quint@RU-BLUE.ARPA (04/24/84)
From: Anne Marie Quint [/amqueue] <quint@RU-BLUE.ARPA>
Pax! Uncle! I surrender!
I must thank Martin Minow and Andrew Klossner for setting my memory
straight as to Heinlein's use of psychics. Among those stories mentioned,
that I freely admit myself wrong about, were:
Gulf
If This Goes On...
Methuselah's Children
Time Enough For Love
Beyond This Horizon
Lost Legacy
Others mentioned that I would argue about, in no particular order:
I Will Fear No Evil: There were two explanations given for the
'communication' between Johann and Eunice:
a) Johann is nuts, bonkers, around the bend and imagining it all
and b) in some way Eunice is present in all of her body and removing the
brain has not removed her personality. This second one seems to be a
spinoff of the fact that planaria remember all over themselves.
In either case, no psychic abilities are brought out.
Stranger in a Strange Land: it is specifically stated that Michael's
abilities are the result of knowing more about the fabric of spacetime and
the nature of reality, and that this knowledge is teachable once one
learns the language. ( I would like to point out that most sciences have
their 'own language' which must be learned before one can do anything in
that science....it took me about a year to be able to understand 90% of
what my hacker friends were talking about). I believe at some point Mike
says that if someone prefers to believe that what is being done is
psychic, that are welcome to do so, but that they would be wrong.
Waldo/Magic, Inc: Waldo draws power and energy from a pathway to another
universe; magic is magic, not psychic powers ( I will admit that the
difference may be negligible here, but I am not an authority on magic).
This one may be debatable.
Communicate With Dead in Number of the Beast: If you are referring to the
scene where Jake 'talks' to his wife, I think that is stretching it. The
scientific method is to create a model of the problem and to manipulate.
This can be done with people too; I see no reason to think that Jake is
talking to this dead wife's spirit when it is more possible for him to
be talking to a mental image. It is a fact that people who are long married
can 'predict' each other to that extent. And an ideal model would not have
the failing of dying. Everyone has at some point gone through a decision
making process where one says "What would so and so do in this situation?"
This sounds lots like that.
Group Mind In Methuselah's Children: The essence of a mind is contact
between all the nerve cells; for all the book says, each body could be an
electro-magnetic transceiver on some odd band. I haven't heard of radio
waves being classed as extra-sensory....
In all of the above cases, the explanation was either given or implied
somehow in the structure of the book (at least to me). I think that
application of Occam's Razor finds explanations other that psychic powers
for the books I dispute, and have given what I come up with. I'm sorry I
have to answer to the digest, but I cannot mail directly out to the net. I
hope no one is too bored....
have fun
/amqueue
-------rickc@iddic.UUCP (04/30/84)
o Wait a minute! What are 'psychic powers' except abilities to perform powerful or otherwise useful tasks without using technology? W. F. Jones' ability to tap magical powers in Waldo certainly seems 'psychic' to me. Perhaps the confusion stems from the 'psychic researchers' attempts to be credible and classify their phenomonae. Since none of their classified effects have been clearly reproducible, I feel free to include any strange, non-technological powers that an individual has as 'psychic'. I Will Fear No Evil: The Joan-Johann connection might have been physical, but what about the connection with Jake? Stranger in a Strange Land: What precludes a 'psychic' power from being learned? Seems to me the whole psychic field is based on the idea that current science is incomplete about its knowledge of the nature of reality. Methuselah's Children: Electromagnetic radiation is not an explanation for the group mind. Any such radiation would be immediately detected by the ship's instruments. (An aside: for a description of radio based telepathy see Olaf Stapledon's First and Last Men.) My personal opinion is that Heinlein makes the statement in The Number of the Beast and I Will Fear No Evil that the noted effects are real, not imaginary. Rick Coates tektronix!iddic!rickc