Mage: The Ascension

[nemorathwald]

You fit in with: Atheism Your ideals mostly resemble those of an Atheist. You have very little faith and you are very focused on intellectual endeavors. You value objective proof over intuition or subjective thoughts. You enjoy talking about ideas and tend to have a lot of in depth conversations with people. 60% scientific. 60% reason-oriented.

Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com

Within the "Read More" link are my results from the religious categorization quiz, gakked from sarahmichigan and rikhei.

Of course it listed me in the atheist quadrant. "But why," I hear you ask, "did you score only 60% scientific and 60% reason-oriented? Why not 100%?" Because it was testing what kind of person I am, not necessarily what kind I want to be. For instance, I answered "right-brained" instead of "left-brained" because although my values assert the primacy of reason and technical expertise, any techie who knows me will tell you I lack the temperament to write shell scripts, compile software, patch my kernel, etc. ad nauseum. I'd rather read an instruction book rich with storytelling metaphor, like Unix for the Beginning Mage. I'm more like a journalist attempting fervently to accurately report on a science outside his scope, to a public who knows even less.

I noticed that there are two kinds of people in my life. There are the technical experts, with whom I enjoy shooting the breeze and absorbing some of their knowledge. Then there are those with no interest in such things, who, when they hear me shooting said breeze with said experts, don't realize the most I know about each topic is the name of the topic and the broad category of problems to which it is applied. Each group thinks I am in the other group. I've been mistaken for a computer science person for as long as computers have existed. Before that time, classmates assumed I would be a psychologist.

My aptitudes are those of an artist, a storyteller, a speechmaker, an emotional engineer. I'm interested in embodying secular, skeptical, scientific values into the inner world of the heart. It is a connection that has rarely been made except by science fiction literature. The universe of the skeptical, scientific, secular view is not a cold and boring place. It's bursting with vitality, passion, interest and love.

Over lunch at a restaurant during ConClave, the inestimable Chuck Child described an RPG campaign he had played in the White Wolf game "Mage: The Ascension." I was fascinated by his description of the Virtual Adepts: hackers who figured out that the universe was a massive computation, and devised ways to hack into it. In this way, they found a "Scooby-Doo" explanation for all the other supposedly magical phenomena in the game's setting.

It's a good thing I heard Chuck describe the hacking re-interpretation before he loaned me the roleplaying sourcebook, or I would never have gotten past the introduction. The majority of the book laments the success of science as changeless mediocrity, disparages the virtue of reason as the sterilization of creativity, and glorifies denial. "Reason is the festering scab laid down over reality... It's not a pretty picture, this dream of reason," reads page 36. Nothing could be further from the truth. Granted-- like any work of fiction, this is not intended to be taken literally. But who is intended to enjoy that sort of talk coming from a protagonist instead of a villianous cult leader or a mob? Is it marketed to someone who can't find anything to acheive or be happy about or interested in among that which is possible? When I thought about what wonder and beauty are revealed in the real-life universe, what oddness and adventure are scientifically plausible, and the mind-blowing vision of post-human ascension the twenty-first century could bring to the world as we know it, I honestly chuckled at how atrophied and sad is the vision of Mage: The Ascension.

Chuck's campaign had been a renegade attempt to squeeze unauthorized lemonade from this lemon. If I were to play the game as originally intended, I might have to join the antagonists of the setting, the men in black of the oppressive "Technocracy", just in order to hang around with players and characters who don't hate me. Interestingly, the Virtual Adepts used to be a well-meaning group within the Technocracy but left because they disagreed with their attempts to enforce conformity.

Does the freedom to believe anything you want a legal freedom, where no one can put you in jail for thought crime, or does it also mean the freedom to not be proven wrong? If somebody shows evidence that you've believed the wrong thing, you are kind of "coerced" by reality to stop believing it. Unless, that is, your brain is outfitted with the sort of industrial-grade denial usually reserved for tantrum-throwing toddlers.

