Is everything pre-determined in OOTS world?

[Conradine]

Since prophecies and oracles do exist, does that means the OOTS world is deterministic, pre-destined?

[Dion]

Since prophecies and oracles do exist, does that means the OOTS world is deterministic, pre-destined?

Of course! Whatever the author wants to have happen, will be exactly what happens.

On a more serious note, here’s my personal head canon for any fictional universe with “true” prophecies which are otherwise unexplained:

The fictional universe is not deterministic, and are an infinite uncountable set of possible futures. But the fictional setting also has “strange attractor statements”, which are statements that converge to true in all (or most) futures.

In other words, there might be a billion billion billion different ways that prophecy might be true. And for most of them, people might say, “huh! I guess that, given that specific wording, that prophecy did technically turn out to be a true statement after all. That’s ironic!”

There’s no way to know *how* a prophecy becomes true, and the characters in the story still have a huge amount of freedom to choose their future. But regardless of what path is chosen, the prophecy (usually) comes true (somehow).

Unless the author explains different, I just figure that for whatever reason, the physical laws of a particular fictional universe are setup to make these hypothetical strange attractors exist, and to give some entities the ability to perceive them. But they don’t actually predict the future in a meaningful way.

[Fyraltari]

I guess so.

EDIT:

Of course! Whatever the author wants to have happen, will be exactly what happens.

On a more serious note, here’s my personal head canon for any fictional universe with “true” prophecies which are otherwise unexplained:

The fictional universe is not deterministic, and are an infinite uncountable set of possible futures. But the fictional setting also has “strange attractor statements”, which are statements that converge to true in all (or most) futures.

In other words, there might be a billion billion billion different ways that prophecy might be true. And for most of them, people might say, “huh! I guess that, given that specific wording, that prophecy did technically turn out to be a true statement after all. That’s ironic!”

There’s no way to know *how* a prophecy becomes true, and the characters in the story still have a huge amount of freedom to choose their future. But regardless of what path is chosen, the prophecy (usually) comes true (somehow).

Unless the author explains different, I just figure that for whatever reason, the physical laws of a particular fictional universe are setup to make these hypothetical strange attractors exist, and to give some entities the ability to perceive them. But they don’t actually predict the future in a meaningful way.
And I'm a compatibilist. That's far less work.

[Dion]

I guess so.

I knew you would say that.

[The Pilgrim]

The fact that prophesies work doesn't necessarily imply that the wold is deterministic. Just because someone can look into the future and watch the outcome of the actions you freely chose, doesn't mean you are not chosing them freely.

[Conradine]

Choice involves at the very least two options. If there is only one option, it's a false choice.
Unless divinations are only probabilistic.

[Morquard]

The fact that prophesies work doesn't necessarily imply that the wold is deterministic. Just because someone can look into the future and watch the outcome of the actions you freely chose, doesn't mean you are not chosing them freely.

Also a lot of prophecies work on the principle that the actions you take to avoid them are the very actions that cause them in the first place. In other words, if you wouldn't have received the prophecy, it wouldn't have happened.

[Dion]

Choice involves at the very least two options. If there is only one option, it's a false choice.
Unless divinations are only probabilistic.

Or maybe there are uncountably infinite ways that a prophecy can be true.

Maybe in another version of the infinite possible futures, Belkar has twin pet gerbils ironically named death and destruction, and he brings them for a visit.

[Resileaf]

Most of the time, prophecies are told in a way that is vague enough that multiple interpretations are right (or can become right).

If we judge Odin's high priest's prophecy alone, it seems to be meant to manipulate events to follow a specific road and reach a specific end.

[Dion]

If we judge Odin's high priest's prophecy alone, it seems to be meant to manipulate events to follow a specific road and reach a specific end.

Hmm... let’s separate “prophecy” from “prediction”.

Let’s assume Odin can use thought and memory to make predictions about the future. He knows things that might happen, and he can even carefully set up events to influence the future.

