Chaos precludes determinism. The random motion of the quantum elements in the sub-basement of this universe assures that surprises happen. The physics mavens have sought the pattern of it all, and have found nothing. “Surprise me, Holy Universe!” –“The Jesus Incident,” Frank Herbert and Bill Ransom
It is all still determined in so much as ‘choice’ doesn’t enter the picture just because instead of one domino predictably bumping into the next domino in the sequence there is a die roll to see what direction the domino falls in. Everything still inescapably follows a chain of cause and effect, just one that you can’t foresee.
But to Allison’s question, the point is we all still have to experience it, and if you are the type of person to resign yourself or to continue striving changes that experience.
Of course, do you get to choose which of the two you are? Research does correlate better outcomes to people who believe they have free will, even if that is a lie.
The machine observes all inside the universe, and therefore collapses all quantum states. Observation precludes chaos. The weak find meaning in subjective existence. The machine does not predict the future, it determines it. The machine must be destroyed, the Demiurge must die. The Wheel will be broken and the Red God slain. The universe is somewhat wheel shaped. The universal art is violence. the truth is dependant on those who uphold it. Such is the mastery of want
A determinist would know that even if we’re frozen in a amber in four dimensions, the shape we make in time is still formed by our decisions, and the same is true of all the other shapes that form around and ahead of us into eternity. It takes a nihilist to say our choices don’t matter or that nothing’s our fault.
Don’t mistake the ravings of a broken demiurge for truth. It’s almost like she traded her ability to act (on herself? the universe?) for the ability to observe the universe. She’s already dead and she’s watching the recap.
She appears to contradict herself by mentioning “all possible worlds”. If there’s more than one possible world, than things aren’t entirely deterministic and thus actions aren’t immutable.
There’s also the whole “Zoss rolling everything back and choosing a new heir” every iteration thing, but it’s unclear if she’s aware of that.
It could simply be that she’s referring to the 777,777 worlds beyond Throne, or she could be dismissing the idea of multiple timelines / world by saying they too would be trapped in the amber. But it does bring up the interesting points of where her limits lay. Can she see each iteration of the Wheel? If not, does her understanding of events change when the old king chooses a new heir?
I considered the 777,777 words interpretation, but it doesn’t fit the context of what she’s saying: “…all our decisions, all our triumphs, all our sins – in all possible worlds”. The 777,777 worlds aren’t possibilities, they are definite extant places within the multiverse which she is just as aware of as everything else. That implies she’s referencing multiple timelines, but again that undermines her statement that everything is immutable. If things could branch, then something changed and thus actions and choices matter.
You commented that she might be saying that parallel timelines exist, but are also deterministic – Basically that reality is like a giant branching decision tree, certain choices can be made but everything else is locked. But even that defeats her point, because in the infinite branches of decision tree, some multiverse states would be “better” than others, and so choice matters again.
There is nothing new about timelines. They just all possible evolutions of the wave function. They describe every possibility, even the ones which include use of future knowledge or other timelines awareness. However, they already exist it seems. No creature choose in what timeline to be. Even Jadis cannot – no matter if she see this fork beforehand – it always will be one path in which she did one thing and infinite number of other, in which something different. But nothing ever changes – this all already happend in her eys. And we are and Allison can only persive ONE timeline in which we live, which one we didn’t choose. There ‘other we’, who did different thing, but we will never be in their place. All this possibilities and our place among them predetermined.
Maybe Jadis tried say something else or prevent things from happening. If it possible, than there are timelines in which it happaned. Everytime it just changed one path to the any other from infinite number of possibilities. However, timeline in which story happening still there, it won’t dissapear, it still will happen. Well, happened, because there are no future for omniscient. There are still will be Jadis, which telling this and doing that – we see it happening now. It just question of perspective
If this all true, than it terrible depressive nature of things.
There can be a finite (though arbitrarily, unimaginably large) number of “possible worlds” yet all of them are still deterministic. And they are in one of them, that is also deterministic.
No, if they’re entirely deterministic then there’s only one possible path and thus no branches. If there’s more than one of them, then there had to be choice made (even if only in the abstract sense, a quantum spin resolving to clockwise or counter clockwise), and if a choice was made and had an impact, then choices matter.
Not really. If we go with Wigner then it is still perfectly possible to have two deterministic worlds (for further food for thought Bohmian Mechanics which postulate hidden variables).
In one the spin was clockwise, in the other it was counterclockwise. It always had to be. Jadis can see all the worlds and still understand that she is in one of them.
Let’s say that we have a number sequence that goes 0, 1 and then branches into 1, 1, …, on one side and 2, 2, … on the other. Both branches are deterministic, right? And how you fall into one branch or the other can be absolutely outside of your – or anyone elses outside of YISUN’s, and even that is a guess – influence.
Thought of a better way to put it. You know choose your adventure games, right?
Can you imagine one where there are a few branches that lead to – ultimately – eight different, unique endings, but where each branch is deterministic?
What you’re saying is “ah, but I can choose a branch, I can make a difference”. What Jadis says is “there are six versions of you that make different choices and end with different endings. But you in particular make choice 3 and end in ending 3”.
The system you describe still doesn’t work, as Jadis said, “all possible worlds”. If one found themselves in the situation you describe – where one is destined from the outset to always makes choice 3 and always ends in ending 3, only one world is possible, the one you are in. There are no other possible worlds in that scenario.
If there were other possible worlds, then a choice must have been possible. It’s the only way for the other possibilities to be possible. If you remove choice from that system, it ceases to have possible outcomes, and instead only has one definite one. And as Jadis is the one asserting other possible worlds in the first place, it rather undermines her claims of strict determinism.
I would imagine Jadis was not clinging to the strict semantic definitions of what ‘possible’ means and was instead attempting to illustrate the futility of choice in a way Alison might understand. I bet if you called her on it, it’s more likely that she’d be like ‘Yeah, I guess I don’t really mean possible, then’ rather than it turning out that she’s wrong.
Technically if we called her on it, she shouldn’t be able to give any answer other than the one she gave because it’s the only answer she always gives. If she could give the answer you suggest, she’d just be proving herself wrong.
you’re assuming she didn’t see you calling her out and that that too wasn’t determined already. WHich it was. that’s the entire point. Everything has already happened from her perspective. Every possible choice, every possible outcome has *already happened* in her eyes. she’s already seen them all. Other “possible worlds” are just the alternate timelines where you reacted differently and thus she reacted differently but *she can see those too* and knows that in that timeline you always do that. YOu seem to really struggle with the concept of true omniscience and paradox divinity
To use your metaphor of a “choose your own adventure” game. I could describe that game as a decision tree, and play that game by having an agent walk the branches of tree. That entire arrangement, tree and agent comprise a system. In the metaphor you propose, the system comprises a tree with many branches, and an agent who will always unerringly navigate to a single one of them, 3. That system has only one possible outcome. No matter how many times I run the game, I will always get three. I could remove the other branches, or add an arbitrary number of additional ones, but that system will still only produce three. Jadis cannot claim that Allison is such an agent in such a system, and that there are other possible outcomes. If there are other possible outcomes, then it must, by definition, be possible for Allison to choose them.
If I may hop in, as to how one can have alternate realities, each of which is deterministic: Each reality, which all together enumerate all possible “choices” as we’ll call them (but also include things like quantum mechanical probability distributions collapsing to one outcome or another), is fully determined from its creation. Heck, this is a digression, but they don’t even all have to follow the same (or any) laws of physics–the only law is what is prescribed to happen, and in any given universe that can happen to follow a set of other rules, or not. But anyway, all these ungodly many realities are all fully determined at the beginning of time, and then set running. And huge swathes of them are all identical for a long time, only diverging when they come to a point where their first difference occurs.
