In the standard, 4 element (earth, water, air, fire) system of

Earth, you retard.

"Ashes to ashes, dust to dust."

>>55054344
Earth.
Everything that dies goes back to the earth, and everything that rises comes from the earth. Water
Though I guess you could make a case for fish necromancy belonging to the water element.

An overlap of Air and Earth - returning the Breath of Life to the Dust of the Body.

>>55054364
fpbp

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>>55054344
In the standard 4 elements system, philosophers considered life to be a mixing of all four elements, so Necromancy would be a corruption of all four.

>>55054364
But Mortal Kombat taught me that Water was the element which brings life

>>55054344
Meh, you could make an argument for any of them depending on how exactly you're depicting necromancy. If it's like traditional "call up the spirit of Virgil to tell him what you think about his plagiarisms" I'd probably go with Air because ghosts in that picture are all about being shady and insubstantial. Earth if you're going with spooky skeletons and zombie stuff, because "there's no spirit there, it's just bones/flesh". Fire if you're talking about true no-shit resurrection, because that's the element of really impressive godlike shit (and possibly stands in for the soul if you're trying to depict it as something marvelous and pure rather than depressingly faint like with Air). Water probably because it's all blood and flesh and such is. Plus, lots of cultures placed the land of the dead underwater, so there's that.

>>55054344
Life is a mix of all, which is why balancing humors was a thing.
Earth is body.
Water is blood.
Air is mind.
Fire is soul.

>>55054448
Trust this man, he's a plague doctor

>>55054448
Wouldn't that make death the absence of all those? That's way deeper philosophy than I think OP is looking for.

>>55054386
>>55054448
basically this, the body is a mixture of all 4 elements, ergo reanimating one requires manipulating all 4

>>55054517
Not really. Do you really need Air and Fire if you're reanimating mindless (and obviously souless) undead? Do you even need water? Zombies and skeletons don't bleed.

It's probably more complicated than that.

>>55054538
that anon's description isn't based on classical belief at all. It actually went:
>Blood-Air
>Yellow Bile-Fire
>Black Bile-Earth
>Phlegm-Water

>>55054344
Air for Soul
Fire for Animus
Earth for Body
Water for intelligence

>>55054391
But not unlife.

>>55054692
Okay, so to expand upon this:
If you only use...
- Air lets you communicate with the Other Side (divinations)
- Fire is life energy manipulation ("Warmth of life"), so draining/giving health
- Earth, you get mindless, soulless, slow moving and relatively weak zombies, but at least they have corporeal bodies
- Water lets you communicate with the dead body (speak with dead).

So using all 4, you'd get an actual living person, or something approximate, depending on specifics.

Using water and air you'd get a guy you could talk to and he could tell you what he knows without being all jumbled, cryptic and riddles, or overly specific, like you had if you only used one.

Fire+Air and you get a poltergeist, that is all feelings, no intelligence.
Fire+Water and you get an unseen servant, which understands and follows orders, but has no incentive of its own.

etc. you can see where this is going.

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>>55054344
Unrelated to the topic, but at which point would somebody go: "Yes, one singular stocking is exactly what this outfit needs for perfection."?

>>55054344
As you see from the thread, you can answer your question quite validly with:

>earth
>all of them
>none of them
>a combination of them depending on the effect
>a different single element depending on the effect

I guess the question is, why do you want to know? What do you have to work with so far? And what do you want to do?

>>55055152
Without context I can't tell if that's a high boot rather than a stocking, or if the other leg's stocking has fallen. In any case, asymmetrical armor has historical precedent as well as asymmetrical fashion. There are many fun setting configurations that would provide for both types of asymmetry.

>>55055202
>Without context
I'd say context is OP's pic.

>>55055295
I meant the context of the pic at >>55055152, actually.

For OP's, the context is obviously
>I am made for fucking

which I totally approve.

>>55054391
Good thing necromancers don't bring shit to life. They speak with the dead and use their remains to see the past, present, and future.

>>55055327
>Necromancy (/ˈnɛkrəˌmænsi, -roʊ-/[1][2]) is a supposed practice of magic involving communication with the deceased – either by summoning their spirit as an apparition or raising them bodily – for the purpose of divination, imparting the means to foretell future events or discover hidden knowledge, to bring someone back from the dead, or to use the deceased as a weapon, as the term may sometimes be used in a more general sense to refer to black magic or witchcraft.

Of course, if you want to get technical, Necromancy doesn't do anything because magic doesn't exist. In any case, nitpickers like you should at least bother to be correct in their complaints.

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>>55054381
You mean a corruption of Earth magic in an effort to mimic Air magic.

One of the major laws of magic is to never attempt to use an element to reproduce the effects of its opposite. It's why water mages trying to light fires using water end up getting radiation sickness, why Air mages trying to create material with wind end up siphoning away their own flesh, and why Earth mages trying to fly using earth magic end up severing their ties with gravity and falling off the face of the Earth.

Though, while trying to bind the Breath of Life using Earth magic gets corrupted and creates undead, binding spirits that never breathed (like elemental spirits) simply creates golems.

>>55054344
It depends on how the body was disposed of. Dealing with the buried who've been returned to the earth is obviously earth. Dealing with the ashes of the cremated would be fire. Dealing with those buried at sea would be water. And dealing with those given a sky burial would be air.

What separates a dude building a golem and animating it and a dude animating a bunch of dusty old bones? Surely the spirits of the dead must be involved?

>>55055597
>dealing with those given a sky burial

Good luck with that.

>>55055637
Nope.

>>55055637
Depends on the system. Sometimes golems are powered by enslaved elementals and thd undead may or may not have a soul at all. Sometimes golems are powered by divine blessings and the undead are corpses puppeted around by demons. Sometimes all sorts of other ways exist to get things moving.

>>55055453
>he has never heard of steam or lava mages
get good

>>55054344
According to HoMM, Earth would do it having both Animate Dead and Resurrection.

>>55055923
>steam or lava mages
No such thing

>>55055923
Combining elements isn't the same thing as trying to use one element to emulate another.

Red and Blue can make Purple, but painting something Red won't make it Blue.

>>55055373
>or to use the deceased as a weapon
Does it even mentioned anywhere outside voodoo zombie creation? Are there examples in fiction of European and Asian mages doing this?

>>55054344
Aether as necromancy deals with souls

>>55056000
Yes. If a toist sorcerer animates a corpse, it becomes a zombie. however, after a cvertain amount of time, if the sorcerer doesn't put it back in it's grave, it becomes a vampire.

And a Chinese vampire isn't nice. it isn't pretty. It definitely isn't sexy. It's a rotting corpse that hops everywhere - and its 'hops' are ninja-style leaps - sees your breath, and drains away your breathe and your blood (along with EVERYONES in the vicinity) right through your body. Yes, that involves your blood literally tering it's way out of your flesh as you suffocate horribly.

Taoist sorcerers who follow dark paths get large sections of cities killed.

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>>55055967
yes there is

>>55056057
>tfw Chinese Cultural Revolution was country wide purge of dreaded taoist sorcerers and it went as expected

>>55054344
THIS IS WHY YOU USE THE CHINK ELEMENTS

>>55054344
earth

or at least that was the association in greco-roman culture, since the deities and spirits of death were "chthonic" (of the earth, as opposed to the "olympian" deities who lived in the sky). and since you've chosen the greek elements it would make sense.

>>55056086
But corrupt Taoists are heretics and the orthodox Taoists would be the ones to take them out.

No, the Cultural Revolution would had have taken out all magic users, and for a different reason.

>>55056000
>Are there examples in fiction of European and Asian mages doing this?
How do you recognize the word "necromancer" at all, without knowing about European fiction about the weaponized dead?

