"Any technology sufficiently advanced would be indistinguishable from Magic"

Do you agree with Arthur C. Clarke's 3rd Law?

  • Yes, we would not be able to comprehend or measure the super advanced Tech, thus it would be like ma

    Votes: 35 31.0%

  • No, any technology, no matter how advanced, can be measured in some way, where magic cannot.

    Votes: 59 52.2%

  • Not sure

    Votes: 19 16.8%
  • Total voters
    113
Pardon me, admittedly I didn't read the entire thread, but wouldn't this entire discussion need a working definition of the word "magic" to begin with?

I mean looking at various forms of fantasy\science fiction novels, you see plenty of forms of magic that are in fact completely scientific. They investigate their magic the same way that we study physics.

So at what point do we distinguish even known and completely understood technology from magic?
 
GrandMasterFox said:
Pardon me, admittedly I didn't read the entire thread, but wouldn't this entire discussion need a working definition of the word "magic" to begin with?

I mean looking at various forms of fantasy\science fiction novels, you see plenty of forms of magic that are in fact completely scientific. They investigate their magic the same way that we study physics.

So at what point do we distinguish even known and completely understood technology from magic?
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I would think "magic" would be the obverse of technology in this case. "Unexplainable, unquantifiable, unmeasurable events that cannot be explained by scientific methodology." (That can be refined, I'm sure.)
 
Gawdzilla said:
I would think "magic" would be the obverse of technology in this case. "Unexplainable, unquantifiable, unmeasurable events that cannot be explained by scientific methodology." (That can be refined, I'm sure.)
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Oh, I am sure things could still be measured and quantified. We could measure that an alien device travels at 3 times c for example, or that an alien energy pack could generate more energy than it's total mass would allow for all we know, etc.
 
He was that writer fella, right? I always thought it was a just okay-ish aphorism. I always relate to Clarke's earlier(est) works and he had a lot of woo in him back then. I can't say whether he continued in that vein because I never got into his later stuff.

But, to me, it sounded a bit like back-pedaling from the plot of Childhood's End.
 
Limbero said:
People who answered no, are you saying that you believe it to be impossible to create technology that goes beyond human understanding? And no, I'm not talking about any kind of woo here, I'm just saying that I don't believe we know everything there is to know about the Universe.
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Indeed i think so.

One can made all possible of stupid example which would be impossible for us to do or the tech escape us (imagine alien have a tech where everything can be done with the mind, including the Q example of removing pollution from an entire planet). But those are utterly made up example are TAILORED to ressemble magic.

The truth is that there is no reason to imagine with the tool we have now that we could not look at that tech and find out how it is made, or even ask the alien how they did it, and get a teaching on it from basic principle to more complicated until we get to the tech point.


Case in point, none, absolutely NONE of the tech we have right now , could not be explained to a 10 BC century human if that person was open to learn and we took time to teach them everything we teach our kids (math, physic, chemistry) up to the point we reach that tech. We have no case of such a tech.

So why the heck are you trying to say such "magic" tech would be incomphrehensible ?
I maintain that every advanced tech alien have, could be traced by baby step back to basic math and principle we already know.

ETA: even if no alien explained it, there is no reason to assume that suffisent study and time would not allow us to find out how it works sooner or alter.
 
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Gawdzilla said:
That wouldn't be magic, then, would it?
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It would look like "magic" because physics as we understand them wouldn't allow for such phenomena.

I think that's similar to what Clarke meant.

What it wouldn't mean is that we could never hope to understand how they worked.
 
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*Reads the thread*

So... Magic that is not distinguishable from technology is not sufficiently advanced? Sounds like a good enough counter-argument for several of the claims I've read recently.

Then again to the uninitiated, or ignorant, the difference between magic and advanced technology might be a moot point. You do something and then something happens. It's all good. Granted that assumes that magic actually does something to begin with.

"Any technology, no matter how primitive, is magic to those that don't understand it."
- Florence Ambrose
 
Gawdzilla said:
That wouldn't be magic, then, would it?
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Well, yes.

Or rather, I disagree that magic could not be measured. So if I had magic and if i did measure it, I might get the results I described.

Why should magic stop being magic just because I can describe its effects?
 
Once he puts in the qualifier "sufficiently advanced," it's impossible for his statement to be untruthful. It becomes a tautology. We can see the supressed premise when we ask, "Sufficiently advanced for what?"

So, his statement is:

Any technology sufficiently advanced so as to be indistinguishable from magic would be indistinguishable from magic.

If we say, "No, we can detect X technology," he would calmly answer, "That's because such technology was not sufficiently advanced."

The only way the sentence could be untrue is if it were logically necessary that all technology always be detectable.

I see no reason why such all technology would always be detectable in all circumstances.

Thus, the only right answer is that Clarke's statement is correct. It is, however, correct because it is a tautology and, therefore, meaningless.
 
I always saw the debate as more of a question "does a suffisent technology , which would be indistinguishable to magic, in fact exists or is possible ?".
 
Aepervius said:
I always saw the debate as more of a question "does a suffisent technology , which would be indistinguishable to magic, in fact exists or is possible ?".
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Yup, the way I read it is something like: "For any given level of technological development, there could be technology so far advanced from it that it appears like magic."
 
Gawdzilla said:
Rewording the original statement isn't explaining it, especially when the rewording doesn't add anything to the debate.
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I disagree--it removes the tautology in the original statement.
 
Gawdzilla said:
I would think "magic" would be the obverse of technology in this case. "Unexplainable, unquantifiable, unmeasurable events that cannot be explained by scientific methodology." (That can be refined, I'm sure.)
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Let me give an example here, what about Alchemy?
 
Aepervius said:
If that 19th century person (heck or even 16th century person) is open minded and has the willingness to learn, we could teach her how cell phone work relatively quickly , starting from some mathtematical fundation, down to the principle of current , light. And to boot we could even show her a few experiment.

There is no reason whatsoever to think alien tech COULD not be explained to us, or could not even be experimented upon to discover how it works. Anybody assuming that we could not find out the inner working of some tech, is assuming "magic" rather than tech.
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If there was someone to teach us, then sure, I agree with the bolded part. "Experimented on"? Do not be so sure.

If you gave a modern PC to scientists in 1940, they probably would be able to isolate individual chips and to determine what input causes what output, but there is no way they could figure out internal workings of an integrated circuit for a very simple reason: chemistry of the time could not even DETECT impurities in silicon which make semiconductors. To them, a microchip would be a mystifyingly pure silicon crystal and nothing else. If internal parts of an alien device are too small/too fine for us to measure, then it would be "indistiguishable from magic".

Note that in some fantasy stories a hero figures out how to control some magic device basically by trial and error. Give it commands and see what happens. Which is not too far from scientific method, but does not tell you anything about its inner workings. In one of sequels to "Rendevouz with Rama" Richard Wakefield takes essentially that approach with an alien computer which controls weather inside Rama. Richard knows he has no prayer to figure out how that computer actually works (and very likely would destroy it if he tried), but he identifies its input channels and figures out how to send it false signals in order to manipulate it into doing what Richard wants it to do. "Indistinguishable from magic" indeed.
 
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