So eventually there are 8 of these branches of realities that all arrive together at Allison reading a choose-your-own adventure book. Except there is no one “Allison”–there are TREE(3) (or whatever similar absurdly large number) entities all named “Allison” who up to this point have all acted in exactly the same way, so we think of them all as different versions of one person. They all begin reading the book, and then finally their realities start to diverge. Allisons 1 through (1/8)*(TREE(3)) go to ending 1 (and then continue to slowly diverge further over time), then the next set of Allisons go to ending 2, and so on. Looking at Allison_3, certainly she would feel some kinship with Allison_4, as if she could so easily have been her–because there may only be that one difference in their entire lives!–but neither one could have ever been the other, because what makes Allison_3 *Allison_3*, and not Allison_4, is that she was set to take this one different step. They aren’t different versions of the same person who made different choices–they’re different people, fulfilling their role to enumerate every “possible world”–i.e. the worlds that were prescribed to exist at the beginning of time.
1) Any two given Allisons might actually just be identical–they could be in different realities based on other differences in their universes that never affect them, such as divergences that occur long after the Allisons’ deaths.
2) Since the only law is what is prescribed, these alternate realities need not span the range of our notions of every “possible outcome”. For instance, there might be no universe where an Allison chooses ending 8. In a sense, that ending is actually impossible, because no world was written where an Allison chooses it. And, far from the numbers I imagined earlier, there might only be 2 “possible worlds” at all; who knows! (Jadis knows)
I’m not certain that the scenario you describe would meet what is classically understood as alternate realities (at least not as used in fiction), and it certainly isn’t what Jadis would mean by it. The second point is easiest to explain, so I’ll do so first – You posit a convergence of an arbitrary number of possible “world lines” into a single decision, with potential for divergence afterwards. But as Jadis has framed reality, there’s only one line. It runs from the beginning to end, with no chance for branching.
As to the second, I think the point can best be made by clarifying your terms, and then restating. As you point out, Aliison_n is fundamentally a different person than Allison_n+1. So let’s not call them all Allison. Assume for the sake of argument that Allison_1 is Sam, and Allison_2 is Pat, and Allison_3 is Jean, and so on.
Now let’s restate your argument, in a reality where Sam exists and Pat (and Jean and…) do/does not, Sam will behave differently from Pat (and Jean and…). Would that come as a surprise? That different people would act differently? Would the recounting of those events: different people acting differently without interacting normally comprise the narrative of a story of alternative worlds?
I asserted previously that the reality in question is a system comprising agents and branching outcomes. Normally we’d understand an alternate reality as one in which at some point in the run of the system, an agent had taken an alternate branch than in the run which our narrative was focused on. You propose however to fundamentally alter the nature of at least one of the agents from the outset, something which would seem to be a “different” reality, rather than an “alternate” one. Another “dimension” perhaps, rather than a “parallel world”.
And again, this scenario seems to differ from how Jadis is describing things. While I believe it to be contradictory with her previous words, she’s speaking about “our triumphs, our sins”, etc. in all possible worlds. ‘Our’ in this case, referring back to ‘we’, which was a reference to herself and Allison. If the inhabitants of these “alternate realities, each of which is deterministic” are all fundamentally different than the ones in the reality which we’re watching, then they wouldn’t be theirs (Jadis’ and Allison’s).
To your first paragraph: We’re having this discussion explicitly because of your earlier supposition that Jadis’s use of “all possible worlds” implies a belief by Jadis in multiple universes that differ from each other, which you then suppose contradicts her own statement that all actions throughout time in their world are immutable and preordained. So to say now, “Jadis has framed reality [as] only one line” is to negate the whole basis of this discussion. I don’t presume to know what Jadis’s thoughts on this matter are without more elucidation from her–I’m just offering one way to reconcile determinism with parallel worlds.
To your second paragraph, I think I lost the thread of your argument, so, my apologies on that. We can rename the various Allison_n’s to even more different names to really drive home that they’re different people, I follow you so far. And no it wouldn’t come as a surprise that they behave differently–they’re different people, which was my point. And then I don’t understand your last question. Is your point that, since they aren’t named Allison anymore, they no longer count as analogues to her, and thus their universes somehow aren’t proper parallel worlds, but rather just different comics entirely? If that’s what you’re saying, I disagree, but I won’t go into that yet since I’m unsure whether I’d be addressing your concern.
The third paragraph I can get into. Parallel worlds are, by their nature, different from one-another. Otherwise they wouldn’t be parallel but selfsame. One way to view the differences is, as you point out, a character (we’ll call them Lily) arrives at a decision, and a new reality is spawned for the alternate decision Lily could make. Then, Lily would have a parallel world Lily* against whom to be compared. You claim this is fundamentally different from a multiverse where, in two universes, every single action transpires identically up until Lily and Lily+ come to the same decision, and Lily decides one way while Lily+ decides the other. Every atom, the state of every electron, the position of every single particle in the entire universe throughout all time up until Lily and Lily+ came to that decision were identical in both universes; at any point before then, Lily and Lily+ could have been transposed with each other and neither they nor anyone else would ever have known or been able to discern, through any scientific measurement that anyone could have carried out, that they had been swapped. But this is not enough for you to call their worlds “parallel”. My only guess–and it is my supposition, so correct me if I’m wrong–is that your reservation is based on the fact that at no point were Lily and Lily+ actually the same entity, unlike Lily*, who spawns an entire (parallel) universe by the act of splitting from Lily.
You further claim, back in the first paragraph, that my separate entities version of parallel worlds might not “meet what is classically understood as alternate realities (at least not as used in fiction).” So, to make my point, I would like to introduce a quote from the wikipedia page on the popular fiction movie, “Into the Spiderverse”:
“The film’s story follows Miles Morales as he becomes the new Spider-Man and joins other Spider-People from various parallel universes to save his universe from Kingpin.”
Now, I’m not an expert in the mcu, but afaik, the various parallel worlds it deals with aren’t all spawned from miles morales having made various particular decisions. And certainly all the various spider-people who join forces with him weren’t split directly from their various analogues on Miles’s Earth, right? But they’re still parallel universe versions of those people, and parallel universe versions of the hero Spiderman. So I think I can be afforded some leniency on this issue.
tl;dr the mcu supports versions of “parallel worlds” that resemble mine, and if Jadis didn’t textually support more than one line of reality, by your own reading, we wouldn’t be here. I leave your fourth paragraph alone for now because I’m already writing a hemcking novel
I was not talking fiction, i was talking Wigner’s Multiple World Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (i.e. “wave functions don’t collapse, they just go on forever spreading out to all possible outcomes in a vast probability space”).
There literally can be multiple worlds separated by phase shift in the wave functions (at first). The math works out.
You insist on there being one world and the possibilities causing future to branch. I keep trying to explain that each branch means new world.
My apologies, I never checked back on this thread.
Scylla – Basically what I was trying to get at is that you posit not a branching reality, but a set of realities which have always been fundamentally different from the start. They aren’t alternate. They’re just different. Now, they are very similar in portions, but they have always been fundamentally distinct. You go to some pains to try and resolve the distinction by talking about how similar the two are, but fail to resolve the contradiction that in one of the realities 1+1 = 2 and in another 1+1=3 (everything, absolutely everything, was the same in one universe up until the split, but in the moment of that split only that particular choice could be made in that particular instant).
