Hammond waddles his way up to his last stop of the day. The sun is just starting to set in the distance. Today has been nice — mostly venturing through the Italian countryside — but it will be nice to get home for dinner.
He straightens his tie, and gives the door a firm knock with his flipper.
She scrambles for the door.
"I'll get iii..." oh, wait she's alone.
She looks through the peephole to see if it's someone they know.
She unlocks the door but keeps the chain on, as her mum told her to do for strangers.
"H... hello?"
"Hello! Do you have a few minutes to answer some survey questions about magic?" Hammond inquires.
"Would that require opening the door? I'm sorry, but mum says to never let strangers in. I don't think she was considering talking walruses but you know, better safe than sorry."
"Oh, no, that's quite understandable," Hammond agrees. "I would tell my calves the same thing, had I any."
"But no, I'm content to put questions to you from out here, so long as you don't mind conversing through the gap."
"No, no, that's fine. This is most probably a dream anyway, walruses can't talk in real life."
He huffs a little.
"Perhaps not in your world," he admits. "But in mine it's perfectly usual. I've been able to talk since before I said my first word."
"And anyway — it might become more common here pretty soon. I've been sent around because your world has grown enough that it's about to develop magic, and I'm surveying people on what form magic should take here."
"Wait. How does that work? If you haven't said your first word yet you haven't talked? I'm confuddled."
"Wait, we're getting magic? For real? Oh, I really hope this is not a dream! Which kind of magic? Is it like Harry Potter? Like the Lord of the Rings? Are you magic? Can you use magic?"
Hammond smiles.
"Well, if I hadn't been able to talk before that point, how would I have said my first word?" he points out. "As for your more important question — that's rather up to you. The Will of Magic is still trying to decide what kind of magic to be, so it sent us out to ask for people's opinions."
He looks to the side.
"... well, technically it didn't send me; I'm a subcontractor. But it's close enough! Anyway!"
He makes a show of consulting the clipboard.
"Are those the kinds of magic that you'd like to have? Magic isn't so limited that it has to match what you're already familiar with, but if you have a kind of magic in mind already, it might make sense to start there."
"I mean, not precisely? Harry Potter's magic words are just silly. 'Wingardium Leviosa', really? Magic should be more dignified than that. And Tolkien's magic is uncommon and often subtle. I want everyone to be able to learn magic. Well, maybe not everyone. You should be smart enough or something. People who are not good at thinking would be dangerous with magic."
"I definitely want spell diagrams! And portals!"
He writes this down.
"How do you feel about the question of 'hard' and 'soft' magic? That is, should magic be based on mechanistic, mathematical principles, or on less rigidly defined concepts such as language or emotion?"
"Definitely hard. I think it's neat if you can choose to use your emotions to influence magic, like feed your rage to make a fireball more powerful, but if you have a spell diagram for light, it should do light, consistently and predictably."
"So I think I'm fine with emotions affecting spells, but if you're calm and comfortable then magic should feel like math, not art."
"That's an excellent distinction!" Hammond comments, scribbling this down on his clipboard. Somehow.
"You mention spell diagrams — if that's how you want magic to work, could you explain a little more about what that means to you?"
"I think... I really like the æsthetic of a big ritual circle on the floor, and I also enjoy smaller spell diagrams. Maybe they could be helping tools? Like, when you're first learning you caaaarefully draw the diagram for the null spell, then cast it channeling your power through it. Then as you get better you can just visualize the diagram and cast more intuitively, so circles would be mostly used either by the novices or for very complicated spells, like ones requiring multiple people or for spell research!"
"Ah, yes, I see. Do you picture the spell diagram as defining everything about a spell, or would you be able to tweak things on the fly once you get to that casting-intuitively stage?"
"I think it would be mostly fixed if you use a physical diagram, whereas the intuitive stage allows you to tweak it. I kinda see it as a recipe? It's easy to add more or less salt, cook slightly longer or shoeter, but if you change something major on the fly it has a good chance of going badly. Like burning your sauce."
"So that's why you want diagrams for spell research. Less probable to explode the room."
"What do you see the process of spell research being like? Constructing new experimental spell diagrams and testing them? What else?"
"Building and testing diagrams is definitely a good chunk, yes, but also trying to build theories on how the symbols relate to the effects? Actually I'm unsure if I'd prefer that to be something known or something that needs exploring. On the one hand, science, on the other hand, what if we never discover the most efficient form for something? I'm conflicted."