>>55055637
A biological entity requires a soul to be animate, so yes, necromancy involves the spirits of the dead. Usually this is just a case of nabbing some random soul from the aether before it's finished passing on. Souls are normally finely tuned to their particular body, so cramming a soul into a body it isn't made for in this quick-and-dirty fashion tends to cause a lot of damage to the soul, like forcing a square peg into a round hole. Hence why most undead are mindless, deranged things.

Intelligent undead require a bit more finesse, getting hold of a particular soul to fit into the original body or carefully adjusting it to the intended body. This requires the active cooperation of the soul in question, which means you pretty much only get evil souls trying to escape a fate of eternal damnation. Souls destined for a more pleasant afterlife generally aren't keen on sticking around as a wight or what have you.

>>55056091
Why? Would wood and metal make this question any clearer?

>>55056686
>A biological entity requires a soul to be animate
See various undead and organic golems.

>>55056694
I guess if someone's too dumb to figure out classical Western elements that explicitly say which elements are necromancy then they're too dumb to figure out classical slant elements that explicitly say which elements are responsible for necromancy.

>>55055637
skellies in diablo are explicitly training wheels for golem construction, working with once living material is a bit easier than clay, steel, or air

there is even a flesh golem, the natural evolution of a skeleton, only needing the flesh for structure, with the power completely from your own magic

5e also says that animate dead imbues your skellies with a simulacrum of life, so you arent using souls, just cheap knock offs of them

>>55056704
Organic matter fashioned into another shape is not the same as a biological entity. A wood golem is not a dead tree, it's an artifact. Likewise, a skeleton and a bone golem are quite different things, fundamentally.

It's not just about the type of matter, but how it's put together.

>>55056761
A skeleton isn't a biological entity, it's a magical entity grounded in the idea of a skeleton that _used_ to be a biological entity. Same with ghosts, vampires, zombies, liches, etc.

None of the undead that are usually considered the products of necromancy are considered biological organisms or biologically alive. If you mean "biological but not alive" then you simply mean organic.

>>55056907
It's not an organism, but it is *biological*, not merely *organic*. The base material is the body of an organism. Not merely matter derived from an organism, but a BODY.

A corpse is different from a living organism, yes, but it is also different from organic matter. Again, it's not just about the kind of matter, but HOW IT'S PUT TOGETHER. It's about form, essence, archetype.

You can't expect to understand MAGIC using real-world science that only looks at matter and nothing else. We're talking about a totally different paradigm here.

>>55055597
>sky burial
Stick the dead in a cloud, let him decompose for a while, direct the cloud over your fields, and enjoy the enhanced rain. Next generation fertilizer! (actually past generation)

>>55057071
Sky burial is the funerary practice of feeding a dead body to carrion birds like crows and buzzards.

>>55057036
The base material of a wood golem is also made from the body of an organism; if you argue that the wood isn't the "whole" organism, then this applies to skeletons and cadavers with damage or stitched together as well.

A corpse is simply organic matter; where it came from is merely a matter of was, not an is, and how it can move is merely a matter of its shape and mechanisms (how it's put together), which apply to golems and other constructs too.

Even if you insist that your setting uses some special mojo of "used to be alive", that does not necessitate spirit - and if you make it so in this specific setting of yours, that does not meaningfully restrict the answer to >>55055637's question.

>>55057036
The divide between magic and SCIENCE! is as artificial as the separation between church and state, or the separation of religion and science.

>>55057200
>The divide between magic and SCIENCE! is as artificial
How so?

>>55057283
You mean besides being man-made? It's sort of incumbent upon you to explain your position that the divide is necessarily natural.

>>55057314
>It's sort of incumbent upon you to explain your position that the divide is necessarily natural.
Anon, you made the statement about artificial separation between magic and science. I'm not him >>55057036. But since you are so defensive of your position I'd like to hear your explantation and reasoning as to why the divide between magic and science is artificial.

>>55057283
>>55057364
Not him but rarely is there a firm distinction between magic and suficiently advanced technology across fiction and even when there is, it's usually arbitrary.
>What's the difference between the Sun Sword from "Curse of Strahd" and a Lightsaber from Star Wars?
>What's the difference between a shield spell and technological shields Halo?
>What's the difference between Magitek and Sci-Fi?
The answer, nothing that matters so much that changing the terminology around vastly changes the end result of a given concept.

It's honestly on the same level of faggotry as martialfags who complained that 4e turned everyone into casters because everyone's actually fucking useful.

>>55054344
Earth, if you're using the 4 elements, Void, if you're using 5-element Japanese system, Earth or Ether, if you're using the 5-element Greek system.

>>55055373
I see nothing in that definition that mentions giving the dead actual life, unless you're implying that raising them bodily counts as giving them true life. My nitpicking is still correct.

Try being less of a twat.

>>55057187
>made from
This is the key difference here. The wood golem is MADE FROM the body of an organism; the skeleton IS the body of an organism (or what's left of it, anyway). The act of reshaping the matter transforms it -- literally, it's changing from one form (or perhaps I should be capitalizing it, Form, given I'm drawing on Platonic/Aristotelian concepts here) to another, altering its essence. Making something from it change it from something biological to something merely organic.

>Even if you insist that your setting uses some special mojo of "used to be alive", that does not necessitate spirit - and if you make it so in this specific setting of yours, that does not meaningfully restrict the answer to >>55055637's question.
Well, yes, obviously. It should be apparent to anyone with two brain cells to rub together that the only truly "correct" answer to anything about the particulars of magic is simply "depends on the setting." (Or maybe "It isn't real," if you want to get super pedantic.) Unless a particular, specific setting is specified in the question, should go without saying that any answer more detailed than that is prefaced with an implied "In my setting..." There's simply no other way to discuss the topic.

(Personally, I also like to think that the debates we have in threads like this are the sorts of debates scholars and wizards in a fantasy would have about how magic works. Just because there's an objective truth in-setting doesn't mean that the particulars are apparent to people in that setting at the time period where a given campaign is set.)

>>55057200
True, but that's why I specified MATERIALISTIC, REAL-WORLD science. In a setting with magic, the distinction between magic and science is arbitrary, but THEIR science is going to be substantially different from our science as far as its content. The distinction I've been drawing between biological vs organic matter IS the science of my setting, but it's different from real-world science.

>>55057421
>a Lightsaber from Star Wars?
>technological shields Halo?
Oh, anon you shouldn't consider them science because none of them are. Basing your comparison on fantasy in space opera like Star Wars no wonder you don't see the crossing line.

>>55057364
It is much less efficient to prove the absence of something than the presence of something. In this case, a connection between science and religion.

So really it's up to anon to outline why they think science and religion are inherently separate (i.e. lack any connection).

>>55057492
>Oh, anon you shouldn't consider them science because none of them are.
What makes them non-science though? Just because they don't exist in the real world? Then I guess spaceships in general don't count as science either since we've yet to develop FTL travel either.

>>55054344
Life is a moderation of the four elements while death is those elements in extremes. Necromancy is modulation of the four elements. Alternatively, Necromancy is the governance of a fifth element, spirit.

>>55057561
Are we still talking in this context?
>You can't expect to understand MAGIC using real-world science
Lightsabers aren't based on exising analogues but expectation that future (or distant past which is more technologically advanced) and progress will somehow produce any wonderful item you can think of and therefore they can be assumed to exist. This is merely a handwaving mechanic. Why people think magic (SCIENCE magic or just plain magic) can handwave anything into reality without any limitations and crippling costs is beyond me.

>>55054344
None, it deals with spirits either possessing bodily vessels or ghosts. Spirits aren't made of 4 elements.

>>55057644
>Why people think magic (SCIENCE magic or just plain magic) can handwave anything into reality without any limitations and crippling costs is beyond me.
Because Sci-Fi and Fantasy were never meant to be an accurate portrayal of real life conventions and both genres have ultimately suffered from people trying to push the realism meme into shit that neither requested or required realism in order to function.