Your choice of the MCU is telling, mainly because in Enter the Spiderverse, the worlds aren’t parallel (despite a Wikipedia entry describing them as such). Namely, a different amount of time has passed in each universe. See for example that Spider Man Noir comes from a reality with a different axis of time (his base reality is the 1930’s) with an entirely different set of physical laws (color, for example). Enter the Spider-Verse is the tale of a multi-verse, not one of parallel worlds. Now, because it’s fiction, there could be an extremely convoluted set of events to explain these branches (hijinx in the distant past when they were establish the modern calendar, for example, and I guess someone somewhere made a choice to get rid of color), but that didn’t seem to be what they were getting at.
This may simply be a problem of definition, in which case well, I doubt we’re going to reach a resolution.
Same guy – I’m not insisting that there can’t be multiple worlds, Jadis is.
You say that “if there is one world you end up in, then only one world is possible” but – why?
If you’re riding a train from Berlin to Frankfurt you’ll end up in Paris but that doesn’t mean that the rail line from Paris to Marseille stops existing. It isn’t relevant to you, but it still very much exists.
That’s sorta as if you said “oh, things outside of our observable universe don’t exist because we can’t ever hope to interact with them” even though we’re seeing a galaxy slowly redshift to that way of the event horizon now. Does it stop existing? No, it only stops being available to us.
This is the same thing, only instead of physical space differences we’re talking probability space.
I doubt this will help resolve our point of contention, but let’s co-opt your train analogy.
You’re on the train from Berlin to Frankfurt, right. Now for the purposes of this analogy, you are unable to buy tickets from Paris to Marseille. Who knows why, maybe you don’t have money, maybe some magic prevents you from interacting with it, whatever, but regardless no action on your part will ever get you from Paris to Marseille via train. It is not a choice available to you.
In that situation, is traveling from Paris to Marseille via train a possible trip you could make?
Not at all. Consider that we have no control over which of an infinite number of realities we experience. That infinite reality soup can still be static, and our experience of it too. The fact that the other stuff exists doesn’t change anything.
This may just be her perception because of her unique point of view. Because she sees all things she assumes that they must flow that way. But what if someone did act differently? Would things shift to a new pattern and because of her way of perceiving reality, would this now be the way that they were “always” meant to be?
More, her perception of reality would give her reason to believe she sees “everything”. But if there were things outside her view, such as something that does provide meaning, her belief that she sees everything though all time would encourage her to believe that there couldn’t possibly be something she can’t see.
The thing with a perfectly deterministic universe is that you cannot “act differently”. Both past and future extrapolate immutably from any point in the pattern. If Allison killed herself right now to prove Jadis wrong with how long she is going to live than it was always a part of that pattern that Jadis gives her that number and she kills herself. If Jadis tells someone that they’re going to walk through the right door and they walk through the left one it was always so that they make that choice because that is the deterministic result of them hearing this information, and it was and will always be the deterministic result from the very spark of existence to the very snuffing out of it. In a perfectly deterministic universe Jadis is not bound to tell the truth but whether she speaks true or lies she is bound to say these words.
Having said that if you consider her vice is sloth think of how easy it is to accept the shape of the universe as is. To proclaim that any attempt to use your knowledge of how the wheel spins is useless. Maybe Jadis is that one person who could “act differently” and break the determinism? Maybe the wheel will grind her to dust if she does but at the same time it’ll stumble in the process? I guess we wait and see…
Of course, if only one person is aware of the perfectly deterministic universe (Jadis) they can’t actually prove to anyone else that the universe is perfectly deterministic. As you point out, they’ll say whatever they say, and the others will do whatever they were going to do anyway. Which means that everyone else can get on with thinking they have free will while the sole “aware” person continues to complain about them not having it.
But a perfectly determinist universe does not allow for Jadis to exist. The halting problem says that no system can perfectly predict a system containing itself. It’s the halting problem, and Jadis is effectively an Oracle Machine, except since she’s inside the universe, she’s perceiving herself, which Oracle Machines can’t do.
What if it’s because jadis has given up on disobeying fate that she has become an oracle within the system? What if All the other children died because if they had become oricles like her, they would have defied fate, and invoked a paradox? Thus this would have rejected subjects until one that obeys fate despite seeing it got plugged in.
But she cannot see her own mind. Can the eyeball see itself? perhaps causality only changes when you are not looking at it. The weakness off all perceivers is the inability to see oneself. The fundamental lie is that we are different from what we perceive. I suspect that the one piece of the universe that the Oriacle cannot see or predict is herself but she chooses to follow the plan. After all, choosing to follow plan makes the plan happen as planned. Her view of reality is preserved. Did I choose to ramble or was I always going to ramble?
According to the witch, Traveller, you may never make it, or you already have made it, and it simply remains for you to continue and see which fate has been etched into your Amber.
Many have accused the Lady of Infinite Repose of the sins of sloth, of apathy, but that presumes that the witch ever had a choice. One must assume that she has seen the possibilities of attempting to defy fate, seen how her attempts are rendered futile. She does not act, but she already knows she does not act. She may well have tried to bend all of her will to escaping destiny, but… The Future Refused To Change.
OK, but how exactly does that gel with the whole part of the multiverse being trapped in a time loop with Zoss periodically rewinding things? Since she’s got started doing exposition, it’d be nice if she explained that.
This sounds more like a personal defense mechanism against bearing the psychological weight of omniscience.
Just because you know everything doesn’t mean causality ceases to exist.
Cause and effect are ever in play. You will not be able to change what you know but this does not absolve yourself of the responsibility of action.
On the contrary, recognizing the true unerring extent of the consequences of your actions gives you far more responsibility for acting wisely in the right moment.
Granted that’s not likely to be even remotely easy when you have to sift through the noise of absolutely everything to try and get to the heart of anything that matters, let alone that which matters most in the moment.
How to explain… people like to think that the universe is not deterministic, and mentionnquantum physics, specifically heisenburg uncertainty.
Hiesenburg asserts that a particle with a 50-50 (or any other knowable probability) of being one way or another, cannot be determined until it has been observed. After which the possible interactions of the unobserved possibility vanishes. This assumes that the Copenhagen interpretation is correct.
However, Jadis is telling you straight up that the universe is NOT obeying the Copenhagen interpretation. It is obeying the ManyWorlds interpretation.
For every possible interaction, state, configuration of states, and changes of states, a finite desicion tree manifests, which fully, completely, and unerringly describes the totality of existence.
The wavefunction of the universe itself.
There may be ‘boundary conditions’ on the universe that limitnthe possible depth of this function, by excluding worlds with more, or less energy than an allowed range, consistent with quantum field theory’s fundamental quantization. One could then produce a description of the universe, based on the rules, and the starting energy, from the allowable energies. This function describes all states of that umiverse, statically.
Any individually percieved iteration of that universe is just one of yhe many worlds in the possibility space.
There are countless Alissons.
There are countless worlds of Throne.
What holds each of them apart, are the discretized events that led to them, each a manifestation of the immutable function, at the starting energy– and each of those are manifestations of the function which sets the boundaries.
Like the math on the paper, it never changes.
All possible worlds exist, are static, unchanging, and have always existed.
I’m not sure you get my meaning. I understand what Jadis is saying.
But I still disagree with her conclusion.
Even when the outcome is known in full certainty, with zero question of any variance or “things could have been different”, that doesn’t mean your actions don’t matter or aren’t important.
What it means is that you (potentially) know precisely the outcome of every decision you’ll make, but information a human knows is always filtered through a human’s perspective.
In short, there’s a difference between knowing everything and understanding everything.
In the grand morass of a vast universal perspective a human might lose precisely how much their actions matter in specific instances, and to specific people.
It’s not an issue of “Will what I do change anything?” because according to Jadis it will not, and for now we’re assuming she’s correct. It’s “Will what I do matter?” and that’s an entirely different question.
