Tea... with Milk!

[Delenn]

Hello! Welcome to Tea... with Milk! 

 

I am Delenn Sedai, Mistress of Novices, raised from the White Ajah and I am with Keeper Cross Sedai, raised from the Brown Ajah. We have gotten together to start bringing you an ongoing discussion thread, formatted a bit like a morning talk show! So find your seat and we will get started! 

 

The format of this will be simple. Keeper Cross or I will introduce a topic by each posting in turn about it. The first part of which will contain a bolded, underlined title so each new topic is easier to find. Then, once we have each posted, we will end with the phrase: Let's open it up for discussions...

 

That will be your cue to join the conversation! The discussion will continue until it runs its course as long as it stays mostly on topic and follows the DM CoC. We understand debates and discussions can get heated but allow kindness to guide your words. We are participating to learn and expand after all. In short no personal attacks of any kind and stay on topic. 

 

Remember, once a discussion has died off, start looking for the next one! It will be posted again in this thread with the title of the new topic in bold and underlined so it's easier to see where it begins. 

 

Oh, and we take suggestions and requests for topics too! Please, message either of us on Dragonmount or Discord and tell us your ideas! We will add them to the list and perhaps they will be selected for discussion! 

 

We hope you enjoy, and let’s start the show! 🤎🤍🤎

 

 

 

[Cross]

White vs. Brown: Knowledge vs. Reason and Logic

 

 

 

welcome to Tea… with Milk! 
 

the show that brings you burning questions, delves into the deepest mysteries, is unafraid to go where pleading minds desire! 
 

hailing from two ajahs that may appear intwined in purpose, the Brown and White, the tea and the milk, may share a strong foundational bonding but our approaches and focus can be vastly different. Offering unique viewpoints, counterpoints and a thirst for both knowledge and its logical applications. My co-host and I may agree on much, may disagree on others, together discussion is had and growth stems from it

 

which is the goal of TwM. 
 

stimulating your mind, broadening your scope. And ours in the process. (With perhaps a healthy mix of levity along the way)

 

so to begin we thought it best to begin with a fundamental introduction, just who are the Brown and White Ajahs? What do we believe? And from there a discussion lies. 
 

and with that i hand it over to @Delenn to tell us about the Whites

 

 

 

 

Edited January 21 by Cross
spelling

[Delenn]

*laughs* I bet you all thought I was the wild child of our pairing! 😉

 

Spoiler

The Whites ~ Basics

 

There is a second question within your post Keeper Cross, that I also meant to answer but I missed it on my first post. Within the White Ajah our focus is on applying Reason and Logic to situations of all sorts. That would include both pure knowledge as well as situations we may encounter everyday on Dragonmount, or out in the world. I would say that the 'dispassionate' part of Whites is actually closer to the fairness of Grays. In fact we can be quite passionate about topics sometimes! But our goal would be to set that aside, while not abandoning it, giving equal weight to the consideration of all possibilities and to following the growth and adaptation of knowledge. There is also a great sense of the rules that underpin social order and structure. Why do they exist and how did they develop? Could they have gone a different way and what kind of social structure would that create? Also, we like to think about thinking. I don't know quite how else to put it. We question the why's of how something works and if it could be done better. 

 

And on that note, everyone please forgive us while we get in sync with each other on this! 

 

 

 

So the topic is: Knowledge vrs Reason and Logic. 

 

I am of the opinion that these things are so interwoven it is hard to separate them. Knowledge is defined as facts, information, and skills acquired through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject. While reason is defined secondarily as the power of the mind to think, understand, and form judgements logically. And finally logic is defined as reasoning conducted or assessed according to strict principles of validity.

 

So each definition contains a bit of the the other in it, even if only in description. A bit like tea once the milk has been mixed in. 

