#science hyperfixations

Introduction, backstory: The concept of the character is that they are “birthed” by another character of mine I currently call the Geneticist. In a standard fantasy world, the Geneticist comes from a hyper evolved civilization of elves who decided to focus on innovating their understanding of magic and the material world into sciences, instead of settling into old traditions. The Geneticist is an equivalent pre/post doc in his studies which are, obviously, genetics and biochemistry and has developed the technology which could incorporate the genetic material of other beings into his own to do wild shit. However the “elders” say the work is too risky and while theoretically possible they shouldn’t test it as no one would/should agree. Now the Geneticist is unhappy with this but does respect the free will of other’s to participate or not.

This leads to the Geneticist leaving the society to pursue his research. Adventures and development occur and frankly I love this character so much by themselves I should make another post about them….Moving on to the current topic though—

Later in life, the Geneticist works on a project to create a new sentient being. Using mushrooms (cause they’re so perfectly odd and unique), the Geneticist designs and specializes various types of fungi to act as different organs and tissues and Frankensteins this new being into existence. I really like the themes of Frankenstein and wish to parallel them, however where Victor Frankenstein abandons his Creation and is frankly unable to handle the situation at all, the Geneticist persists. Because they wanted this and they must see the experiment through to its very end.

Again, I have not worked out a name but for the sake of being coherent I’ll refer to the creature as Fung-I (cause why not).

I have details as to physical appearance and personality vaguely worked out. Those details are not the topic I’m focusing on though I’d love questions to be asked about literally anything about this concept!!! If not serious though at least make it funny.

My issue is free will and motivations. See I have a Catholic perspective of free will and have about two definitions which are (very basically) “choosing to follow God’s will, or not” and “being able to choose between two good/bad/evil options”. But here’s the thing, Fung-I’s closest thing to God as a creator is the Geneticist and the definitions of “good” and “bad” can be extremely subjective and are usually based upon what a person grew up learning. Kohlberg’s theory of moral development, to my understanding, does not elaborate on good/bad/evil and speaks more to developing thought out understandings of morality up to defining “objective moral truths”.

See, this is an issue because the purpose of the project of the Genticist was not only to make a completely new complex creature but also to see how it integrates into the ecosystems. They wanted to make the passive decomposer (fungi) to be active. In a way they created a new predator and wished to see how it handled itself. And so they designed it to be humanoid because (in most fantasy though not all) humanoids are the most sentient. They designed Fung-I to be vibrant because they hypothesized it would attract before it repelled. The Geneticist imbued a their creation with charged evolutionary abilities to always adapt and be the next step (not only to improve themselves but also cause the rest of nature to have to adapt in tandem.)

So this is the motivations the Geneticist, the creator, has and teaches to Fung-I. But now we are at free will and how that affects the personality, morality, and development of the character. More importantly, what is it the allows a rational being to have free will versus a “common animal”? Which, in the real world, we observe to be as intelligent as small children.

People who can only see with glasses need them because their vision has degraded. And the structure of glasses is to enhance the image by placing a focusing apparatus a certain distance from their eye to get sharpest quality of what they're looking at. --Similar to how we use magnifying glasses and microscopes to see something outside of our regular range of vision-- right? At least that's the premise.

Cameras taking pictures, specifically old cameras, and not digital cameras, but also digital cameras. Expose themselves to light to capture the detail, which is engrained into some film or sensor. I remember hearing that the negatives of film cameras have all the detail up to extremely fine detail, but the method we had to expose them made the quality get loaded. Similar to how with increased pixels, we can sharpen the image of what is on a screen. Or polygons in 3D design in games.

Mirrors and other reflective surfaces reflect whatever light photons/waves hit it. Now the amount of light does decrease depending on how much light is absorbed, because mirrors are not perfect reflective surfaces.

So my question is this: would a near sighted person, one who cannot see far away from them, be able to see detail or far away objects, which they could not normally see, with clarity as if it was that close to them by using a handheld?

I will clarify that the person can read letters on a page very crisply at 10-12 size font at an arms length. However, no magnification of the object occurs. It is that simply what they are seeing is now "closer to them" because it is on the mirrored surface

My thought is that yes they could. Because it would be as if they had a picture or video of the thing they are looking at with great detail.

I want to know what anyone else thinks? I’ll do a poll for simplicity