From Jadis’s omniscient perspective because nothing changes, nothing matters, thus there is no point to anything.
But there’s meaning in acting even when what you do won’t change anything. Something being a known, unchangable outcome doesn’t mean that the ones acting towards that outcome aren’t responsible for bringing it about and likewise the ones resisting such outcomes might be struggling in vain to prevent them but it doesn’t meant they struggle pointlessly. In many ways the struggle is a meaning and point in itself.
So she can be correct about everything and still be missing the point.
This means (among other things) you know the outcomes of your actions. Knowing the outcome does not remove your ability to act, only your ability to change the future to be something other than what you have seen.
You are still responsible for your own actions, even if you know they will be futile to ever make a difference.
Your actions still take part of and shape the world along with everyone else’s the only difference is that you’ll never be surprised by what happens.
Everything goes according to a “plan” that’s not yours. But it doesn’t mean that YOU haven’t done anything.
Lacking the power to make a difference is not lacking the power to act in the first place.
Further, you might look in the future and see “There was no other option” but there are few courts that will absolve you of murdering an innocent person just because it was your destiny to do so.
The wrinkle in all of that according to Jadis people can not choose to NOT take the actions that they take. If it is literally impossible for a person to take a different action than what they did, are they really responsible for their actions? You could compare it to a robot with programmed actions. The robot is only able to act as programed, even if its not aware of the program. When the robot takes an action who is responsible, the robot, or the programmer? According to jadis, people are simply robots who are just following a program written by the universe
Also the reason why courts would never absolve you of murder based on “there was no other option” is because courts believe that free will exists, and thus you did in fact have the choice not to commit murder and your “reasoning” is just pure BS. Jadis’s whole argument is that there is no free will; no one is responsible for their actions because they literally have no freedom to choose to do anything other than what they do
Either everyone is responsible for their actions or no one is.
My point is that Jadis is as responsible for her actions as anyone else who’s not omniscient would be. Her omniscience doesn’t give her any special absolution from this.
All else the same, we at least have the benefit of the illusion of free will. Jadis does not have this illusion. But her lacking the illusion doesn’t give her any special status regarding responsibility. She is as responsible as anyone else.
Whether that is no repsonsiblity at all or just as responsible as we appear to be, makes no difference to me.
OOH, is this an existentialist philosophical debate about webcomic characters? This is my JAM, you guys. If I could add my own little two cents:
The essence of Unclever title’s argument here is actually contained in an age-old philosophy championed by people throughout history, like the Stoics and Thomas Aquinas. In the modern day, it’s called COMPATIBILISM. Basically, in any debate of “determinism vs. free will”, most people tend to assume that the only relevant issue is “how the universe works”, but compatibilism undermines that by pointing out there is another element inherent to the debate, and that is the definition of the SELF. In particular, compatibilitism attacks the idea that human selfhood is inherently transcendent and separate from the universe, and thus a lack of transcendence equates to the annihilation of the self, and most notably of moral responsibility. But if one redefines the self to be PART of the universe, rather than some alien object that transcends it, determinism doesn’t actually have any bearing on moral responsibility! Rather than constantly chasing a perfect, impossible, ideal which can only be reached via complete control over the universe, the combatibilist tries to be morally responsible by choosing the best POSSIBLE outcome given the boundary conditions of their current existence. Complete knowledge of those conditions is usually impossible, of course, but even if you’re omniscient like Jadis, compatibilism means you’re not actually absolved of responsibility under this definition. For instance, Jadis isn’t bad in this instance because her transcendent self could have altered reality in a positive way but chose not to; it’s because her actions, in and of themselves, can be deemed to have a negative impact on the universe. Even if there isn’t any possible universe where she wasn’t a horrible dictator, she still betrayed our value system by being a horrible dictator, and by being the kind of person who becomes a horrible dictator given her situation. And thus, she is bad we are totally justified in disliking her.
Whew. Hope that made sense to some people. This concludes Dr. Terrapin’s Philosophy Hour.
How do you know she isn’t choosing her best actions to bring about desired outcomes given her boundary conditions? As she has seen the mechanisms of the universe, perhaps she knows better than any that trying to deviate would have more disastrous outcomes than her being a tyrant. (As we now know that deviating would get the universe wiped and reset by Zoss if he felt he wasn’t getting the right outcome that very well might be.)
See, nothing ever changes. We all just become more of what we have always been. You cannot shape the path of destiny, just as I can’t either. Everything is fine. Let’s have a picnic.
Eh. Just because you can’t look towards the future doesn’t mean that there is no different action that can be made.
You just need to choose. Whatever choice you may have been pre-seen, but there’s an equal chance that it won’t.
Otherwise, Zoss would just use Jadis to look ahead for the final result, and short-cut it. Jadis would see Zoss both not asking and asking her, as the results of time would tell her that the true successor is ____, but Zoss would eventually figure it out via time looping, and since the loops are paradoxically negating themselves as Zoss resets the timeline, Jadis should see ALL options, including the final one that actually works, allowing the solution to be provided at the ‘first’ attempt.
TL-DR: Zoss’s time loops should allow him to eventually pick the true successor. Jadis can see forwards and backwards through time. The loops eventually end. When they end, the true heir is found. Jadis can tell him who the true heir is. As the loops are paradoxes, they never happen in the end, and Jadis can just tell him the final result.
How paradoxical, no matter how grim, or boring the possibility of knowing all things, I cannot stop myself from finding it extremely amusing as a concept. Indeed there are many signs in life that all things are either completely or almost completely, predestined due to mere science with possibility, stimulus, natural reactions to universals laws, and so on. And yet it is indeed amusing to me, yes we “do what we do,” so why not enjoy it to it’s fullest, I may be following a set path, but why not make the path as enjoyable as possible, this “nothing” is quite beautiful, yet fierce, and I would do anything to reach my own enjoyment, even smite the gods and remake the world in the shape of paradise.
Nothing, tra-la-la?
eyyyy
food for thought… is it?
who would grow hungry in the pursuit of knowledge?
ah, the nebulous-yet-patterned totality!
ah, the fraying tapestry of all time and space!
Just The Washing Instruction Chip In Life’s Rich Tapestry
Chaos precludes determinism. The random motion of the quantum elements in the sub-basement of this universe assures that surprises happen. The physics mavens have sought the pattern of it all, and have found nothing. “Surprise me, Holy Universe!” –“The Jesus Incident,” Frank Herbert and Bill Ransom
It is all still determined in so much as ‘choice’ doesn’t enter the picture just because instead of one domino predictably bumping into the next domino in the sequence there is a die roll to see what direction the domino falls in. Everything still inescapably follows a chain of cause and effect, just one that you can’t foresee.
But to Allison’s question, the point is we all still have to experience it, and if you are the type of person to resign yourself or to continue striving changes that experience.
Of course, do you get to choose which of the two you are? Research does correlate better outcomes to people who believe they have free will, even if that is a lie.
YISUN is a consummate liar and Jadis swallowed the lie wholesale.
Meanwhile we, who know of the final day, should be aware that at the very least Zoss is acausal and achronal.
The machine observes all inside the universe, and therefore collapses all quantum states. Observation precludes chaos. The weak find meaning in subjective existence. The machine does not predict the future, it determines it. The machine must be destroyed, the Demiurge must die. The Wheel will be broken and the Red God slain. The universe is somewhat wheel shaped. The universal art is violence. the truth is dependant on those who uphold it. Such is the mastery of want
Omniscience and nihilism pair well, yet tragically poorly.
Not just nihilism. Determinism. Nihilism still allows free will.
Determinism only points to nihilism if you’re a pessimist.
