17th April 2005, 8:32 PM
Quote:I'm not saying "most" here. But, that was said in absolutes, no? I'm only disputing that not EVERYONE would assume magic.
Sorry, only 999,998 or 999,999 out of a million.
Quote:Greek fire was not assumed to BE magic though, that's the important thing. It was assumed a terrible weapon, and feared, but not magic.
How do you know this?
Quote:And as for the DVD player... Yes, explaining it to them would be just like explaining one to a child, but I'm talking analysis. I did state that a logic-minded person would have to be the one to grab it.
No, it wouldn't. A child has the advantage of a blank slate: they have no preconceptions about how things work, so they can learn easily. I said that in my post... children learn easily. Adults do not. Like languages -- it is far, far easier to learn foreign languages as a child than it is as an adult. Once you've learned things it's very hard to learn different things... so no, it wouldn't be like teaching a child. It'd be teaching someone who has learned a complete world view that their world view is hopelessly wrong. It's a significantly harder challenge. As for 'analysis' and 'logic-minded', your problem there is finding such people in most of history. Even if someone was predisposed towards it, in most human cultures they'd be trained to act differently -- to follow orders from above (God/the gods, their priests, nobility above them, etc), to not think much, definitely to not question what is known... the scientific theory, the idea of science being something that requires experimentation... those are recent things, DJ! Even in the 1700s it was acceptable for scientists to base theories on no experimentation...
I'm just saying that our modern society prepares people for the possibilities of modern life and modern ideas. Without that basis, people won't be thinking that way and humanity isn't predisposed towards high technology... yes, we do have large brains, but it took hundreds of thousands of years to get beyond the basics... only in the last 10,000 years or so has humanity really advanced.
How is someone with no education, no concept of technology above perhaps agriculture, domesticated animals, the wheel, the plow, and maybe some kind of forging (bronze or iron; otherwise, just stone carving) supposed to have even the faintest idea of how to respond to a DVD player? They know how the world works (as I said, unlike a child) and this does not work in that view... yes, a few probably would understand that it's not magic, but explaining it to them... wow, as I said, it'd take a long time. "It's a machine... it works somehow"? That's what a lot of people who live today would say -- they don't really know how it works, exactly, they just know it does... the science-minded are now, as ever, a minority. So you are probably one who would be able to understand "magic" technology. So? This says nothing about society as a whole... and this law is about a society as a whole. Saying 'a tiny number might not' does not in any way disprove it. Actually, I'd say it does the opposite... 98 or 99% accuracy is pretty darn good. :)