How do dragons work, Veeky Forums?

I would argue that asking for an explanation at all is missing the point. You don't ask about the exact nature of Zeus' interaction with electrons, because as far as Zeus is concerned, they don't exist; lightning is hammered into shape by cyclopes. Asking how dragons fly is the same. There is no explanation, because they were conceived through an understanding of the world that made no explanation necessary. To add one in post-facto is almost always asinine, and inevitably takes away the mystical from the magical.

they're like dinosaurs, but they can spit napalm

also they can fly as well as tear your shit up but dinosaurs could already do both of those

>and inevitably takes away the mystical from the magical.

Which is the entire point of this thread.

Nice wyvern loser, who do you think you are, Leonardo da Vinci?

Didn't Animal Planet have a whole special on the plausibility of dragons and how they functioned a few years ago? From what I recall, they had hollow, birdlike bones, specialized sacs filled with bacteria that generated hydrogen gas as a byproduct, and chewed platinum and other metals to combine with the hydrogen to breathe fire.

I thought this was real when I was a kid until my teacher said it wasn't.
youtube.com/watch?v=8FIDeOOL52Q

>youtube.com/watch?v=8FIDeOOL52Q
That's the one.
>when I was a kid
Christ, user, you're making me feel old.

/thread

>Narrow the body down.
Long snake shape relative to size.
>Frills and folding glide-structure along long body.
Extra wind resistance.
>Bird-like bone structure.
Keep 'em lightweight.
>Stanima like an Alaskan Shoebird.
These things do not stop if they don't want to. Size limits this somewhat but if they can find food they can go for scores of miles, maybe a hundred or more over the course of just a day or two.
>Smart, both intellectually and physically.
They are aware of their means and Very agile. They undulate in the air to keep mostly afloat as you see some aquatic snakes do and their large wing-span makes up the difference and allows them to ascend. Launching is difficult so they favor tall places, citiscapes, mountains and cliff sides.

Reptilian longevity means they live a long time, they're smart, and even the ones with mouths that don't let them talk can figure out how to communicate. Early era pacts were mostly "keep stuff safe on your cliff for us and we'll share some of the livestock with you and team up for hunting." They fit in with Dogs and the like for "man's best friend" but also with the stigma that the less social ones are akin to wolves and treated as such.

In contemporary eras, they realized the value money has and hoard it however they see fit, gathering it as brigands, mercenaries and simple services at first, but amassing wealth over decades to invest further and accumulate other sources of income and options, so there are a fair few draconic banking firms which are usually held in high regard.

Their fire breath is a bit variable. Some generate caustic fluids that they can spit a fair distance. Some spew a fluid that they ignite with an electrical charge more like an eel, or a high-friction pair of throat-bones that spark to cause ignition of their natural napalm. Neither of these are quick to replenish their reserves, and so need to be used sparingly and as a defensive mechanism.

I'm not a biologist.

ITS FUCKING MAGIC

Young dragons have lightweight bones and huge wings, and rely on natural means for their breath. As they age, they begin to supplement their natural abilities with magic, using more and more magic to fly as they become heavier and using magical effects in their breath as their magic grows stronger

>giving unnecessary explanations to fantastical creatures
???

Blame evolution. She always making something strange work after trial and error. If a lobster can clap death and an insects spit liquid fire, I don't see why a dragon can't do both and be more.

This is a meme that I hate. Dragons aren't reptilians. They have traits that can be observed among a few classes of animals, such as insects (six limbs), hollow bones (birds), scales and eggs (reptiles), warmbloodedness and high intelligence (mammals).
Dragons are their own class of animals that emerged around the same time as birds and animals merged off from reptiles. The class contains many different suborders and species such as wyrms, sea serpents, and knuckers. Wyverns are a case of convergent evolution. They are related to pteranodons and can't breathe fire.
The fire breath of a dragon is powered by water. It drinks and creates gaseous hydrogen by magic-powered electrolysis, which it then stores in a compressed pouch near its stomach. They choke it up and ignite it with a set of flintstone-like teeth.

Sure but they're also reptiles, like dinosaurs are.