>>55057486
If you're using Platonic ideals, then naturally we are dealing with something very different. This is fine, but it does just boil down to "I use this setting and therefore it is how I say it is"; after all, it is really unrealistic to expect someone to guess that you meant to invoke a hypothetical Platonic ideal of a "living corpus, alive or dead" based on an English word coined in 1819.

I wish you would respond to my point about partial cadavers, even if just to say "well in my chosen setting that obviously wouldn't work".

You're right that all discussions of fictional or hypothetical systems are naturally understood to be prefaced with "in this scenario"; but in answering the question would agree that you are attempting to answer something more than a self-contained "I say it is because in this case I say it is"?

(I quite like the scene you have painted with scholars and wizards debating the nature of magic, but I think that their arguments would be rather different than ours considering that [depending on the setting, of course] certain kinds of magical disputes would be easy to settle through direct and immediate trials. So the discussion would be contained to something either too costly to perform or too esoteric to be observed and refuted directly. Honestly they would resemble the philosophical debates found in our world more than anything; I can argue, I can suggest, I can convince, but rarely can I prove.)

Materialistic, real world science is not exempt from the possibility being the nature of a hypothetical setting. Of course, this depends on the setting...

Seriously though, I would recommend against using terms from our world that are particularly dissonant or misleading in the context of the elements of your setting they are associated with, UNLESS you are cultivating this dissonance or misconception intentionally and plan to use it to some worthy effect.

>>55057716
>trying to push the realism meme
Pop culture fantasy is so devoid of its mythological roots, some people consider mere notion of putting limitations on magic a dire act of pushing realism meme.

>>55057644
>Lightsabers aren't based on exising analogues
Sure they are. They're a compound analogue of light + swords.

>>55057773
Actually their an analog of light and saber.

>>55057756
Nonsense. People put limitations on PARTICULAR portrayals of magic all the time, and are generally happy with those limitations.

The resistance you describe is in response to the notion of putting a limit on ALL possible portrayals of magic, as a matter of type.

>>55057795
A saber is a type of sword. Lightsabers are not particularly saber-like apart from being sword-like.

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>>55055453
>>55055996
I don't know, whatever I'm doing seems to be working out.

>>55057802
>Nonsense.
Not at all. Some people are very defensive of their unlimited escapism and wish fullfilment vessels.
>putting a limit on ALL possible portrayals of magic
Are you talking about something that was actually tried?

>>55057740
>I wish you would respond to my point about partial cadavers, even if just to say "well in my chosen setting that obviously wouldn't work".
Ah, I missed that. Partial or repaired cadavers would still qualify, since a partial cadaver is simply a damaged body (your body doesn't cease to be your body if you lose an arm, right?), or restored body (your body doesn't cease to be your body if you get stitches), respectively. Though if you're stitching a corpse together with a lot of material taken from other corpses to patch missing bits, it gets into a gray area where eventually you are transforming it into something else. There is a line between a patched-up zombie and a flesh golem, but it's tricky to pin down.

>but in answering the question would agree that you are attempting to answer something more than a self-contained "I say it is because in this case I say it is"?
If the asker didn't specify a particular setting or premise (and in this case, he didn't), there's no other possible answer one CAN give.

>Materialistic, real world science is not exempt from the possibility being the nature of a hypothetical setting. Of course, this depends on the setting...
True, but I personally find that it makes for a more robust and interesting magic system if it's not.

>Seriously though, I would recommend against using terms from our world that are particularly dissonant or misleading in the context of the elements of your setting they are associated with, UNLESS you are cultivating this dissonance or misconception intentionally and plan to use it to some worthy effect.
Fair point, I didn't consider the implications that would've been taken from my terminology as thoroughly as I ought.

>>55057756
>>55057852
Magic has always had some sort of limitation that prevented people from using it to solve their issues, 3.PF just dropped the ball by forcing in WBL and allowing mages to invest their wealth towards wands, staves, orbs, scrolls, and other magical trinkets to offset their limited spell list.

In either case, the issue comes when we have mages who wield cosmic power while martials are held to a standard that's weaker than most olympic athletes IRL, let alone in a fantasy setting where magic not only exists but can be utilized by any PC.

>>55057927
>3.PF just dropped the ball by forcing in WBL and allowing mages to invest their wealth towards wands, staves, orbs, scrolls, and other magical trinkets to offset their limited spell list
If you use 3.PF as example I think we established here on /tg/ that casters in D&D grow to become more powerful than all gods in Earth pantheons except Shiva the Destroyer and YHWH. 3.PF mages are absurdly powerful both in breadth and depth of their magic for no reason whatsoever and surpass deities of the myths from which very concept of magic came from. That's before touching on internal economy of the system you've mentioned.

>>55054344
I'm going to steal from Anima here and say: It dosen't. Rather, Necromancy is a perversion of the naturual order of birth>life>death and so exist OUTSIDE the natural order of magic as well.

They way they do this mechanically in Anima is that each type of magic has it's oposite, Fire and water oppose as do earth and air. You get points to spend to show how much mastry you have with this or that element, and once you spend points the costs in it's oposite increase. You buy fireball? Gonna be a lot harder to learn water walking later. Necromancy is opposed to ALL elements.

>>55057888
In regards to partial cadavers I was also hinting at combined (i.e. crafted or constructed) bodies made from multiple cadavers, which are a common trope as far as necromancy goes.

>your body doesn't cease to be your body if you lose an arm, right?
No, but I would say that the arm ceases to be my body when it leaves my body, especially if I grow a new one. Of course, this is semantics based around your interpretation of the terms "biological", "cadaver", "body", etc. so there is really no way for me to refute any of this in a setting that you can clarify or alter as you see fit. Saying that an abomination or a patched up zombie is different from a flesh golem but that this difference is elusive is a pretty clear hand wave (not that I disapprove - a sense of mystery, discoverability, and unknowability can be a delicious element of a great setting).

>there's no other possible answer one CAN give
Disagree. If someone says "how do dragons usually operate", of course you can answer with "well in my setting [or a specific setting not your own, like the legend of Merlinand King Vortigern's tower], dragons usually...". You can also say "dragons usually..." referring to a plurality of settings. I guess OP didn't specify whether their question was a request for potential setting details where both the concepts necromancy and of classical elements were concerned, or an invitation to discuss how they might interact generally.

>it makes for a more robust and interesting magic system
>robust
I don't see it.
>interesting
A matter of opinion and personal taste.

>implications that would've been taken from my terminology
What terminology would you use now, instead?

>>55057927
>>55058018
Magic always has limitations of some kind, at some level of analysis (ie. even when "magic can do anything", there is a limited logic to it; whether or not this is effective or pleasing is a matter of implementation).

>>55057849
YOU FOOL

YOU'VE MESSED WITH THE NATURAL ORDER

>>55058185
>No, but I would say that the arm ceases to be my body when it leaves my body, especially if I grow a new one.
Certainly, though that's more a question of belonging to an individual, as opposed to belonging to a category. It ceases to be part of your body, but it is still a (detached) body part.

>(not that I disapprove - a sense of mystery, discoverability, and unknowability can be a delicious element of a great setting).
Yep, I do try to deliberately aim for that. Honestly, I don't think it's even a good thing to try to aim for perfect 100% complete explanation. In real life, we know a whole hell of a lot about the way our world works, but there's still plenty we don't know, and we're waaay ahead of where your typical fantasy setting society would be, even a relatively advanced setting (say, comparable to 19th-century development level). It's silly to pin down details that nobody in-setting is going to know and that won't be pertinent to events in the stories you're trying to tell in the setting.

>If someone says "how do dragons usually operate"
I would say that asking how something "USUALLY operates" IS specifying a particular premise for the question (ie, it suggests that they're asking for an overview of the general trends across disparate settings out there).