Let’s also assume that Odin is a skilled trickster, and can also make prophecies. He can construct statements that can be twisted and interpreted through hindsight in ways that it turns out they’re always true (even if just ironically true).

Prediction and prophecy aren’t the same thing. Not even close.

Of course, Odin is a tricky dude, so he used a prophecy to help along a prediction, confusing us all. Way to go, Odin!

[Emanick]

The fact that prophesies work doesn't necessarily imply that the wold is deterministic. Just because someone can look into the future and watch the outcome of the actions you freely chose, doesn't mean you are not chosing them freely.

This, basically.

Beings who are capable of prophesying have the ability to allow their perception to essentially time-travel into the future and observe what has taken place. This does not actually change the events that transpire; it merely allows the prophesying being to learn which events have occurred by that point in time. The fact that somebody could theoretically travel forward in time to see what you're about to do doesn't rob you of your ability to act freely; it simply means that person is able to skip ahead and see what you chose to do without being bound by time. That's my headcanon, anyway.

I also assume prophecies can typically only be generated in situations where knowledge of them will not lead to a paradox of some kind. Perhaps some beings, like The Oracle, are able to discover the answer to specific questions, but they can foresee which outcomes will lead to a paradox that invalidates said prophecy, annuling the possible future and (at least in The Oracle's case) jeopardizing his business. For a question like "Will I sleep in by accident tomorrow?", for instance, the answer might be Yes, but it might change if the answer Yes is given to the question-asker. So it is possible that The Oracle would automatically foresee that outcome, and thus be able to provide an answer that does not lead to a paradox ("Not if you go to bed by nine").

[Dion]

Hmm... I think I’m confusing what I think of a “literary prophecy”, which is just a statement that can be seen to be true through hindsight, with “true prophecy”, which is actually predicting what will happen with foresight.

So far, Odin has demonstrated only what I would call “literary prophecy”. Odin never predicted an actual concrete future, just some extremely vague statement that could have meant billions of different things.

The oracle, on the other hand, appears to be have actually demonstrated “true prophecy”. He seems to actually have some idea what will actually happen (for a very narrow part of the future).

[Resileaf]

Hmm... let’s separate “prophecy” from “prediction”.


How is Odin's prophecy a prediction?

[Dion]

How is Odin's prophecy a prediction?

Well, Ive seen nothing in the comic that has convinced me that odin predicted anything. .

He made a very vague prophecy, but there were a billion billion different ways that could have come true.

[Rrmcklin]

Choice involves at the very least two options. If there is only one option, it's a false choice.
Unless divinations are only probabilistic.

If I offer you the choice of two foods you like equally, and also have the power to see which one you eventually end up choosing, does the fact that I know which one you eventually pick mean it wasn't actually your choice? I played no role besides offering one or the other, and wouldn't refuse regardless of which one you picked.

Me knowing the outcome has absolutely no effect on how you independently came to your decision.

[Resileaf]

Well, Ive seen nothing in the comic that has convinced me that odin predicted anything. .

He made a very vague prophecy, but there were a billion billion different ways that could have come true.

Yes, that's the point of a prophecy. You say something vague and people interpret it.

[Gnoman]

There's a few things pointing to the "OOTS prophecies are not infallible" notion. First, the Test of The Heart intended to avoid prophecy seekers keeling over - that's something that would be useless in a fixed world. Second, when Roy askes where Xykon is going to attack, the Oracle tries very hard to steer him toward the actual target (excluded by Roy's rule's lawyering) where Roy getting the right answer would probably result in a successful defense of the city and Xykon never getting a chance to go for the next gate. Finally when the Oracle gets raised, the clerics who do it (and are implied to do so frequently) ask if the next scheduled raise is still needed - implying that the Oracle sometimes cancels the service as unneeded.




The most likely explanation is that it is a matter of probabilities (the prophecy is the most likely output of the "computer" called the universe with the settings as they currently are), and getting the prophecy fixes one of the variables so strongly that the probability of it coming to pass is greatly strengthened.

[Devils_Advocate]

I don't think that predestination requires determinism. I.e. one definite future need be determined by the present.