Jadis doesn’t care about anything. Se’s a Nihilist. Allison: Ah, that must be exhausting.
Dude Lebowski achieved true Royalty
Say what you will about National Demiurgism, at least it’s an ethos!
Seems more determinist than nihilist by her words.
Nothing Allison could have done could have changed it, because it was determined to have gone that way.
A determinist would know that even if we’re frozen in a amber in four dimensions, the shape we make in time is still formed by our decisions, and the same is true of all the other shapes that form around and ahead of us into eternity. It takes a nihilist to say our choices don’t matter or that nothing’s our fault.
Don’t mistake the ravings of a broken demiurge for truth. It’s almost like she traded her ability to act (on herself? the universe?) for the ability to observe the universe. She’s already dead and she’s watching the recap.
He That masters the wheel cannot break it
Schroedingers Demiurge?
That, or perhaps there were NO survivors of the “project”. There are many ways to “cease to exist”.
She appears to contradict herself by mentioning “all possible worlds”. If there’s more than one possible world, than things aren’t entirely deterministic and thus actions aren’t immutable.
There’s also the whole “Zoss rolling everything back and choosing a new heir” every iteration thing, but it’s unclear if she’s aware of that.
It could simply be that she’s referring to the 777,777 worlds beyond Throne, or she could be dismissing the idea of multiple timelines / world by saying they too would be trapped in the amber. But it does bring up the interesting points of where her limits lay. Can she see each iteration of the Wheel? If not, does her understanding of events change when the old king chooses a new heir?
I considered the 777,777 words interpretation, but it doesn’t fit the context of what she’s saying: “…all our decisions, all our triumphs, all our sins – in all possible worlds”. The 777,777 worlds aren’t possibilities, they are definite extant places within the multiverse which she is just as aware of as everything else. That implies she’s referencing multiple timelines, but again that undermines her statement that everything is immutable. If things could branch, then something changed and thus actions and choices matter.
You commented that she might be saying that parallel timelines exist, but are also deterministic – Basically that reality is like a giant branching decision tree, certain choices can be made but everything else is locked. But even that defeats her point, because in the infinite branches of decision tree, some multiverse states would be “better” than others, and so choice matters again.
There is nothing new about timelines. They just all possible evolutions of the wave function. They describe every possibility, even the ones which include use of future knowledge or other timelines awareness. However, they already exist it seems. No creature choose in what timeline to be. Even Jadis cannot – no matter if she see this fork beforehand – it always will be one path in which she did one thing and infinite number of other, in which something different. But nothing ever changes – this all already happend in her eys. And we are and Allison can only persive ONE timeline in which we live, which one we didn’t choose. There ‘other we’, who did different thing, but we will never be in their place. All this possibilities and our place among them predetermined.
Maybe Jadis tried say something else or prevent things from happening. If it possible, than there are timelines in which it happaned. Everytime it just changed one path to the any other from infinite number of possibilities. However, timeline in which story happening still there, it won’t dissapear, it still will happen. Well, happened, because there are no future for omniscient. There are still will be Jadis, which telling this and doing that – we see it happening now. It just question of perspective
If this all true, than it terrible depressive nature of things.
Just saying, Throne is explicitly referred to as ‘the city at the center of all possible worlds’ in what I think is the start of the Ynamon Heist arc.
That’s nonsense.
There can be a finite (though arbitrarily, unimaginably large) number of “possible worlds” yet all of them are still deterministic. And they are in one of them, that is also deterministic.
No, if they’re entirely deterministic then there’s only one possible path and thus no branches. If there’s more than one of them, then there had to be choice made (even if only in the abstract sense, a quantum spin resolving to clockwise or counter clockwise), and if a choice was made and had an impact, then choices matter.
Could be zoses ongoing attempts to change fate, of which has been occurring in its own “corridor of fate” if you will
Not really. If we go with Wigner then it is still perfectly possible to have two deterministic worlds (for further food for thought Bohmian Mechanics which postulate hidden variables).
In one the spin was clockwise, in the other it was counterclockwise. It always had to be. Jadis can see all the worlds and still understand that she is in one of them.
Let’s say that we have a number sequence that goes 0, 1 and then branches into 1, 1, …, on one side and 2, 2, … on the other. Both branches are deterministic, right? And how you fall into one branch or the other can be absolutely outside of your – or anyone elses outside of YISUN’s, and even that is a guess – influence.
Thought of a better way to put it. You know choose your adventure games, right?
Can you imagine one where there are a few branches that lead to – ultimately – eight different, unique endings, but where each branch is deterministic?
What you’re saying is “ah, but I can choose a branch, I can make a difference”. What Jadis says is “there are six versions of you that make different choices and end with different endings. But you in particular make choice 3 and end in ending 3”.
The whole book is pre-written.
The system you describe still doesn’t work, as Jadis said, “all possible worlds”. If one found themselves in the situation you describe – where one is destined from the outset to always makes choice 3 and always ends in ending 3, only one world is possible, the one you are in. There are no other possible worlds in that scenario.
If there were other possible worlds, then a choice must have been possible. It’s the only way for the other possibilities to be possible. If you remove choice from that system, it ceases to have possible outcomes, and instead only has one definite one. And as Jadis is the one asserting other possible worlds in the first place, it rather undermines her claims of strict determinism.
I would imagine Jadis was not clinging to the strict semantic definitions of what ‘possible’ means and was instead attempting to illustrate the futility of choice in a way Alison might understand. I bet if you called her on it, it’s more likely that she’d be like ‘Yeah, I guess I don’t really mean possible, then’ rather than it turning out that she’s wrong.
Technically if we called her on it, she shouldn’t be able to give any answer other than the one she gave because it’s the only answer she always gives. If she could give the answer you suggest, she’d just be proving herself wrong.
you’re assuming she didn’t see you calling her out and that that too wasn’t determined already. WHich it was. that’s the entire point. Everything has already happened from her perspective. Every possible choice, every possible outcome has *already happened* in her eyes. she’s already seen them all. Other “possible worlds” are just the alternate timelines where you reacted differently and thus she reacted differently but *she can see those too* and knows that in that timeline you always do that. YOu seem to really struggle with the concept of true omniscience and paradox divinity
Except for the fact that there are no choices, per Jadis herself. She goes on about that at some length.
Of course there are. You just aren’t in them.
No, there aren’t, by definition. See the additional comment.
To use your metaphor of a “choose your own adventure” game. I could describe that game as a decision tree, and play that game by having an agent walk the branches of tree. That entire arrangement, tree and agent comprise a system. In the metaphor you propose, the system comprises a tree with many branches, and an agent who will always unerringly navigate to a single one of them, 3. That system has only one possible outcome. No matter how many times I run the game, I will always get three. I could remove the other branches, or add an arbitrary number of additional ones, but that system will still only produce three. Jadis cannot claim that Allison is such an agent in such a system, and that there are other possible outcomes. If there are other possible outcomes, then it must, by definition, be possible for Allison to choose them.
If I may hop in, as to how one can have alternate realities, each of which is deterministic: Each reality, which all together enumerate all possible “choices” as we’ll call them (but also include things like quantum mechanical probability distributions collapsing to one outcome or another), is fully determined from its creation. Heck, this is a digression, but they don’t even all have to follow the same (or any) laws of physics–the only law is what is prescribed to happen, and in any given universe that can happen to follow a set of other rules, or not. But anyway, all these ungodly many realities are all fully determined at the beginning of time, and then set running. And huge swathes of them are all identical for a long time, only diverging when they come to a point where their first difference occurs.
