Unknown magic sites in starting provinces?

[Norfleet]

Originally posted by NTJedi:
Peter the magic sites are unknown at this time... the events make them become known. They exist as iron and copper deposits... these deposits don't just pop out of thin air.

Actually, they pretty much *DO* pop out of thin air, due to divine providence. The fact that deposits don't suddenly appear out of the void in the real world has nothing to do with this: In the real world, you're not likely to be suddenly ARROWED! by a seeking arrow lobbed from the other side the world, either.

[NTJedi]

Originally posted by Graeme Dice:
I don't think you are using the definition of unknown properly. Calling the sites "unknown" is likely to do nothing more than confuse people into thinking they can cause them to be found some way other than pure random chance.

Hopefully it's not confusing any new players. I was merely mentioning these are magic sites which can appear at the capital. The magic sites remain unknown until one of those events occur and will not appear by any other means. As discribed in the event the iron/gold/copper deposits are found.

Hopefully that clears it up for any new players reading the forums.

[ March 19, 2004, 01:32: Message edited by: NTJedi ]

[Darryl]

Originally posted by NTJedi:

quote:

---

Originally posted by Graeme Dice:
I don't think you are using the definition of unknown properly. Calling the sites "unknown" is likely to do nothing more than confuse people into thinking they can cause them to be found some way other than pure random chance.

Hopefully it's not confusing any new players. I was merely mentioning these are magic sites which can appear at the capital. The magic sites remain unknown until one of those events occur and will not appear by any other means. As discribed in the event the iron/gold/copper deposits are found.

Hopefully that clears it up for any new players reading the forums.

---

Actually, according to the game, the sites don't exist until the events occur, as the definition to "Aschaic Record" states that it reveals the prescence of "all magic sites in a given province". As these sites cannot be found by Aschaic Record, then either the spell is intentionally misleading or the sites did not exist and were "created out of thin air".

Darryl

[Arryn]

Originally posted by Darryl:
As these sites cannot be found by Aschaic Record, then either the spell is intentionally misleading or the sites did not exist and were "created out of thin air".

The spell is worded properly. As has been mentioned before by myself and others, the sites do not exist at all, period, until the event that brings them into being and they do, indeed, magically appear out of thin air.

Acashic Record is the proof of the assertion. Once a province has been searched via this spell, any sites that show up later due to an event most assuredly do appear literally "out of nowhere", as the spell had already uncovered ALL sites that had been generated for that province at the start of the game. New sites in such a province are therefore just that, new, since "unknown" has been ruled out.

[GavinWheeler]

Originally posted by NTJedi:
If something has become known... then before it was unknown.

Faulty logic, as there are other possibilities - it may well simply not have existed before it suddenly both came into existence and became known. To talk about an "unknown nonexistent object" is just a problem of sloppy language. Something that does not exist has no qualities.

The events make the magic sites known.

And brings them into existence, in reality.

In-game, the rationalisation may be that they existed and have just been found, but out-of-game, in reality, the sites did not exist before the random event.

example:
there are likely unknown substances or metals which will be eventually be created... because they don't exist now makes them unknown.

Many elements were 'known', theoretically, long before we could make them. We can even work out their properties before making them. If they have short halflives, we continue to know about them even after the synthetic sample has ceased to exist.

But you are confusing a Category of things, such as atoms of the element X, with a specific example of that Category, such as a handful of such atoms created in a collision chamber. Before the handful was created, we knew about the possibility of X atoms existing, how to make them, when we would bang together other atoms to try to make them, and what their properties would be when they were made. But it would be silly to talk about there being a handful of nonexistent (known or unknown) X atoms floating around in the chamber waiting to 'turn into' known existing atoms.

And it doesn't matter. If there were (only) nonexistent copper mines (known or unknown) before the event and no existing ones, then no copper mines existed before the event, so there were no (known or unknown) copper mines before the event. QED.

PS: It is possible for a gold/copper/diamond deposit to suddenly come into existence in your back yard, especially if you live somewhere geologically exciting like Hawaii. But it is probably not something you would want to happen while you are anywhere in the vicinity. Although if you keep quibbling like this, others here may wish you to be!

[NTJedi]

Originally posted by GavinWheeler:
To talk about an "unknown nonexistent object" is just a problem of sloppy language. Something that does not exist has no qualities.