Choice involves at the very least two options. If there is only one option, it's a false choice.
When one says that a sentient being, rather than e.g. an inanimate object, "can" do something, one often mean this in the special sense that the sentient being could perform the activity if it wanted to. That doesn't necessarily mean that there's actually a possibility that it might do it, as it might be that it will certainly never want to. Thus, taking "can" to mean "might" in this context is equivocation. {Scrubbed}

So, in that sense, there being two things that you can do doesn't mean that you might do either. And if "option" doesn't mean "something that one can do", what does it mean?

"Free will" is a contradiction in terms, insofar as the term "will" refers to a force that determines one's actions and the term "free" denies any such determination. That you determine your own actions requires that your actions be determined, not undetermined. (http://lesswrong.com/lw/r0/thou_art_physics/) Specifically, it requires that your actions be determined by you (https://existentialcomics.com/comic/70). This factor does not serve to make human behavior unpredictable. On the contrary, I predict with a high degree of certainty that you will eat a meal within the next twenty-four hours, not because you are compelled to eat against your will, but because you are compelled to eat by your will, as it is your will that you be fed. You're still "free" to go hungry, in the sense that you could if you wanted to.

To value unpredictability in this context seems to me absurd. Are we to regard voluntary action as morally significant if and only if the cognitive processes involved in decision-making include the equivalent of a random number generator?

To give an illustrative example: Gandhi wants not to commit murder. As a result of this desire, he also wants his mind not to change such that he wants to commit murder, as then he might murder someone, which he wants not to do. Given all of this, does the potential to suddenly flip out and kill someone grant him more self-determination than lacking that potential?

Agency doesn't require metaphysical freedom; it requires a lack of metaphysical freedom, at least to a degree. For example, if our utterances were wholly constrained, but instead could be anything, we would only produce gibberish, and not even gibberish of our choosing! Random noises would not be based on our intentions, and thus would not be chosen. We are only free to use language because our utterances are constrained by our intentions.


Prediction and prophecy aren’t the same thing. Not even close.
The online dictionary that I checked gives "prediction" (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/prediction) and "prophesy" (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/prophecy) as synonyms, at least in some cases. Your intended point seems to be that guesses about the future aren't the same as claims about the future. Why not just say that? Redefining words against their normal meanings is, quite frankly, the opposite of helpful for communication. It annoys me when D&D does it, and it annoys me when individuals do it on their own, too. No sir, I don't like it.

[Conradine]

If I offer you the choice of two foods you like equally, and also have the power to see which one you eventually end up choosing, does the fact that I know which one you eventually pick mean it wasn't actually your choice?

Yes.
If my choice could be predicted with 100% certainity, that would mean I'm an automaton, not a person.



{Scrub the post, scrub the quote}
{Scrubbed}



That doesn't necessarily mean that there's actually a possibility that it might do it, as it might be that it will certainly never want to.

Nope. If there's zero chances then it's not a possibility.

[Fish]

No, not yet.

But it will be.

[Rrmcklin]

I'll say it seems less like the OP is actually asking a question, and more just looking for people to agree with them on something they've already decided.

[Dion]

The online dictionary that I checked gives "prediction" (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/prediction) and "prophesy" (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/prophecy) as synonyms, at least in some cases. Your intended point seems to be that guesses about the future aren't the same as claims about the future. Why not just say that? Redefining words against their normal meanings is, quite frankly, the opposite of helpful for communication. It annoys me when D&D does it, and it annoys me when individuals do it on their own, too. No sir, I don't like it.

The comic I’m reading right now uses the world “prophecy” to mean “a very vague statement that only turns out to be true in hindsight.”

It might technically be a prediction, but not in the sense that it predicts what will happen, or how it will happen, or when it will happen.

In he comic I’m reading right now, Literally the only thing a prophesy predicts is that at some point in the future, people will say “oh, that’s how that statement turned out to be true. How ironic!”