This is also an explanation I can get behind
I just stated the exact opposite m8

Would it even be possible to start a centuries long dragon breeding program? Are there any living lobe-finned fish with six limbs to start with?

As a biologist, I think dragons necessitate a magical explanation; the "elemental furnace/reactor in chest" bit works pretty well to describe why they can breathe random crap and eat basically anything.

For a more sci-fi take, cribbing a bit off of Iron Kingdoms (which still does dragons wrong but w/e), we could go with the idea that dragons are nuclear life; that is, while the reactions that make life as we understand irl are chemical, the reactions that make up a dragon's metabolism are nuclear. They'd literally be made of radioactive metal, explaining their durability and fearsome nature, able to move by somehow manipulating magnetic fields to move the metal atoms of their own body in relation to each other. The same magnetic fields would allow them to fly; their breath is them venting a fusion reactor at you.

>They have traits that can be observed among a few classes of animals, such as insects (six limbs), hollow bones (birds), scales and eggs (reptiles), warmbloodedness and high intelligence (mammals).
No. They don't. If we speak about classic mythology and folklore, they don't actually have any of these traits inherently in any way.

As someone who hates when people science up fantasy, nuclear dragons is pretty fucking badass.

I was under the impression they'd need magic to fly because of their bulky size and wing span being all wrong to allow it naturally.

Smaller ones would only use their wings to steer, but only if they could figure out how to fly... possibly flaming out the ass?

Pic very much related.

>magic-powered electrolysis
Why have a magic process to power a mundane process? That's fucking weird - your'e trying to explain it rationally, but the underlying mechanism is still just magic.

Why bother with the middleman?

Dragon is a symbolic creature and an chimera: that is it's an amalgam of different animal parts because each of the animals is associated with certain traits, and dragon represents a being that displays all of those qualities at the same time.

That is all you have to know. Applying scientific standards to it, speculating about it's biology or physiology is quite literally missing the point. The idea of a dragon exists as a COUNTER POSITION to science - science is a process of analysis, mythological symbolism is the process of synthesis. Science breaks things into smaller parts, mythology combines small parts into one big image. In case of dragon quite literally.

So the constant desperate attempts to force modern, scientific perspective on mythological images will never cease to confuse me. People enjoy fantasy because it's a revisiting of the mythological perspective, something we are quite literally hard-wired to enjoy. So what is the point in seeking mythological concepts, but then immediately doing the thing we wanted to escape from - the boring, mundane rationality of modern secular world?

Speaking as a zoologist, dragons as imagined by modern society are essentially an ultimate apex predator, combining the best traits of pretty much every major vertebrate predator including human intelligence, then blowing the whole result up to the size of a barn and giving it a flamethrower.

Basically it's just the size and flames you need to handwave, and by magical monster standards that's pretty fucking little.

Dragons have been around in mythology and folklore for millenia. There are thousands of different images and accounts of dragons across the ages and cultures. I'm sure you can find examples of dragons that defy every single thing I posted. But the most common image of dragons in the western world is that of a fire-breathing beast with four legs and wings that hoards its treasure, lays eggs, and is often smart enough to speak.
I added the bits about warm blood and hollow bones because I can't imagine them functioning otherwise. Of course, we're talking about fantasy, so they might as well still work without these details.
Because otherwise they would need a small generator next to their kidneys and they'd be cyberpunk cyborg beasts all of a sudden. Maybe there's a way to include a purely biological, maybe bioelectrical mechanism of electrolysis, but I don't know enough about the subject to lay out how that'll work without magic.
I'm a fan of worldbuilding and of explanations that go a bit further than "they're magic beasts, they can cast the spell Fire Breath once a round, and they are also constantly using magic to defy gravity".

I'm , and I'd like to distance myself because you're waaaaaaaay overshooting. There's nothing wrong with analysing and codifying fantasy, you only need to distance yourself from making it fit real world science and step back to if it's logically self-consistent. Doesn't have blatant fundamental contradictions.

Being chill with a mindlessly irrational world for entertainment you're willing to spend hours talking about on the internet is honestly kinda disgusting. It's fine for shit you watch once or twice then don't dwell on, but if it's worth discussion then it's worth being a coherent fucking world.

