If you hang around in psionics-oriented forums and communities for very long you will eventually see such fancy terms as "pyrokinesis" or "electrokinesis" or even "geokinesis." I can understand the desire to want to differentiate between things that you may be affecting with terms specific to the substance. However, I think that there comes a certain point when it becomes cumbersome and unnecessary. All of this is why I prefer the umbrella term of psychokinesis.
Thinking about it logically for a second, all of these abilities consist of you using your mind to control or move something. This would qualify them all as psychokinesis. I just don't see the reasoning behind giving a fancy name to every particular way you could possibly use psychokinesis. In my opinion, if you can move one thing with psychokinesis you should have the same ability to move another substance unless there's some kind of psychological block in place.
Words like "pyrokinesis" are convenient for telling people that you're working on manipulating fire through psychokinesis. Terms like "atmokinesis" or "aerokinesis" seem to overlap, as I imagine there would be a lot of air manipulation going on if you were manipulating the atmosphere. Because of this, I just think that sometimes it's superfluous to use these terms. I have nothing against people that use these terms, but they probably shouldn't be surprised when others have to ask "What is that?" and the practitioner has to explain it anyway, perhaps defeating the purpose of the specialized term.
In summary, I don't really care much for it. I prefer to just use the umbrella term of psychokinesis. I recognize that these designations must be useful to someone though, so to each their own. I sometimes substitute "telekinesis" for "psychokinesis" when around people that don't know what psychokinesis means.
No comments:
Post a Comment