Magical Theory Crafting: The Mutable - Immutable Spectrum

[TheEldritchGod]

So I was just in the shower and had a thought.


In my attempt to create the world's most highly detailed theory of how magic works, I have been working on the idea of duality: There are the physical sciences and the physical world, and then there is the immaterial world of magic where thought and magic are one and the same.

The two come together to form "life". You need an interaction of both to make it.

The physical world, matter if you will, is objective on a macro level. You CAN express a baseball as a wave and a particle, but for all intents and purposes, it is a particle. It doesn't exist in multiple places at once until observed. It can't quantum teleport through the bat of the opposing player.

Yet we have observed just such events happening on a level with physical matter as large as a bacterium.

On a quantum level, perception DOES change reality. Hell, some of the stranger stuff is on the level of magic, in my opinion. It still worries me that observing light under certain conditions can retroactively change its nature IN THE PAST.

Yeah. Let that sink in a little.



So here comes the shower thought.


What if "magic" is the reverse of this?


So, when most magic systems apply magic to their story, the magic is usually:

MY WILL BE DONE.

If you want to sum it up. YES, there are complex formulas or gestures, or incantations, or blah blah blah that add complexity and "science" to the magic spell someone is casting, but in the end, it comes down to:

I WILL IT, SO SHALL IT BE.

That makes it fairly easy on the author. So that begs the question, why bother with the circles, the incantations, the ritual, the "science" behind the spell if magic is just:

I IMAGINE. I POUR ENOUGH MANA INTO MAGIC. STUFF HAPPENS.

Well...

TL/DR: If for science, on a macro level the "Real world" is objective on a macro level, but the smaller you get, the more subjective reality becomes, what if for magic, it is subjective on a macro level, but the smaller you get the MORE objective it becomes?

I will repost the layers of complexity part of my theory

Original Post

Compiling My Thoughts On My Magic System

So, I've been trying to get this worked out in more detail, get down to the nitty-gritty, and I want to put it all in one spot. You can most likely skip over this part. Now that the basics are out of the way. Okay. The important part Types of Mana One of the problems I was...

forum.scribblehub.com

Spoiler: Meme Complexity

Memes can be broken down by the layers of complexity

1. Monads - There are 6 types of this fundamental memetic particle: Up, Down, Angelic, Demonic, Weird, and Top. FYI, Top is the particle that is required for a human soul.

2. Metatron - Typically you have 3 monads come together. A Typical Metatron is Two up and one down, or two down and one up. This is 'basic' memetic material. However, 'complex' Metatrons have one up, one down, and then one of the other 4 types to form an individual Metatron or the smallest 'free form' memetic particle. These 'complex' metatrons are found normally in 'intelligent memetic matter' and are required for self-awareness.

3. Neological- A bit more broad which could be an individual letter of the alphabet, a word, or a phrase, but whatever it is, it is a singular concept that could be boiled down to 'one thing'. It's more complex than that, but I'm just going over the basics. You need a cluster of Metatrons to make a Neological.

4. Eidolon - A cluster of neologisms makes up an eidolon. This is a memetic concept that cannot be expressed in a single 'thing'. It would best to think of it as an experience. An individual 'memory', if you will. It comes in two flavors 'Explicit', which is a 'real' memory, usually something you personally experienced. The second is 'implicit', which is something you 'created'. One cannot experience 'capitalism', but one can 'conceptualize' capitalism. You infer the concept of capitalism from your 'explicit' experiences to create the 'implied/implicit' memory of what capitalism is. Furthermore, it isn't 'just' the words that make up the concept, but how you FEEL about the concept. Each Eidolon for each person would be different for each person. My Eidolon for capitalism would be different from a Socialist's Eidolon for capitalism.

Yes, Capitalism is a single word. So the word Capitalism is a neological, but my life 'experience' with capitalism in total would be my Eidolon of Capitalism

5. Memeplex - This is a collection of Eidolons that forms up a mutually supporting and self-sustaining memetic 'life form'. However, it's a bit more complex than that, since this this the top layer of the chain. For example, an individual is a memeplex. You could say that it is their 'soul'. However, An individual does not exist in a vacuum. They are part of other memeplexes.

Your Church would be a memeplex, and the religion your church practices would be a memeplex. The line where YOU end and something else begins, from a conceptual/memetic point of view is difficult to understand, because, well, we're down here in the muck. It's sort of like an individual bacteria trying to understand the petri dish.

