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Bakker XXXVIII: Where The Posters Are Damned


Madness

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Are you suggesting Bakker wrote this stuff to call attention to real life problems? Because that's probably a massive failure on this part his part if so.

Well, dude, where's my estimate going at this point? Because all you've given is raw assertion - do you feel raw assertion, if raw enough, makes for fact? I'm left guessing where you're going - something like 'it's got dragons, so nothing to do with real life!'. To me that's escaping into even more fantasy to further an escape into fantasy.

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Given the consonant shift of celmomas-> kelmomas, does it hold for callon to kalon?

Of course, though I think it's Callan, which likely makes it a silent l and is pronounced like Cayenne.

 

it's manifestly the most relevant and applicable post-tolkienian fantasia ever
That's an interesting claim. Possibly because the dearth of actual fantasy past JRRT is so completely blah. I'd probably claim Mists of Avalon is more practical, as is Earthsea. 
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Could you give examples? “Rape” is a pretty flexible term, so I’m not sure which scenes spring to your mind. The most detailed ones I can think of are magically coerced intercourse with Consult avatars, which we get from both male and female perspectives. I may be wrong.

 

Ah Happy Ent!  I believe you were traveling at the time of the previous Bakker thread's end, so I have a question that perhaps you could answer:  Would it be possible to build a sorcerous computer in Earwa?

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Of course, though I think it's Callan, which likely makes it a silent l and is pronounced like Cayenne.
 That's an interesting claim. Possibly because the dearth of actual fantasy past JRRT is so completely blah. I'd probably claim Mists of Avalon is more practical, as is Earthsea. 

Nonsense, you're just trying to get out of proper ancestor worship or veneration. Careful, or he'll let you be damned. ;)
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Would it be possible to build a sorcerous computer in Earwa?

 

I don’t understand the question. What is a sorcerous computer?

 

(I assume the logos should be able to perform computation to implement a digital computer. But since there are soul-trapping gizmos, this would be trivial. Just use a brain. No magical gadgetry is necessary.)

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I don’t understand the question. What is a sorcerous computer?
 
(I assume the logos should be able to perform computation to implement a digital computer. But since there are soul-trapping gizmos, this would be trivial. Just use a brain. No magical gadgetry is necessary.)


yeah--wouldnt a sorcerous computer = Dunyain+magic? maybe u could make a sorcerous smartphone in Earwa if u could shove a soul inside??
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I don’t understand the question. What is a sorcerous computer?

 

(I assume the logos should be able to perform computation to implement a digital computer. But since there are soul-trapping gizmos, this would be trivial. Just use a brain. No magical gadgetry is necessary.)

 

A computer that uses sorcery to perform calculations.  The thought I had was that, say when Achamian attacks a formation with a parabola of light - he's not actively describing a number of discrete points, he's spouting some manner of equation and some part of reality is actively graphing the points where the slicey-light is going, so I was wondering if that means that you could somehow use the principle to actively calculate things.   Say Kellhus wanted to find the solution to a complex problem that he couldn't calculate in his own head or on a piece of paper, even.  But say there was a hypothetical algorithm to brute force the solution.   Could Kellhus then render the problem and algorithm in the form of a sorcerous spell, and then receive a solution instanteously in the same manner that Achamian's parabola is graphed instantly? 

 

And with the dunyain-in-a-jar, how do you ensure the Dunyain's cooperation or even full intelligence?  The only intelligent bound soul we've seen is Shae.  The Wathi doll and the Library door mechanisms didn't retain human intelligence.   And Shae requires human hosts to retain his brain functions, Aurang also notes the smaller bird brain requires a longer time to process his thoughts.

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Ah. I see.

 

I believe the parabolas and straight lines we’re seeing are optima for whatever the spell wants to bring about. I don’t think the sorcerer inputs the coefficients, no more than a basketball player does when he hits a 3-pointer. The spell is “give me the essence of throwing a ball into that hoop”, which happens to be a parabola because of the laws of physics and logic, not because the basketball player understands (or uses) calculus and Newtonian physics.

 

Thus, I don’t think Gnostic sorcerers compute. But you’re right that if they were to compute (for instance, by instantly fitting a polynomial through a set of points) then they could do super-fast polynomial identity testing (by observing with their eyes if the fireball that goes through the Second Quyan Lemma of Finite Field Interpolation is a straight line).

 

This would be awesome computational power.

 

What instead they have, is sufficient gadgetry to build a Turing machine, so they can simulate every computation (but the simulation would be slow). Note that you have hat gadgetry yourself (you can build a computer using water canals, or sufficiently well-trained dogs), the Gnostic mage can just make it look better and maybe get the mechanics to work as fast as we can on Earth using digital technology.

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