>>55058185
>What terminology would you use now, instead?
I'm not sure off the top of my head if there's anything that wouldn't require a little explanation one way or another. I could stick with "biological" and just clarify what that term means in my setting.

"Animal" might come closer with less explanation, but I'd still need to explain that I'm using it more in the classical sense, not the modern taxonomical sense, and even there it's still a little different (I think a sufficiently advanced automaton might be considered an "animal" under the classical meaning, but it wouldn't fit the category I'm trying to outline). (More pedantically, there's also the fact that the necessity of some manner of "soul" applies to vegetable life as well, though that's not as relevant to the topic of necromancy.)

Or I could coin my own term, which would require its own definition be given. Maybe or something.

>>55057849
Question by ignorant anon. Since we can give matter negative temperatures below absolute zero does it mean when we will reach -1300C we will create negative fire?

>>55055996
Painting something red with blue will literally make it purple, as long as they are both plastic or the blue is transparent... honestly it was a shitty metaphor anyway.

Better to say that while mixing macaroni and cheese might be useful, trying to spread macaroni on toast seems like a trainwreck waiting to happen.

>>55058501
>Food Analogy
You were better off using paint anon.

>>55058467
The Greeks were familiar with decomposition. What is the defining criterion that marks the transition from "body" to "not body"? Ideally this be a criterion that would establish a theoretical underpinning for the quality, would be intuitive once described, and would function to determine for the casual observer across a wide body of cases what would or would not be considered an exhibitor of that quality.

>that's not as relevant to the topic of necromancy
Not sure I agree. In any case it is very interesting to imagine a boreal necromancer that works with the husks of dead trees, binding the dryad that once lived there much as a normal necromancer would bind the spirit that inhabited a human body.

>>55058589
How do you figure? We are simply comparing the combination vs substitution of two natures.

Maybe you require a metaphor that include a smaller set of natures and the idea of natural opposition:

You can hop forward with your right leg while leaning right, or your left while leaning left, or with both while balanced; but trying to hop forward with your left leg while leaning to your right will not get you where you are trying to go.

>>55058487
You can not go beyond 0 degrees Kelvin. By definition.
Besides fire is the release of energy in the form of heat and light, not the temperature of the air.

>>55055453
Please. A skeleton is just a cheap, mineral-based golem.

>>55058487
>And thus negative energy was invented.

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>>55058487
>we can give matter negative temperatures below absolute zero
No, we absolutely cannot.

>>55058741
>first the negative steam engine paved the road into the new era quickly followed by internal negativity engine

>>55058589
Watch your tone with me boy! You may be the waiter, but i'm still your superior as a chef.

>>55058704
I just tried that. It's crazy and dangerous. Don't do it.

>>55058487
>-1300C
Literally whose ass did you pull that out from, son?

>>55058950
1300C is temperature of the flame for natural gas according to wiki

>>55058982
Why would the first expression coldfire be at the mirror value of natural gas? There are plenty of cooler flames than natural gas.

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>>55058501
macaroni on toast is great though

>>55060300
This is what amerifats thing macarroni looks like

>>55060300
That's macaroni and cheese on toast. It's not that surprising that it can partially behave as cheese.

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>>55054675
>>55054538
>>55054386
>>55054391
>>55054448
Philosophy professor here. The classic four/five element system in Ancient Greece (and a distinct but similar one in China) sees life as the result of a specific mixture of all the elements. Beginning with the Milesians like Anaximander, observation of living things suggested they all needed water to drink, air to breathe, sunlight and warmth, and either dirt to grow in or food that grew in dirt. If the balance was tipped by taking in too much or too little of one element, the creature suffered and eventually died. Later thinkers, like Plato, concerned with maintaining the notion of an immortal soul and a stronger distinction between animals and humans, added the quintessence, or fifth element, which was variably called aether, universe, void, spirit, anima, Milla Jovovich, etc. This is where we get the term "Platonic solids" for our familiar dice shapes. Plato theorized that each element was composed of imperceptibility small regular solids. Fire burned because it was a d4 (pointy), water flowed and was slippery because it was a d20 (almost round), and so on.

Thus, if one had to introduce the concept of necromancy into the classical elemental model, the most appropriate would be the quintessence. An unnatural inversion of that power would involve reanimating a body which has lost its naturally occurring anima, i.e., a corpse. The corpse no longer requires the proper balance of the four elements to animate, because the spiritual force is being fed into it from an external force. D&D-style magical healing would restore a being's existing anima, rather than replacing it outright.

If you really didn't want to include the quintessence in your cosmic model, you would have to decide what distinguished a living body from a corpse - for example, perhaps necromancy simply restores the balance of the elements and thus "fixes" the dead body into operating again.

>>55061441
Huh, I was right all along. Thank you, professor, for giving my ego extra food it did not need.

>>55058715
You totally can, it's just ridiculously "hot".

The definition of temperature is based on an inverse relation with entropy.
A positive temperature indicates a decrease in entropy, if energy is added. However, because entropy is the distribution of states in a volume (or its disorder), consider the "order" or distribution of states of matter whose states are all the highest energy states. Entropy would be decreased, if energy were removed from the system, and thus this is by definition negative temperature, however it is extremely energetic and will burn the shit out of you.

Poorly explained, but the gist is that a negative temperature is possible, but you can be considered to be correct in the sense that there can be no lower level of energy than 0 K

It's one of those edge cases where formal definitions don't line up with our intent.

The original question is still dumb though

>>55058767
See >>55062226

>>55054364
>Ashes
>Not fire

Anyways, Ether or Void is the Fith element in some elemental systems including Japanese and Western occultism, but not Chinese.

>>55061441
Question, sir.
Why would a dodecahedron be chosen rather than a sphere as a platonic solid? Why only polyhedrons? Spheres are kickass, why aren't they as revered as the platonic solids?

>>55062226
>the definition of temperature
>this is by definition negative temperature
The phrase you are looking for is "a definition".

>>55062361
A perfect sphere has no faces on which to form bonds, and so exhibits no stability.

>>55055152
It's (a)symetrical when you consider that she has exactly one glove as well on the other side.

I'm more concerned by the fact that her dress is making faces at me. The glove/stocking thing (along with her visible panties) is so you won't notice the dress and hat are both living artifacts with hands eyes, and mouths.

>>55054461
Plague doctors actually followed the miasma of Medicine not the four humors

>>55062387
wow, the Greeks really didn't think that argument through very well, did they

>>55062369
No. It is bad form to "correct" people when you clearly have no idea what you're talking about. There does not exist a formal definition of temperature which is not a relation between entropy and energy. Only intuitive "definitions", which are inconsistent and only serve for illustrative purposes.

>>55062463
How do you figure?

>>55062487
Sorry bud, but I am thoroughly knowledgeable whereof I speak. You're the one confusing technical definitions within a particular disciple as the only proper definition of a thing.

If you don't believe me, we can walk through the logic together. Perhaps I will learn something.

What are the criteria for you to accept a definition? So far you have mentioned formality and consistency.

>>55054344
>Necromancy for the last two decades has been all about dead bodies instead of the superior talking to/working with spirits

What do I blame for this, diablo 2?

>>55063627
Necromancy from the inception of the word and earlier been about accessing the spirits, often through physical talismans and/or offerings like dead bodies or parts thereof.

In fact, I'm pretty sure the oldest recorded account of necromancy in the Odyssey involved dead bodies.

So, what the fuck are you on about?

>>55062701
Spheres can be adhesive, and have points of contact with other spheres.
Having no faces doesn't mean it can't be joined with anything. That's just wrong. It's logically invalid. It doesn't follow from anything.

>>55054448
Necromancy usually doesn't return blood, mind, or soul.

>>55063712
I think you misread what I'm saying. You're right that the original meaning is the stuff you said.

However, every single /tg/ or /v/ version of necromancy, not to mention other medium for many years has necromancer/cy exclusively has it mean "spooky guy that makes dead bodies move and is probably evil"

>>55063746
Of course it does.

