What Works vs. What is Right from ANDOVER_at_delphi.com on 1997-05-22 (Glorantha Digest Vol 04)

From: ANDOVER_at_delphi.com
Date: Thu, 22 May 1997 02:08:27 -0400 (EDT)

In regards to the great objective/subjective debate, I wonder how the
"objectivists" (hmm, a term used by the Randites) feel about living
in our world, in which such "simple" questions has the nature of light cannot be explained except by directly contradictory theories (wave, particle) or in which the nature of the relationship between "solid" reality and "underlying" quantum physics is still so much a contradiction that we can't even adequately explain such paradoxes as Schrodinger's Cat?

On the other hand, unless conflict is to make no sense, a pure
"subjectivist" position doesn't make sense either. Despite Nick Brooke's
typically expansive attempt to claim every story-writer on the digest for the "subjectivist" position, I don't consider myself a subjectivist. The stories I have written have all been within the parameters of published material -- and, where there are paradoxes, I have attempted to explain them
"logically."

By the way, it is quite possible to write "logical" stories about worlds in which the nature of reality -- or the perception of reality -- changes in dramatic ways. Consider Saberhagen's Empire of the East/Swords series, in which such changes happen at LEAST four times! In Tolkien's work, Middle- is changed from being flat to being round at the end of the Second Age. Brian Aldiss wrote numerous stories with remarkable inversions -- consider Cryptozoic! as an example.

It is obvious that the nature of reality in Glorantha has changed at least half-a-dozen times -- and is going to change at least two more times, according to KoS! That means that what "works" in one period -- whether God-Learning experiments or the simple act of reading -- does not work in another.

This does not require one to be "subjective" about Gloranthan reality, anfd as Sandy P. has cleverly pointed out, no one in Glorantha is a subjectivist (with the exception of a few illuminates?).

MY interest in Glorantha is what WORKS, not what is "right," which is why I reacted so sharply to Andrew Behan's misquoting Asimov (and attributing his quote to me). Quantum mechanics as it now is, and indeed almost all cosmological theories about our own universe, is almost certainly not
"right." Equally certainly, it works pretty well. As a matter of fact,
for most "real-world" calculations, Newtonian physics work pretty well. As a player and a GM, and even as a writer about Glorantha, my interest in such questions as how many of the endlessly multiplying Sun Gods there are actually ARE, or what "really happened" at some place and time which I know very little about, is rather limited. But I am interested in what these arguments mean for something that my players or characters may actually be doing.

Jim Chapin