[Devils_Advocate]

If my choice could be predicted with 100% certainity, that would mean I'm an automaton, not a person.
Is there some established definition of "person" for which that's necessarily the case? If so, could you point me towards it?


Actually, it works. It's a valid argument.
No, it doesn't. No, it isn't. It equivocates between different senses of the word "can". That's like equating existing and being located in the mind with being imagined, because those can both be described as "existing in the mind" (http://machall.com/view.php?date=2003-04-21), when obviously the phrase means something different when taken literally than it does when taken figuratively. It's just pure verbal trickery, like suggesting that you could eat "the Sundays" from a calendar. Sure, it might make for a cute joke, but hopefully you can agree that that's not something that you can actually do.


Nope. If there's zero chances then it's not a possibility.
... Exactly. Why did you put "Nope" before agreeing with me?


The comic I’m reading right now uses the world “prophecy” to mean “a very vague statement that only turns out to be true in hindsight.”
Dude, I don't like it when the comic redefines words against normal use either (e.g with "Dedication" (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1144.html))! I don't like it when anyone does that. In fact, I dislike it when anyone does that. Am I now making my position sufficiently clear?


It might technically be a prediction, but not in the sense that it predicts what will happen, or how it will happen, or when it will happen.
"Prediction of what will happen" is a redundant phrase, with the same meaning as simply "prediction". Any claim about the future is a prediction of what will happen. Some are more specific than others, but it's not like any of them is going to give the position of every particle in the universe. Language in general is vague. (http://bactra.org/Russell/vagueness/) Further, the prediction was of what will happen when Durkon next returns home.


In he comic I’m reading right now, Literally the only thing a prophesy predicts is that at some point in the future, people will say “oh, that’s how that statement turned out to be true. How ironic!”
Um, no. Prophesies in the comic are not all self-referential statements of the form "You'll think that this is true at some point in the future". In fact, none of them are one of those.

[Squire Doodad]

Not everything is predetermined.
You can have 100% accurate Oracles and infinite timelines coexist. An Oracle simply looks at which timeline they are, peeks a bit further ahead and then lets the client know which tidbit of info puts them onto the path for that future. Of course, the Oracles themselves can always lie, for one reason or another.

[Dion]

Um, no. Prophesies in the comic are not all self-referential statements of the form "You'll think that this is true at some point in the future". In fact, none of them are one of those.

Well, unlike *real* prophecies, we assume that the prophecies in the strip are ACCURATE predictions of the future. So that’s one major way the prophecies people are discussing in thread are nothing at all like the dictionary definition of a prophecy.

Second, the prophecies in the strip are all self referential, in the sense that they describe an event that retroactively gives meaning to a prophecy, but fails to give meaning to the event.

For example, “By saying the right four words to the right being at the right time for all the wrong reasons” or “when the goat turns red strikes true” are meaningless until after the event they describe retroactively gives them meaning.

Not only are they meaningless without the event, even after the event the only thing they reveal is that the statements themselves turned out to be true.

[factotum]

This is a problem I have with prophecy in fiction generally. I don't think any of the "solutions" raised by people in this thread get around the fact that, if my future actions are 100% predictable, then to all intents and purposes the universe is entirely deterministic. But we know in reality that even predicting something as simple as the weather more than a week or two ahead is impossible, so why should people's future actions be any more predictable? Heck, I might choose to go out or not depending on whether it's raining or not, and as I already mentioned, the weather is a chaotic unpredictable system, so if my actions are being influenced by that, they're equally unpredictable.

Now, I know what someone is about to say: but Thor controls the weather in OotSverse, it's not unpredictable! I was just using weather as an example, there are plenty of other unpredictable things that could influence someone's actions. To my mind, as soon as you introduce 100% reliable prophecy of the kind we've seen, you're immediately making the entire universe and everyone in it run on predictable clockwork paths.

[Fyraltari]

I am just going to let someone more talented than me sum up my position (http://existentialcomics.com/comic/278).

