Board Thread:The Last Sovereign Discussion/@comment-25941257-20170825174215/@comment-31763506-20170919164804

@LordCyberForte

We're kind of straying outside the topic, but on reflection, I'm asserting a philosophic intuition of my own as a general "rule" above.

I'm a strong believer in deterministic causality (whatever the Quantum Physicists have to say on the matter), and that means that everything we see in the real natural world is a consequence of the (comparatively) simple rules of physics. At the same time, emergence, in the sense of Langton's Ant (I actually have to nip out and can't explain that link in detail), means that even though we (roughly) know these simple rules, it's a practical impossibility to go from the knowledge of those simple rules to predict how the universe will behave at time x+infinity after it gets set in motion from some starting conditions.

Once you accept that the real universe is the way it is as a consequence of the emergence of complexity from an application of simple rules, it follows that any change to the rules will cascade up in an unpredictable way, and the way things are in the real world has a high degree of contingent interdependence.

But speculative fantasy isn't built like that. Instead, you start from a world like ours and imagine how it could conceivably be different by tweaking a few things here and there. Magic fireballs, dragons, incubus kings and so on. But the problem is that however hard we use our imagination to model the consequences of the changes we've made to reality, there's going to be something we didn't think of as a consequence of the changes we've made that either results in a universe that is different from what we expect it to be, OR something that'll keep the new universe we've created from working. For example, how does a magic fireball deal with conservation of energy? If the universe we're in doesn't have conservation of energy, what are the consequences of that?

So even if we could come up with explanations for the questions of succubus biology I've raised, which may be possible, those explanations will have other objections to them, and so on down until you get to a point where you have to give up and say "a wizard did it".

Unfortunately for me, proving that philosophical intuition as a general rule would require actualizing a wide variety of hypothetical universes with rules different from our own and showing that they can't work the way we expect them to. Which is obviously impossible.

On a simpler level: "if you're wondering how succubi eat and breed and other science facts, just repeat to yourself it's just a game, I should really just relax..."