samdkatz wrote:
I've been toying with the word "vim" as a count noun. The unintelligent ones are vims, and the more intelligent ones that try to trick people can either be angels or demons. Vim is a kind of archaic word for energy, but hasn't ever been used quite this way. I want them all (vims, demons, ghosts of ancestors) to be called spirits so it makes sense to call their world the "spirit world", which people will immediately understand. Maybe the dominant ones can be spirits, and it can just be understood that the world is named after the spirits but the vims also live there. My thought is that when an intelligent matter-being dies, carbon copies of their consciousnesses are released into anti-space. There is an ancestral plane where they are stable, but this is really hard for the living to get to. Then there are the planes where the vims and demons live, and while copies of ancestors go there, they are often predated by carnivorous spirits (and if they survive, they become grisled, and are "clones" of the actual ancestral spirits; they don't know about each other's experiences).
This all works for me. Vim as in "vim and vigor."
samdkatz wrote:The knotted vortices are what I'm thinking of as the "manmade" vims. I figure some people are able to "fish" for the stable (simple) ones, and then shape them (through meditation and possibly sacrifices of worldly energy) into bose machines, each one capable a specific purpose. I love your analog to enzymes for these. I figure these will be "tied around" physical objects in The Universe, so they don't get lost; like a string on a balloon. These talismans could be anything, but are typically small wooden tokens with instructions carved into them.
Knotted vortices of energy would be very small. They are the energy equivalent to atoms. In fact, back in 1895 or so Lord Kelvin and others were quite hot on the idea that our atoms WERE knotted vortices. It turned out not to be true, but the idea caught on in the math world. The study of knots has been a very prestigious area ever since, producing a high proportion of Fields medal winners. The different sorts of knots would be equivalent to our elements. All life is built of only about a dozen elements, so you would need only that many types of knots. The knotted vortices would then supposedly attract one another much like atoms forming molecules. That's how you can get life forms made out of energy. So even the vims would be composed of a great many knots, like a bacterium has a great many atoms.
BUT knots can be as complex as you like. It would be possible to have huge organism sized knots. It's just hard to see how they would evolve naturally. Since your vims don't evolve naturally, maybe that would be a good choice for them. Or they could be composed of ten or a hundred or a thousand big knots stuck together, like a machine is made out of standardized parts: screws, levers, knobs, choppers, etc. That would be more practical
samdkatz wrote:Do you think any type of chemical/energy reaction might be possible here, conceivably? Starting a fire, making lightning strike, digesting someone alive, telekinesis? Can you think of anything that wouldn't be possible?
I'd say that the anti-world would be very good at producing sparks in our world. Lightning is just a big spark, taking a lot of power but basically the same thing. Digesting someone alive is chemical, so I don't see that. That's an atom thing. Maybe they can inhibit energy so that someone's molecules stop attracting each other and the person slides into a puddle of bones and bloody goo. (Gross!) That seems somewhat outlandish to me. Boiling them alive with microwaves would be far easier and at least as gross.
Energy can move matter, so telekenesis would be possible. It would be a lot more organized and controlled than a lightning strike, so harder to do. Heating things up without moving them would be very easy.
Matter is stuck in our world, so teleporting couldn't be done. Could they plant thoughts in people's minds? Thoughts are electrical energy, so it would seem so. It would be the most sophisticated technology of all though, possibly beyond the edge of possibility. You'd have to understand someone's brain in very great detail to do that. Whispering in someone's ear so that they hear voices would be a lot easier. All you are doing is causing air molecules to move in an organized way. I guess a vim could be built to do that.
So from easiest to hardest
Heating things up
Sparks/Lightning
Influencing the movement of "random" things like casting the I Ching , affecting rolling dice to come up a certain way, or a great many other things limited only by imagination.
Moving things directly. Wind.
Whispering in the ear/Louder speech
Creating an energy body, like ball lightning.
Having that energy body do something useful.
Well beyond these would be introducing a thought directly.
Cooling something down or disintegrating something would involve some completely unknown inhibiting "force" or more like an anti-force. Seems to me that you have enough to work with without making up a new and weird basic force.
Matter can't leave this world so teleportation (discontinuous motion) would be impossible. Causing matter to travel in time is pretty much the same thing so ditto.
If the anti-world has a different time then it could be easy for them to access different times in our world. That would be very powerful. If something happens you don't like in this world, then go to an earlier time and do some little thing that prevents it. If you can use the so-called butterfly effect to your advantage then you have a great power while expending very little energy. You could go back a billion years and do some tiny thing that causes the orbit of the Earth to be different two billion years later. The anti-beings aren't traveling in their own time -- that would be weird -- but they can appear to "travel" in our time and mess with our causality. Retrocausality is mentioned these days in physics without embarrassment, so it is possibly coming into vogue.