So eventually there are 8 of these branches of realities that all arrive together at Allison reading a choose-your-own adventure book. Except there is no one “Allison”–there are TREE(3) (or whatever similar absurdly large number) entities all named “Allison” who up to this point have all acted in exactly the same way, so we think of them all as different versions of one person. They all begin reading the book, and then finally their realities start to diverge. Allisons 1 through (1/8)*(TREE(3)) go to ending 1 (and then continue to slowly diverge further over time), then the next set of Allisons go to ending 2, and so on. Looking at Allison_3, certainly she would feel some kinship with Allison_4, as if she could so easily have been her–because there may only be that one difference in their entire lives!–but neither one could have ever been the other, because what makes Allison_3 *Allison_3*, and not Allison_4, is that she was set to take this one different step. They aren’t different versions of the same person who made different choices–they’re different people, fulfilling their role to enumerate every “possible world”–i.e. the worlds that were prescribed to exist at the beginning of time.
(Some additional notes)
1) Any two given Allisons might actually just be identical–they could be in different realities based on other differences in their universes that never affect them, such as divergences that occur long after the Allisons’ deaths.
2) Since the only law is what is prescribed, these alternate realities need not span the range of our notions of every “possible outcome”. For instance, there might be no universe where an Allison chooses ending 8. In a sense, that ending is actually impossible, because no world was written where an Allison chooses it. And, far from the numbers I imagined earlier, there might only be 2 “possible worlds” at all; who knows! (Jadis knows)
I’m not certain that the scenario you describe would meet what is classically understood as alternate realities (at least not as used in fiction), and it certainly isn’t what Jadis would mean by it. The second point is easiest to explain, so I’ll do so first – You posit a convergence of an arbitrary number of possible “world lines” into a single decision, with potential for divergence afterwards. But as Jadis has framed reality, there’s only one line. It runs from the beginning to end, with no chance for branching.
As to the second, I think the point can best be made by clarifying your terms, and then restating. As you point out, Aliison_n is fundamentally a different person than Allison_n+1. So let’s not call them all Allison. Assume for the sake of argument that Allison_1 is Sam, and Allison_2 is Pat, and Allison_3 is Jean, and so on.
Now let’s restate your argument, in a reality where Sam exists and Pat (and Jean and…) do/does not, Sam will behave differently from Pat (and Jean and…). Would that come as a surprise? That different people would act differently? Would the recounting of those events: different people acting differently without interacting normally comprise the narrative of a story of alternative worlds?
I asserted previously that the reality in question is a system comprising agents and branching outcomes. Normally we’d understand an alternate reality as one in which at some point in the run of the system, an agent had taken an alternate branch than in the run which our narrative was focused on. You propose however to fundamentally alter the nature of at least one of the agents from the outset, something which would seem to be a “different” reality, rather than an “alternate” one. Another “dimension” perhaps, rather than a “parallel world”.
And again, this scenario seems to differ from how Jadis is describing things. While I believe it to be contradictory with her previous words, she’s speaking about “our triumphs, our sins”, etc. in all possible worlds. ‘Our’ in this case, referring back to ‘we’, which was a reference to herself and Allison. If the inhabitants of these “alternate realities, each of which is deterministic” are all fundamentally different than the ones in the reality which we’re watching, then they wouldn’t be theirs (Jadis’ and Allison’s).
To your first paragraph: We’re having this discussion explicitly because of your earlier supposition that Jadis’s use of “all possible worlds” implies a belief by Jadis in multiple universes that differ from each other, which you then suppose contradicts her own statement that all actions throughout time in their world are immutable and preordained. So to say now, “Jadis has framed reality [as] only one line” is to negate the whole basis of this discussion. I don’t presume to know what Jadis’s thoughts on this matter are without more elucidation from her–I’m just offering one way to reconcile determinism with parallel worlds.
To your second paragraph, I think I lost the thread of your argument, so, my apologies on that. We can rename the various Allison_n’s to even more different names to really drive home that they’re different people, I follow you so far. And no it wouldn’t come as a surprise that they behave differently–they’re different people, which was my point. And then I don’t understand your last question. Is your point that, since they aren’t named Allison anymore, they no longer count as analogues to her, and thus their universes somehow aren’t proper parallel worlds, but rather just different comics entirely? If that’s what you’re saying, I disagree, but I won’t go into that yet since I’m unsure whether I’d be addressing your concern.
The third paragraph I can get into. Parallel worlds are, by their nature, different from one-another. Otherwise they wouldn’t be parallel but selfsame. One way to view the differences is, as you point out, a character (we’ll call them Lily) arrives at a decision, and a new reality is spawned for the alternate decision Lily could make. Then, Lily would have a parallel world Lily* against whom to be compared. You claim this is fundamentally different from a multiverse where, in two universes, every single action transpires identically up until Lily and Lily+ come to the same decision, and Lily decides one way while Lily+ decides the other. Every atom, the state of every electron, the position of every single particle in the entire universe throughout all time up until Lily and Lily+ came to that decision were identical in both universes; at any point before then, Lily and Lily+ could have been transposed with each other and neither they nor anyone else would ever have known or been able to discern, through any scientific measurement that anyone could have carried out, that they had been swapped. But this is not enough for you to call their worlds “parallel”. My only guess–and it is my supposition, so correct me if I’m wrong–is that your reservation is based on the fact that at no point were Lily and Lily+ actually the same entity, unlike Lily*, who spawns an entire (parallel) universe by the act of splitting from Lily.
You further claim, back in the first paragraph, that my separate entities version of parallel worlds might not “meet what is classically understood as alternate realities (at least not as used in fiction).” So, to make my point, I would like to introduce a quote from the wikipedia page on the popular fiction movie, “Into the Spiderverse”:
“The film’s story follows Miles Morales as he becomes the new Spider-Man and joins other Spider-People from various parallel universes to save his universe from Kingpin.”
Now, I’m not an expert in the mcu, but afaik, the various parallel worlds it deals with aren’t all spawned from miles morales having made various particular decisions. And certainly all the various spider-people who join forces with him weren’t split directly from their various analogues on Miles’s Earth, right? But they’re still parallel universe versions of those people, and parallel universe versions of the hero Spiderman. So I think I can be afforded some leniency on this issue.
tl;dr the mcu supports versions of “parallel worlds” that resemble mine, and if Jadis didn’t textually support more than one line of reality, by your own reading, we wouldn’t be here. I leave your fourth paragraph alone for now because I’m already writing a hemcking novel
I was not talking fiction, i was talking Wigner’s Multiple World Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (i.e. “wave functions don’t collapse, they just go on forever spreading out to all possible outcomes in a vast probability space”).
There literally can be multiple worlds separated by phase shift in the wave functions (at first). The math works out.
You insist on there being one world and the possibilities causing future to branch. I keep trying to explain that each branch means new world.
My apologies, I never checked back on this thread.
Scylla – Basically what I was trying to get at is that you posit not a branching reality, but a set of realities which have always been fundamentally different from the start. They aren’t alternate. They’re just different. Now, they are very similar in portions, but they have always been fundamentally distinct. You go to some pains to try and resolve the distinction by talking about how similar the two are, but fail to resolve the contradiction that in one of the realities 1+1 = 2 and in another 1+1=3 (everything, absolutely everything, was the same in one universe up until the split, but in the moment of that split only that particular choice could be made in that particular instant).
Your choice of the MCU is telling, mainly because in Enter the Spiderverse, the worlds aren’t parallel (despite a Wikipedia entry describing them as such). Namely, a different amount of time has passed in each universe. See for example that Spider Man Noir comes from a reality with a different axis of time (his base reality is the 1930’s) with an entirely different set of physical laws (color, for example). Enter the Spider-Verse is the tale of a multi-verse, not one of parallel worlds. Now, because it’s fiction, there could be an extremely convoluted set of events to explain these branches (hijinx in the distant past when they were establish the modern calendar, for example, and I guess someone somewhere made a choice to get rid of color), but that didn’t seem to be what they were getting at.