So I'm viewing a spell in the same context as matter here.

Quarks = Monads
Protons/Neutrons/Electrons = Metatrons
Elements = Neologicals
Chemicals = Eidolons
Alloys/Compounds = Memeplex or a typical Spell.

So in this view, the more Vague and imprecise your spell is, the more "Magic" you need to make it happen, because the more "Subjective" it is. However, the more detailed and complex your spell is The more chants, incantations, magical sigils, etc etc etc, the "cheaper" it is to manifest because the more "objective" the spell is.


Whereas for matter, fundamental particles are just strange on a quantum level, for magic, fundamental memes would be MOST stable on a quantum level.

And so we come back to the start of this post: The Mutable-Immutable Spectrum.


And so we have:

Macro Science to Quantum Science
and
Quantum Magic to Macro Magic
being
The Most Objective Reality to The Most Subjective Reality​

DO NOTE: An important part of my ever-increasingly complex magic system is that "Dark Matter" is Anti-Magic, Anti-Subjective, or CLARITY.

Spoiler: How Dark Matter Works

What I mean is, imagine you projected an image of a person from a projector onto a wall. The further away from the wall, the more fuzzy the image, and the larger it gets. Assume the projected image of the person was "alive". To the projected person, everything feels the same. There is no change, regardless of the distance of the projector from the wall. However, there is less clarity/resolution. If you put a piece of paper in front of the lens, you would get a very small, but very crisp picture.

The universe is a projection onto a backdrop. However, there are materials that can pass between the projector and the backdrop. This material is called Dark Matter. The more dark matter, the more clarity, the less wiggle room in the universe, and the less magic you have. Get too much dark matter, magic dies and life isn't possible.

I refer you back to the post of my full theory if you need more details.

Now if you go with this, the implication is that in some locations, magic is difficult because of too much "clarity". So, to get around this, you need to be more efficient with your mana usage. To become more efficient, you would need to get "down in the weeds" of your spell, trying to be as precise as possible.

Now you might ask, so this means there is one set of magical rules? After all, this guy over here draws circles while this guy chants and waves a chicken foot, yet they both cast fireball. What gives?

I would like to point out it is on a SPECTRUM of Objective to Subjective. Consensus would also play a part. If you have a lot of people looking at something and they all agree you need chicken feet to cast a fireball, then the act of agreeing creates a "Local Objective Rule Of Magic" thus you need chicken feet.

A group all agreeing on how a spell works would create an "Objective" agreement on how magic works, therefore making the magic less subjective and "cheaper" to cast as it would need less mana to cast.

Now, you don't NEED the chicken feet. You can get around the lack of chicken feet by just pumping in more mana. However, we come back to the limitation of Dark Matter creating "clarity". This creates an upper limit to how far you can push "BY MY WILL BE DONE". When you reach that level, you NEED to start making the magic cheaper to cast.

Part of this also involves what a fundamental particle of magic is.

I view a single particle of magic as Three Loops of Monads linked together. However, those loops can be rather complex, specifically, they can be Knots. (See the periodic table of knots in the linked post) However, no matter how complex a knotted loop is, you can always stretch and shift the knot to form a ring with all the "holes" in the knotted loop overlapping.

Example: A Metatron is three loops of interlinked mana with each loop having a different level of knots. You could have a metatron with 4-1, 6-8, 9-27 loops with the first number being the number of times the loop crosses itself with the second number being the order it was discovered. So 4-1, 6-8, 9-27 is different from 4-1, 6-8, 9-26 in this context like Oxygen is different from Sulfur. Yeah, they have the same number of outer electrons, but they react very differently when you try to inhale them.

For the sake of my sanity, I'm only allowing loops with a complexity of up to 9, BTW

So, the less "clarity" you have locally, the more complex you can have your knots and the wider and more strange your spells can be. But some universes would collapse 9-knots so they become just loops, and thus not function. Or 8-knots, or 7-knots, etc etc. And since life can't exist without magic under this system, any universe where loops of five complexity or collapse, life becomes impossible.

Since Information is Memes Is Magic Is Life, and DNA is a form of Information, I worked out what "knots" correspond to the 8 types of nucleotides that make up DNA. (And yes, those crazy Japanese found four more nucleotides we didn't know about, even if humans only use 4. No. Seriously. This shits real. I'm telling you, they're gonna be making an actual race of catgirls before you know it.)

