So it seems these guys are literally technomages, have some kind of feuding clans, are ruled by a hierarchy of seer councils (of three) and are generally obsessed with the number three.
Cool. I like them.
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Well, when you study sociology, it become apparent that the use of religion is the best way to keep knowledge.
When using a scientific approach of education, you quickly face the problem of needing to understand the basics before the advanced. That’s why you learn to do addition before multiplications, why you learn about general physics before quantum physics, etc etc.
But that mean you need to spend long years before “understanding” things.
When you are in a dangerous space (for exemple, abyssal deadspace ^^) you can’t spend years forming only a few people. if whatever happen to you, the knowledge is lost.
So you decide to write it down, and one of your student ask “but why do we do this ?” you can say “because god want it that way, if you don’t, we will die”
and the thing is, that in a highly advanced environment, you will indeed probably die if you don’t do it right.
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‘Technomages’? I dunno, it just looks like normal military technology research to me, wrapped up in a bunch of terms and idioms we don’t understand because they’re not our idioms, in a society that’s built around the number 3 (which has a lot of good selling points to it, like being the minimum number of legs needed for effortless stability).
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That’s actually more dangerous to the continued survival of your society, though.
First, it means that you quickly wind up with people at the top who have lived all their lived being told that things work because ‘God said so’. So they’re not pushing on the boundaries of ‘why?’. They’re not looking for deeper understanding. After all, God will tell them. You don’t need to ask why, in fact, that kind of environment actively discourages asking ‘why?’. If God wanted you to know, he’d tell you.
Second, it means that the actual understanding of the principles that make things work gets concentrated into a smaller and smaller body of individuals. And that makes you more and more vulnerable to a freak accident. Calamities happen. Leadership can be crippled by one or two key losses in short order. If someone in charge dies, you need to be damned sure they had someone who knows absolutely everything they knew, ready to step in… because if they didn’t, then the moment they died, your society took a step backwards in terms of scientific knowledge, sustainability, and survival.
The way this usually expresses is that once you get above a certain level in the hierarchy, you start to be shown ‘past’ the religious trappings. You begin to be let in on the scientific basis… but the longer it goes on, the more likely you are to have both of those problems combine, until the people at the top were never read in, because the people who should have done that died too soon… and then you have a society where ‘how to research’ is lost because the only people who knew that ships and space travel aren’t divine magic given physical form… died two centuries ago.
Religion is not the best way to retain knowledge. Religion is a terrible way to retain knowledge. Religion leads to institutionalization of dogmatic, a-curious thought, and turns procedure into ritual. Process becomes folklore and myth. Why things work gets mixed in with morality lessons. The fluid router didn’t fail because of a nanoassembler error, it failed because you weren’t virtuous enough. Or you didn’t say the right prayers while using the Wall of Speaking (the holoterminal). Or just because God didn’t want it to work that time, and there’s no point asking ‘why not?’ because God did it.
The better way is simply to commit to aggressive and constant expansion of knowledge, because in order to expand it, you have to teach the fundamentals first.
Really, I’m kind of shocked the Amarr managed to get orbital, all things considered, but constant warfare will provide a modicum of research imperative. I suspect that’s operational within the Collective as well, if this is a ‘religious’ framing.
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To be honnest I kind of disagree with you.
I mean, I’m totally ok with you: it IS a terrible way to transmit knowledge.
But I disagree on the “restriction” part.
On the contrary, if you manage to shape you society in this way, baseliner can be taught rituals but never have the right to ACTUALLY do them.
And the “why” is asked if your religion is not “book based”.
In a “book based” religion, adding things is difficult because you need to see if it contradict the rest. So in this case, I agree.
But if you add a “divination” part, especially combined with computers, it become way less difficult to do so.
But on a whole, I think like you, that an elite being less “dupe” is likely.
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Well, the problem is that over the long term, the top levels of any society become more and more infiltrated and shaped by the broader society. So you get very competent people who advance due to their competence, but when you try to show them that it’s not all ‘god’, they become extremely hostile to this idea. It challenges everything they’ve ever believed. Worse, it shows them for fools for believing.
