29 KiB
[BST] If wizards are normal, why did someone create muggles?
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Author: u/OffColorCommentary *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/2x8tup/bst_if_wizards_are_normal_why_did_someone_create/
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Score: 19
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Created: 2015-02-26T16:23:00
Post:
I have a good, solid magic system for a setting. To play by the rational rules, though, it requires that human brains run off magic, not masses of neurons. I'm willing to go with that.
Now, let's say that you want to use this magic system in an HP(MoR)-like setting, where wizards are living parallel to the modern muggle world in secret. It's impossible that muggle science wouldn't have noticed that brains run on magic - it has big, obvious testable consequences. So muggle brains have to still run on masses of neurons, which cannot possibly have occurred naturally. It would be too huge of a coincidence for there to be basically the same people with two completely different brain structures.
The best way to make sense of this would be if someone, at some long-forgotten point in the past, went and made a very low-magic environment that contains humans and animals that run on neurons. Muggles are so much like real people because someone very much intentionally did that.
And that's where I'm stuck - what motivation could this person possibly have had?
Comments:
u/RandomDamage [+27] (31 minutes later)
If there exists a phenomenon that is antithetical to magic, such that Wizards and magical creatures find themselves dead when they encounter it, Muggles would have been created by past Wizards as a way to have people that can survive that.
If that phenomenon is spreading, Wizards may in fact be an endangered species.
u/OffColorCommentary [+5] (40 minutes later)
I really like this one, thank you.
(Be sure to check my other response with magical details in this thread.)
u/gabbalis [+8] (an hour later)
They would also be immune to any big bad's thaumic mind control, an ability that seems very feasible in this setting.
u/OffColorCommentary [+4] (an hour later)
Yeah, I went through all the effort making a setting where mental magics make coherent sense, it would be a shame not to use lots of it.
For any given mentally-affecting spell, the muggle-affecting version is a completely different incantation and substantially harder to cast, if it even exists. It does seem like an obliviate equivalent would have to exist, though, just out of practical consideration.
u/sicutumbo [+2] (5 hours later)
If you wanted, you could also have his motivation be that he wanted some way to fight even against something that nullified magic. Since the muggles can't use magic and therefore can't rely on it for anything, as well as still wanting effective weapons, they would necessarily create weapons that didn't need magic to operate
u/OffColorCommentary [+3] (5 hours later)
As an addendum, I do find it funny that you managed to add a dementor analogue back into my not-HP setting.
u/blockbaven [+12] (36 minutes later)
They wanted to create a subordinate underclass of laborers and menial-task-doers. Their lack of magic would mean that they would have a hard time threatening their master's position.
Maybe it was just one guy and he only wanted a small cadre of slaves to carry him around in a palanquin or something. Unfortunately, a few ran away at some point. Before he knew it the fucking things were everywhere. Muggles are an invasive species.
u/OffColorCommentary [+7] (2 hours later)
I enjoy the invasive species angle, but otherwise this is a little too common an explanation, and doesn't quite perfectly fit the evidence.
It's absolutely good enough to use as a red-herring hypothesis though.
u/None [+2] (a day later)
They wanted to create a subordinate underclass of laborers and menial-task-doers. Their lack of magic would mean that they would have a hard time threatening their master's position.
Hullo Assassin's Creed.
u/chthonicSceptre [+6] Highly Unlikely (9 minutes later)
Tell me how magic came to be. Humans have neurons because natural selection; why is there magic? You'll have to explain animals too. It makes more sense to say that Wizards without neurons are deviations rather than the people with neurons, because the people more closely resemble what you would expect from a species descended from higher primates.
Unless you're saying that all animals are deviations from magical animals, in which case I propose that the person who did this was a scientist who wanted to see if he could devise either life or a computational system that didn't run on magic, so he xeroxed some people and gave them prototype brains of different sorts, entirely different from the positronic stuff that Wizards apparently have. Then he died, and his experiments (unfinished) fulfilled their programming to procreate (programming which he added so that the experiment to propagate and refine itself).
We need more details!
u/OffColorCommentary [+16] (38 minutes later)
Unless you're saying that all animals are deviations from magical animals
I am. Magic is the default.
The universe has two classes of matter - thaums and atoms. Atoms behave as they do in our universe. Thaums are invisible, intangible^(*), golf ball-sized objects with mental properties. There is such a thing as an anger thaum, or a sadness thaum, and while it would take several different types of intelligence thaums to create a mind we'd recognize, it's not a huge number. Thaums gently push each other away, but can get stuck in atomic matter. They apply small amounts of forces to atomic matter, as strategically as they can (one thaum is not smart), to accomplish whatever they're trying to do. This makes animism right-ish.
