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Voluval as truth, especially bad marks.

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Ulphus:
Something that came up in discussion the other day. Is the voluval true - does the mark really accurately describe or predict your personality? If you get a bad mark, does that really mean you're a bad person?

Personally, I interpret the Voluval as being "technology indistinguishable from magic" that reads a persons genetics, brain chemical mix, etc and produces a prediction of the persons future behaviour that is, while not determinate, fairly accurate.

Incidentally, this is one reason I suspect that brain injuries (or too many drugs) might lead to a different mark if you got it done again - although pod pilots are probably the only ones who might get away with that nowdays.

For example, if you spend your childhood torturing squirrels to death, you end up with a bad mark. You carefully list all the things you want from santa every christmas and save your pocket money obsessively, and you end up with an accountants mark... You're straight forward and blunt and don't step quietly around people's feelings, you end up with the bull mark. etc.

Your future is not set, but it will take hard work to avoid your "destiny".

OOC, I'd like to think that the Matari are not so barbaric as to continue such a practice if it didn't give societal benefits, and that therefore, they believe a clan is better off exiling people with bad marks even at the cost of writing-off the years of effort to raise a child to Voluval age (I could have borrowed Cia's rose coloured glasses here without noticing).

Therefore, IC I think there are real and demonstrable personality issues with people who have the "bad marks" which make them a risk and a liability to the clan and the people around them. They don't play well with others.

Am I completely out in left field here?

Casiella:
Hmm. I tend to think that it's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy: tell a kid he's destined to be a great soldier, and he'll go out and train and fight. Tell her she will be a great leader, and she'll get into politics. Tell them they're outcasts and not worthy of being among polite society, and that will happen.

Ava Starfire:
No. Not in left field at all.

The Matari may be thought of as simplistic, but seriously, these were an advanced people before the Day of Darkness... they know about nature vs nurture and all the other arguments that people raise against the voluval. If they didnt have a LOT of reasons to keep doing it, they wouldnt keep doing it. Matari may be lots of things, but stupid isnt one of them.

I can buy that the Voluval "might" not be accurate 100% of the time. I expect its accuracy is over 99%, however; people that do thinks like skin frogs alive and pull the legs off bugs, who grow up to decide humans are more fun to torture than animals, are wired differently. The Voluval detects that.

Esna Pitoojee:
Eh... here's my question about that, then - why are people so concerned about those in Vo'Shun if everyone there are "bad people"? Seems to me that Vo'Shun isn't so much a "prison island" as a "mix of innocence and evil".

Mithfindel:
I've also heard the theory about previously space-capable races (possibly Jove) setting loose the Voluval. So it's still technology advanced enough to be indistinguishable from magic, and it works, but it has a quirk - it favours those individuals which have the genetics its original designers want people to have. In short, it is an eugenics tool.

Naturally, this is deeply in the tin foil padded domain of mass wild guessing.

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