>Six limbs
There are phylum besides arthropods with more than four limbs (molluscs). You can always just use wyverns, then they fit perfectly. Or think of them as a more developed version of the draco genus. It's style of wings fit perfectly with D&D's brass or gold dragons.

>Birds
Birds are basically dinosaurs.

>Scales and eggs
See pic. And what do birds lay?

>Warmblooded
Birds are warmblooded and can be highly intelligent (see corvids).

All in all, I'd say dragons are a species of bird or are possibly related to dinosaurs.

>But the most common image of dragons in the western world is that of a fire-breathing beast with four legs and wings that hoards its treasure, lays eggs, and is often smart enough to speak.
The only trait of those you listed common to most dragons in western cultural cannon is the fact that they hoard (or more precisely, GUARD) some form of a treasure.
None of the other traits is even close to being common. What they really do have in common (not only even in European cannon, but also through out most of the world) is that they have a vaguely snake-like body and represent chaos or natural state of things, power/might and they guard treasure. At best you can argue that a non-trivial portion of them have wings and/or associated with fire.

The number of their legs and heads is not in any way consistent enough for anyone to actually codify as consistent traits, and as for eggs, that is actually almost never really mentioned anywhere outside of really modern fantasy. Neither is the idea of them being able to talk (at least not in the west).

>There's nothing wrong with analysing and codifying fantasy
There is quite a lot wrong with it, namely that you are defeating the original purpose of the image you use and thus depriving it of any actual meaning. Dragons aren't real, but they are important and fascinating to us because of the symbolic value they have: they represent our abstraction of certain aspects of the world. If you instead transform them into rationalistic constructs just following arbitrary pseudo-scientific rules, they ironically actually lose what connection to reality they held and thus driven them irrelevant concepts.

>Being chill with a mindlessly irrational world for entertainment you're willing to spend hours talking about on the internet is honestly kinda disgusting.
There is nothing mindless about it. And the fact that you find it disgusting may be bordering on autistic at this point. It just means that you are really, really tunnel-visioned, to a point that is kinda disturbing: where you can't comprehend storytelling from a different perspective than a (actually mindless) exercise in pseudo-causality and speculation. It's a masturbatory activity.

>It's fine for shit you watch once or twice then don't dwell on
Yeah... except for you know: all of the most important and most popular stories in the world. Mythology? Ever fucking heard of that? That is totally the kind of storytelling we absolutely don't dwell on, right? All that shallow shit like Song of the Nibelung, Song of the Pearl, Enuma Elish, Bible, Edda, Tale of Yamata No Orochi, story of Saint George, and also: Hobbit and Lord of The Rings.
I'm pretty sure that shit is not worth discussing. And totally not what fantasy has been desperate to emulate to begin with, right?

Only a fruitless speculation on arbitrary kinda-like-science-but-not-really rules that don't mean anything to anyone is worth discussing. Great logic there.

So, how would a dragonfolk species be? I mean bipedal dragons, but not exactly dragonborns from D&D, I mean they are dragons but they bipedal capable of having a society like our own

Take a look at Dragonewts in the Glorantha setting of old-school Runequest....
Basically larval form of dragons, that gradually develop as they age and gain experience, going through reincarnations and physical changes until they look like miniature dragons, at which point they begin preparing for ascencion to dragonhood.

Hmm, thanks, but I was thinking of dragons as being another fantasy race, similar to elves and shit, not the old school dragon, but thanks anywya.

masterofmagic.wikia.com/wiki/Draconians
They would work like humanoids except with dragon-like features. Not really that hard to figure out.

Well makes sense, but I wanna know society wise, should i just copypaste medieval fantasy land as their society?

That is largely up to you to invent, man, that is the point of this exercise. You chose.
That said, here is one fun thing to consider:
Flying creatures don't need stairs. Or using mounts for personal transportation. Or much use for walls in defensive sense.

Does that dragon have a cock and balls?

Is that the first dragon dick ever drawn?

Well, where they would live? and I can see some of points right there, kinda asking over here because /wbg/ is still sleeping and with 4chanx, i can't make new threads for some reaosn.

perhaps the flames could be due to the natural formation of two chemicals that, when in contact with each other, produces a flame, similar to potassium permanganate and glycerin?