Comments

[sarahmichigan.livejournal.com]

I thought about what wonder and beauty are revealed in the real-life universe, what oddness and adventure are scientifically plausible, and the mind-blowing vision of post-human ascension the twenty-first century could bring to the world as we know it...

You sound like Carl Sagan or some of the other scientific thinkers I've read. There is wonder in the universe even from a completely atheistic, rational standpoitn.

Does the freedom to believe anything you want a legal freedom, where no one can put you in jail for thought crime, or does it also mean the freedom to not be proven wrong? If somebody shows evidence that you've believed the wrong thing, you are kind of "coerced" by reality to stop believing it. Unless, that is, your brain is outfitted with the sort of industrial-grade denial usually reserved for tantrum-throwing toddlers.

windswept recently posted this quote:

Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith

[overthesun.livejournal.com]

What I always remember, when reading the Mage: The Awakening books is this:
Every time you hear a description of Anything, it is colored by the perceptions of the "Source". If you are reading the main rule-book, you are reading about things from a generic anti-normality standpoint, unless stated otherwise. Often you are hearing a narrative from a EXTREMELY different viewpoint. . . .But in those two books I lent you almost all of them are Further toward that edge, rather than closer to the center. The closest you will come to those who like current normality will be the Sons of Ether, or the Virtual Adepts.

Another important piece to remember is: All the groups you are reading about remember the time before Science. Before science EXISTED. In the game-history, before the mass of humanity believed in Science, *It Did Not Work* Except for mages, who believed in it. In other words, if you took a pistol, and brought it back to the 15oo's, far from it working, it would produce Paradox for the person using it, unless their will was Truly Epic.

In other words, the structure you Point at:

When I thought about what wonder and beauty are revealed in the real-life universe, what oddness and adventure are scientifically plausible, and the mind-blowing vision of post-human ascension the twenty-first century could bring to the world as we know it, I honestly chuckled at how atrophied and sad is the vision of Mage: The Ascension.

That structure is Created, Imposed on a free-form reality. Imposed by what has Become the Technocracy, but began as mages.

If you dig into the History of the Technocracy, most of the things I find most amazing (Space Travel, Computers, Radio, Radar, Chaos Theory, Etc) were things the Technocracy, as a whole, didn't want to exist. Things outside the plan. Things that renegade groups (Specifically, The Sons of Ether, and the Virtual Adepts) produced, displayed, "Spliced in" to reality, in such a way that, by the time the technocracy tried to stop it, they could not.

In other words, Yes. While the view presented in the first couple of pages of the mage book is rather sad, remember that it is produced by a viewpoint that remembers a time when Dragons and Sorcerers walked the land, when gods came to earth. . . . And which blames the group that ended all of that (the Technocracy) . .. . . Without appreciating the structure it brought into place to replace it.

Does the freedom to believe anything you want a legal freedom, where no one can put you in jail for thought crime, or does it also mean the freedom to not be proved wrong? If somebody shows evidence that you've believed the wrong thing, you are kind of "coerced" by reality to stop believing it. Unless, that is, your brain is outfitted with the sort of industrial-grade denial usually reserved for tantrum-throwing toddlers.

Well, taken as a whole, it's the freedom to *TRY* to be right, against all odds . . .. With the knowledge that if your denial is *Not* strong enough, if the universe takes offense .. ..There will be Consequences to pay, Aplenty.


As a whole, Humanity doesn't not want to believe in dragons, and ogres, and wizards any longer. However, I do find seductive the viewpoint that, if you create it, and make it strong, and make it good, and make it plausible, it will be, and stay .. . The idea that if enough of us believe, and our target is enough of a gray zone that humanity doesn't see a conflict with "reality", that the strength of our consensual will can create a new rule, a new law. . . . One on par with Relativity. . ...

Either way I hope you will give that lemon a thorough Wringing. . . . .You may find more juice in there than you thought.

- Chuck

[sarahmichigan.livejournal.com]

Thought you might find this anti-ID argument amusing:

http://abstractfactory.blogspot.com/2005/10/only-debate-on-intelligent-design-that.html

[matt-arnold.livejournal.com]

That's funny! Thanks!