This may simply be a problem of definition, in which case well, I doubt we’re going to reach a resolution.
Same guy – I’m not insisting that there can’t be multiple worlds, Jadis is.
You say that “if there is one world you end up in, then only one world is possible” but – why?
If you’re riding a train from Berlin to Frankfurt you’ll end up in Paris but that doesn’t mean that the rail line from Paris to Marseille stops existing. It isn’t relevant to you, but it still very much exists.
That’s sorta as if you said “oh, things outside of our observable universe don’t exist because we can’t ever hope to interact with them” even though we’re seeing a galaxy slowly redshift to that way of the event horizon now. Does it stop existing? No, it only stops being available to us.
This is the same thing, only instead of physical space differences we’re talking probability space.
I doubt this will help resolve our point of contention, but let’s co-opt your train analogy.
You’re on the train from Berlin to Frankfurt, right. Now for the purposes of this analogy, you are unable to buy tickets from Paris to Marseille. Who knows why, maybe you don’t have money, maybe some magic prevents you from interacting with it, whatever, but regardless no action on your part will ever get you from Paris to Marseille via train. It is not a choice available to you.
In that situation, is traveling from Paris to Marseille via train a possible trip you could make?
Not at all. Consider that we have no control over which of an infinite number of realities we experience. That infinite reality soup can still be static, and our experience of it too. The fact that the other stuff exists doesn’t change anything.
Okay, let’s run with your premise.
There are an infinite number of entirely deterministic realities. You find yourself in one of them. Is it possible for you to be in any of the others?
This may just be her perception because of her unique point of view. Because she sees all things she assumes that they must flow that way. But what if someone did act differently? Would things shift to a new pattern and because of her way of perceiving reality, would this now be the way that they were “always” meant to be?
More, her perception of reality would give her reason to believe she sees “everything”. But if there were things outside her view, such as something that does provide meaning, her belief that she sees everything though all time would encourage her to believe that there couldn’t possibly be something she can’t see.
The thing with a perfectly deterministic universe is that you cannot “act differently”. Both past and future extrapolate immutably from any point in the pattern. If Allison killed herself right now to prove Jadis wrong with how long she is going to live than it was always a part of that pattern that Jadis gives her that number and she kills herself. If Jadis tells someone that they’re going to walk through the right door and they walk through the left one it was always so that they make that choice because that is the deterministic result of them hearing this information, and it was and will always be the deterministic result from the very spark of existence to the very snuffing out of it. In a perfectly deterministic universe Jadis is not bound to tell the truth but whether she speaks true or lies she is bound to say these words.
Having said that if you consider her vice is sloth think of how easy it is to accept the shape of the universe as is. To proclaim that any attempt to use your knowledge of how the wheel spins is useless. Maybe Jadis is that one person who could “act differently” and break the determinism? Maybe the wheel will grind her to dust if she does but at the same time it’ll stumble in the process? I guess we wait and see…
Of course, if only one person is aware of the perfectly deterministic universe (Jadis) they can’t actually prove to anyone else that the universe is perfectly deterministic. As you point out, they’ll say whatever they say, and the others will do whatever they were going to do anyway. Which means that everyone else can get on with thinking they have free will while the sole “aware” person continues to complain about them not having it.
Basically, it doesn’t matter if Jadis is telling the truth. It only matters that she is saying what she always says. And always to be same results.
But a perfectly determinist universe does not allow for Jadis to exist. The halting problem says that no system can perfectly predict a system containing itself. It’s the halting problem, and Jadis is effectively an Oracle Machine, except since she’s inside the universe, she’s perceiving herself, which Oracle Machines can’t do.
What if it’s because jadis has given up on disobeying fate that she has become an oracle within the system? What if All the other children died because if they had become oricles like her, they would have defied fate, and invoked a paradox? Thus this would have rejected subjects until one that obeys fate despite seeing it got plugged in.
But she cannot see her own mind. Can the eyeball see itself? perhaps causality only changes when you are not looking at it. The weakness off all perceivers is the inability to see oneself. The fundamental lie is that we are different from what we perceive. I suspect that the one piece of the universe that the Oriacle cannot see or predict is herself but she chooses to follow the plan. After all, choosing to follow plan makes the plan happen as planned. Her view of reality is preserved. Did I choose to ramble or was I always going to ramble?
She can perceive her own actions though, which would be enough to change those actions.
Unless it isn’t. She sees strings. She isn’t free.
Unless she’s cynical and has given up on doing so.
The alt text of the past pages…
How many times have you been here, Allison?
Maybe I will never make it home..
According to the witch, Traveller, you may never make it, or you already have made it, and it simply remains for you to continue and see which fate has been etched into your Amber.
Dear traveller,
Have you considered that you might be a snail and however far you travel your home is right behind you?
No! Defy this fate, break the infinity of your lost identity and return to your loving family!
I believe in you, traveler. You will come home soon.
Many have accused the Lady of Infinite Repose of the sins of sloth, of apathy, but that presumes that the witch ever had a choice. One must assume that she has seen the possibilities of attempting to defy fate, seen how her attempts are rendered futile. She does not act, but she already knows she does not act. She may well have tried to bend all of her will to escaping destiny, but… The Future Refused To Change.
OK, but how exactly does that gel with the whole part of the multiverse being trapped in a time loop with Zoss periodically rewinding things? Since she’s got started doing exposition, it’d be nice if she explained that.
To possess knowledge without the power to act upon it; a terrible curse indeed.
Built with the backs of the destitute,
the monolith stands wicked and red.
This sounds more like a personal defense mechanism against bearing the psychological weight of omniscience.
Just because you know everything doesn’t mean causality ceases to exist.
Cause and effect are ever in play. You will not be able to change what you know but this does not absolve yourself of the responsibility of action.
On the contrary, recognizing the true unerring extent of the consequences of your actions gives you far more responsibility for acting wisely in the right moment.
Granted that’s not likely to be even remotely easy when you have to sift through the noise of absolutely everything to try and get to the heart of anything that matters, let alone that which matters most in the moment.
No. That is not how this works.
How to explain… people like to think that the universe is not deterministic, and mentionnquantum physics, specifically heisenburg uncertainty.
Hiesenburg asserts that a particle with a 50-50 (or any other knowable probability) of being one way or another, cannot be determined until it has been observed. After which the possible interactions of the unobserved possibility vanishes. This assumes that the Copenhagen interpretation is correct.
However, Jadis is telling you straight up that the universe is NOT obeying the Copenhagen interpretation. It is obeying the ManyWorlds interpretation.
For every possible interaction, state, configuration of states, and changes of states, a finite desicion tree manifests, which fully, completely, and unerringly describes the totality of existence.
The wavefunction of the universe itself.
There may be ‘boundary conditions’ on the universe that limitnthe possible depth of this function, by excluding worlds with more, or less energy than an allowed range, consistent with quantum field theory’s fundamental quantization. One could then produce a description of the universe, based on the rules, and the starting energy, from the allowable energies. This function describes all states of that umiverse, statically.
Any individually percieved iteration of that universe is just one of yhe many worlds in the possibility space.
There are countless Alissons.
There are countless worlds of Throne.
What holds each of them apart, are the discretized events that led to them, each a manifestation of the immutable function, at the starting energy– and each of those are manifestations of the function which sets the boundaries.
Like the math on the paper, it never changes.
All possible worlds exist, are static, unchanging, and have always existed.
The universe is a ‘solved game’.