 

As a White I believe that by definition the ability to reason starts this process off. Quite simply you must gather data in order to survive. As you gather data it becomes knowledge that you then use to see patterns and predict outcomes. This is reasoning and logic coming into play. This would then be followed by the pure desire to know. To understand something more about the world around you, or even about yourself. The reasons for this desire to know are many, and a different topic. But it leads to continued gathering and recombining of data sets into the model we collectively refer back to as a basis for a more formal, scientific knowledge. 

 

From these data sets you naturally start drawing conclusions. At its most basic level it goes about like this: ~The weather is getting warmer, the days longer, the trees are growing flowers, soon there will be fruit on these trees. I know this from multiple data sets that have been experienced and reinforced by the shared experiences of others. I will return soon to gather it and eat well. ~  Reasoning has lead to the collection of facts and knowledge has allowed further reasoning to lead to logic and desired outcomes. Each building on the other and unable to stand alone. 

 

I don't know Keeper @Cross. I don't think you can take the milk out of the tea! 

 

 

Edited January 21 by Delenn
Added another section under the spoiler

[Cross]

knowledge and the Browns. as an ajah both in the books and here on DM,  we thoroughly enjoy expanding our minds, our experience, dedicating ourselves to understanding. be it understanding our jobs, our hobbies and interests, things that puzzle us and those that intrigue us. our small worlds or the universe as a whole. learning is our passion. because when you take the time to learn, to understand a thing, your scope, your world expands and you're better able, more capable of applying and handling it. i personally believe our collection of knowledge tends to the passionate more than the dispassionate. for we research what we love. 

 

as one should with the people they love, you get to know them, their quirks, their personalities, their likes and dislikes and truly the deeper sign of love is studying what makes them happy, understanding what they love, their passions. KNOWING them as completely as you can. that same passion can be applied to such a vast array of things it boggles the mind. it excites the soul of a Brown. 

 

is there overlap? most certainly. we are not knowledge consuming machines, rather ones that apply what we learn. discern its best uses, its value. 

 

but whilst we agree on the intermingling of knowledge/reasoning/logic in life and in our ajahs, i do challenge the presumption that reasoning leads to the collection of facts and knowledge allows further reasoning. when the initial 'reasoning' could well be nothing more than instinct. to use your example of the seasons, knowing when to prepare, to read the times etc. one does not need to apply logic to what they see to know a thing. to recognize a pattern and to act on it. instinct can do all that without the application of actional logic. 

 

to 'reason' after all is a verb. a choice. a willful application.

 

knowledge CAN be innate. it can exist pure. 

 

and for that, there is no milk. 

 

 

 

and with that, let's open it up for discussion!  have a thought? a question, a side? chime in! 

 

[Delenn]

So the question then becomes, When does reasoning start? A fundamental question that occupies historians and philosophers. This will likely lead to 'When does man gain awareness?' and possibly 'What is intelligence?', but we aren't there just yet. Please let us know in your posts below as you join the conversation if there is a particular direction you'd like us to go! 

 

Cross is correct and going back further the latin root reri, is to consider. So, it strikes me that the thing we have both have said is that an action, namely observation of the world around you, is the first piece in the chain of events that starts this process. Noticing and being aware, then comes making the connections in the mind. When is it instinct and when is it learning? It brings to mind the stories of octopus and how their biggest failing is that they fail to teach their young. 

 

What are your thoughts? Let's open it up for discussions...

 

 

 

 

 

[Cross]

intelligence is situational and varies respectively based on species. that cant be a marker by which we judge. unless we keep this solely to the human aspect. which we kinda need to otherwise we'll be in the weeds forever. 

 

also the mind makes connections on subconscious levels all the time. so not sure that's a solid basis either. though i know your intent of the point. personally i like the question 'when is it instinct and when is it learning?' 

 

when intentional action comes into play. 

 

[Cross]

 

now that you all have gotten a taste for Tea with Milk, and because we like to keep things loosey goosey around here, AND because i love keeping my co-host @Delennon her toes. ANNND because i had a convo ( @HeavyHalfMoonBlade ) and this came up and it was too good to pass up. 

 

......

 

 

 

.....

 

 

WEAVE TALK! 