Real animals evolved with thaums in them. Real brains are organs that are good at containing thaums, and they contain mostly sensor neurons, which pick up the small amounts of force that thaums can produce and send them to motor neurons in the body. This would show up blatantly on an MRI. Real brains also respond to brain damage differently than ours.
So, at some point, someone (more likely a group of someones) sectioned off a large chunk of the planet and removed most of the thaums there. They built all-neuron brains for the replacement animals and people that would live there. They also went to the trouble of folding space so that the sectioned off part of the planet would look like a spheroid.
But it seems like too specific a group of things to do just for "to see if we can."
^(*) But we don't go down the invisible-dragon-in-my-basement rabbit hole; they're easier to detect than atoms turned out to be.
u/Saffrin-chan [+3] (a day later)
They also went to the trouble of folding space so that the sectioned off part of the planet would look like a spheroid.
Oh, I'm actually more interested than this. So what, the earth is actually flat, or something, and goes on "forever", but the section of earth that non-magical people and animals inhabit has some crazy space-folding magic on it that makes it appear spherical.
u/OffColorCommentary [+4] (a day later)
Oh, less interesting than that, I'm afraid. I was thinking the world is actually a significantly larger spheroid. The planet ends up sphere-like unless we start throwing out a lot more of the laws of physics than I want to.
The problem with the Harry Potter model is that if you get there by folding real locations, it would be clearly detectable by now, and if you get there by creating pocket dimensions, then why are wizards the ones living in the second-class topological spaces? It's certainly possible to do a larger-scale folding that makes the new surface have the right shape to be consistent with physical laws, and leaves the majority of space for wizards, but that's a very specific thing to do. I needed an explanation for why they'd pick that way (and I have one now).
I've been working with some exotic coordinate systems in my day job lately, so the true laws of topology are probably going to be something quite byzantine, because I can, but I haven't picked a structure yet.
u/scruiser [+5] CYOA (3 hours later)
What are the calorie requirements of magic? If being non-magical is more metabolically efficient, then it would make sense for muggles (or nonmagical variants) to evolve under the right circumstance.
Conversely, if magic can get you free energy in the physical universe, why haven't fast breeding magical grey goo (or I guess green goo if it evolved from algae) spread to everything and consumed all other forms of life?
intelligence thaums
Are intelligence thaums scarce or otherwise limited? The limit on certain kinds of thaums could have acted as a hard cap on various species' population's ability to grow larger. Thus, the non-thaumic or scarce thaumic variants would have a strong evolutionary advantage for a species that was reaching the limit on rare thaums types. This would also provide intermediate advantages as rare thaums became scarcer.
Edit: Reread main post and realized you are prioritizing explanations with the creation being intentional. The scarcity of higher intelligence thaums might still apply. Some wizard realized that the population of magical intelligent beings would be limited by the number of intelligence thaums and decided to create a non-magical form of intelligent life to get around this.
u/OffColorCommentary [+8] (3 hours later)
Are intelligence thaums scarce or otherwise limited?
I wasn't planning on that. As-written, the main evolutionary advantage of humans was brains that were able to get a critical mass of thaums in one place, not a way to gather the exact right ones. Note that thaums only weakly interact with matter, and repel one another, so this is still an evolutionary feat.
I think sufficiently scarce thaums would have even bigger impacts on how evolution turned out than the above. Though I guess the most obvious one is just that wizards eat lots of brains for nutrition, which isn't THAT weird.
Some wizard realized that the population of magical intelligent beings would be limited by the number of intelligence thaums and decided to create a non-magical form of intelligent life to get around this.
This actually fits a lot of the same evidence that would go with what /u/RandomDamage suggested. And the similarity of the two theories predict is extremely handy for me.
Conversely, if magic can get you free energy in the physical universe, why haven't fast breeding magical grey goo (or I guess green goo if it evolved from algae) spread to everything and consumed all other forms of life?
In the real world, green goo DID successfully colonize almost the entire surface of the planet and displace almost all other life. And it did this by "breaking" conservation of energy by getting energy from off-planet via photosynthesis.
