Energy Beings

Yeah, so I decided not to digress onto the matter of the Navajo gods--bit off topic. It's gone.

But the discussion of the gods did remind me of something that could be interesting, but is absolutely never handled right: energy beings. The Q, the Ancients, even the First Ones (yeah they're handled better, but "better than Star Trek" isn't saying much). Energy beings are, very largely, an excuse to have fairies/gods without rattling the cages of the materialist troglodytes (four words: allegory of the cave).

Now, there is an opinion abroad in the land that energy beings represent, in the words of TVTropes, "the unpopularity of philosophical materialism among science fiction writers."

You fail metaphysics forever. Also relativity.

See, if something's made of energy, it's still material. Relativistically speaking, energy is just matter-in-potency--"potential energy" is a rather awkward idea; it'd be truer to speak of it as "actual matter". Energy is something between material and efficient cause; it's not a form or an end. Philosophy that only deals with efficient and material causes, is called materialism.

But the energy beings are always portrayed erroneously in two ways, one scientific, the other artistic. First, the science.

Energy, as we understand it, is not really something that you can make a "body" out of. It's really questionable if energy, properly so called, has any existence, save when it's actualized in the mass of matter. Most of what we call "energy" is just an effect on matter--a motion, a change from one state to another. Yet energy beings in SF are always portrayed as, at best, balls of light, or floating goldfish made of plasma. Now it's occasionally pointed out, "if they're made of energy they should move at light-speed", on the assumption that their "bodies" would be made of photons. Which is still questionable--can you make anything understandable as a body out of photons? I doubt it.

Still worse, is that they're all assumed to have once been "physical", by which is meant "made of actual matter." Um...I like Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann as much as the next guy, but where's this potential to evolve into pure energy? Is there some kinda critical mass of adaptations, after which an organism just stops being a very complicated gravy (water held together with proteins)?

Maybe they're reading some collector's edition of Origin of Species that I never saw.

Okay, so the second part is the artistic error. The energy beings are always portrayed as basically childish, and as if their arrogance in presuming to tell humans what to do was somehow wrong. And yet the Federation? Always the good guys. Now I know this is fantasy, but come on, Roddenberry--a human government that doesn't need a massive overhaul (not to say purge) about every forty years? There's a hell of a lot more evidence for the gods than for that, dude.

Forgive me, but I grow tired of these stories about "humans are old enough not to need 'gods' anymore", as proudly proclaimed in Babylon 5, Star Trek, and arguable Stargate SG1. After the 20th century, I think it's a reasonable question whether humans are old enough to cross the street on their own, let alone not need the gods.

Now, what would a real energy being be like? I must here pause for an explanation, that some of you might have seen before:
Mortimer Adler, in several of his writings, felt the need to contradict the existentialists' denial of a single human nature, in the face of the extreme variation observed across human cultures. This he did by explaining that an animal's nature largely consists of actualities--a certain sort of calls and body language, a certain kind of den, a certain family makeup, etc. Human nature, however, consists mostly of sets of potentials--potential to speak, potential to order the family or the state, potential to organize the concepts by which they view reality.

What if, therefore, it is in the nature of some beings to have bodies, but only as a set of potentialities that they can realize as they see fit? Now, bodies are material...and what, pray, do we call "potential matter"?

So a real energy being would probably not even be "around," unless it was in a body made simply of straight-up matter, indistinguishable from any other matter (though probably lacking a lot of organs, since it wouldn't need to eat for energy). Q actually seems to work like that--point to Star Trek (I know, I'm scared too). Conveniently, this saves on budget.

So, what would it behave like? Hell if I know; it sure as hell wouldn't act like anything that has a body full of chemicals. Probably it would have a much flatter, by our standards, emotional range--probably just "liking" and "disliking", since it wouldn't need fear or, probably, sex, being practically indestructible. Being an intelligent being, it'd also have love (willing others' good), hate (willing their evil), and desires, though the main desires we could understand would be the intellectual ones (curiosity, for instance). Hell, it might enjoy gamma rays as humans enjoy having their backs scratched, too.

Under no circumstances would it serve as a strawman for a thickheaded sermon about religion, authority, or such crap. Any rational person meeting a creature like that, especially if it's also got psionic powers, would be quite right to consider it worthy of respect--more respect, in fact, than the semi-rational varmints who are the protagonists of the book or show. Might make for an actually intelligent point, namely, "Just because you're undeniably vastly inferior to it, doesn't make you worthless." Or, "People are only equal in their intrinsic dignity, and anyone who says otherwise is just too much of a coward to admit that denying the existence of human nature makes the concept of 'human rights' meaningless."

But I realize I'm asking that writers acknowledge that some philosophies have different ethical implications; I think I got a better chance of meeting an energy being.

Actually, Canyon de Chelly's not that far away.