 

 

 

so in the course of discussing chocolate. i happened across the idea of whether or not we'd be able to weave chocolate into existence. given the elemental nature of the threads with which to weave, is it possible? can aspects be re-ordered to say change the spirit of a thing into something else? dirt can be removed from water, and thus be added back in. cannot that also happen with other things? are, say plants, not just an extension of earth? 

 

is it possible to weave new things out of something else? 

[HeavyHalfMoonBlade]

The answer obviously would take far too long to really go into. A short answer would not do the subject justice. I'll put the full detailed answer in spoilers to save people scrolling.

 

Spoiler

No, just... no.

 

This is a thread that I have been meaning to contribute to but did not manage so far due to acute laziness. 

 

However anyone tries to argue the point, knowledge and interpretation are inseparable. Facts alone are meaningless. Intellectual systems without factual basis are also meaningless. Or maths, so pretty much the same.

 

For example, what does archaeology tell us without interpretation? If pottery shards are found at a certain depth at a certain location, is that fact interesting or illuminating? A theory of what those shards mean has to concocted. 

 

Or another example is New Coke. Despite worldwide domination (what would alien archaeologists make of the spread of Coca Cola merchandise in a few hundred years?), those at Coca Cola felt that their product always coming the bottom of blind taste testing was something they needed to fix. Because that was a fact. And facts are important, m'kay? So the multi-billion dollar (I may be exaggerating) disaster that was New Coke happened. But if it was fact based how could this be? As the taste tests were sip tests. Which were not accurate to how most people drink soft drinks. Interpretation is important. 

 

Intellect on its own though leads to the horrors that can be seen in the discussion of the Raven paradox. But I am not allowed to talk about that. *pouts* Oh, I haven't pouted in months! Everyone is being far too well behaved. *pouts again*

 

I know, you are thinking what about Egyptian hieroglyphs. Exactly. No, come with me on this one. We can read hieroglyphs, even though they baffled everyone for quite literally thousands of years. Until they were deciphered it was the prevalent theory that they pictorial, which seems so dumb, as if they were, why could everyone not understand them? But anyway. Some English guy whose name escapes me and if you are too lazy to look it up then I don't see why I should, noticed that the Egyptians circled the names of their pharaohs (lit. big house, only used very late in Egyptian history) to protect them from evil magic. The circle is called a cartouche, from the French for cartridge as it was French soldiers who first remarked upon them in Napoleon's jaunt into Egypt. So this meant said English guy could work out what the names of the pharaohs were in hieroglyphs. This led to him painstakingly making a phonetic alphabet of hieroglyphs. Though of course, that does not help you understand what it actually means. Queue some French bloke, ah ha!, Jean Pollion, bet you didn't expect that, I can remember about one name in a thousand. So there. Anyway, where was I? Ah, queue Jean, who was a precocious little trolloc, whose father was a librarian. So little Jean grew up amongst books, and by the time he was a teenager could speak (well, read at least) something like 23 languages. And when he was looking at the latest research on hieroglyphs, he realised he could understand it. One of the languages that he spoke was Coptic, the language of the orthodox church in Egypt - that to this day still holds mass in the Egyptian  language of priests, ancient Egyptian. And so now we can understand the very words of a civilisation thousands of years old. Thanks to amazing reasoning, and superlative knowledge. The two cannot be un-intertwined. I was going to go on about Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe, but I'll leave that for another day. 

 

Disclaimer: I haven't looked any of this up, so the actual details may not be entirely consist with the external world outwith my brain, but that does not affect the argument contained within.

Edited February 8 by HeavyHalfMoonBlade

[Elgee]

12 hours ago, Cross said:

 

is it possible to weave new things out of something else? 

 

Yes, and no. Which things? From which things? It would most probably depend on the elements, atoms, molecular structure involved, and whether or not one is allowed to add or subtract some?

 

Basic description of Weaving: There are five different elements* (or threads) to the One Power that

Channelers can draw from: Fire, Earth, Air, Water, and Spirit.