A six-limbed dragon would be more difficult to explain as the body plan is already set in place, however a wyvern could simply just be a normal reptile with four limbs, and the forward two evolving a webbing.
Or, you can go the dinosaur route and say that they're closer to birds?

But the overall problem with dragons existing is the mixture of protection and being lightweight.
Hollow bones would be a must, but the wingspan of the dragon (i assume) would have to increase on a logarithmic scale, at which point would a dragon even have the energy to move them?

>Or much use for walls in defensive sense.
If they are fighting each other, maybe. But if their opponents can't fly? A fortress dedicated to stop creepers will have high walls (but not doors).

Also it depends on how convenient flying is: if they need some space, you may still need some stairs for interiors, if it's tiresome, you may still have some long distance mounts.
Disabled unable to fly would be so fucked though.

Dragons don't work. They're bourgeois that live off their liquid assets.

>Well, where they would live?
It makes relative sense (depending how hard to you make it for them to fly) for them to naturally build habitats in less accessible places that only flying creatures could reach (say, building your city on a cliff-face or on top of mountains etc) to keep enemies and predators at bay. They might prefer caves carved into the cliff above ground sometimes. Though eventually, they would probably still end up building normal houses and palaces (you still need walls to carry a roof and keep wind and cold from getting in) - it just makes sense from them to take advantage of height and inaccessible terrain to boost natural defenses.
Though you probably should consider that if they are to have civilizations, they will still need some form of agriculture. Maybe the might chose to prefer building terrace-like farms on steep slopes though, if possible. Think of China and their famous mountain cities and farms. It could be something like that.

>But if their opponents can't fly?
Then build your doors 15 meters above the ground. Or make the entrance to your house on your roof.

>Also it depends on how convenient flying is
That is true. See above.

>Disabled unable to fly would be so fucked though.
You mean like disabled people who can't climb stairs were in real world?

MAGNETS

>Yeah... except for you know: all of the most important and most popular stories in the world. Mythology? Ever fucking heard of that? That is totally the kind of storytelling we absolutely don't dwell on, right? All that shallow shit like Song of the Nibelung, Song of the Pearl, Enuma Elish, Bible, Edda, Tale of Yamata No Orochi, story of Saint George, and also: Hobbit and Lord of The Rings.
I'm pretty sure that shit is not worth discussing. And totally not what fantasy has been desperate to emulate to begin with, right?

All of these stories reflect their time period and region of origin, the purely symbolic context of dragons made sense. People back then didn't understand their surroundings and most people were more superstitious.
But times have changed, people have more access to information and technology which makes them more inquisitive and skeptical. Therefore a story which features dragons and other magical/fantastical elements as pure metaphors and symbolic elements simply doesn't fit with the modern 21st century consciousness, simply put everything today needs rhyme and reason
I'm not trying to say the myths and stories you mentioned are outdated and useless, far from it. What I am trying to say is that these stories were written in a very different today's and trying to uphold them as the gold standard for modern fantasy fiction is wrong headed.

Huh, makes sense, thanks user.

>All of these stories reflect their time period and region of origin, the purely symbolic context of dragons made sense.
The region is simply human experience, and the history is universal history of human kind. It's actually completely reasonable to say that these stories have their origins maybe 25 thousand years in the past or even more. Yet they are still obsessive fascinating to use even today, as obvious from the fact that we spend hundreds of millions of dollars to recreate them and tens of millions of people flock to the cinemas to re-watch them. People did not go to Hobbit or the bloody Capeshit movies because they are interested in vapid pseudo-scientific speculations on how dragon anatomy works or how Hulks organic skin can withstand temperatures that would make ANY protein in existence denaturate. People go to them because they STILL find their symbolism relevant, because it's so profoundly universal. It's also the reason why you actually find that these stories repeat themsleves from Japan to Scandinavia.

>People back then didn't understand their surroundings and most people were more superstitious
They actually understood them in many ways better than you do. Which is why they created stories that are valid and attractive to us 25 thousand years ago. Meanwhile, most modern scientific theories are completely irrelevant to vast majority of the public and themselves outdate in matters of decades.