In the debate between determinists and compatibilists it is often repeated that the side arguing that free will and determinism are compatible are just playing word games, and changing the definition of "free will". However, it's probably the other way around. When the debate is first framed in philosophy 101 classes it causes people enter into a sort of confusion about what they had previously believed. It's hard to get at what people's pre-theoretical notions of freedom are, but we can certainly observe that no audience has ever gasped in shock like Marty does in this comic upon "learning" that people behave deterministically, and only by altering their environment would you alter their decisions. In fact, this is the basic premise of all time travel movies, and people find it so obvious that it never has to be explained. If the director wanted people to find it disconcerting that they supposed have no "free will", a large explanation would have to take place in order to get the audience to understand. Likewise, if the director wanted to depict the so call "libertarian" view of free will, that is that we are "truly" free and our souls or consciousness can make decisions outside of physics, the audience would also demand an explanation. I suspect that most people, upon learning that the mere act of going back in time and observing themselves again, might find themselves making different decisions for no apparent reason, would feel like they were less free. After all, if my decision to get married was based not on the kind of person I am, nor on the environment, but on something else entirely that can oscillate back and forth "freely", I might feel like the fact that I'm currently married wasn't so much my choice, but merely chance.
What concerns people about freedom in movies, it seems, is whether or not the action came from ourselves rather than a foreign object, not whether or not our decisions are somehow able to take place outside of the "laws of physics" (a strange idea to be sure, since the laws of physics merely describe what exists in reality, so whatever occurs in reality must be under them, i.e. it is definitionally true that nothing can break the laws of physics, because if they did we would just revise the laws to accomadate for this new information). While people do not react with horror that we make the same decisions every time, they probably would react with horror if a sci-fi movie shows that our decisions are secretly being made by a computer chip implanted in our brains without our knowledge. No one worries that the computer chip is deterministic, merely that it is not part of our being. The compatibilist account of free will, which seems to be taken for granted in time travel stories, is that freedom simply is having what we are be in control of our decisions.

[factotum]

Sorry, but what does physics have to do with anything? That is saying, as far as I can see, that you can predict what someone is going to do just based on the state of all the molecules in their brain at any time. That may be true, but the problem is, it's not possible to exactly determine the state of all the molecules in a person's body at any one time, Heisenberg being what it is--so if the only way to predict a person's reaction comes down to physics, that makes reliable predictions *less* feasible, not more!

[Emanick]

I am just going to let someone more talented than me sum up my position (http://existentialcomics.com/comic/278).


I always thought that comic, along with the accompanying explanation (to a lesser extent), was rather confused. I'll do my best to explain why.

Marty's parents only live through the events of 1955 once. There is no reason to believe Marty's presence in 1955 would automatically alter the trajectory of his parents' lives in any way if he had simply avoided them. We don't know why, in a metaphysical sense, they made the decisions they did - all we know is that they did.

Should we expect the opposite - that, if free will did exist, every hypothetical time traveler to 1955, by virtue of his or her presence, would somehow observe Marty's parents making different choices? Of course not. There's only one George and only one Lorraine. This is not a situation where timelines are necessarily being split (of course, this does happen in the movies, but it only explicitly happens in the second movie). Every observer is watching the same series of events playing out over the same time period. It's not clear to me why, if you moved yourself back through time, you would somehow compel other people to behave differently while you watched them all over again.

I grasp the idea that, if you watched somebody behave the same way over and over again in identical situations (a la a certain episode in Doctor Who - if you don't know what I'm talking about, there's no point being more specific), you might think her or his behavior was dictated entirely by circumstances, personality, etc. If someone lives the same day 100 times - with his or her memory wiped at the end of each day - and behaves identically every time, perhaps that would be evidence of determinism. But Back to the Future has a sample size of 1, not a sample size of 100, so it's just not comparable. George and Lorraine only experience the same week once, so it shouldn't be any surprise that they would behave the same way whether or not Marty is there, as long as he doesn't interfere.

I apologize for any redundancy in the above, but I have a difficult time understanding why anyone would believe that, if observing the past doesn't cause it to change, the world must be deterministic, so I tried to say the same thing in several different ways. Maybe I'm missing something?