So, the more Rules, Chants, Incantations, and Limitations, you put on your magic, the less complex your monad loops need to be, because you are making your magic less subjective, and thus in certain 'low magic' worlds, magic would be possible, whereas in a high magic world, all that extra complexity does is keep the price tag down.

Anyrate, just my ongoing madness to create the perfect magic system.

Thoughts/Feedback/Observations/Questions are encouraged so I can stress test the theory.

 

[LilRora]

I didn't read all you wrote in detail cause there's a lot, but

On a quantum level, perception DOES change reality. Hell, some of the stranger stuff is on the level of magic, in my opinion. It still worries me that observing light under certain conditions can retroactively change its nature IN THE PAST.

This is heavily debatable. From my perspective this is a misunderstanding, but go on.

So in this view, the more Vague and imprecise your spell is, the more "Magic" you need to make it happen, because the more "Subjective" it is. However, the more detailed and complex your spell is The more chants, incantations, magical sigils, etc etc etc, the "cheaper" it is to manifest because the more "objective" the spell is.

I have seen a couple of stories where magic was presented as pure manipulation of reality through mathematical formulas. This might just be a matter of wording not your understanding, but I wouldn't say that more chants, incantations, etc make a a spell cheaper.

On a small level, that would be the case - chanting "fire" leaves a lot of room for interpretation, but even "fireball" is better, and something like, "heat, form a fireball and seek that guy in the distance" gives a lot more details. However, the reason we can do this is we're operating on words.

If we're operating on sigils, or runes, or something similar, depending on the exact system that kind of improvements might be impossible. Then, as we get down to details, it isn't really possible to specify how large a fireball, how much energy it has, how fast it flies, and all those tiny seemingly irrelevant details in a chant without actually understanding how the fireball works - and that's what matters, the details you convey in the chant, their precision, and how well they match with reality. This is why a mathematical formula would massively reduce costs, because while it's not perfect, it's a representation of reality and the spell you're casting - even if it's just a short line of symbols.

You could spend three nights chanting a perfect spell, but if you don't get how it works it's not gonna get more efficient for some reason - unless we turn to what you're talking about later, which to me requires a lot of work.

Now if you go with this, the implication is that in some locations, magic is difficult because of too much "clarity". So, to get around this, you need to be more efficient with your mana usage. To become more efficient, you would need to get "down in the weeds" of your spell, trying to be as precise as possible.

Now you might ask, so this means there is one set of magical rules? After all, this guy over here draws circles while this guy chants and waves a chicken foot, yet they both cast fireball. What gives?

I would like to point out it is on a SPECTRUM of Objective to Subjective. Consensus would also play a part. If you have a lot of people looking at something and they all agree you need chicken feet to cast a fireball, then the act of agreeing creates a "Local Objective Rule Of Magic" thus you need chicken feet.

Mostly it's this. This, I think, is a very cool idea, but in my biased opinion it falls apart in how it is connected to objectivity and subjectivity.

You get a paradox if you think about it. The reason for this is that human opinion, by its nature, is subjective. You can go two ways from there: that consensus, in itself, is also subjective, which means there's no effect on magic, or what I think you did, that consensus sort of makes things objective, that the more people agree on something, the more objective it becomes - similar to how many stories have gods as beings created from the belief of a large number of people.

This in not incorrect, but the issue with this, at least for me, is that people's thoughts are not the same, and you most certainly won't get more precise or accurate if you add up what multiple people think about one thing. It should go in the opposite direction - if there was any effect of people's thoughts on magic, more people think about something should pile up more and more noise that distorts the image.

Ask a number of people how gravity works. If you're lucky, all of them will give you the same general answer, but the more detailed questions you ask, the more and more discrepancies you will find, until it turns out each of them holds a different opinion.

If we look at this mathematically, it becomes very similar to how sets work. If you choose some specific set, you will have a number of smaller sets that are all contained in that set. But as soon as you start narrowing it down to smaller and smaller sets, it turns out less and less of them are contained in the one of your choosing - until there's none.

Looking from the other side, if you add up a number of sets, you get a large set that contains all of them. The issue at hand is, this set, by definition, cannot be smaller - more precise or accurate - than its components. What you would need to do, you would need to find the common part of all sets.