That tends to lead to a situation where the only people you have to replace the current generation… are exactly the people you never want trying to push scientific thought, because they actively hate it.
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So, stealing a moment before the next meeting, but my read, Mr. Moros, is that ‘the struggle’ is the war against the Drifters.
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thanks for your intake, that’s also my reading.
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Arrendis, it seems like this doesn’t track lived experience very well.
Achura: a diverse religion, most of whose sects revere seekers after insight and treat inquisitiveness as a sacred duty.
Amarr: tesseract capacitors. Not exactly anti-science?
It seems like you’re assuming a very detached-from-reality understanding of religion. Why not just include it in your doctrines that the world is an amazing place worth exploring; human understanding of divine will is fallible, even if divine will is not; and what the universe shows you cannot be against divine intent?
That way you can get people going, “Okay, this happens because God wants it to happen, but what’s the mechanism God designed here?” And then they go and find out all kinds of neat stuff.
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Because those in power will always want to remain in power, and if you establish ‘interpretation of divine will is fallible’, then you’re establishing ‘MY interpretation of divine will can be questioned at any time’. And religious authority figures tend to not like that.
Consider your own example of Achura: your teachers are only teachers. They don’t claim to be interpreting ‘divine will’. They don’t claim there’s a will to interpret. If anything, Aria, from what you’ve said, your belief structure strikes me far less as ‘religion’ (which requires the worship of higher-order beings) and more a kind of philosophical spirituality. And there’s a universe of difference between the two. But this is getting into the whole issue of ‘the words we choose matter, and introducing a little bit of error in terminology creates problems down the line’ that’s going to send me into full-on pedantic sermons about the choice of the word ‘religion’ and how it has a definition and ignoring the actual definition in order to call a structure of beliefs without deities ‘religion’ is utter nonsense.
So let’s avoid that one, because either you’re going to nod and say ‘ok, I see what you mean on that’ or we’re never going to agree about whether Achuran spirituality is a ‘religion’, and nobody wants to sit through that pointless debate! 
Including us!
Anyway, like I said: The Amarr are, frankly, an aberration, but one that’s likely explained by centuries of conquest and warfare planetside, possibly alongside a cultural folklore (likely, considering the length of the Amarr calendar) that establishes ‘we got here from elsewhere, and there are more people who’re still elsewhere’. As a result, you’ve got the divine mandate at play forcing them to either a)get back into space (where awaits more conquest and violence to drive technological advancement), or b)deny their god.
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No it doesn’t. Theistic religions, sure, but a religion overall is simply a system of belief. I can think of three relatively mainstream ones on northern Mikramurka alone that does not include worship or ‘higher-order beings’. I believe the official definition includes “a cause, principle, or system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith”. Faith then being defined as belief without evidence.
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So …
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“Okay, I see what you mean on that.” … except that you do realize we’re just one sect out of probably over a thousand? And that we, also, tend to leave out offerings to spirits and deities because (a) it’s not bad to show a little reverence towards natural forces that can casually kill you if you get careless (sword winds: still a thing) and also (b) we could possibly be wrong about them not literally existing.
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People wanting to stay in power, unquestioned, is a common but not a universal/inevitable thing. You can limit its effect by ruling on religious stuff by committee, which Achura and Amarr both do in different ways. The inevitable factionalism and rivalries will keep new ideas bubbling as long as you can keep anybody from developing an iron grip on the whole institution, which both societies have managed to avoid.
It’s not that different from secular councils, really. You don’t have to be talking religion to be discussing something that’s probably largely imaginary, after all. Take that most pervasive of secular deities, money: doesn’t exist outside our social constructs, but might as well because we all act like it does and come up with all kinds of strange things to do to/with it.
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Has anyone let Max Singularity know about this conversation? 
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not this one, I taggued him on an other thread also on TC.
(the one on FTL)
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Nope.
They might be difficult to do anything useful for you, if you think only in terms of industry standard, which is binary.
If they indeed use ternary computers and nonary numeric system, that makes their electronics way more efficient than our computers, which operate in binary code and do calculations on decimal arithmetic (or even hexadecimal).