>But times have changed, people have more access to information and technology which makes them more inquisitive and skeptical.
This is laughably fucking naive and arrogant. I can assure you that humans have not actually changed that much. The new domains of scientific inquiry are incredibly interesting and useful, but also insanely narrow in their relevance.

>and trying to uphold them as the gold standard for modern fantasy
Fantasy is NOTHING, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ELSE but an attempt to revive these stories, to emulate their appeal. That is fact.

>Huh, makes sense, thanks user.
It doesn't, really. It was just me throwing around ideas completely ad hoc. My intention was to illustrate how can you go around doing this, rather than to tell you this is what you should depict in your settings. The whole thing I described makes zero sense if your dragons just need more effort to get off the ground. In fact just changing the amount of presumed effort to get off the ground could result in exactly OPPOSITE ideas and images: with them seeking wide, open areas and plains where the could find enough space to get themselves in the air if necessary, build their buildings as ramps, keep low to the ground whenever they don't feel like flying, turn them into maybe Mongolia-like nomades...

You can really play around as much as you want. It's just a matter of setting up yourself some basic restraint or ground rule, then building on associations that it brings.

Well, my basic plan was to rip off the pillar and necrons from jojo and 40k, but now i am more convinced to try something.

>Some generate caustic fluids that they can spit a fair distance. Some spew a fluid that they ignite with an electrical charge more like an eel, or a high-friction pair of throat-bones that spark to cause ignition of their natural napalm.
Dragon breath is the easiest part of the beast. Just have them create a binary explosive with the appropriate balance of flame and explosion when the two constituent compounds are mixed. Given the ridiculously huge range of substances animals around the world create - things human material science can't yet dream of imitating - I'd be comfortable with them creating some pretty spectacular breath.

I'm just playing with the idea of a very heavy build, "needing a lot of speed to lift of and more capable of gliding than actual acrobatic flight" dragons in my head and it actually sounds like a lot of fun.

Sort of a reptilian secretary bird thing. Exceptionally good runners (as they need that to get of the ground), semi-nomadic creatures that inhabit remote cold scandinavia-like islands or great steppes and build their housings in crude burrows dug under ground. Technologically relatively primitive as their claws and tooth and scaly skin allows lesser reliance on hunting tools or armor, plus their need for large open spaces encourages more solitary, tribal lifestyle and dissencourage urbanization, but that could be outweighted by some interesting spiritual life, religions and cosmologies: their eagle's perspective (once they to get off the ground) could predicate some kind of fascination with chronicling and historiography, as they observe the other races living out their grounded lives from above...

Just making shit up as I go, but it sure is fun. Shame I really only do human-only or almost-human-only serious world-building myself.

If you're going for realistic fire-breathing dragons there would have to be be a pressing evolutionary need for them to be able to produce fire. Storing the energy and releasing it as a flammable liquid or gas isn't an issue biologically, but it would be ridiculously expensive metabolically. If it didn't absolutely 100% need it to live, it would end up being selected against pretty strongly due to the number of calories needed to make it work. Those without it would need far less food and so be far less likely to starve to death (teeth and claws are about as good at killing and far, far less resource intensive). Something like a poison spray or poisoned darts would be more plausible, but doesn't fit the classic fire-breathing motif.

You don't need gas bladders.
Just make it so they can inflate and deflate their stomach with air and use the highly corrosive spray of their gastric juices as weapon. That's a much more realistic burning breath than the biblically inspired serpent that breathes literal fire. Or just take inspiration from the bombardier beetle's ability to shoot a jet of burning vapour by using a chemical reaction.

Also, two legs and two wings, extremely intelligent but only borderline sentient is the way to go for realistic dragons. Four legs plus two wings is not realistic at all, unless your dragon is some kind of alien that evolved on a different planet. And I have a hard time imagining how the hell a reclusive individualist animal that is incapable of building tools or cooperating with anything would ever develop reason and sentience as we know it.

Something as big as a dragon is going to need a lot of calories anyway - maybe the evolutionary pathway began with a mechanism for setting bushfires with the vast quantities of fleeing/dead animals providing the energy to allow a gradual advancement of the breath mechanism. Say most of the time they just use it at a fraction of its max power to start hunting fires, only in a life or death situation does it unleash what we picture as dragonfire.