Your example with waving a chicken leg. On the surface they may agree that a chicken is required, but why? What does it do? How does it work? All of them will have different ideas about this. All of those, however, can be generalized to some more or less vague concept - waving a chicken leg - and I think this part is what you should focus on.

*In the middle of writing this I realized that I gave a really good explanation on how this could work. After thinking about this for a while, I think the main thing that bugs me is how you're tying this to objectivity and subjectivity.

This whole thing is far too complex for me to explain my whole thought process, but going back to my comparison to sets for a moment, imagine a 2D plane that represents people's thoughts about casting a fireball. Doesn't matter how, the principle matters. So for each human, there is a smaller or larger set represented by a shape on the plane - larger for people who have less an idea what's actually happening, smaller for those who understand the process better and see that only a limited number of things is necessary to cast a fireball. (Ideally we should add various strength of belief and certainty, but that's too much details to show the idea.)

Now, for all human, those shapes are gonna overlap - what I want you to focus on is the places with the highest overlap. Those places - say, waving a chicken leg - are what people believe is necessary to cast the spell. BUT, is that in any way objective? No, it's completely subjective, and additionally extremely vague. Now matter how many people think it is correct, it's a subjective, general idea of a large number of people.

How I think this should be approached, and how you DID approach it, is that the closer a person is to a certain objective nature of reality, the more efficient their spells are. However, in my opinion, tying this to general opinion and consensus isn't the right way, at least not in that way.

If you do want consensus there, it should affect objectivity, like with the gods, where people's consensus can make a god that was subjective into something that definitely exists and is objective.

...Maybe you did, I'm not you so I don't know though I got a hunch. The thing is that it's a completely separate phenomenon, and a different mechanism that ties into the existing ruleset. It's your system though.

This got a bit lengthy, because a lot of my considerations in regards to my own magic systems were similar in nature. I might have gotten a bit of track, but I hope it's at least food for thought.

So, the more Rules, Chants, Incantations, and Limitations, you put on your magic, the less complex your monad loops need to be, because you are making your magic less subjective, and thus in certain 'low magic' worlds, magic would be possible, whereas in a high magic world, all that extra complexity does is keep the price tag down.

This is a very cool idea. Never thought about it in this way.

 

[Sergeandgreen]

You definitely shower too long.
Also, writing a story with such a magic system would be quite demanding on the reader. You basically expect them to learn real science and your pseudo science.

 

[Biggest-Kusa-Out-There]

Magical Theory Crafting

>Looks inside
>Sci-fi

 

[Peter3135566]

Im impressd! Only quastion, if dark matter is clarity and reduces magic access, other then dark matter is there enything that reduces clarity, or something that lowers "sciences", mabe its not only not having too much dark matter, but rather a balance betwheen it and say reality essance or heat per galactic region avarage or such?

 

[melchi]

This sorta reminds me of ancient/medieval medical theory.

You are sick? Your humors are out of balance, we must adjust to restore the balance.

 

[TheEldritchGod]

You definitely shower too long.
Also, writing a story with such a magic system would be quite demanding on the reader. You basically expect them to learn real science and your pseudo science.

I don't intend to explain it.
The only one who needs to know how it works is me.

Im impressd! Only quastion, if dark matter is clarity and reduces magic access, other then dark matter is there enything that reduces clarity, or something that lowers "sciences", mabe its not only not having too much dark matter, but rather a balance betwheen it and say reality essance or heat per galactic region avarage or such?

Ooo... Now there's a thought.

If Dark Matter inhibits Magic, is there a counterpart that inhibits "science"?
I don't know, but I shall think about this.

This sorta reminds me of ancient/medieval medical theory.

You are sick? Your humors are out of balance, we must adjust to restore the balance.

I love all this dead-end "science" stuff. You know, Luminiferous aether, Phrenology. That's my bread and butter.

This is heavily debatable. From my perspective this is a misunderstanding, but go on.

It's easier to explain what's happening with quantum entanglement, which is the same effect, basically.

Two atoms quautum linked. You take one to Alpha Centauri. You take the atom here on earth and to alter it's spin. The spin of the other atom changes to equal the spin here on earth. So, in theory, you now have a type of morse code that works faster than the speed of light and technically goes back in time, Right?

Wrong.