Ternary logic with ternary gates can be done very easily with just a semiconductor technology. The only thing that prevents us from doing them is industry standard.
If you are interested in this, I can recommend reading some computer sciences papers on ternary logic - they really should be easily available in GalNet.
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I can totally understand obsession with the number three - it’s the number of dimensions in the space (pure fabric of space, not space-time) that we do live in.
Guess that’s what I get for leaving my pod to get all rusty and dusty!
They tend to stop at some point, though!
Yeah, that thread made, like, no sense to me. Sorry buddy!
Maybe! It still makes me wonder where, precisely, those outside the struggle actually are, though.
For the translation doodads, I’ll keep the same format as last time.
“Damavik Subclade of Perun Clade…”
“Imprinting” could refer to some infomorph-style technology, sure. I don’t see a strong distinction between that and training in a more traditional (and more boring!) sense, though.
“Leshak Subclade of Veles Clade…”
I absolutely distinguish between the (sub)clades and the ships! We’ve far more subclades than we have ship designs floating around. It may be that the other designs are made with less militaristic goals in mind, leaving them out of our sight, but simpler to me is just that not every subclade ends up involved in ship design. Specialisation is important! I totally lost the “without proving” part of that fragment, though–I’d agree that it equates to “without testing” in less arcane language.
It doesn’t look like you entirely followed the last part of my translation. I call the techniques–not the Commune Troika!–old because they’re “reverse-time reclaimed”: that is, they’re reclaimed from the past. Then, there is “now-time” (which is to say “current at the time of writing”) pressure for these old techniques to be passed on to strategic leaders.
“Paramount Technical Troika of Gromovi Subclade…”
For something to qualify for having an exclave, it needs to have some primary corpus in the first place. Hence, I “sub-27 exclave” to me suggests somewhere outside the main body of the Collective (wherever or whatever that actually is).
For the last part, man. It really took me back to an old colleague of mine. Yeliana had a superb way with words! Let me try and explain for someone less well-acquainted with the Integrator.
- “…material realisation…”: Literally the realisation of an idea in material form–in this case, we’ll see in the form of new technology.
- “…in advancing-time…”: In the immediate future. This new technology is to be deployed in the near future (again, at the time of writing, at least).
- “…of tactical casting…”: Another word-substitution game. If “casting” gets read as the process of decision-making (like I do for the fragment about the “winnowing of the clades”!), then the reasoning is straightforward. This talks about tactical decision-making.
- “…and reflection across arbitrary response units.”: These “arbitrary response units” seem like ships to me. The reflection of tactical casting, then, is the dispersal of tactical decisions between these ships–that is, within their fleets.
“Convocation of the Troika of the Vodya Subclade…”
No, no, I just can’t read. I saw “Vodya” where CONCORD saw “Yodya”. Let’s assume it isn’t a typo. I mean, CONCORD can be sketchy and unreliable, but we need to draw a line somewhere. They let me (me!) into that Yulai station for that one press conference, after all, so I can trust them this far.
Makes things a lot more awkward, though! A pithy resolution isn’t coming to me. It could be part of yet another subclade (that is, the Yodya-with-the-‘y’) chosing to combine themselves with the Vodyi, but that’s perverse. If they’re going to start merging and recombining, come on, the Collective could at least be polite and combine subclades with easily-distinguished names!
I don’t understand your last point, I’m afraid. How is the word of God to be realised if not through the actions of individuals and groups? (Wow-ee. That takes me right on back to Dam-Torsad. Who’d have expected that?)
Disunity is for nerds and squares. It’s still sad that they’re not, however human they are!
These guys aren’t savages. Why would they glorify space and not time? They’re inextricable if you want any kind of consistency. Besides, all the cool kids work in d + 2ε dimensions until they really need to send ε towards vanishing, and only fix a value for d if it’s super-duper necessary.
(Admittedly, the last part of that is glib and not-entirely-serious. Not the first bit, though!)
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Would a ship of their own design survive beyond the pockets?
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I don’t think a Vedmak can do enough damage at enough range to survive within the pockets, let alone without.
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What if the “[modifier]-time” construct is a piece of a verbal conjugation for a verb nearby in the sentence?
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