Say evolution discovered a few extremely efficient catalysts to help the process along and I don't see why it'd be all that expensive.

It's funny. Even in the context of this thread I find the idea that 'a 6-limbed beast is impossibly unrealistic' autistically nitpicky. I mean, I know it's got no earthly evolutionary lineage but c'mon, it's just another pair of bloody limbs.

>that one fag in every thread that insists on talking about mythology dragons even though literally everyone else in the thread is talking about fantasy dragons
Is it autism?

The larger something is the harder it becomes to get those calories - especially for something that flies. Note how there are no land predators over a ton today and there are very few in history. Once you go past that kind of weight it becomes impossible to chase down prey without expending more energy than you get from the kill. Going after larger animals is too dangerous as the square-cube rule means everything is proportionally more fragile, so there's a greater risk of injury.

Efficient catalysts still require you to have that energy in the first place. That means consuming huge amounts of food for a few seconds of fire.

tl;dr: There's a reason there are no huge, flying predators, or firebreathing ones in RL. If you want dragons that fit the fantasy definition, you have to go fantasy.

Look up the Draco genus, there's your six limbs (sort of).

An autist is a person who cannot understand that the two are deeply related, kid. Fantasy is a reproduction of mythology. It's the only thing that gives it relevance. Just like hard-sci-fi is a reproduction of scientific causality.

>the two are related (as it that isn't obvious to everyone ever)
>therefore, I MUST talk about them every time even when people are clearly talking about the fantasy version
yup, it's autism.

>the two are related (as it that isn't obvious to everyone ever)
>therefore, I MUST talk about them every time even when people are clearly talking about the fantasy version
Apparently it's quite as obvious as you claim, since you yourself don't seem to be aware of it. And this might shock you, but knowing that they are related is not the same as knowing HOW they are related and why that would matter.

If you actually know how the two concepts are related, you'd realize that it's absolutely necessary to bring up if you want the discussion to go anywhere and not be just a completely and ACTUALLY autistic noise of people belching out random claims that no one else is going to find in any way useful.

The only reason why you are mad at me is that you actually do seek that kind autistic belching contest and I'm reminding you that such a thing is pointless masturbation.

I hate these threads.

For all the people trying to come up with realistic dragons, any attempt will literally produce pterosaurs (). They are the only realistic take on dragons that is physically possible. Evolution already showed us how to do it, and then they went extinct.

As for that shitty fucking ideas about gas bladders and hydrogen storage and all the other stupid shit that has been suggested for fire breath, all of it doesn't work. Yes, even the retarded mockumentary. Platinum deposits are extremely rare and very few are anywhere near the surface. Its stupid shit.

As to magical explanations for fire breath that are magical but elegant, and don't remove the mystical elements of it, D&Ds version is IMHO the best. Dragons are capable of all their great feats by way of an organ situated next to their heart, the draconis fundamentum. This organ has thousands of micro portals to the elemental planes, blood coming from the heart passes through the organ infusing the blood with elemental magical power, before going off to the rest of the body. The elemental power strengthens the bones and flesh against the square cube law, provides enough magical "up" power for the wings, and provides the ability to vomit elemental power when some of that blood is mixed into the stomach. This organ alone makes it so that the flesh of dragons is so valuable and important.

As to taxonomy, dragons share features of birds and mammals, and very little with lizards beyond slight superficial similarities. Their scales are more like a pangolins than a lizards or snakes or crocodiles. Their eggs are hard shelled like a birds, and unlike the soft leathery ones of lizards. Their body shapes tend toward mammalian style ones, usually with legs directly beneath instead of splayed like most reptiles, barring of course the more snake like of the draconic kind. They have horns like a mammal, if they have any. They are a mish mash of various animals, and are more than just big lizards.

Evolution is nothing more than the law of least effort, Dragons could be made as machine or artificial life forms.

ITS A GODDAMB WAIVERN!

They are fucking dragons, why would you let autism ruin sweet shit?

*Someone* failed high school chemistry.

I understand that the thread needed a bump but seriously?
What is even the logic behind this post?

Some people lack the smarts for science (or really, the hard work necessary) and try to say that the scientific viewpoint has limitations it doesn't.