I don't see small-scale violations of conservation of energy having a very different impact. However, larger-scale violations could be disastrous, which is, again, extremely handy for me.
u/puesyomero [+4] The Culture (2 hours later)
the way you explain them. thaums are akin to a soul, semisentient puppeteer parasites, and magic interfaces. maybe some ancient think tank(ha!) discovered thaums have a half life, they decay and maybe the process is accelerating with magic use? anyway they panic. after the panic some begin searching for a way to reverse that but others see the futility. hoping to preserve higher forms of life and sentience from the imminent collapse they begin with project "roundworld" as a corralled off section of the planet to test their replacements. neurons are pretty much one of the first avenues of research as normal humans have them to interpret thaum imput. the project takes years and complete generations of researchers and eventually is forgotten as its purpose is lost or simply left to progress on its own until the barrier collapses on near thaum depletion. instead of a full collapse it becomes instead porous earlier than expected letting some muggles wander off reservation and start communities while letting wizards in sometimes. :D
u/puesyomero [+2] The Culture (2 hours later)
also it would be fun for thaums to decay into atoms XD
u/nevinera [+5] (2 hours later)
The meat-brains are the result of a catastrophic invasion by the necromancer Carl. Meat, unlike Thaumic Intelligence, can be directly reanimated with almost no loss of effectiveness!
Essentially, neuron-based humans are the remains of a global necromantic invasion. The invasion failed, but they breed so damn fast that the meatids are now the dominant life form.
I would expect an enormously extended conflict, followed by eventual tolerance, but with significant remaining species prejudice. I would want to run a game during that global conflict; wizards fighting a desperate battle against the enormous militarized meatid race. But if your plans call for peaceful coexistence, you could just place the setting a few thousand years later, and let the events fade into mythology.
u/darvistad [+3] (13 minutes later)
Edited, now that you've explained a bit more about your setting.
What are the drawbacks of magic? The purpose of muggles could be to have beings with an incentive to find the ramifications of the laws of physics and exploit them, resulting in technology that gets around magic's limitations. Wizards then wouldn't be reliant on casting spells for everything. Naturally, wizards would keep the existence of magic a secret; after all, how could muggles figure out the laws of physics if they were regularly being violated? Over time, the wizards could possibly have forgotten their project's original purpose, along with the reason for their tradition of secrecy.
u/Nepene [+3] (3 hours later)
Suppose certain types of matter arrangement repel magic. Atoms in the right orientation push it away, granting something resistance to magic.
A wizard discovers this and tries to weaponize the process. They section off a portion of the planet, build a number of simple lifeforms, and cast a mass death spell over the planet. They accelerated time.
This spell isn't 100% effective. It isn't fast. But if an organism has thaums this spell uses that magic to kill them slowly.
Over time the organisms with the most resistance to magic became dominant. Generations of organisms with atomic arrangements that repelled thaums arose.
Every now and then the mage checked in. At times they tweaked an organism, sometimes they modified something.
Billions of years later, their creation was complete. Sentient, extremely magic resistant organisms, some of them intelligent, ready to be used against an enemy.
The original mage had vanished, the time speeding spell long since faded. And slowly the magic that held apart the worlds was breaking apart...
u/Someone-Else-Else [+3] Anti-Spiral (13 hours later)
Hmmm... An old idea I had - probably won't work in your universe, but maybe it'll help you think of something - was a class of spells that destroyed anything that relied on changing to convey information, in a universe where living things had mild AT-field-like strengths. Rocks could break, and paper could burn, but a genetically-engineered subspecies storing information was priceless.
Even without those metaphysics, you could have Muggles be created as a form of information storage that tries to preserve itself.
If you make mind-reading easy against wizards, Muggles might have been meant to be spies who could securely communicate/ act.
You could literally just make the motivation for science - I've seen people suggest that once we know how to make human-intelligent uplifts, we should uplift as often as possible, just because.
u/royishere [+2] (10 minutes later)
Just a suggestion: could wizards themselves have made muggles? That would be why they're so much like wizards, and there are all manner of reasons why a wizard might have done so.
u/OffColorCommentary [+1] (11 minutes later)
Er... might want to re-read my post. I'm asking why a wizard did just that!
u/royishere [+1] (22 minutes later)
My bad, I thought you were looking for reasons a greater being would have created both.
u/MineDogger [+2] (2 hours later)
I always thought of it like there was some kind of genetic divergence and muggle-ness was like the wizard equivalent of something like Downs-syndrome, and either it turned out to be a dominant genetic trait, or the muggles were forced to be better at cooperation, organization and industrialization because they lacked magic and eventually outnumbered wizards and forced them into hiding.