 

Simple example:

Yes: you can weave Fire into H2O to change it from water to steam. So yes you can change something with a weave.

No: you can't weave any of the 5 WoT "elements" at H2O and turn it into wine.

 

* Short example of Elements, courtesy of https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/element

 

Quote

To illustrate the immutability of an element, imagine a carbon atom. The carbon atom starts off bonded to oxygen in a carbon dioxide (CO2) molecule. Carbon dioxide is captured by trees and, using the photosynthesis chemical reaction, the carbon is stripped out of the CO2 molecule and added to a glucose molecule. The glucose is then used to form the cellulose of a tree's cell walls. When the tree is burned, it becomes coal, which is primarily a lump of compressed carbon. When the coal is crushed under immense pressure, the carbon atoms are rearranged into a diamond. During this entire process, the carbon has gone through many reactions and been in different molecular structures, but it hasn’t changed from one element into another.

 

So one could Weave perhaps Air or Fire or a combination thereof at CO2 to separate the C from the 02 and add it to a glucose molecule.
Once could then Weave (something) at the glucose molecule to add it to other molecues to form a tree's cell walls.

Next one could Weave Fire and possibly Air (oxygen?) at the tree to burn it to coal.

Finally one could us Air (and possibly Earth?) at the coal to introduce immense pressure, thereby creating diamonds.

[Elgee]

7 hours ago, HeavyHalfMoonBlade said:

The answer obviously would take far too long to really go into. A short answer would not do the subject justice. I'll put the full detailed answer in spoilers to save people scrolling.

 

  Reveal hidden contents

No, just... no.

 

This is a thread that I have been meaning to contribute to but did not manage so far due to acute laziness. 

 

However anyone tries to argue the point, knowledge and interpretation are inseparable. Facts alone are meaningless. Intellectual systems without factual basis are also meaningless. Or maths, so pretty much the same.

 

For example, what does archaeology tell us without interpretation? If pottery shards are found at a certain depth at a certain location, is that fact interesting or illuminating? A theory of what those shards mean has to concocted. 

 

Or another example is New Coke. Despite worldwide domination (what would alien archaeologists make of the spread of Coca Cola merchandise in a few hundred years?), those at Coca Cola felt that their product always coming the bottom of blind taste testing was something they needed to fix. Because that was a fact. And facts are important, m'kay? So the multi-billion dollar (I may be exaggerating) disaster that was New Coke happened. But if it was fact based how could this be? As the taste tests were sip tests. Which were not accurate to how most people drink soft drinks. Interpretation is important. 

 

Intellect on its own though leads to the horrors that can be seen in the discussion of the Raven paradox. But I am not allowed to talk about that. *pouts* Oh, I haven't pouted in months! Everyone is being far too well behaved. *pouts again*

 

I know, you are thinking what about Egyptian hieroglyphs. Exactly. No, come with me on this one. We can read hieroglyphs, even though they baffled everyone for quite literally thousands of years. Until they were deciphered it was the prevalent theory that they pictorial, which seems so dumb, as if they were, why could everyone not understand them? But anyway. Some English guy whose name escapes me and if you are too lazy to look it up then I don't see why I should, noticed that the Egyptians circled the names of their pharaohs (lit. big house, only used very late in Egyptian history) to protect them from evil magic. The circle is called a cartouche, from the French for cartridge as it was French soldiers who first remarked upon them in Napoleon's jaunt into Egypt. So this meant said English guy could work out what the names of the pharaohs were in hieroglyphs. This led to him painstakingly making a phonetic alphabet of hieroglyphs. Though of course, that does not help you understand what it actually means. Queue some French bloke, ah ha!, Jean Pollion, bet you didn't expect that, I can remember about one name in a thousand. So there. Anyway, where was I? Ah, queue Jean, who was a precocious little trolloc, whose father was a librarian. So little Jean grew up amongst books, and by the time he was a teenager could speak (well, read at least) something like 23 languages. And when he was looking at the latest research on hieroglyphs, he realised he could understand it. One of the languages that he spoke was Coptic, the language of the orthodox church in Egypt - that to this day still holds mass in the Egyptian  language of priests, ancient Egyptian. And so now we can understand the very words of a civilisation thousands of years old. Thanks to amazing reasoning, and superlative knowledge. The two cannot be un-intertwined. I was going to go on about Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe, but I'll leave that for another day. 