Basically, they can't compete in terms of logic and rational thought, so they try to make it sound like their feeble brains matter.

But logic and rationalism have both been demonstrably quite limited in the course of human history. Logic utterly failed as a means to ground math or language, and rationalism was passed over in favour of empiricism (itself quite limited) in most fields of inquiry.

Logic has limitations and scientific thought is anethema to play.

Imaginary shit isn't logical, user. Trying to claim it is is not merely stupid, it's a marker for certain kinds of very bad mental phenomena in your head.

That is some grade A projection you have there. Do you react with such delusions to every post that does not validate your feelings?

I think he was just trying to vaguely talk about the things he considers "proper" smarts and wasn't really even considering the distinctions between rationalism and empiricism, as by "rational though and logic" he just meant the whole "thing that scientists do".

After all, it's just a little more than a lazy shitpost.

That said, there are a bit more things at play when some people suggest that modern scientific and "materialistic" (I hate to use that word myself) perspective, as incredibly cool as it, is barely sufficient perspective on the world. Ironically enough, it's Darwinism and modern neurological and cognitive sciences that simply suggest that analytical view is technically speaking inefficient.
And as somebody already noted in this thread, evolution is a law of least effort. Human brain and our cognition is primarily heuristic-driven, down to most fundamental aspects of it. The world as we percive and establish it for ourselves is far from being build around either empiricism or rationalism. We can employ those, but it's pretty silly to assume they are the ultimate, solve-all code to read it.

We don't have any ancient six limbed reptiles for it to have evolved from. Adding an unnecessary ( and unexplainable, evolutionary-wise ) pair of limbs would break the realism.

The problem with trying to use logic, rationalism, or empiricism to understand the world is that the world is not logical, rational, or empirical. We can use those tools to make sense of parts of it, but we'll never get a complete picture with those tools.

Also I too detest the term materialism (I prefer physicalism) and feel that the distinction between materialism, idealism, and spiritualism, assuming you're not trying for some manner of dualism, is just a naming convention (since the latter two are really just materialism with unverifiable materials).

Except fantasy is the ANTI-THESIS of realism. Like - literally, it's basically defined as "stuff that isn't realistic".

And god dammit I really wish the would make "teaching children the difference between realism, belivability, coherence and relevance" a fucking mandatory part of basic education. It's incredible how many discussions on fiction boil down to this very simple set of problems.

You know you're talking about critters from a reality where creationism is the norm typically, right?

>We can use those tools to make sense of parts of it, but we'll never get a complete picture with those tools.
Well... that could be actually somewhat debatable. There is a reasonable cause to argue that the world might actually be coherent and reliably patterned. And there is DEFINITELY a cause to assume it as such (even if we can't know that for certain, because knowledge itself is nothing else but pattern recognition - ergo if there is part of the universe unpatterned it will not be knowable).

I don't necessarily detest materialism (or physicalism if you prefer the term) as a notion, I just view it as a tool with specialized and potentially narrow use. Absolutely amazing if you want to get a spacecraft on the orbit. Absolutely terrible if you need to decide whenever it's more worth-while to shoot ships into orbit, or feed starving children in Africa.

That said, your use of the notions of idealism and spiritualism intrigues me, because those might be contestable. Especially idealism, which can be interpreted from classical Platonic sense (which I SERIOUSLY think was just a very old code for "semiotics") to modern political ones.

I also can't exactly agree that notions of spiritualism and materialism are merely naming conventions and that they speak about matter of one sort or another.
I'd be more tempted to claim that "spiritualism" or "idealism" actually focuses on interpretation through cognitive models and focuses on notions of meaning, while physicalism or materialism focuses on matters of empirically observable causality.

In regards of above, I'd say that one is direct, while the other is heuristic. Though of course, if you reject my original assumption that world might be reliably patterned ("logical" or "empiric"), you could argue that it's just more complex heuristic vs. less complex one.

And I honestly don't have any idea of what I'm saying makes any sense or if it's fitting this thread.