You do realize that none of this, the greek classical elements, or necromancy in general, is real or correct, right? None of it follows anything real beyond "at some point, we say that this is how it works" with some anecdotal justifications. Not sure why you can't make the leap to "flat planes have more surface area to "stick" to other flat planes then two points on two spheres.

These theories, as sohpisticated and beautiful as they were, were some of our earliest recorded garbage attempts at understanding the world around us. That's it, that's all.

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>>55062361
>Why would a dodecahedron be chosen rather than a sphere as a platonic solid? Why only polyhedrons? Spheres are kickass, why aren't they as revered as the platonic solids?
A good question! The idea was based on mathematics, which many Ancient Greek thinkers considered to be the sacred system of meaning which governs the flow of the cosmos. Consider: the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter is ALWAYS approximately equal to π - you can't draw a perfect circle that has a different ratio. So, the atomic matter which makes up all physical things ("atomic" originally meaning "unable to be divided further") would need to be able to bunch up easily in order to form the relatively massive bodies we encounter in the world. There are a LOT of atoms in an oak tree. The five Platonic solids are the 3D shapes with the most equal faces - that is, all five shapes are composed of a number of identical sides. This is why they make for good dice - equal odds on landing on a given side. Thus, atomic elements are most likely composed of a number of equal faces, for much the same reason you want all your bricks to be the same shape: you want to be able to stick them together without any spaces between them.

>>55062463
>wow, the Greeks really didn't think that argument through very well, did they
Quite the opposite - they overthought the issue, if anything.
Consider: we often encounter bodies made up of many elements in many combinations. Platonic solids have equal faces all around, allowing them to bond much easier than, say, an asymmetrical polygonal shape, i.e., you can stick a d20 onto any face of another d20 and know they will match exactly - all the faces are identical on both dice.

But a sphere has NO faces on which to bond - try building a wall out of baseballs. If a spherical element exists, we could never know about it because it would only exist as little spheres floating around - they would be unable to bond and form objects large enough to see.

>>55062763
Then what the fuck do you mean by "proper" definition you mongoloid? Colloquial? Because fuck you, that's not how technical terminology is used, because it fails to be technical terminology if it is not applicable in technical usage.

Layman's definitions are incorrect. They're incomplete, when arguing the physical scientific ramifications of a definition. Saying that one cannot go below 0 Kelvin is objectively incorrect, if Kelvin is defined in a manner that is rigorous.

>>55063781
Because the other stuff doesn't need to be called necromancy anymore; we have lots of other names for it. The term necromancy gets invoked when you want to pull on the tropes associated with it these days. That's just not necessary for speaking with ghosts in general (necromancers are not needed to speak to Casper or Bill Cosby from ghost dad, and doing so does not need to be called necromancy). There is also the matter of the aftereffects of the now mostly defunct taboo/body horror of corpses and working with them, when you broke that taboo it was in order to use the most gruesome and deeply anathema aspects of necromancy, which was the dead bodies bit. Remember, in general you could have had "good spirits", or "angels", quite easily in the then-existing framework, but that a "good" undead taken seriously was essentially unheard of until more recently.

Additionally, there are plenty of instances of necromancy in /tg/ AND /v/ that definitely are not exclusively "spooky guy that makes dead bodies move and is probably evil".

>>55062425
>The Hat and dress are both living artifacts, and capable of casting spells by themselves.
>People will focus on the significance of the asymmetrical stocking because it confuses them, or the panties because they are lewd, and ignore the real threat.
>Some Idiot is going to try and stop her from casting spells with verbal or somatic components, and miss the dress completely.

>>55063883
There are multiple disciplines that factor into our conversation, and so multiple technical definitions and usages that apply.

Remember, I asked you to describe your criteria in order for you to accept a definition - for it to be rigourous "enough" (for what exactly?), if you will. Why won't you make an attempt?

>>55063876
>But a sphere has NO faces on which to bond - try building a wall out of baseballs.
Look, I'll defer to your knowledge of the original philosophical reasoning but this is just really poor reasoning from them, then. It's not that hard to build a structure of spherical objects if done properly. And there's nothing preventing the usage of mixtures of platonic solids. Quite the contrary, it would stand to reason that a combination of polyhedrals would be necessary for several types of shapes, and spheres would be necessary for certain structures which can only otherwise be approximated by polyhedrals. The Greeks did think many things through rather well, as I've studied number theory and am thus familiar with quite sophisticated geometric mathematical proofs of rather beautiful theorems (way beyond just Pythagorean shit), so I KNOW they had the reasoning abilities to understand why this isn't really enough to justify this kind of construction. ANY perfect circle would be incapable of being constructed of a finite amount of discrete shapes, and while I'd usually accept this being unknown to the Greeks, Platon is famous precisely for his argument that no ideal shapes exist (necessarily) in physical shape, meaning he'd be aware of it.

But then Platon was never really one of those smart mathematicians (or logicians) so maybe I'm overestimating what he'd come up with as compared to the rigor of e.g. Euclid or Pythagoras.
I'll accept that he figured that since a perfect sphere couldn't exist (a priori, more or less), for any approximation to be as arbitrarily close as possible would require least-space discrete units.
>>55063835
Do you not know what it means for things to logically follow from other things? I'm saying the explanation must be incomplete because the argument was fallacious. This patronizing attempt at explaining the obvious misses the point.

>>55064054
The argument was logically valid and not fallacious at all, it's just that the premises were wrong. Take a cue from the anon earlier and don't use terms you don't understand.

>>55064008
It'd make it a lot easier if you tried to post a "proper" (your words) definition of temperature which you consider validly prevents the existence of negative temperatures, and I could explain why that definition is
A) Inconsistent
B) Incoherent
C) Nonspecific
D) Either reducible to a combination of other definitions which satisfy said conditions, or irreducible to a first-order logical expression

>>55064103
You're retarded. Fuck you. I hate pseudointellectual morons like you.

Let me explain why you're objectively wrong:
>A perfect sphere has no faces on which to form bonds, and so exhibits no stability.
Premise: Spheres have no faces on which to form bonds
Premise: Platonic solids require stability when bonded
Conclusion: Spheres are not platonic solids because they cannot bond and are thus not stable

This reduces to
B possesses property C
A does not have B
Therefore A does not have C

WHY exactly do they need bonding faces to exhibit stability? That's just wrong. It follows from nothing. It was not declared axiomatically true, it was just begging the question.

Fuck you. Kill yourself.

I'm not saying that there did not exist a better argument, I'm saying the one sentence summary was not complete.

>>55064105
Sure, let's go fishing instead of mapping out our specifications beforehand like adults.

Tell me what you make of this:

>Temperature is a physical quantity that expresses the subjective perceptions of hot and cold.

I look forward to this diversion of ours and hope that you will be kind enough to put me through my paces.

NB I used "proper" the way it means; appropriate to the context of the discussion, which includes topic, forum, and register, among other variables.

>>55064173
>WHY exactly do they need bonding faces to exhibit stability?
Under this philosophical framework of elements, bonding faces are needed to exhibit stability because without bonds, these atomic elements would be unable to form stable objects on a scale that could be perceived by humans.

To what sort of stability did you think I was referring?

>>55064185
Nice, your definition manages to be extremely easily made invalid by the water bath thing that kids do to show thermoreceptors acting wonkily to quick bursts of high-temperature (i.e. feeling cold when it's in fact very hot). It is nonspecific in that it does not say *what* the physical quantity is, how it can be determined, what possesses the physical quantity, or anything else. It's not strictly speaking incoherent, nor inconsistent, but in terms of attempting to communicate a property it is extremely inconsistent as it depends on thermoreceptor activity. Someone nerve-damaged would rightfully be able to say that temperature does not exist to them, by your definition, as there is no reason their subjective perception should not matter.