The problem is, you cannot MEASURE the spin on the quantum entangled atoms before you "send the signal" and it's basically a one-time thing. So, if you don't know the spin of the atom BEFORE the spin is flipped, Alpha Centauri has no idea if it's a one or a zero. So, while we know FTL communication is possible, we can never "listen in" without destroying the very information we seek to get out of our flipping atom.

With a photon, it's basically the same thing, except that the reason this communication works is because a photon actually doesn't "move" because time doesn't exist for a photon. At the speed of light, time stops, so for all photons, there is no time.

No Time means that the photon exists all along the path it has taken basically simultaneously. It is only from the perspective of us moving slower that it appears to "move". This is why a photon is a particle AND a wave, because it is ONE LONG PARTICLE from the perspective of space, or a single point from the perspective of time, (Or is it the other way around? I forget) depending on how you measure it.

I gotta get back to work. I'll look at the rest of your reply later.

 

[melchi]

@TheEldritchGod there was one explanation in lore (the prime series) that I really liked. I can't link it because paywalled.

Anyway one common practice was that the body consisted of 2 things.

Body and soul.

What held the soul to the body was the anamus. Which is simply identified by the body having liquids in it. So, if a dead person doesn't dry up properly that means that their soul is stuck in the body, cursing anyone that has a connection to them.

 

[LilRora]

It's easier to explain what's happening with quantum entanglement, which is the same effect, basically.

Two atoms quautum linked. You take one to Alpha Centauri. You take the atom here on earth and to alter it's spin. The spin of the other atom changes to equal the spin here on earth. So, in theory, you now have a type of morse code that works faster than the speed of light and technically goes back in time, Right?

Wrong.

The problem is, you cannot MEASURE the spin on the quantum entangled atoms before you "send the signal" and it's basically a one-time thing. So, if you don't know the spin of the atom BEFORE the spin is flipped, Alpha Centauri has no idea if it's a one or a zero. So, while we know FTL communication is possible, we can never "listen in" without destroying the very information we seek to get out of our flipping atom.

With a photon, it's basically the same thing, except that the reason this communication works is because a photon actually doesn't "move" because time doesn't exist for a photon. At the speed of light, time stops, so for all photons, there is no time.

No Time means that the photon exists all along the path it has taken basically simultaneously. It is only from the perspective of us moving slower that it appears to "move". This is why a photon is a particle AND a wave, because it is ONE LONG PARTICLE from the perspective of space, or a single point from the perspective of time, (Or is it the other way around? I forget) depending on how you measure it.

I gotta get back to work. I'll look at the rest of your reply later.

I'm not convinced by this explanation. On one hand you are right in that observing a photon does, in a way, affect its past, but it happens in a very limited and specific manner. Notice that when you observe a photon, you see its source, so what you can change is, at most, everything in between. However, you have not observed it at any point in between, so you know nothing about the space between the source and you; at most, you have the time elapsed, the direction it came from, and its energy, which may allow you to determine how it arrived.

The wave form of a photon should only affect the probability you find a photon somewhere at a specific time - when you are observing it, you are not changing it somehow from a wave to a particle; you are seeing the particle it always was but knew nothing about up to this point. What does work retroactively is your knowledge about it - you can figure out where it came from and how its evolution led to you observing the particle.

Now the issue, and why it shouldn't, to my knowledge, allow FTL communication, is that while from the perspective of the photon no time has passed, from your perspective a certain amount of time was necessary before you could observe it - because it had to travel there. I see a few conceptual ways to work around that, but I don't know enough about quantum physics to be sure they're actually possible, much less viable.

Also, I don't think photons have any properties that can be altered and measured this way?

 

[CharlesEBrown]

Since you seem to be making magic an expression of will rather than "power" I would be tempted to call it "psionics" or "mentalism" - and I usually include this as an "outlawed magic" - traditional magic-users HATE these people with the "short cut" and hunt them down, much as witches were allegedly (most records suggest these tales were greatly exaggerated after the fact but...) in the middle ages.

I kind of liked the way a guy who initially trained as an engineer, then became an IP lawyer and game designer described magic (paraphrasing because he wrote it in 2007 in a post on a forum that was lost in an upgrade) for one semi-Vancian system:

"The power to work (arcane) magic is, essentially, a mental circuit board. When you understand which connections make which effects, you learn spells. Most magic users have a limited amount of energy they can run through their circuit boards (spell points), and they can use any spells they know, but ones that they have studied recently take less energy than ones they learned but have not been practicing."