Also "muggle" sounds a bit similar to "muddle" or "meddle" to me, so its possible that the condition was created either by breeding with non-humans or maybe some person or group was cursed to be without magic and the loss of powers was genetically transferred to their offspring.
u/eaglejarl [+2] (11 hours later)
Here's a thought: muggles are to wizards what Cro-Magnon was to Neanderthals. There could be a variety of reasons -- a few offhand:
- Thaums alter probability in their areas, causing excess numbers of mutations and thereby interfering with wizard fertility and increasing the rate of wizard cancer
- Thaumic neurology is less efficient than protoplasmic neurology, because [magiteknobabble]
- There are high- and low-magic areas of the world. Wizards who spend much time in low-magic environments get the equivalent of vitamin deficiency diseases and eventually die. This leaves ecological niches where muggles can thrive and wizards can't.
u/OffColorCommentary [+2] (13 hours later)
There isn't an evolutionary path that would lead from human-like intelligence based on trapping exotic matter to human-like intelligence based on masses of neurons.
Once both exist, all sorts of things like what you describe can happen, but I was stuck on the initial problem.
u/eaglejarl [+1] (14 hours later)
There isn't an evolutionary path that would lead from human-like intelligence based on trapping exotic matter to human-like intelligence based on masses of neurons.
Why not? You said below:
"Real brains are organs that are good at containing thaums, and they contain mostly sensor neurons, which pick up the small amounts of force that thaums can produce and send them to motor neurons in the body."
I'm assuming that by 'real' brains, you're referring to the brains of your wizards -- right? If so, your wizards have brains that are made out of meat, contain recognizable neurons, and transmit signals through the body. Even though those neurons are 'designed' / optimized for catching thaums, you've got the basic substrate to evolve a regular non-thaumic brain.
u/OffColorCommentary [+2] (22 hours later)
The problem is that, as specified, those wizard brains don't really need more neurons than fish brains. Even if the decrease in thaums in their environment was gradual enough to let evolution save them, there wouldn't be any reason to expect humans to wind up with human intelligence, when they have basically the same number of neurons as every other animal.
I could use authorial power to declare that, yes, there were usable-enough neurons sitting there and it didn't take that many mutations. But that's pretty improbable - if I asked you what you thought an organ would be like if its role was to pick up signals from a thinking mechanism and relay them to the body, and I stopped the question there, you would never predict that this organ is structured that similarly to a brain.
u/bbrazil [+1] NERV (33 minutes later)
Hunting is one possibility.
u/xamueljones [+1] My arch-enemy is entropy (13 hours later)
Will you be posting the rules behind the magic and history of the setting for your roleplaying game somewhere? I'd love to read about it even if I'm not going to be playing it. Thanks!
u/OffColorCommentary [+1] (13 hours later)
I'm not done yet, and I'm leaning towards using this for a story where many of the details I've already revealed would be heavily obfuscated, so such a thing would not be available for quite some time, sorry.
u/None [+1] (a day later)
Magic usually violates various conservation laws. Let's pretend that it can violate the laws of computation and information, as well (ie: via prophecy). Wizards made Muggles to have people who couldn't FOOM because they had strictly finite substrate and no self-understanding of how they thought.
Of course, that's presuming that you're willing to allow wizards to be so far up in power level it's not even funny.
u/ajuc [+1] (2 days later)
Magic is finite resource that will run out (maybe thaums half-life is finite). Muggles are preparation for that time. Wizards forgot that magic will run out.
May also explain the secrecy of wizards so that muggles should learn to live without magic (but in the meantime wizards forgot the original reason).
If you don't want magic to run out it might have just been a wrong theory of magic, if made supporters make muggles, and then they learnt it's incorrect, but the muggles were already there.
u/Zeikos [+1] Communist Transhumanism (2 days later)
Hmm i think the answer to your question needs the answer to another question to be correctly assessed i think. What is your explanation for squibs and muggleborns?
Do they exist? If yes are squibs a different category altogether? If they are not how do you get people that work with thaums produce people that work with neurons and vice-versa? Could be that the two things co-evolved and in the early stages of the fetus you get a person with thaums or a person with neurons only and only if you have a particular genetical "switch" open/closed? Open = Wizzard [doesn't need neurons / genetic code ignored /] Closed = Muggle/squib.
To explain why squibs can see magic you can explain it by purely envoirmental factors (a squib is the same of a muggle but by being in a witch's womb his/her perception is altered)
The trick here is to explain why wizzards are not so common .
Possible explanations : Average child per couple is low , really low (< 2) [and it seems supported by canon , there are not many weasly-like families] .
The reason can be easily because magic creates a good QOL like in first world countries where birthrates lower the more life is confortable. This also explains why purebloods are the minority , since purebloods don't have on average more than 2 childs per couple they steadly lower in numbers upon reaching a stable number when the afflux of old generation-muggleborn becomes pure-blood (it's 3 generations if i'm not wrong? So 8 MB gran-granparents = 1 PB son )
Ok i went a bit out of topic. The real question is What causes squibs and muggleborn? The answer to that question will give you the reason why muggle exist , or at least some way to "bridge" the problem.
u/OffColorCommentary [+1] (2 days later)
My answers to those ones were much simpler, as well.