As there is no physical quantity of the object, but instead of the thermoreceptors' action potentials, you've turned temperature into a question of qualia.

Also fuck you, you condescending prat. Expecting axiomatic definitions for something very obvious on a fucking imageboard is stupid. I'm not going to rewrite the Principia Mathematica to prove arithmetic.

>>55064295
>Under this philosophical framework of elements, bonding faces are needed to exhibit stability because without bonds, these atomic elements would be unable to form stable objects on a scale that could be perceived by humans.
This is, again, begging the question. Why can they not form bonds, without flat surfaces? Why is a curved surface not good enough? It's got plenty of contact points, in fact it has infinite contact points. There's no reason it would need to be face-to-face to bond. Why would it need to be face-to-face, other than to minimize wasted space?

>>55064327
>>55064185
if it wasn't obvious why turning temperature into qualia is absolutely retarded: There is literally no known way for 0 K to be expressed in terms of qualia.

>>55064295
I think he wants you to formally state that the Greeks in question considered axiomatic that, all things being equal, objects too small for humans to individually perceive interact similarly to objects that are large enough for humans to perceive. Because of this, it follows that, all things being equal, adhesion between to objects of a given substance increases proportionally as the amount of interacting surface area between those two objects increases.

Put simply, if two things are stick against each other, this stickiness increases according to the relevant surface area.

Do you want to go further? There are a lot of little steps if you wanted an exhaustive litany of the little thoughts that can account for their system, but I am interested to see at what point you will grasp the method and accept a proof of concept in place of the entirety.

>>55064365
See, this post is better than the one before it.

If we consider temperature an objective quantity that expresses the subjective perceptions of hot and hold, then it is by definition quite capable of expressing qualia. It literally cannot fail to do so, and in fact creates by its very existence the conceptual space to express it.

>>55064481
>I am interested to see at what point you will grasp the method and accept a proof of concept in place of the entirety
It would be odd if he refused to do so, after his adamant refusal to "rewrite the Principia Mathematica to prove arithmetic".

>>55064554
>If we consider temperature an objective quantity that expresses the subjective perceptions of hot and hold, then it is by definition quite capable of expressing qualia.
We can't because there exists no objective quantity that expresses the subjective perceptions of hot and cold.
So your "if" fails. But yeah, if you didn't have a huge flaw, you'd have yourself a real nice tautology there.

>>55064481
Why are you guys so completely incapable of understanding that I'm saying that not being the best at adhesion, but being inexpressible by approximations, means there's no reason spheres should be excluded, because they are CAPABLE of adhesion, even if they're not GOOD at it, AND they have unique properties which CANNOT be expressed by the other platonic solids, and CANNOT be approximated by them to an arbitrary precision GIVEN an atomic size

This is basic fucking shit and you think I'm not grasping what is essentially missing the point entirely

>>55064591
Note: I'm being facetious. Your definition is stupid in every (colloquial) sense of the word.

>>55064591
Sigh, alright, I will make it more explicit.

The very notion of expressing a subjective subjective with an objective value makes use of the concept that there is an objective reality upon which subjective observations are made. Remember, since we are dealing with a philosophical framework of elements that we KNOW is not sound.

So, the exercise therefore becomes not "are all of the framework's propositions valid and all of the assumptions true" but what is the fewest number of incorrect assumptions that would render the framework internally consistent" ie., find out the most "whole" picture of a framework we know in advance to be false, in order to consider its significance to its fundamentally lax and creativity-driven combination with necromancy.

Are we getting close to the same page yet?

>>55064614
>because they are CAPABLE of adhesion
Not if cosmic noise-level "kinetic disruption" (lol) is beyond whatever hypothetical and arbitrary adhesion strength a sphere might exhibit.

Think of it as a floor "adhesion strength" to overcome whatever infinitesimal, inscrutable, poorly defined forces and factors keep the spheres from adhering.

/tg/ - Geometry and Philosophical Discussion

>>55064753
>>55064834
Hey, sorry but my people have started up a movie. I will probably not see your undoubtedly rigourous evisceration of my posts until you have long lost interest. If you're around in a few hours then perhaps we can pick it up.

>>55064920
/tg/ - Tesselated geometry and Greek elements

>>55064920
/tg/ - Sacred Geometry and Poorly Understood Theoretical Physics

>>55064614
I find it funny that you complain about that, but not "Fire is a triangular pyramid because they're the pointiest".

>>55064354
think of it like bricks. a spherical brick would be pretty useless.

>>55060037
Of all the crazy and absurd assumptions in the first post you decided to nitpick the most irrelevant detail. Bravo, anon.

>>55067247
Which first post are you referring to? What more relevant details can be found there?

>>55058487
>>55058487
>What more relevant details can be found there?
The concept of fire? Temperature? Modern technological level? Replace -1300 with -800 and the core of the question doesn't change a bit.

>>55067358
See >>55067422

>>55066512
>I find it funny that you complain about that, but not "Fire is a triangular pyramid because they're the pointiest".
Haha, well said.

>>55067422
It looks like it was a response to the cold candle flame image, which contains those elements (other than modern technological level, which is not necessarily an issue in that scenario).

The -1300C value is oddly specific and not called out by said image, so I'm not surprised it piqued someone's interest and elicited a question.

>>55067464
Eh, I choose to give the guy a pass. If he wants to sperg out about that the ancients thought the building blocks of matter were block-shaped, then let him.

Reading through some of their stuff it kind of annoys me when he pretends to believe that two perfect spheres can touch at more than one point in space and time. It's too bad he wasn't very interested in being serious about the discussion, it sounds like he had a mind and the ability to use it.

>>55067883
Fair enough

>>55064920
>>55065158
>>55066217
One of these acronyms is better than the others.

>>55067951
What confuses me is why he used the average temperature of natural gas combustion and not just the temperature of a candle flame?

>>55064054
> It's not that hard to build a structure of spherical objects if done properly.
The ancient Greeks weren't arranging atoms into structures with intent, they were assuming a natural formation of more or less continuous material.

I mean, a child will immediately understand when you introduce the idea that building a structure out of spheres - even ones covered in adhesive or made out of magnets - is inherently less stable than building with similar blocks with flat planes. Why does this guy find it so hard?

According to most mythologies, man was created from clay, mud or dust. Therefor, necromancy falls under earth magic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_of_man_from_clay

>>55068910
Clay is essentially mud using dirt that is very fine and high in silt, often found in rivers.

Clay must contain Earth AND Water, and in the Greek myth was explicity baked in Fire before having Air breathed into them by the goddess to complete the work and create life.

Many of the other creation-from-clay myths follow this format, but suffice it to say that the Greek myth specifically requires all four elements to create man. This makes sense, honestly.

Elemental magic is shit

>>55069191
Why do you feel that way?

>>55069244
He feels strong desire to unleash his elemental magic into the world

>>55061441
>Milla Jovovich
Okay I chuckled at that.

>>55054344
Void.

>>55064173

Imagine a flat surface.

Build a pyramid on that surface out of cubes. Build another out of dodecahedrons, octahedrons, whichever. They all sit still, nice and stable.

Now build a pyramid out of spheres. It doesn't work, unless you have a frame of some kind to keep the base from rolling away and bringing the whole thing down.

Hence, >>55062387

Spheres can't form structures on their own. If you add something to keep the spheres together, the end result isn't 'atomic' because you can separate it into different distinct parts.

And that's why spheres aren't a platonic solid.

>>55064173
No anon, you are the pseudointellectuals.

>>55064753
That conversation is about temperature, you fucking moron. not a framework of elements.

Now that you've been reminded of what was being discussed in the first place, seeing as you seemingly possess the working memory of a toddler, note that what was really being questioned was

>>55058715
Which states that by "definition", one cannot go [below] 0 Kelvin (though he said degrees Kelvin, which shows that he's not actually familiar with Kelvin except superficially).