We can observe in particle decay random patterns of decay that don't follow any conventional understanding of order or structure; the reason one particle decays before another identical particle beside it is as far as we can see, random, and even attempts to account for a hidden cause have come up null. While we can't assert this randomness as absolute truth (because we can never truly be sure there isn't a hidden cause) I believe this hints at the reason for the failure of all of our systems of structured thought to account for the nature of reality in a substantial sense, and shows where our attempts to put a logical origin to the universe have come up short. The universe isn't logical, and so to make sense of of it with logic is impossible.

Idealism and spiritualism as I understand it are just forms of monism that assert what reality is composed of (Spinoza and Hegel for instance both believed reality was composed of the substance of thought) and I believe the distinctions in this capacity are a matter of nomenclature and nothing else.

The decision of whether to feed starving people or shoot ships into space works fine as a materialistic one, because our emotions, our sense of empathy, are likely rooted in material causes and their being material doesn't make them insignificant as some would have it (I honestly suspect this idea is the panicked grasping of those of a more spiritualistic mindset seeing physical doctrines as a threat to the existence of their ideals).

>I believe this hints at the reason for the failure of all of our systems of structured thought

Ok Deepak. What else do you know?

Not much, hence why I said believe.

>We can observe in particle decay random patterns of decay that don't follow any conventional understanding of order or structure
Well, quantum physics might not be intuitive but it does a good job at prediction of these things, so some kind of pattern has been assumed at least.

>randomness as absolute truth
Well, "absolute truth" is a good example of what we can very reasonably assume of a COMPLETE heuristic that our brain invents out of sheer convenience. It's very likely that there might be no absolution. However, so far it's remarkable how while there is no absolution, there is a very strong probability of a pattern at least on statistical level.

>I believe this hints at the reason for the failure of all of our systems of structured thought to account for the nature of reality
I'm not sure I agree here. So two things: A) it really depends on what you expect to be "the nature of reality". Maybe the "nature of reality" is just another of our heuristics - maybe we (or you, in this case) just have the wrong expectations.
Second of all: I'd say we are amazing good at establishing really, really substantial account of the reality and it's nature around us. It's in fact absolutely mindboggling how good we got at this. I mean - just the damn theory of evolution and our ability to comprehend it offers such insanely profound insights into our nature it completely blows my mind.

Ultimately, I'd argue that maybe the kind of "nature of reality" question we ponder is just us running headlong into one of those imperfect but efficient heuristic of mind we use. It may not be a mystery at all: maybe what we see is really what is there, no further "insight" necessary, it's just that evolution programmed us to seek further patterns even when they aren't there.
(cont.)

>I believe the distinctions in this capacity are a matter of nomenclature and nothing else.
Well, yeah, but that is just Hegel and Spinoza, trapped in illusion of world as materialistic since Aristotle and atomists. I mean they are damn smart but I would not say that is the end-all-be-all of all potential concepts of "idealistic" or "spiritualistic" perceptions.

If you look all the way back at the origin of the word Ideal, to Plato: he is an anti-materialist, quite an aggressive one. And I think he really is - he is not treating his ideas as some form of materia, at all. And as for spiritualism, rather than Spinoza, I'd ask religions on their view: after all they have been maintaining that notion for the longest time. And I'd say their views are rarely materialist as well - except for maybe Shinto. Shinto is like FUCKING MATERIALISTIC AS FUCKING HELL. Damn Japs.
This is why I asked you how you define them, because I would define both completely differently. I believe you really can't call Platonistic or Neo-Platonistic idealism to be a different form of materialism.

>fine as a materialistic one
I don't think so. Maybe we have a problem on different view of "materialism" here. Because I think both are based on priority of potential futures. And you really can't reasonably attain those by merely observing clumps of matter.
You talk about emotions, which is all well and I sure agree - there is no real duality of mind and matter (it's just another heuristic we made) - but I'm more talking about ethics, and that is where mere emotions don't cut it. Instead, you must establish value. Which is a form of preferentiality. And we can argue that kind of preferentiality is fundamentally rooted in evolutionary pressure (e.g. some possible futures result in our increase or decrease of fitness): but the actual fucking cognitive process you have to do is so nightmareishly complicated that materialistic grounding is just not going to cut it at all. Not practically.

How does dragon poon feel?

shitty b8 desu senpai