Recently I was invited by a minor necromancer to hold a short discussion with him. He is by no means a philosopher, but wanted to say some things about the differences between opposites and absences, a common misconception among the laymen. He would say nothing of his name other than that he was not infamous, yet he had a proud lineage dating back to an archmage of fire and black magic known as Durgaaz the Red, who was said to be a fiery tempered gnome with Draconian ancestry.
"So you wanted to discuss the difference between opposites and absences?"
"Absolutely! I have called you here to try and address some basic issues. You see, when an adventurer barges in to disrupt my latest experiments I am studying, they almost always mention something about my creations being devoid of life, or calling them soulless, empty husks. This is far from true; they are not empty husks by any means! They are not full of life, I will grant them that, but there needs to be something besides just my magic to sustain them, or as soon as the necromantic rites are completed the construct would be a constant drain upon my own magical force, which would be impossible to sustain. No, they are fueled, not by a spark of life, but by the cold flame of Undeath. This is not the same as life, or as death. Death is just an absence of life! However, undeath is the opposite of life! Take a rock for example. A very few would call them dead. The more proper terminology states that they are non-living. However, I cannot very well bring a rock back with a necromantic rite any more than I could read in a pitch black room! Something cannot exist without its opposite! “
“So what you are saying is that while nonliving things like rocks and objects that are dead are merely the absence of life, Undeath is the opposite?”
“Exactly!”
“Now what differentiates Undeath from Life? In what ways are they opposite?”
“Life, especially sentient life, is fueled by the soul, which in turn is filled with positive energy, or essence in some cases. This soul is responsible for giving animation, emotion, thought, and free will. Undeath is life’s opposite in that the body or vessel is filled with basically an anti-soul. Some may call it negative energy, or some may call it unholy magic, but in the end, it is an object that grants animation, but has a corrupted will and being. When entering contact with the positive energy of the living things, the positive energy and negative energy both cancel each other out, destroying themselves. This is something both necromancers and wielders of positive energy know. Anyways, this got me thinking..."
"About...?"
"About my next line of research!"
He was clearly distracted by this research which, I was admittedly somewhat interested in hearing about.
"Research about what?"
"Unlight! Just as death is the absence of life, and undeath its opposite, darkness is the absence of light, not its opposite! So it stands to reason that there is such a thing as unlight! Or at least that it is possible. I wish to bring about its observable existence and quantify it! I have postulated that it will appear something like a darkness so deep that it will actually blot out light when brought near it, and that it could cast shadows when placed between the area or object being observed and a light source..."
He proceeded to ramble on about his hypothesized unlight, and eventually moved onto unsound, and most bizarrely and interestingly, ungravity. It was quite interested and I am somewhat excited to hear about his research in the future. I am also pleased to hear that this short but philosophical thought marked a permanent move away from the dark, sinister, and quite illegal art of necromancy.
Editors note: I would like to thank my friend very much for contributing this wonderful piece! If you have any questions/comments/criticisms, please comment below. If you would like to submit a piece to be published, please contact me at fantasticalphilosophy@gmail.com.
You might consider drawing an analogy to color. In the RGB color model, blue and yellow have opposite hues, but certainly yellow is no more the absence of blue than is red. The pure absence of any blue might even be said to be black. So there is anther case in which the absence of X is not the opposite of X, and vice versa.
ReplyDeleteThat is a really interesting comparison Jacob! I can totally see how that analogy works. Never considered it from that angle before!
DeleteI am intrigued by the idea of unlight. Consider light from the point of view of the physicist—of which I have known a few! Light can be a wave or a particle. So what is unlight? Is it anti-light? An anti-photon? Photons of light do have anti-photons. Unfortunately, for the philosophical aspects of this conversation photons and anti-photons are in fact the same particle. So when they meet what happens? When they collide, they produce other particles!
ReplyDeleteA pair of photons may collide to make an electron-positron pair. This happens all the time in particle physics experiments.
In a supercollider, what is colliding is not just a stream of electrons and positrons but also a group of "hanger on" particles where the hanger-ons are usually photons! And when they hit with enough energy they produce a pair of particles like an electron and a positron, a muon and an antimuon, or some quarks, depending on how much energy was originally in the system.
And thus light creates mass!
But that contradicts our everyday experience, right? I certainly don't see any type of matter created when I flip on a light switch!
The light or photons in our everyday life are low-energy photons. This means, visible, radio waves, x-rays (anything outside of a high-energy physics lab) photons just go right past each other without interacting in this way. In our ordinary life, the particles act as waves. When electromagnetic waves collide the result is the sum of the two. Like waves on a pond -- they will pass through each other without interacting.
Of course, what does this say of the necromancer's idea off death and undeath? Well that's not my specialty I have a just a brain full of fluff and light…