I stated then that "the" definition (which anyone except a massive autist would understand to obviously be the technical definition in use in scientific contexts to establish what is ontologically possible as far as we can determine) allows for temperatures of negative Kelvin.
Then >>55062369
attempts to discredit this fact with the notion that this is just "a" definition, implying an equivalent status with other, less scientifically acceptable definitions. I rebutted this, stating that if one is talking science (as one is implicitly doing when using Kelvin), we ought to use scientifically rigorous definitions lest we end up karplawbing our freedlehocks and be talking nonsense.

You assume the existence of an objective quality that translates directly to subjective perception. No such quality exists. You'd have been far better off simply defining it to be "the subjective perception of hot or cold", as this wouldn't allow for direct contradiction just by your own definition, even if it'd not be particularly useful in any scientific context. It'd be like defining temperature to mean "how throbbing your erect dick can get within a parsec"

Are you now beginning to understand why I think you're a fucking idiot?

>>55064834
True, and actually something I would like to hear more about. How did Platon propose the adhesion of the atomic units worked, such that a spherical unit would not be capable, whereas flat surfaces for some reason would? I understand that he may not have quantified it, as this is very early musings about the nature of reality, but I don't expect empiricism nor particularly well-defined systems. Still, this supposes that any atomic unit would necessarily need to be bound to a larger structure to exist, which precludes the existence of spheres a priori from reality, which just seems odd for Platon, and that's why I am confused. You'd expect idealistic philosophers to want reality to be able to encompass more things, rather than fewer, even if not very well. Spherical atomic units would be mostly useless even without the floor adhesion strength, but being useless has never prevented philosophers from positing the existence of it.

>>55066512
Because that's perfectly fine? Making wrong conclusions based on incorrect premises is perfectly logically valid. It's wrong in terms of facts, but I was honestly just curious as to why atomic spheres didn't exist to Platon, and found the answer that they had no bonding faces to be extremely dissatisfactory, because that just isn't enough reason by itself. There's gotta be more than just that to not want them to exist, and you're Greeks so there's no one to tell you that you can't will things to exist in your system even if they can't really be of much use on a macro-scale.

>>55067951
Two perfect spheres cannot on more than one point, no,

>>55068093
What? I wasn't the retard who thought there was "cold" fires below 0 K, I explained that there are negative temperatures Kelvin (fact) and that these are actually counterintuitively ridiculously "hotter"

>>55066880
Sure, except to create structures which are bumpy without being pointy, which would be nice to have available for one's world-building. Basically beads.

>>55068203
>More or less continuous material
There are large volumes of space not continuous within a super-structure of icosahedrons. There would be even larger volumes for spheres. This would be less stable, if adhesion were a factor of contact area, which we've assumed axiomatically which is fine because we're not doing science, we're being Greeks.

I mean, a child will immediately understand the idea that building a structure out of spheres - ones not approximations formed from superstructures of smaller atomic units - is inherently different than building with approximated spheres, thus allowing for more possible configurations than a more limited set of building blocks. And spheres are special in many ways, especially to Greeks who were into geometry like crazy, so it seems a bit funny that they'd exclude them.

Why do you guys find it so hard to understand that I'm just saying I find it weird that the Greeks would, philosophically, exclude something they had a huge boner for?

>>55070439
Try building structures other than a bottom-up configuration, from the other building blocks. They would also fall apart without extras.

And I did explicitly mention at one point that one could construct a frame of the other, obviously more useful building blocks, and you can get a spherical pyramid which is impossible to replicate otherwise with the more useful blocks (and they are obviously more useful in most senses, as I've repeated ad nauseam now, but incapable of approximating the way that spheres can be used for certain configurations)

All I've been saying is that saying they have no faces to form bonds on is not really telling me the whole story. I phrased this flippantly as "the Greeks didn't think this through" which was a mistake. What I should have said was more formal: "This is not sufficient to exclude spheres, because there's motivation to include them and we're just making shit up anyway, so why not this too, when its issues can be somewhat mitigated?"

>>55070452
Sure thing Anon, whatever makes you feel better.

>>55071087
The person screeching about spheres is not an intellectual.

One of the absolute keys to being truly intellectual is to be able to entertain, understand, and explore an idea without accepting it.

What he is doing is simply, though verbosely, insisting that the sphere should be a platonic solid, despite not meeting the definition or the classical reasoning that led to the category existing.

And when those are explained, continues to "Yeah, but..." reiteratively.

>>55071175
So he explores an idea?

>>55071175
I'm asking WHY it isn't, and saying that the answer I was given didn't really feel very satisfying
Then when people insist that it IS satisfying, I explain WHY I don't think it's satisfying. Because it DOES meet the classical reasoning AS PRESENTED in this thread.
I'm ignorant as to the classical reasoning in its entirety so I inquired for it. I was met with unsatisfactory answers, and so I asked again. And was answered with a nonanswer that missed the point of my question, along with conceited self-assured smugness based on an inability to actually want to read what I'm saying.
Retards like you think this means I think spheres should be a platonic solid, but I don't think there should be any change to it. In fact, I'm willing to give credit to Platon and say he had a very legitimate reason to not classify a sphere as a platonic solid, because I feel like he was an intelligent man with a strong command of logical reasoning, so when I was met with reasoning that did not seem complete, I wanted a better reason.

"Yeah, but..." is necessary when an argument fails to hold up under logical extremes. Greeks were smart, they knew how to make claims for ALL possible elements of a category, so exceptions should not appear in their models. Although Diogenes did famously explain to Platon how his categorization of humans was retarded, with the whole chicken thing, but I refuse to reduce a person's false conclusions to simply them being stupid.

I can't believe you keep misconstruing my point. It's almost like you're willfully misrepresenting me because you don't want to actually bother engaging me with at least a modicum of respect for the idea that I'm not just pulling shit out my ass.

>>55071511
Have you ever considered reading HIS reasoning? Because that would explain it much better.

The simple explanation is that platonic solids are not curved and a sphere is. Really, that's the entirety of the reason. And that you find this offensive or somehow wrong does not make the facts any less valid.

The math is even more effective at proving it,. but I'm not a mathematician. I am, however, smart enough to understand that platonic solids are angular in nature and cannot be curved in order to fit the definition of 'platonic solid'.

>>55071511
You sound like the autistic furry who insists you can divide by zero, and tried to prove it by using division by zero in his proof.

>>55071551
I just don't get why that's enough of a reason

And I was hoping someone educated on the matter could elucidate, better than I would've been able to from cliff notes, and more concisely than reading all of it.

I just don't why platonic solids not being curved is declared axiomatically, but I'll accept that. That's actually fine. That's actually way better then saying it's because a sphere lacks faces with which to bond to other platonic solids. This eliminates spheres from the category, and I'm willing to accept it as an axiom, even if I don't see why Platon thought it necessary to declare.

But no one fucking said anything about curvature, they just claimed it had to do with the bonding efficacy. Efficacy is an extremely odd categorical criterium, to the point where I'm not even sure if it can be validly called one, except for purpose of communication rather than logical formalization.

>>55071577
Nice ad hominem, really makes you look smart with your false analogies.

>>55071598
Note: the complaint about bonding efficacy is strictly contained to quantity of effect strictly different from zero. Having NO bonding effect is obviously a valid categorical criterium logically speaking, as it is a logical negation.

This thread is why I give my players a sliding scale of Necromantic spells allowing to pick between summoning, raising or animating.

Although I still don't allow Lawful/Neutral Good Necromancers.

>>55071598
Weeeeelllllll.....

A sphere can only bond at one point, making it inefficient to bond with. that's why the bonding inefficiency is brought up. Even a two point bond is stronger than a single point bond.