"It's not usually a component of hard magic systems, but some forms of magic do have a notion of predetermination or destiny; how would you feel about it being predetermined that people would eventually figure out everything there is to know about magic?" he asks.
He's deeply tempted to point out that, if the magic ends up compatible with creating processes that last forever, something like a Gödel search will almost certainly result in that being the case anyway. But he's really not supposed to get sidetracked into abstract computer science.
"I don't think I'd want that. Destiny seems... stifling. Especially destinies of the self-fulfilling kind."
"What if magic was like... physics, in a sense? We don't know everything, but we can look inside atoms, and at galaxies, and learn things in a way which feels... It feels like eventually we'll be able to know enough? That made more sense in my head, I'll be honest."
She ponders for a moment.
"What if the building blocks are very easy to discover and then magic is such that you can build any possible spell out of those basic building blocks? Like you do in programming. There are still an infinite amount of programs that we haven't written yet, but we have the building blocks, and anything we want to build we should eventually be able to?"
"What if magic was like programming. So a magic circle would just be... a program? And the reason that you need them for bigger rituals or experimentation is that you need to write down what you're doing to check it. But like, you can definitely write an hello world from memory if you've ever programmed, and you can write - like - a calculator from memory if you have even a small amount of experience and so on."
Hammond smiles widely.
"Oh — when you have the time, you should really look up an explanation of Gödel numbering; I think you'll find it very interesting," he advises her. "But yes, that's definitely a way magic can work; is it your opinion that it should be like that?"
"It makes sense to me? But maybe there should also be space for something more... magical?"
"Maybe this should be like, the mainstream way of doing magic? Like with folk medicine? It's mostly superstition but then you find out that willow bark works because it contains... something?"
"I don't know, it feels really neat to have magic as programming, but it also feels... reductive"
"Salicin," Hammond supplies. "It's a precursor to acetylsalicylic acid, which I think people around here use for pain relief. It doesn't work very well on walruses on account of our delicate skin."
He relates this with the air of someone repeating rote facts while his attention is elsewhere.
"And I do see what you mean, I'm just trying to think how to phrase my natural follow-up question ..."
He drums his tail in thought.
"Earlier you made the comparison of spell diagrams being used as a kind of mnemonic, to guide the creation of the spell — how would you feel about a system where there are multiple competing kinds of mnemonics, such as different kinds of rituals, some of which are programming-flavored and some of which are more esoteric?"
"Yeah, I think that works. Like you have wizards and witches and sorcerers and it's all magic but with different flavors."
He nods.
"Excellent. Alright ..."
"What are some things that you think magic should definitely be able to do?"
"Fireballs! Teleportation! Flight!"
"I want to say 'control Time and Space' but I think that could create paradoxes?"
"Well, it depends on what you mean by 'control Time and Space'," Hammond replies. "For one thing, there are some models of time-travel where paradoxes — except for pre-destination paradoxes, which I don't think should count — are impossible. The 'the past was always that way, and when you go back in time you will turn out to be making it be that way' model. Or the 'traveling to the past creates an entirely independent timeline' model, which also avoids paradoxes like that."
"If you could pick a particular way for time-travel to work (which you can), would you want to extend your answer?"
"Oooh, like the Asimov story! I love that. It means that you can go back in time but only to change things you don't already know to be different. I reeeeeeeally dislike the independent timeline one. It means that in your original timeline you just disappear, and all your friends and family mourn you. Terrible. Horrible. The worst."
Hammond diligently records this.
"Alright — what should magic definitely not be able to do?"
"Make it easier to kill people, I guess. Like, obviously if you can throw fireballs those can kill people but like, no Power Word Kill or Inflict Wounds. And honestly I'm having second thoughts on the fireball. I think it's acceptable if magic is dangerous and can be used for evil. A kitchen knife can also be used for evil. But I wouldn't want more magic to bring more misery."
"A thought."
"I don't like it, I don't think it works in the real world - well, the world is weirder than I expected but... you get what I mean I hope."
"Maybe there is a way to make it work, you seem to have good ideas."
"What if you needed to be Good to use magic?"
"Oooh! Clever!"
Hammond straightens up and considers this for a moment.
