Dave Wilton - 29 April 2012 02:48 AM

That’s a very modern and Western definition of magic. The medieval European concept of magic, for example, held that magic was based on unknown physical laws. If you could suss out the knowledge, you could perform magic. (Chaucer’s The Franklin’s Tale is a nice example of this belief.) The only supernatural object was God. (The medieval Latin supernaturalis, which is first found in Aquinas, is applied to the divine.) Even Satan and demons had to obey the laws of nature that God had set forth.

There is a great process theologian whose name escapes me (edit: Stephen Neill, Bishop of South India, I think) who said that the word “supernatural” should be understood as a kind of “super charged” natural. Natural but charged with the possibility of the transcendent without violating natural law. I cite this thought with appreciation.

Oecolampadius - 29 April 2012 02:29 PM

… the word “supernatural” should be understood as a kind of “super charged” natural. Natural but charged with the possibility of the transcendent without violating natural law. I cite this thought with appreciation.

Whatever that means.

As an amateur, I would have to suppose it means that God is the absolute entirety of everything that exists and that the natural world around us is not everything that exists, so therefore “supernatural” means whatever is beyond what we know or perceive around us. But it still has to stick to the law, just like us citizens. But as long as it’s natural I guess the FDA and the foodie folkie cultie crowd must think it’s kosher, so it’s all right by me.

But then on the wp page dealing with process theology it seemed to imply that God wasn’t the absolute entirety of everything, and there was some kind of link to panenthusiasm, so I’m feeling kinda out on a very long limb.

Thanks.  It’s kinda starting to almost make sense.  We know that there’s things we don’t know.  Still, the word supernatural carries a lot of baggage with it and would be best not used in this context, IMO.

Dave Wilton - 29 April 2012 02:48 AM

The medieval European concept of magic, for example, held that magic was based on unknown physical laws. If you could suss out the knowledge, you could perform magic.

Well, I’m not sure I’d put the word physical in there: “unknown laws”, certainly, which were, until you discovered then, “occult”. Once the process was known, it was science: that may even be tautological, given the roots of the word “science”, though I am aware of the anachronism of using “science” in its modern sense in relation to medieval alchemists and the like.

But I remember impressing a woman once (she was easily impressed) by dropping a lump of dry ice into a cup on a counter in the kitchen when she wasn’t looking, and then, in front of her, pouring hot water into the cup. As the “smoke” poured up out of the cup and over the counter, she looked at me with wide eyes and said: “You’re a magician!” To her, because she didn’t know about the dry ice, what I had just done was indistinguishable from magic: but it was hardly a triumph of advanced technology. Any technology at all looks like magic, if you don’t understand the physics: that’s why Clarke’s aphorism is stupid.

Any technology at all looks like magic, if you don’t understand the physics: that’s why Clarke’s aphorism is stupid.

Hence Clarke’s qualification of “sufficiently advanced.” It’s all relative. It’s not stupid if you accept the modern idea that magic is a process that operates outside the laws of nature. Clarke is simply pointing out the ancient idea that there is no distinction, only different degrees of knowledge. (Although I don’t know if Clarke was aware of medieval and classical conceptions of magic.)

For a laugh, here’s an example from MIT that uses computers to create “scientific papers”: 
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/#examples

Description:  SCIgen - An Automatic CS Paper Generator
SCIgen is a program that generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations. It uses a hand-written context-free grammar to form all elements of the papers. Our aim here is to maximize amusement, rather than coherence.

Here’s a paper they created using the above that was actually accepted for publication:

Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy

ABSTRACT
Many physicists would agree that, had it not been for congestion control, the evaluation of web browsers might never have occurred. In fact, few hackers worldwide would disagree with the essential unification of voice-over-IP and publicprivate
key pair. In order to solve this riddle, we confirm that SMPs can be made stochastic, cacheable, and interposable.

"Could a computer write this story?”

Fluffy, but the technology is definitely evolving:

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/05/11/tech/innovation/computer-assisted-writing/index.html

.

These fellows link say they:

also help publishers who are faced with the constant challenge of keeping up with the speed, scale and cost demands of content creation. We offer an innovative and cost-effective solution that allows publishers to cover topics that can’t otherwise be covered due to operational or cost constraints.

"Could a computer write this story?”

A fluffy article, but the technology is definitely evolving:

http://edition.cnn.com/2012/05/11/tech/innovation/computer-assisted-writing/index.html

.

These fellows [link] claim:

We also help publishers who are faced with the constant challenge of keeping up with the speed, scale and cost demands of content creation. We offer an innovative and cost-effective solution that allows publishers to cover topics that can’t otherwise be covered due to operational or cost constraints.

Speed, scale, and cost demands. Cost constraints. Potentially scary. But I don’t think we’ll be seeing any “Help Wanted: Robot reporter” signs anytime soon.

In such a case the publisher should forgo the topics it doesn’t have the human resources to cover effectively.Leave it to someone else who does have the capacity.

We know that there’s things we don’t know.

“....There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy”.

I think Shakespeare and his contemporaries used the word “philosophy” to mean what today we call “science”

Leave it to someone else who does have the capacity.

Meh. Why should I? Why shouldn’t I have a go at the market and let them decide? Publishing is a new landscape and now I am a publisher and that’s just one of the ways this is all going to affect everything.

computers don’t have the same capacity for pitch, emotion and story structure.

This idea betrays the fact that he’s a journalist and not a computer scientist. It’s a childishly “no duh” statement to say that computers don’t have the capacity for emotion. The meaningful question is if they have the capacity to mimic emotion. These Narrative Science guys have already demonstrated the ability to template simple story structures and this ability will certainly improve. I think it’s silly to believe that they’ve already reached their limit. As for pitch and emotion, these are also structural elements that can be quantified and manipulated.

A computer will never be a duck. But will it quack like one and it will it walk like one and it will look like one? I’m betting yes.

Meh. Why should I? Why shouldn’t I have a go at the market and let them decide? Publishing is a new landscape and now I am a publisher and that’s just one of the ways this is all going to affect everything.

Because you are going to waste resources in a market where you are doomed to fail. And you are likely to weaken your brand in the process. Go after segments that you can do well, and expand when you have the capacity to do so properly. Specialization is a good thing.