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Old 03-26-2019, 08:16 PM   #53
Johnny1A.2
 
Join Date: Feb 2007
Default Re: Magic in Space Opera

Quote:
Originally Posted by Fred Brackin View Post
Um, because it's a bad and silly idea?

If the nature of "Reality" was even influenced much less determined by mass belief we'd be living in a hybrid conservative Chinese/Indian paradigm rather than any sort of modern Western Technocracy.

Then there's things like the Earth would have been actually flat at one point and if so why would it ever have changed?

I could go on but you ought to be getting the idea. If the world was what people thought it was there never would have been any evidence to help change their beliefs.
All true.

Another reason I detest Subjective Reality is that, taken to its natural conclusion, it creates peculiar moral inversions for the characters in a story or game. For ex, let's say that a new kind of evil, murderous monster becomes real if a certain percentage of the population either believes it in, or worse, are just familiar with it.

OK, we've just make the book burners from Ray Bradbury the good guys. Not the ones from Fahrenheit 451 so much, as the ones from The Martian Chronicles. The ones who tried to stamp out fictional stories.

If that sort of Subjective Reality applies, there could still be a moral place for fiction, but it would need to be very tame, if you see what I'm saying.
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