"So the basic idea is definitely possible: you can have a system that judges people on their Goodness, and only gives magic to the ones that meet some threshold. The tricky part is where the definition of Good comes from. There are plenty of universes that judge Good and Evil in various ways — sometimes contradictory ways. How would you go about defining Good? Either directly, or in terms of a process by which magic, which lacks built-in mortal sensibilities, could come to know it?"
"It's something about... using magic for good? But that's not really explaining it, is it?"
"What if... my intuition is that using magic for good means that you do something which is good for people. Most of the time this is easy. If I scrape my knee, healing me is going to be good for me and neutral for everyone else. But what if I want to be very rich? That money needs to come from somewhere, so the criterion cannot simply be 'good is what a person finds valuable', although it definitely is a component of that."
"And it's not even a matter of how many people a spell is good for, because I'm sure that you can convince the majority of people to do horrible things. If you've read anything about our history for the last century you would know."
A moment of silence, to remember.
"I don't know. Good is... helping others, working together, happiness, safety, growth, discovery, freedom, but this is still not pinning it down..."
"Well, in fact, with magic money doesn't have to come from anywhere, but places that work like that tend to get a bit strange," he notes.
"Hmm. Would you say that something that has more of those traits is more likely to be good, and something with fewer of those traits is less likely to be good, but no specific trait in that list, itself, directly indicative?"
"Yes, definitely, and I can probably come up with a better list with more time. Does it make sense to do that?"
"Maybe! One thing that magic can often do is tell whether two things are 'similar' or not, because there are a lot of magic systems that depend on being able to make that kind of judgement in one way or another, when you think about it — so the capacity to judge similarity is something that the Will of Magic often has to implement. So if you want to, you could define goodness by listing a bunch of things that are good, and a bunch of things that are bad, and saying that, when determining if something is good or bad, magic should compare it to each one of those and combine those comparisons to form a final judgement."
"The risk with a system like that is that you're giving up fine control over the precise definition of 'good', in favor of a sort of vague gesture. But if you can't give a precise definition of 'good', maybe a vague gesture is better than the alternative. Does that kind of system for judging goodness sound like something magic should do? It's definitely not the only way, so if it doesn't sound right we can talk about alternatives."
"I'm not convinced? If you go back two thousand years, no one - well, almost no one - believed slavery to be particularly evil. I don't want to bind magic to unchanging values when in two thousand years we could realize that... I don't know. Pineapple on pizza is evil. Even though it clearly is."
"Well, any specific concrete decision you could make now could turn out to be wrong in the same way," Hammond points out. "So it sounds like maybe you want a procedure that magic can go through to change the definition of 'good' as people's views change, so that it grows alongside people."
"That sounds way better, yes! Although... like. We don't have world peace right now, so 'the majority view' is not necessarily... enough? I don't know. I feel very unqualified."
Hammond bites his lip. There's a limit to how much he's supposed to lead people's answers, but surely helping her brainstorm a bit isn't a problem.
"I agree that the naive majority view probably isn't the best you could come up with," he settles on. "For one thing, to use your slavery example, the slaves probably knew it was wrong far before the majority of people did, and if magic could have picked up on that it would be a good thing."
"When I have a hard problem, I sometimes find it useful to think about how I could identify a solution if I saw one," he muses. "What properties would a satisfactory solution have? I can write them down, and then we can brainstorm alternatives and see which one comes closest."
"Well. A solution would look like magic being used to make the world better and not worse. Which is kinda self-referential, we are trying to define 'better' in the first place. Some values are prooobably going to be seen as good in the future as they were in the past? It's good when people are free to make choices for themselves. It's good when people can eat, have a place to stay, friends, when people have time off work or school to pursue their hobbies and passions. Very little poverty, ideally none. I think it's fine if some people are rich, as long as the gap isn't too big? Olivetti had a rule that the CEO pay couldn't be more than ten times a blue collar worker's pay, and it seems intuitively like a good idea? I think... wait, I'm getting distracted from the question."
"I'm somewhat tempted to just crib some ideas from the Gospel? There's a lot of stuff that was meant for... a different time, but the basic message of 'love each other' is sound I think."
Hammond hums in thought. That's not really what he was getting at, but this is a pretty abstract question.
"Some magic systems involve the creation of gods, spirits, fae, or other magical people — do you think that having the magic mediated through a loving person, about whom you could specify additional details, would be a more approachable potential solution?"