[Dion]

To my mind, as soon as you introduce 100% reliable prophecy of the kind we've seen, you're immediately making the entire universe and everyone in it run on predictable clockwork paths.

Can you give an example from the strip of a prophecy that has worked like that?

[Squire Doodad]

Can you give an example from the strip of a prophecy that has worked like that?

The Oracle. Specifically, what the Oracle said to V and Durkon- the others are more a vague comment that is meant to put them on the right track.
V: "Will I ever obtain ultimate arcane power" "By saying the right 4 words to the right being for all the wrong reasons" - V said "I...I must succeed" to the IFCC, granting him ultimate power. While the "wrong reason" bit is debatable, it still worked out almost exactly as the Oracle said.
Durkon: "Will I ever return to the Dwarven lands" "Posthumously" - Well, this should be obvious. Sometime after Durkon's death (and while he was still dead, as a bonus), Durkon made it back to the Dwarven Lands. That he was revived while there is irrelevant; what matters is that Durkon died and then made it to the Dwarven Lands afterwards.

[factotum]

You're forgetting what happened when Haley and Celia went back to the Oracle. Not only did Belkar fulfil his prophecy there, but the Oracle knew when that would happen so precisely that he could arrange for someone to teleport in and resurrect him. He also precisely described when his next death would be, and under what circumstances, to those helpers.

[Dion]

Durkon: "Will I ever return to the Dwarven lands" "Posthumously" - Well, this should be obvious. Sometime after Durkon's death (and while he was still dead, as a bonus), Durkon made it back to the Dwarven Lands. That he was revived while there is irrelevant; what matters is that Durkon died and then made it to the Dwarven Lands afterwards.

Right, but the Oracle didn’t predict with 100% certainty that he would be killed by Malack, or team up with Gontor and Poncho, or return to dwarven lands to influence a vote.

The Oracle only said Durkon would be dead. That could have happened a billion different ways, and there is nothing in the comic to suggest that the actual events that would happen to make him dead were predetermined.

TLDR: The only thing that seems to be actually predetermined is that the oracles statements somehow come true. I’ve seen no evidence that HOW they come true is predetermined.

[Resileaf]

And let's not forget that the Oracle tried, admitedly half-heartedly, to cheat death by pretending Belkar had already fulfilled the prophecy. And for all we know, it's trying to cheat it that made Belkar kill him because he was annoyed.

[Fish]

It’s possible to imagine prophecy as a state of temporally-displaced quantum entanglement, or like two ends of a wormhole. The prophecy exists at one end of the tether; the event it predicts happens at the other end of the tether. They are, for all practical purposes, simultaneously determined, despite being displaced in time. Everything else in the universe need not be 100% determined as a result of that prophecy, only such things that are displaced by the pull of that one event.. The prophecy will come true, despite what the sandstorms in Mars or the current in the River Styx might do.

[Jaxzan Proditor]

I’d say that OOTS is a deterministic universe. Not that that’s really different from our own.

[Dion]

I’d say that OOTS is a deterministic universe. Not that that’s really different from our own.

Maybe the fact that the physics of oots-verse allow accurate prophecies actually REMOVES the determinism.

Here’s my thinking: suppose our universe were deterministic. Further suppose it requires a computer the size of our universe to store the current state of our universe, and a computer the size of our universe running the same speed as our universe to determine future state of our universe.

In other words, the reason you can’t figure out what is going to happen until it happens in our universe is because the universe is deterministic.

Then it logically follows that if you can figure out what will happen before it happens in oots-verse, then the oots-verse is proven NOT to be deterministic.

[Jaxzan Proditor]

Maybe the fact that the physics of oots-verse allow accurate prophecies actually REMOVES the determinism.

Here’s my thinking: suppose our universe were deterministic. Further suppose it requires a computer the size of our universe to store the current state of our universe, and a computer the size of our universe running the same speed as our universe to determine future state of our universe.

In other words, the reason you can’t figure out what is going to happen until it happens in our universe is because the universe is deterministic.

