Glorantha's Most Unverifiable Positive Facts.

From: Alex Ferguson <abf_at_csmail.ucc.ie>
Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2003 18:54:47 +0100

Julian:
> > > I'll quibble with that, although only in a minor way, [...]

> > I'd quibble with calling that a quibble; more like 180 degrees
> > opposite of what Graham was saying, as best as I could judge...
 

> No.
>
> This is a minor quibble because it concerns things that 99.99% of
> Gloranthans don't know and don't care about.
> Not to mention players ...

I think your postings on this topic are quite tenebrous enough, without wanting to rewrite the usual meaning of "quibble" from minor disagreement, to total disagreement on a issue unilaterally declared to be minor, despite being the entire topic of the thread...  

> The trick here is that both Gloranthans' sensory perception of
> Glorantha, and our literary/linguistic knowledge of Glorantha are
> media, hence subject to the ordinary Mystery of communication, which
> means that both methods of knowing Glorantha lead to the same problem
> of the ineffable.

Clearly.  

> The difference being that our knowledge of Glorantha is *entirely*
> literary/linguistic, so that there is a particular class of
> Gloranthan facts, expressed officially using literary/linguistic
> methods, that we can simply accept as facts (In Our Gloranthas),
> because of the medium used, whereas real Gloranthans would constantly
> need to adjust such ideas to actual reality as known by far more
> direct (but far less effective) magical and natural means.

Which amounts to say that "top-down" Glorantha is better than "bottom-up". One of the attractions of Glorantha for me is that the perceptions of the inhabitants (and it's the inhabitants, after all, that we'll be RPing, story-viewpoint, etc) are _not_ subordinated to some a priori "how things really are" that may be seen to negate their validity. Sure, some things are "expressed officially as facts" which correspond to those perceptions were they are genuinely universal (there's a big yellow thing in the sky, it's warm and bright, it moves -- well, at least in _this_ age there is), but that's evidently not what we're talking about here, is it now? Rather it's where some alleged "higher level of Gloranthan fact" is either _counter_ to those perceptions, or in a total disconnect from them.

> > Or equally, let's suppose that Greg or Mark decides to
> > inform us of one or other such fact. In what sense is this more
> > positive knowledge than a Gloranthans experience of this truth?
>
> It is more positive because of our fiat.

Yes, I understand that you're saying this; but you're not making any case that this is in any way true. Not from gaming utility, not in narrative terms, not in any that can be connected to an experience of that world, not philosophically. Well, depending on one's choice of philosophy, I suppose (sensing a very large landmine go *click* as I step on it).

The most natural comparison as, I suppose with the authorial voice in a conventional story, where we drift into an "... but in point of fact..." mode. (Or by way of ObGeekery, maybe I should say The Book in HHGttG, or the somewhat anal-compulsive "notes" in Schlock Mercenary...) Those are not, however, in the the normal reading of such, any more positive pieces of knowledge than those mediated by the experiences of characters. And in any event, conventionally those are merely things that happen to be beyond the _current_ scope of _certain_ characters, not things that in principle unknowable to everyone in the narrative (which is at least two orders of magnitude more obscure and pointless, it seems to me).

> It's quite simply because YGWV that our experience of Gloranthan truh
> is at such a high level : even a HQ challenge IYG would lead not to a
> confusion and misunderstanding of Glorantha, but to a more precise
> understanding.
>
> Faith is the most difficult element here : but quite simply, we are
> aware of the fact that Glorantha does not exist. Actual Gloranthans
> are not.
>
> ...
>
> But AFAIK this is dangerously close to a secret topic or two, so I'll
> shut up ...

Huh. Sounds more like the Nephilim version of the GL Secret, if anything. In any event, I can't see how this goes to our topic.

> > (Or
> > these truths...) In one sense, it's entirely less "positive", as it's
> > beyond any verification, whereas experiential knowledge has at least
> > vicarious verification available to it.
>
> I respect your opinion, but this much depends on belief more than any
> transcendental experience, such as your vicariousness appears to rely
> on.

I don't see how you get that impression at all. I'm speaking of experience of _Glorantha_, not of RW religious experience or whatever. To be more explicit: We experience Glorantha most directly and most verisimilitudinous when we do so from the PoV of someone _in_ that world. If I introduce a "fact" into my Glorantha, that's _in principle_ unknowable by anyone in it, what am adding to Glorantha in any real sense? OK, the Unknowable It was pink. This is beyond the perception of any sentient being in Glorantha (what with It being... well, Unknowable). Even if they were _told_ of the pinkness of the II (hrm, interesting acronym, obviously a Deep Secret there), they'd have no objective means of verifying this. It can't add to our games set in Glorantha, our stories about it, or even our learned postulations, except in the restricted field of Unknowable It Pinkness, necessarily disjoint from the rest of what we can say about the world.  

> > A further question is: are such 'facts' about the world, which by
> > assumption are unverifiable within it,
>
> YGWV .. ;-)
Eh, no, it was _implicit_ in the matter as stated. If it's knowledge that _can_ be obtained by someone in Glorantha, then it's (potentially) in-Glorantha knowledge, and thus Not What We're talking About.  

> > a "good" thing to have? In the
> > sense of "useful campaign assumption", I've already stipulated that
> > they are, in some sense. But in the broader, "diagrams of the
> > ineffable" sense I'd say they are not, especially wherein they're
> > represented as being in any sense a "better" class of knowledge than
> > the other.
>
> All I am aying is that we share a certain class of information,
> unavailable to Gloranthans, but common to our conceptions of what
> Glorantha is.

Yes, but you're not exemplifying this, or otherwise demonstrating that it exists, in any useful sense. If you did so, we might be getting someplace.  

> > To pick up on the example of HQ challenges, let's say,
> > these are not flaws in one's perception of Gloranthan reality, they
> > are aspects _of_ that reality;
>
> Exactly why I am suggesting that actual Gloranthans' understanding of
> reality is centred on faith.
>
> Of course this is another heretic idea of mine, but I'm fairly
> strongly moved to suggest, given actual Gloranthans' inability to
> perceive/understand any cohesive nor universal Gloranthan
> ?berReality, contrary to fantasy RPG bog-standard, that the existence
> of Gloranthan gods does not, as has previously been suggested, lead
> to any possibly universal recognition as regarding their existence,
> nature, names, powers, et cetera.

I'd agree with that. But that's really more properly in the category of things that are not knowable by Gloranthans (other than by personal transcendent experience) *and* not knowable by us (though obviously emenable to speculation).  

> > a truth that omits such considerations
> > is distinctly suspect, rather like classical physics kvetching about
> > the 'imperfections' of quantum mechanics, if you will.
>
> No, this is about the basic imperfections of human rationality.

Don't see where this comes from at all.

Cheers,
Alex.

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