mould

THEORY (small): Causation/Correlation

What are the arguments for or against true causation as opposed to strong correlation? I suppose I should know this, but my excuse is that I didn’t do induction for general philosophy last year. In the humanities of course you never know which way causation runs, so at most you can use strong correlation for predictions. However if you can come up with a necessary (but not necessarily sufficient) condition you might be able to establish some form of causation. But more interesting is the stronger case of the sciences. Basically everything can be reduced to particle activity. At the basic level then, is there any logical link at all between one particle striking another, and the strikee moving in a certain direction at a certain speed? I don’t think so…it seems it’s just an empirical correlation that has always been true. So it’d be quite interesting I think. Kinda just destroys everything.

Anyway, that wasn’t the point. The point is –

SPECIAL: Dark-side/Berserk
For the latter, the quote is “ROARRRRR!!!!!! *chew* *chew*” by Eva-01 after defeating the 14th Angel Zeruel
For the former, it can only be: “Luke, ga wah ke orh orh yi peng,” by none other than the 3rd greatest villain on the American Film Institute’s Top 50 Villains list.

In some of the stories I’ve experienced, the main character gains power through tapping on some forbidden or ‘dark’ type of power. Examples of these are Star Wars (Luke and the Dark Side), Naruto (Naruto and Kyuubi), Bleach (Ichigo and the Hollow), some wuxia instances (maybe Zhou Ziruo from HSDS) and I’ll probably be referring to them for the rest of this post. The idea is that these things are unnatural, or not intrinsic to either human nature or the character’s true self. As such, accessing this resource grant great boosts in power but there are a few drawbacks. The character usually loses his sense of self (though berserk mode does this as well); his body may end up getting hurt (re Naruto) but his psyche almost definitely becomes scarred, either because of the direct effects of the power, or because of the experience of having too much power without having to work hard for it, or because of the morally corrupting influence of too much power.

I think the key thing is the unnatural aspect of it. This makes for some potential resolutions. In some cases the character is able to reconcile, in which case he becomes damn powerful (because he can tap this thing without drawbacks, or at most some rather token constraints like ‘keep a firm grip on your emotions’ or ‘don’t lose sight of the precious ones around you’). He might lose access to this power, usually voluntarily relinquishing it, but sometimes become just as if not more powerful from his struggle to overcome it or some other more arbitrary and less satisfying reason like he finds an alternate power source. Tragic endings can also result, when the dark side becomes so much a part of him that he cannot exist without it. He then makes the decision to end himself and thus end the dark-side as well. Wah. So sad. I’m sure there are others as well, but I’ll add more as time goes along. (Yah sure.) We might plausibly generalise this to not just unnatural but external sources of power. I’m thinking in this case of Rand al’Thor and his Dragon power (associated with the madness of Lews Therin Telamon). The unnatural bits might still hold (e.g. the self rejects the external intrusion and the character must endure a lot of pain before he assimilates it), but the sacrifice thing becomes less likely.

In contrast we have berserk mode, which I associate mostly with the desire to live on. This brings to mind a very cool trailer which made a strong and lasting impression. It’s for Vertical Limit on AXN, and the voice-over says, “the most powerful force on the planet…” then this guy leaps off a cliff, avalanche swelling behind him, “is the will to live” and he flails about with two pick-axes trying to sink them into the opposite cliff face, but you don’t know whether he succeeds. Then “Vertical Limit. Only on AXN. The heart of Action and Adventure.” Or something.

Uh, anyway. The examples for this are not many I suppose. There’s Eva obviously. Limit breaks in the FF series are another example of this, and I guess Vincent’s embodies this most clearly. There should be a few more but I can’t think of any. It seems a somewhat regrettable trend that I like to draw general conclusions from very limited samples. So the key difference between this and dark-side power is that this is internal (we might link it to some Gaia or life-force thingy, but that’s usually seen as quite natural – you can never have too much life, though you can have not much of a life, which is my situation right now). So the main drawback is the loss of self. Unlike dark-side, where the character can sometimes hold on to his sense of self (either in an internal struggle with the dark-side re Naruto talking to the Kyuubi, Ichigo talking to his Hollow, or just simply retaining consciousness re Luke v Darth in the Death Star II or ZZR when fighting with the short-cut JIZJ) berserk mode is the relinquishing of one self for another more primal one (of course we can argue that this more primal one isn’t a self at all): the usual ego/id dilemma. This loss of self thing is usually amplified by the storyteller introducing some tragic consequence, like you kill your loved one or some shit like that. But the key thing is that berserk mode is probably stable in the sense that the character won’t get scarred like he would if he attempted to absorb external power. In this case the power is internal but can only be access under certain conditions.

Thinking of it now, I suppose a classic example of things like that are Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (dark-side? But they’re both the same man? Are they?) and the Incredible Hulk (might be unnatural because of the gamma thing, but probably it’s berserk). Apart from these guys though, I feel that Western stories usually have characters who are just powerful to start with, or they gain natural access to power as part of birthright or something. Once again the sample is limited, or even totally biased/skewed but I just wanna bounce this off my readership (right off the top of my head, Raistlin Majere from Dragonlance proves this wrong). Superman is the prime example, as are most superheroes. Even in fantasy, let’s see: Gandalf (but then we have Gollum I suppose), Harry Potter (actually I’m loathe to put this in because it’s so mainstream and not very cool but I need a larger sample), Garion… Oh. Pug is fine I think, but Tomas is the interesting one who has dark-side power (this is from Feist’s Magician). The more I look at it the wronger I seem. (Jordan and Lucas draw from Eastern ideas to some extent, by the way, so that might validate me somewhat.) My point is that maybe Eastern stories are more about harmony and naturalness, while Western ones don’t need so much of that.

Ok I guess this was an okay post apart from statistical problems. If anyone can do a hypothesis test on this thing I’ll give you money, no matter how shit it is.