can regenerate limbs in real life
Most creatures can't. So, will your healing spells not work on humans?

>So, how does the wizard know which stem cells to produce?
Look man, just research it in more detail. The natural healing process. You'll get it.

I'mma make it simple though: What happens when you put a loose magnet next to other magnets? Do you personally have to turn it?

Imagine it like nanomachines if it helps you.

>Look man, just research it in more detail.
>Do science.
Right. Without science, you can't do it.

>What happens when you put a loose magnet next to other magnets?
Will they form a complicated pattern that can be trusted to actually function like a highly specialized machine?
I'm curious.

>Right. Without science, you can't do it.
No man, I meant you personally should look up stem cell therapy so you could understand the example.

>Will they form a complicated pattern that can be trusted to actually function like a highly specialized machine?
Depends on the polar arrangement, doesn't it? Molecules are just bound together by positive and negative electrical charges after all. There are magnetic analogs.

But you omitted replying to the 'nanomachines' example:
What if I directly stated that all of the magic was actually due to nanomachines sensing the environment and processing the wish? Except none of the characters know that.

Can you separate that from magic applied through an 'arcane force'?

You're probably one of those faggots who says that magic has to be so mysterious and unknowable you have equal chance of shitting lighting as you do casting it by jazz handing.

>who says that magic has to be so mysterious and unknowable
It's a cultural thing. In the West, I'd probably statistically correlate it with religiosity and an external locus of control. Possibly a media-emotionality axis as well. If you wanted a potentially 'edgy' assessment that is.

It's a common view among people who don't value or apply reason as much as feeling, and so don't see how you would apply reason to magical forces. Same people who wouldn't be able to figure out electricity from electric fish, in favor of classifying them as torpor magic. True story, too.

>What if I directly stated that all of the magic was actually due to nanomachines sensing the environment and processing the wish?
Then we'd be back to an intelligent third party, so you'd agree with me.

>Depends on the polar arrangement, doesn't it?
RIght. Who's going to arrange them if no one knows how the machine works?

>to an intelligent third party
This depends on your definition, really. Do you believe in intelligent design by a divine creator? If not, you must invalidate that claim.

>Who's going to arrange them if no one knows how the machine works?
And in invalidating the claim of intelligent design, you arrive at the process of autoassembly. Each part like a puzzle piece is shaped to provide cues as to what goes next.
In the case of a 'healing spell', it could read the DNA and the cellular markers of the target, supplying the appropriate missing spaces, as a wound healing does.

There's just different levels of 'precoding' in the universe, for both magic and technology, in every setting. Drop a rock down a well and listen for a sound. The sound-making is a precoded physical effect that you are aware of as a consequence of your action.

>Do you believe in intelligent design by a divine creator?
No, I don't. I also highly doubt that you can just randomly sprinkle stem cells onto somebody's stump and have him regrow limbs. Stem cells are not that smart. Nano machines are not that smart either. They are just about smart enough for very simple tasks that only come together in something other than grey goo if you coordinate them properly.

>Each part like a puzzle piece
Which means somebody must provide every puzzle piece. Which means somebody needs to know what the final picture is going to look like ahead of time. Do you see where this is going?

>as a wound healing does.
Which is why, after losing a finger, your body just closes the wound, rather than regrowing a limb.

You can still experiment to see what does what and what doesn't do what you're trying to do. You might have to start initially by seeing someone outside and gettting struck by lightning but eventually you'll work your way towards figuring out electricity .

Reminds me about the Displaced

>Which means somebody needs to know what the final picture is going to look like ahead of time.
Yes, your body's DNA does in fact know what the final picture will look like ahead of time. You've proven my point.

>Which is why, after losing a finger, your body just closes the wound, rather than regrowing a limb.
I don't see why 'magic' (read as well: sufficiently advanced technology) cannot do better without the wizard explicitly knowing all the fine details.

Do you know all the code that runs your computer?

Yes, there is a preexisting force that knows what to do. Obviously. That's the "magic" part. Just like your arm knows what muscles to move, even if you don't know what muscles are.

>You might have to start initially by seeing someone outside and gettting struck by lightning but eventually you'll work your way towards figuring out electricity
Point of that was that the people who don't apply reason to 'magic' never would figure that you. They of course technically can. But as history has shown, emotional humans are very apt to blame that lighting on 'divine wrath' rather than researching it.

>your body's DNA does in fact know what the final picture will look like ahead of time.
So somebody would have to read the DNA and provide the raw materials as required by it in a very controlled fashion, because if they provide too much or too little, the stem cells certainly won't know that something's fucked.
It doesn't explain your wild claims for stem cells, but it does make sense to say that wizards would be able to intuitively read DNA and feed the wounds with the proper building materials.
>Do you know all the code that runs your computer?
No, and I wouldn't be able to repair it if chunks of it suddenly went missing. At best I could try to find replacements elsewhere.

>Just like your arm knows what muscles to move,
No, that's the brain.

It's not the emotional nature of man, so much as science is a social construct.
It took humans a long time before they developed the rigorous methods necessary to take apart natural phenomena and begin to understand them.

I wouldn't discard that. In fact, I would imagine that's part of the researching part.

>guy gets struck by lightning
>Must be the work of the gods
>The best way to not get struck by lightning is not to go outside when the gods are angry (i.e. it's storming)
>You then notice tall things get struck by lightning
>Do these things upset the gods?

And then we go from there.

For what it's worth I support both schools of thought in a setting. Even if the metaphysical aspects of a setting can be examined scientifically it doesn't invalidate or eliminate the spiritual/emotional aspect of it. Just because we used science to figure out the big bang didn't make Chrisianity go away. why would this be different for magic/science?

>No, that's the brain.
And your arm. You know, the calcium ion channel responses and nerve conduction paths.

user, it seems like you're pushing some weird theory based simply on an incomplete understanding.

The magic knows what to do. You'll have to explain how you can move your arm without explicitly knowing anatomy in order to prove any different. You can't. So that's really it for your argument.

That's all highly flawed reasoning. Humans can believe incorrect things even in the face of contrary evidence to their own eventual detriment.

We've empirically seen that people are apt to instead blame their own perceived 'immorality' as the reason for the lighting when applying emotional methods, and thus completely miss the relation to tall objects.

You don't seem to be distinguishing between impediments to reason and boons to reason, while both can happen concurrently.