What causes squibs?
There aren't any in this setting.
What causes muggleborns?
Adoption.
u/Zeikos [+1] Communist Transhumanism (4 days later)
Okay so by default everyone is a pureblood. This is pretty tought then , your world is socio-politically completly different from the canon one , there's no such thing of blood purity ; or at least not as hard since i guess people like malfoy would still brag about having a "recognized noble family history".
Ok , so , less complicated the explanation is better it is , isn't it? So let me thow some ideas at you. If they were made it means there was a purpose and we have to assume this purpose had something to do with magic.
- Blood rituals : Muggles aren't completly devoid of magic since they were made from magic , the idea to invent them came from old ritualistic societies that wanted a "less cruel" (uhu? i know...) alterative and made a species of humans with the same blood but different mid from magicals. [Obviosly they were ignorant and didn't think that a being with a different substrate for intelligence could be conscious , so it was done with good intention] .
Then you can throw in some isolation , the muggle population booms and old magicals aren't able to contain them. [this is the weak side of this theory]
[less points for more complexity ] Resource Harvesting , Resource X gives out a radiation that interacts with thaums ( magical kriptonite?? ) but is really good for enchanting once refined , humans were made after the first attempt clamorously failed (goblins! yeah! , ignore if you have another history for them) but after some centuries they rebelled using aganist wizzards the same resource they gathered from them. Population got out of control and bla bla.
Exploration / colonization , they were used to "test" a particular envoirment if it was suited for wizzard settlement , we can assume where a muggle could live a wizzard can so they were used like we used a canary to test for methane in old mines
War , wizzards and another race with capabilities (or weapons) able to destabilize thaums were in war with each other , wizzardkin then invented a being that was smart and could fight but was unaffected by enemy weapons.
--?Sex? Muggles were sex slaves for naughty wizzards/witches [doesn't expain the number difference]
These are my ideas , but i've a question for you. How the hell do you explain evolution in your world? I mean if magical creatures are the norm and all else is a offshot from them then you wouldn't have the three of life and muggle scientis woudl understand that something was pretty wrong. I doubt wizzards went all the way to make fossile records and shit . If only muggles were the exception then it would make sense : wizzards just used monkeys as a template for a neural-working-human being. this line of thinking arises many questions , i wont write more since i don't want to waste your time, but if you could explain a bit it would be apreciated.
Anyway GL with your FF , it intereste me a LOT so gimme gimme the link :) put it here for us when you start! Don't forget us! Even if you will hate me for my useless ideas :( :P good luck again
u/OffColorCommentary [+1] (4 days later)
To clarify, I'm not writing a Harry Potter fanfic. We're just doing the "modern muggle enters magical world" trope, which has been done before HP as well, but less popularly. I don't need HP's tropes on blood purity or anything.
Evolutionarily - I'm still checking some details with an evolutionary biologist, but I can guarantee that there's no fossil evidence that anything strange happened ;-).
u/Zeikos [+1] Communist Transhumanism (4 days later)
Oh , i see. I saw you using the term muggle so i guessed it was based in the hp universe. Makes sense now :)
u/mynoduesp [+1] (12 days later)
It's like us creating artificial intelligence which can reprogram itself.
Some mad bastard created homunculus constructs originally with a few neurons and magically accelerated their intellectual growth over generations to provide skilled labour or so that a wizard could feel like a powerful god above lesser beings, as it's hard to feel godlike when everyone has god like powers.
u/None [+0] (4 hours later)
Talk about god in /r/rational
I would prefer to think about natural selection. Obviously the traits that coincide with the magic gene reduces reproduction compared with those without the gene.
u/OffColorCommentary [+7] (4 hours later)
You should re-read my post, and this one, because that's not what this is about at all.
And I don't think that settings with God in them should be excluded from /r/rational anyway. A universe with the Christian god in it is still coherent, and there are still rational decisions to be made in that universe. We just don't live there.
u/None [+0] (4 hours later)
Ah, my apologies, I skimmed this topic far too quickly.
In the end though, you're talking about the motivations of an individual or group of people, which can be anything. As a result, unless your deity is a player in the story (a la greek gods) I simply find the question rather uninteresting. If your deity is a main or auxiliary character, then the motivations come naturally from character development.
My answer of "I don't like your system" probably isn't terribly helpful to you though, so I'll duck out. Sorry!
u/holomanga [+3] (5 hours later)
Talk about Harry Potter in /r/rational