Any scientist would strongly disagree with you because there are Unknown substances which have still yet to be found and created.
If for some reason all gold in the world vanished... the properties/qualities of gold would still exist even if everyone lost knowledge about it.
If a new fuel was developed next year... this qualifies now as an unknown nonexistent object.

For heavens sake goto school !

Originally posted by GavinWheeler:

PS: It is possible for a gold/copper/diamond deposit to suddenly come into existence in your back yard, especially if you live somewhere geologically exciting like Hawaii.

Goto school as diamonds and gold do not SUDDENLY come into existence. Or search the internet and you'll see what is needed !

Nature's way of creating diamonds is to subject carbon molecules to intense heat and pressure over eons of time.


------------------

The magic sites found at a capital because of an event are unknown nonexistent mines. The mines become available and known because of the event.

One of the following conditions apply:
To know about something which does not exist (dinosaurs, places or plants now extinct, places yet to be created, etc...)
To not know about something which does not exist (futuristic metals, fuels or substances)
To know about something which does exist (gasoline, the wheel)
To not know about something which does exist (cancer, quantum physics, etc.)

[ March 19, 2004, 20:15: Message edited by: NTJedi ]

[E. Albright]

Originally posted by GavinWheeler:
Faulty logic, as there are other possibilities - it may well simply not have existed before it suddenly both came into existence and became known. To talk about an "unknown nonexistent object" is just a problem of sloppy language. Something that does not exist has no qualities.

Well. This depends. Under certain metaphysical systems, one can have non-existent objects that possess qualities. We could, for example, drag out such hideous entities as Platonic Ideals . But of course at that point we should likely fall into a bitter, sectarian squabble as to precisely what "exists" means...

[ March 19, 2004, 20:29: Message edited by: E. Albright ]

[E. Albright]

Originally posted by NTJedi:
Any scientist would strongly disagree with you because there are Unknown substances which have still yet to be found and created.
[...]
If a new fuel was developed next year... this qualifies now as an unknown nonexistent object.

For heavens sake goto school !

Please calm down.

Methinks the problem here is essentially one of semantics. I blame the English langauge. On one hand, we have the notion of "discovering" something which was created; i.e., something that did not exist. On the other hand, we have the notion of "discovering" things which existed but were unknown; e.g., a new species of parrot or moose. One refers to gaining knowledge of something which previously had no referent, and the other refers to gaining knowledge of something which previously had a referent of which the learner was ignorant. The single term "discover" conflates the two, but one can and ought to make a distinction.

If for some reason all gold in the world vanished... the properties/qualities of gold would still exist even if everyone lost knowledge about it.

Um. This doesn't parse for me. How could the properties/qualities of gold exist without a referent? Do you mean that things that were metal, pyrite-colored, more-or-less as dense as lead, etc., but not all of the above and thus "gold", would continue to exist? Or do you mean that gold's "goldness" would continue to exist in an abstract (ideal) form? And if the latter, are we then talking something like a Platonic Ideal (in that you've also posited that everyone will have forgotten what gold is, and "goldness" could not then just be a mental construct of what it is to be gold)?

[ March 19, 2004, 20:48: Message edited by: E. Albright ]

[Peter Ebbesen]

Originally posted by NTJedi:

For heavens sake goto school !

For heavens sake, take a rhetorics course! - or a logic course. If you want to argue that you can assign known/unknown status to nonexistent objects, you can do much, much, better than to try to do it by blurring the distinction between an unknown idea and an unknown object on the one hand, and between a physical object developed through millenia in the real world and a simulated physical object created in an instant with no pre-history in a game on the other!

"All scientists say..." and "goto school" just don't cut it! Because they don't and we have.

[ March 19, 2004, 21:04: Message edited by: Peter Ebbesen ]

[GavinWheeler]

Originally posted by E. Albright:
Well. This depends. Under certain metaphysical systems, one can have non-existent objects that possess qualities. We could, for example, drag out such hideous entities as Platonic Ideals . But of course at that point we should likely fall into a bitter, sectarian squabble as to precisely what "exists" means...

Of course, under Plato's system there is a neat answer to that in the concept of a platonic existence. Personally, if you differentiate between the concept of something and the thing itself, the signifier and the signified, I don't see where a problem exists.

For example we all know that "a unicorn has a horn on its head", but we are talking about the concept, the mythical entity. The concept exists and has qualities, but the thing itself does not. If we try to talk about a physical unicorn having or lacking a horn, we are in quite different territory and should produce the unicorn in question before the debate is sensible.