@MB957
Yes, but you possess an exceedingly rare quality. One known as "creativity." It's hard to be a dreamer or a romantic if you don't have any creativity whatsoever. Why do you think people like hard-sci, modern day settings, or near future ones? It's because it's what they can relate to, their imagination doesn't actually go any further than that. Anything slightly outside of that just puts them outside of their comfort zone. Push that barrier a little more, and you have people screaming about space magic.
What's really sad about this though is that any good scientist knows that science is 99% theory and imagination, you're tossing around imaginary numbers all the time. It's amazing sometimes that people don't realise why peer review is necessary; it's because science involves such large quantities of imagination. If you can't imagine, then you're not a good scientist. So the funny thing is is that a proper scientist would be more at home with ME3 than those who aren't.
I have a smart engineer friend who spends most of his time working on classified stuff, and he had no problems with ME3 at all. His favourite ending? Control or Synthesis, he sees Destroy as a waste, and just shakes his head at the ridiculousness of 'space magic.' I think the more accustomed you are to creative thinking, the less prone you are to luddite thinking. And not in absolutes, but on a sliding scale. The more you slip down into ludditism, the less creative and more conservative you become at the same time.
The issue I have is that people use magic and mysticism as a negative connotation, essentially trying to pull a Harry Potter on it. You know, the usual 'magic is bad' line of **** and bull. Somehow pretending that science doesn't have any creative thinking to it. That's why I tend to shy away from it. I still call it science, but I call it
science fiction. It's creatively taking what could be a potential, and turning it into a reality within the scope of a story. What could potentially exist? Well, the mileage may vary depending on the imagination of the person viewing.
But the way I look at it is this: If there was no romanticism, no fiction, and no creativity in science, then we'd never have gotten anywhere. We'd be stagnant. Most scientific discovery is serendipity based upon someone being a little crazy and cooking up cockamamie ideas to submit for peer review. And many of those turn out to be true. Not all of them, but most of them. I just see people who embrace that lack of creativity as being behind the times, because science is progressing faster now than ever, and that's due to the open-mindedness involved.
Arthur C. Clarke said "
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Barry Gehm said "
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
Mark Stanley said "
Any technology, no matter how primitive, is magic to those who don't understand it."
From a human psyche point of view, it's worth actually letting those sink in for a while, and realising the truth in them. Since "magic" and "science" can essentially be the same thing, but "magic" carries negative connotations, and people point, scream and use the "magic" label against forms of science that they dislike. That's the sad part; in this context, both "magic" and "mysticism" have essentially come to mean "science that I don't like, for whatever ridiculous reason."
So what the OP has essentially written there, disguised by the tag of "mysticism," is really "ME3's descent into fantastical science-fiction, which I strongly dislike."
What the OP is actually saying is that the science-fiction of ME3 became more symbolic, romantic, and fantastic, and something designed more to inspire imagination and creative thought. And the OP doesn't like that, because the OP doesn't like being challenged in that way. So thus the more fantastic science-fiction becomes "magic" because science-fiction that challenges them too much is
bad.
From an anthropological standpoint, this is interesting. You essentially have people demonising science-fiction which is simply too fantastic for them to accept as a possibility. This is borne of a lack of creative thinking - the sliding scale of creativity and ludditism. I don't think you can truly be free of one or the other, we're talking about human nature here, after all. So the breaking point for people is different, and that's actually fascinating.
You have people who think that the Lazarus project amounts to being too impossible when, actually, the Lazarus project is damned close to hard sci-fi. It's something we could almost do today. And in 200 years, after all those developments, and the resources of The Illusive Man? Easy! But see, this is where the sliding scale comes into play, those people are nearer the extremes. And then you have those for whom the reapers themselves, or the Catalyst and Synthesis represent something which is impossible to believe/accept.
Going by the ludditism/creativity sliding scale, each person has a breaking point.
I once read a very interesting statement that went something like this: "
To some people - anything that existed before they were born is the natural way of things, any new ideas introduced to them within their teenage years are new and interesting, and new ideas introduced to them at middle age are abhorrent and go against nature."
That's a very interesting statement. The fact of the matter is that due to the sliding scale, there will be people who're more or less prone to this, who'll just get to a point where they're physically unable to accept new ideas. But the interesting point here is, of course, at some point in the future what we see as transhumanism is going to be the norm. For those born then, that will be the natural order of things. What people are railing against now as impossible is an inevitability that they are incapable of accepting.
You have a sliding scale of variance regarding those who can and can't accept new things past a certain age. Some might get to a point where new ideas are just 'abhorrent' to them. I have to admit that 'abhorrent' is an idea I see thrown around a lot. And it makes me wonder whether they see increases in the field of medicine as 'abhorrent' too, simply because they weren't available within their period of formation, their teenage years. So, would being able to replace the eyes of a blind person, or the spine of a paralysed person be 'abhorrent?'
Would that 'go against nature?'
And that's what I see a lot of, really. Some people just... hate some scientific inevitabilities. So they call them magic, they call them abominations, they call them abhorrent, and they live in denial of their inevitability. And they're never able to admit their own limitations in that regard, it's never that their thinking is just behind the times, or that someone else is more progressive than them. It's always 'magic,' or 'abhorrent,' or 'abomination.'
Yet there are never any well reasoned responses to this, really. Ultimately, this all boils down to technophobia on some level. And they think that just because they use a computer that they're immune to technophobia. But they're not, it's a sliding scale. Give us 50 years and we'll probably have people buying eye upgrades just as a thing you do if you have the money for it, and that'll likely be seen as abhorrent, too. "
What's wrong with the eyes you were born with?"
So, yeah.
Ultimately, the whole thing about decrying fantastic science-fiction as magic in a negative way is just
really bloody silly. It's just a path to self-stagnation, to getting stuck in a rut, and frozen in time.
Edit: I have to say, though. Being fortunate as I am to know some truly intelligent people, this is why I've ended up with the mindset I have. I suppose from a sociological standpoint, part of how open-minded you are depends upon the company you keep. And if you have friends who're obsessed with science, even fringe science, then that's going to make you very open-minded. I love the conversations my friends have about some of the more weird things that tend to come up, especially the 'what ifs.' When you listen to scientifically inclined people go off on crazy what ifs, Mass Effect 3 is really not that far-fetched at all.
At all.
Modifié par Auld Wulf, 19 février 2013 - 02:50 .
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establishes Shepard as the Messias character that he/she needs to be to fulfil the rest of the franchises themes and the ending of the trilogy.