>>55071653
Yeah, sure, it can only bond at one point with a single other object (given the symmetrical constraints of the other objects, but those are a given), but being capable of bonding at all means they, well, are capable of bonding. Not very well, but for them to be excluded would require quantification of bonding strength and minimum bonding strength, which either becomes handwavy (there isn't enough), or impossible to determine by the tools the Greeks had. So I figured there's a different, more definitely and conclusively exclusionary reason, but no one gave me a single fucking one, but kept insisting I didn't grasp something so obvious a toddler could, when really people just weren't fucking listening to why I said they weren't actually making a conclusive argument.

Needing no curvature in the platonic solid symmetry is weird, but it eliminates spheres completely, so this is sufficient to at least be conclusive. If there is no reason that they need no curvature other than arbitrarily declaring it axiomatically, that's fine. I can accept it, even if it's arbitrary, as long as it's consistent.

I don't see how that's not obvious.

>>55071083
>Try building structures other than a bottom-up configuration, from the other building blocks
If you assume that they're literal blocks, like the greeks did, everything is bottom up, because that's the only way to build something.

>And I did explicitly mention at one point that one could construct a frame of the other, obviously more useful building blocks
But then you've made this one fundamentally different, because it can't stand alone. That's an entirely different philosophy where some elements can only exist with the support of others. In this system, they all stand alone.

>>55072798
>If you assume that they're literal blocks, like the greeks did, everything is bottom up, because that's the only way to build something.
Let me clarify what I mean by bottom-up: A structure whose quantity of units near the contact with the surface on which it is built is greater than the quantity on the unit height above it, and whose quantity of units decreases in this fashion continuously.

This is not actually what bottom-up means, but I used the wrong words to describe it and I'm not sure how else to do it. Bottom-heavy maybe?

Anyway, my point was that it's hard to conceive of a structure of units without a method by which it can bond to the other units, which will be able to stand, even with platonic solids.

Unless there's something inherently getting the pieces to stick together, they'd also fall apart given gravity if not directly supported by an underlying piece, so it's not very different for spheres except that they run into the problem of not forming stable structures at a very otherwise easy structure too.
But like the Icosahedron represents water, this simply means that a sphere could hypothetically just be the building block of inherently unstable structures like liquids, or other things which have little "solid" character to them (to the Greeks who may not have been aware of their solid qualities). After all, water can't stand on its own either, right?

>But then you've made this one fundamentally different, because it can't stand alone. That's an entirely different philosophy where some elements can only exist with the support of others. In this system, they all stand alone.
Well, for one it can stand alone perfectly fine. It just can't structures very well except the simplest, a tower of spheres (or a line of points I suppose) where each sphere is directly above the lower sphere. The tiniest fluctuation anywhere in the tower would make it crumple, but it'd exist at least.

Still, this is a reasonable argument. Simplicity is key.

>>55072966
Water can't literally stand up, but it exists on its own elementally. If you make one of them a sphere, it can't exist alone in any meaningful way, just a bunch of imperceptibly tiny balls rolling around on the floor.
Water holds itself together enough to be perceptible whether it's cupped in your hands, running in a river, or sitting in a lake or ocean, fire holds itself together enough to be visible and burn you. Air holds itself together enough to support life and move about coherently. Earth obviously holds itself together. The fifth element is invisible, but it also has to hold itself together.

>>55073041
Water only holds itself together if you make a frame for it though, if one does not consider surface tension, which I presume without basis that the Greeks would not consider?

Why can't enough spheres that are not bound to each other exist in a meaningful way? Spheres can hold themselves together just fine if there exists a frame around the structure. The pyramid for example works just fine if you've got walls around the base, similar to the walls of your hand cupping the water.

Water is pretty hard to perceive on a completely flat surface. Hell, with absorbance that materials have, and evaporation, one might even come to suspect that individual tiny water units are so lacking in ability to bind that they simply disappear through the surface because they go through any hole in any structure of platonic solids. Hell, the only of the platonic solids that tesselates properly in Euclidian space is the cube, right? Anything consisting of anything but cubes would have holes the spheres could conceivably go through.

Water holds itself together on its own, but were the Greeks aware of this? Did they realize that you don't need a container completely encompassing water to have the water maintain a shape? I'd be surprised, but this would at least be an excellent counterpoint: They were aware that the ontological ramifications of spherical water units were not present, and thus if spheres existed, they'd have to be something else.

Now, if there had been a fifth element for the fifth platonic solid, I'd accept that Platon considered the icosahedron better as there would exist a one-to-one correspondence between elements and platonic solids sans spheres, but Aristotle was the one to propose Aether, no? So how did Platon explain that the Dodecahedron was "the Universe" which one presumes encompasses all the others, rather than a building block like the others? Why not another building block that doesn't map to an element?

>>55073151
Note: I completely understand why spheres aren't platonic solids in terms of mathematics, but not why they were not considered a possible shape for an atomic unit. Maybe people have thought I've mixed together these things.

>>55073151
Even water that is saturating dirt is perceptible, which means it's holding itself together.
Literally, if you can perceive it or its effects, it has to be a platonic solid. Since you can clearly see that humans have souls and animals don't, the element that makes that up has to be a solid with edges that can build on itself, alone. If it was a sphere, you wouldn't have a soul because it couldn't hold itself up.

>>55054344
Death is the anti-element. It's the cold that extinguishes fire, it's what makes water stagnant and toxic, what makes soil impotent and plants wither, and air stale and miasmic.

>>55073279
>Even water that is saturating dirt is perceptible, which means it's holding itself together.
No, it means it's present in/on a solid frame of cubes. Come on man.

>Literally, if you can perceive it or its effects, it has to be a platonic solid.
Sure, and you can perceive ludicrously small spheres, given there are enough, even if they're not supporting each other but simply spread across a surface. Heck, dirt being wet makes sense because cubes tesselate completely so the water would settle on the surface, except where gaps were created not because they had to be there by geometric considerations, but because there simply was a distance not filled with cubes.

Can souls exist outside a human container according to Platon? Because if not, then how's that any different from spheres that need a supporting frame to stay together (which, again, they can given external pressure). A soul would basically be like beanbag filling. It keeps the beanbag from collapsing despite not having a strong structure itself, because there's just enough of it stacked together and kept together by the frame of the bag.

I'll accept that Platon just didn't think it made sense, but I don't see why it'd be an obvious conclusion or at all be necessary.

>>55071021
> Making wrong conclusions based on incorrect premises is perfectly logically valid.
But the premises isn't incorrect. The pyramid IS the pointiest. It's the logic that's shaky, unless you go into the reasoning of why it follows that pointiness leads to hotness, and chase it down to the faulty premise.

I think you were being criticized:
(a) because you seemed incapable of recognizing the similarity of the two logical failings,
(b) because you were an asshole about it, choosing to abrade the very people who were able to explain to you what you didn't understand, and
(c) because you chose to be an asshole rather than openly expressing your interest in the topic and the merit of your question, which is the binding factor between people who are in a position to help you.

Reading through your responses to various people in your post, it's clear you're more interested in defending yourself then understanding the problem. You even defended yourself against an expression of confusion made against someone who you know isn't you.

This is extremely fucking childish, and you should knock it off if you expect to be able to function with the wider community of people around you and actually learn something. This is the only way you will distinguish yourself and compete or contribute, even compared to people with your h̶a̶n̶d̶i̶c̶a̶p̶ point of view who have lived longer than yourself and have the benefit of time and the accumulation that this brings.

>>55054364
This. Idiot.

>>55075337
See:
>>55054386
>>55057573
>>55054448
>>55069158

etc.

>>55076044
Earth is not that stupid of an idea, though. You must admit there is a lot of traction in that direction, even within the greek.

>>55077522
That's why I didn't mock the original guy for his idea. If you had to pick a single element out of the four, I'd consider Earth the most sensible, too - though I can see enough of an argument for any one of the four to work just fine in the right setting.

>>55054344
Fire, the element that leads to rebirth.