On the "bright" side, it hasn't been the dreaded ongoing two person point-for-point. Instead, everyone seems to just pile in on their own account, generalities flying, which as has been demonstrated, has problems all its own.
I hereby grant David Cake the Indulgence of the Digest Backlog:
> I would speculate that Alex coined the term from Hidden Variable
> theory in quantum mechanics, which attempted to deny most of the 'observer
> effect' in QM.
Speculate no longer, for I already have confessed (in this very Digest) that that's where I ceremonially Pinched it from.
> For the record, they are pretty much considered wrong....
I confess I'm not up on these things, but I thought it didn't so much deny the observer effect, as put a quasi-classical "spin" on it. Mainly as an exercise in keeping classically-minded physicists happy, without actually changing any of the implications.
> The New York Review of Science Fiction, a journal of literary
> criticism, made every contributor pay a fine every time they used the term
> 'post-modern'.
I laughed. ;-) Perhaps Illuminate is actually more of a cognate, but isn't quite so over(ab)used.
Andrew Joelson feels left out:
> Your 1 - 5 classification system left out #6, the Faceted
> Objectivists.
Well, they certainly wouldn't be #6, and it's not clear to me that this is a distinct position from the others I hand-waved about. In fact, from what follows below, it's fairly clear to me that it isn't, but you're not specific enough for me to be able to tell you which other it falls under.
> Such people (I am one), think that the gods are immense
> beings beyond full understanding.
See #3.
> I believe the old chestnut about blind men and the elephant has been
> brought up as an example of this.
By several different camps, in fact...
> So Orlanth and King West Wind are two different
> ways of looking at the same guy.
Or depending on just how much of a Theory of such equivalences and their ramifications you have, perhaps #2. Or if you think this (sort of) proposition is provable _in Glorantha_, then conceivably even a species of (gasp) #1.
My personal feeling about these Facets/Elephants/Masks explanations is that they sound perfectly reasonable on the face of it, but get altogether trickier if one insists on trying to build them up into some sort of complete model of the Gloranthan invisible world. One immediately runs into questions like: What's the canonical list of "primal forces"? Can a God be a Mask on more than one such? What consequences of these underlying equivalences for Gloranthans? Etc, etc. (Not that I insist on asking such questions, but some others clearly want to, hence the multiplicity of positions.)
In support of this sort of idea, though, it is quite a lot like the conception Kralori and Pelorian mystics have of the gods, though. (Praise to some ears, damnation to others, doubtless.)
Hedgedly,
Alex.
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