 

Disclaimer: I haven't looked any of this up, so the actual details may not be entirely consist with the external world outwith my brain, but that does not affect the argument contained within.

 

🤩

 

 

[Delenn]

I absolutely adore how Mother went from chocolate to Diamonds. 😍

 

All of the above being true, I would add that specifically a person would not be able to channel pure foodstuffs into existence, because they are made from living things. One of the very first things we ever see in the books is the horror of Lewis trying to use the OP to create life in the dead. And many time in the books we are told the OP cannot return the dead to life but can save those who are at the very edge.

 

Similarly, to truly create food you have to first create the plants they came from. Our food must be living for it grow to the point of ripeness for example. The books did mention Elaida making roses grow in winter for Elayne, but those were existing plants. 

 

I am of the opinion that we could make chocolate if we had the ingredients but we couldn't make the ingredients themselves. 🤎

[Elgee]

1 hour ago, Delenn said:

I am of the opinion that we could make chocolate if we had the ingredients but we couldn't make the ingredients themselves. 🤎

That seems logical.

I've always wondered what weave Elaida used to make the plants grow faster (I presume that is what she did, anyway, a la David Eddings).

 

1 hour ago, Delenn said:

I absolutely adore how Mother went from chocolate to Diamonds. 😍

Chocolate? Where??

 

LoL .. on a sidenote, my sister wrote a series called Diamonds for Diesel. It's a post-apocalyptic family comedy drama.

 

[HeavyHalfMoonBlade]

2 hours ago, Elgee said:

I've always wondered what weave Elaida used to make the plants grow faster (I presume that is what she did, anyway, a la David Eddings).

I've always thought it must be similar to healing - a speeding up and strengthening of the plants metabolism, possibly also enhancing photosynthesis so that the plant does not die from lack of energy, or need to recover like after healing as would not leave the plants looking healthy even if they had grown a lot.

[Cross]

honestly it could be as simple as a form of fertilizer. enriching the earth with life, providing weaves of warmth 

[HeavyHalfMoonBlade]

Would flowers grow in winter with a little fertilizer and a heater?

[Cross]

Yeah it’s called a greenhouse

 

also I did add life/spirit in there too 😛

[Elgee]

11 hours ago, Cross said:

honestly it could be as simple as a form of fertilizer. enriching the earth with life, providing weaves of warmth 

 

*Nods* Your basic fertilizers contain variations on the theme of nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium (K). Those are elements, so one should be able to manipulate them using the Power.

[Sebastian]

On 2/12/2024 at 6:17 PM, HeavyHalfMoonBlade said:

Would flowers grow in winter with a little fertilizer and a heater?

Winter Pansies are an easy flower to grow and very pretty.

 

[Sebastian]

[Elgee]

OMW in the snow! Those are so pretty, Sebastian!

[Cross]

19 hours ago, Sebastian said:

 

 

 

which raises a question! 

 

we've established weaves can be used to manipulate on a chemical level to degrees, so then can they be used to alter color? to say...turn a flower from blue to yellow? 

[Sebastian]

If the waves suddenly exploded around the wold and the chemical reaction on a microscopic level was to turn all colours to something different.    
 

I wander what a gold fish would look like 🤔

[Elgee]

23 hours ago, Cross said:

we've established weaves can be used to manipulate on a chemical level to degrees, so then can they be used to alter color? to say...turn a flower from blue to yellow? 

 

Well, since how we perceive colours depends on the wavelengths of light which hit them, or some such thing, then one should be able to do that with a Weave that bends light.

[Cross]

well also some plants their color is determined by the make up of the soil