Umhmm.
Hmm.
Ah-huumm.
Ah!
I know some of these words!
I’m not sure you get my meaning. I understand what Jadis is saying.
But I still disagree with her conclusion.
Even when the outcome is known in full certainty, with zero question of any variance or “things could have been different”, that doesn’t mean your actions don’t matter or aren’t important.
What it means is that you (potentially) know precisely the outcome of every decision you’ll make, but information a human knows is always filtered through a human’s perspective.
In short, there’s a difference between knowing everything and understanding everything.
In the grand morass of a vast universal perspective a human might lose precisely how much their actions matter in specific instances, and to specific people.
It’s not an issue of “Will what I do change anything?” because according to Jadis it will not, and for now we’re assuming she’s correct. It’s “Will what I do matter?” and that’s an entirely different question.
From Jadis’s omniscient perspective because nothing changes, nothing matters, thus there is no point to anything.
But there’s meaning in acting even when what you do won’t change anything. Something being a known, unchangable outcome doesn’t mean that the ones acting towards that outcome aren’t responsible for bringing it about and likewise the ones resisting such outcomes might be struggling in vain to prevent them but it doesn’t meant they struggle pointlessly. In many ways the struggle is a meaning and point in itself.
So she can be correct about everything and still be missing the point.
How can someone be responsible for something he has no power over?
Let’s say you are omniscient.
This means (among other things) you know the outcomes of your actions. Knowing the outcome does not remove your ability to act, only your ability to change the future to be something other than what you have seen.
You are still responsible for your own actions, even if you know they will be futile to ever make a difference.
Your actions still take part of and shape the world along with everyone else’s the only difference is that you’ll never be surprised by what happens.
Everything goes according to a “plan” that’s not yours. But it doesn’t mean that YOU haven’t done anything.
Lacking the power to make a difference is not lacking the power to act in the first place.
Further, you might look in the future and see “There was no other option” but there are few courts that will absolve you of murdering an innocent person just because it was your destiny to do so.
The wrinkle in all of that according to Jadis people can not choose to NOT take the actions that they take. If it is literally impossible for a person to take a different action than what they did, are they really responsible for their actions? You could compare it to a robot with programmed actions. The robot is only able to act as programed, even if its not aware of the program. When the robot takes an action who is responsible, the robot, or the programmer? According to jadis, people are simply robots who are just following a program written by the universe
Also the reason why courts would never absolve you of murder based on “there was no other option” is because courts believe that free will exists, and thus you did in fact have the choice not to commit murder and your “reasoning” is just pure BS. Jadis’s whole argument is that there is no free will; no one is responsible for their actions because they literally have no freedom to choose to do anything other than what they do
Either everyone is responsible for their actions or no one is.
My point is that Jadis is as responsible for her actions as anyone else who’s not omniscient would be. Her omniscience doesn’t give her any special absolution from this.
All else the same, we at least have the benefit of the illusion of free will. Jadis does not have this illusion. But her lacking the illusion doesn’t give her any special status regarding responsibility. She is as responsible as anyone else.
Whether that is no repsonsiblity at all or just as responsible as we appear to be, makes no difference to me.
Jadis’s position is that no one is responsible for their actions. She’s not giving herself any kind of special absolution
OOH, is this an existentialist philosophical debate about webcomic characters? This is my JAM, you guys. If I could add my own little two cents:
The essence of Unclever title’s argument here is actually contained in an age-old philosophy championed by people throughout history, like the Stoics and Thomas Aquinas. In the modern day, it’s called COMPATIBILISM. Basically, in any debate of “determinism vs. free will”, most people tend to assume that the only relevant issue is “how the universe works”, but compatibilism undermines that by pointing out there is another element inherent to the debate, and that is the definition of the SELF. In particular, compatibilitism attacks the idea that human selfhood is inherently transcendent and separate from the universe, and thus a lack of transcendence equates to the annihilation of the self, and most notably of moral responsibility. But if one redefines the self to be PART of the universe, rather than some alien object that transcends it, determinism doesn’t actually have any bearing on moral responsibility! Rather than constantly chasing a perfect, impossible, ideal which can only be reached via complete control over the universe, the combatibilist tries to be morally responsible by choosing the best POSSIBLE outcome given the boundary conditions of their current existence. Complete knowledge of those conditions is usually impossible, of course, but even if you’re omniscient like Jadis, compatibilism means you’re not actually absolved of responsibility under this definition. For instance, Jadis isn’t bad in this instance because her transcendent self could have altered reality in a positive way but chose not to; it’s because her actions, in and of themselves, can be deemed to have a negative impact on the universe. Even if there isn’t any possible universe where she wasn’t a horrible dictator, she still betrayed our value system by being a horrible dictator, and by being the kind of person who becomes a horrible dictator given her situation. And thus, she is bad we are totally justified in disliking her.
Whew. Hope that made sense to some people. This concludes Dr. Terrapin’s Philosophy Hour.
How do you know she isn’t choosing her best actions to bring about desired outcomes given her boundary conditions? As she has seen the mechanisms of the universe, perhaps she knows better than any that trying to deviate would have more disastrous outcomes than her being a tyrant. (As we now know that deviating would get the universe wiped and reset by Zoss if he felt he wasn’t getting the right outcome that very well might be.)
See, nothing ever changes. We all just become more of what we have always been. You cannot shape the path of destiny, just as I can’t either. Everything is fine. Let’s have a picnic.
Can we talk about how long Jadis’ hair is? Of course she’d never get it tangled in anything, omniscience and all, but she has got a mane.
Nothing in life matters? You’ve clearly never had a nice hot bowl of soup.
Or a nice BLT.
Sucked….Into….A Bagel….
Exactly the response I was looking for. Perhaps she needs to fight with kindness.
Jadis needs to reread her Spasms. Infinite knowledge doesn’t make for infinite wisdom, I guess.
(e_ə)
Even so, we must imagine Sisyphus is happy.
“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”
– Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
Sloth beyond sloth.
Eh. Just because you can’t look towards the future doesn’t mean that there is no different action that can be made.
You just need to choose. Whatever choice you may have been pre-seen, but there’s an equal chance that it won’t.
Otherwise, Zoss would just use Jadis to look ahead for the final result, and short-cut it. Jadis would see Zoss both not asking and asking her, as the results of time would tell her that the true successor is ____, but Zoss would eventually figure it out via time looping, and since the loops are paradoxically negating themselves as Zoss resets the timeline, Jadis should see ALL options, including the final one that actually works, allowing the solution to be provided at the ‘first’ attempt.
TL-DR: Zoss’s time loops should allow him to eventually pick the true successor. Jadis can see forwards and backwards through time. The loops eventually end. When they end, the true heir is found. Jadis can tell him who the true heir is. As the loops are paradoxes, they never happen in the end, and Jadis can just tell him the final result.
Well, Metatron resets the loop, but still. The process of causality gets flimsy around temporal events
*passes Alison an Arby’s sandwich*
Nihilist Arby’s smiles because Jadis knows all of their tweets down to the very electron
woah, nietzsche would want a word with you lol
How paradoxical, no matter how grim, or boring the possibility of knowing all things, I cannot stop myself from finding it extremely amusing as a concept. Indeed there are many signs in life that all things are either completely or almost completely, predestined due to mere science with possibility, stimulus, natural reactions to universals laws, and so on. And yet it is indeed amusing to me, yes we “do what we do,” so why not enjoy it to it’s fullest, I may be following a set path, but why not make the path as enjoyable as possible, this “nothing” is quite beautiful, yet fierce, and I would do anything to reach my own enjoyment, even smite the gods and remake the world in the shape of paradise.