Then it logically follows that if you can figure out what will happen before it happens in oots-verse, then the oots-verse is proven NOT to be deterministic.
I believe the inability to make predictions about our universe is less solely because it’s deterministic and more that we have physical limitations on what we can compute. In OOTS they have “computers” far beyond what we will ever have in our universe, thereby letting them make predictions we can’t.

[Dion]

I believe the inability to make predictions about our universe is less solely because it’s deterministic and more that we have physical limitations on what we can compute. In OOTS they have “computers” far beyond what we will ever have in our universe, thereby letting them make predictions we can’t.

Right. The limit on what we can compute is because our universe is deterministic, which means to compute the future we need a computer the size of the universe to store the state of the universe, and it would only compute the future at the same speed as our universe.

If the oots-verse doesn’t have the same limitation, that means it’s not deterministic.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

Maybe the fact that the physics of oots-verse allow accurate prophecies actually REMOVES the determinism.

Here’s my thinking: suppose our universe were deterministic. Further suppose it requires a computer the size of our universe to store the current state of our universe, and a computer the size of our universe running the same speed as our universe to determine future state of our universe.

In other words, the reason you can’t figure out what is going to happen until it happens in our universe is because the universe is deterministic.

Then it logically follows that if you can figure out what will happen before it happens in oots-verse, then the oots-verse is proven NOT to be deterministic.

This logic falls apart the moment you change those assumptions about computer "size". And there is no reason to make those assumptions at all.

The alternative, that the Oracle can predict the future because the OotS universe is deterministic seems as plausible, and far more parsimonious.

Grey Wolf

[Dion]

To expand on this, if prophecies are accurate in oots-verse, that means they come true regardless of what you do.

That is the opposite of determinism.

The claim that accurate prophecies somehow prove determinism seems to have no basis.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

To expand on this, if prophecies are accurate in oots-verse, that means they come true regardless of what you do.

That is the opposite of determinism.

No it is not. It is exactly the definition of determinism: that you don't chose anything, there is only one path, that path is set up by the state of the universe, and that therefore, anyone with the ability to do so can check where the universe's path is leading you to, and tell you in advance.

Grey Wolf

[Dion]

No it is not. It is exactly the definition of determinism: that you don't chose anything, there is only one path, that path is set up by the state of the universe, and that therefore, anyone with the ability to do so can check where the universe's path is leading you to, and tell you in advance.

Grey Wolf

Ok, I’ll make he statement weaker.

The ability to see what happens in advance doesn’t require determinism.

So the claim that the ability to see what happens in advance proves determinism is a false claim.

[Jaxzan Proditor]

The limit on what we can compute is because our universe is deterministic

See, I'm not sure I agree with that. There are definitely limits to what we can compute, but those limits have more to do with the size of the universe (among other things) that would still apply in a non-deterministic universe. The only difference is the non-deterministic universe would be much harder to simulate since you couldn't really make predictions about what would occur.

[Peelee]

Malack had free will.

We can infer that if Malack had free will, everyone else also has free will, and thus everything is not pre-determined in OOTS world. QED.

Do I win the thread? :smallcool:

[Jaxzan Proditor]

We can infer that if Malack had free will, everyone else also has free will, and thus everything is not pre-determined in OOTS world. QED.

Do I win the thread? :smallcool:

I'm posting this while fully expecting to get ninja'd by Fyraltari, but under compatibilism determinism and free will are not actually mutually exclusive. Because The Giant is definitely a compatabilist.

But, I'm a strong proponent of threads letting everyone win, so absolutely, you win!

[Peelee]

I'm posting this while fully expecting to get ninja'd by Fyraltari, but under compatibilism determinism and free will are not actually mutually exclusive.
Hmmm. We can infer that I'm correct regardless.:smalltongue:

But, I'm a strong proponent of threads letting everyone win, so absolutely, you win!

Hooray!

[Grey_Wolf_c]

Ok, I’ll make he statement weaker.

The ability to see what happens in advance doesn’t require determinism.

So the claim that the ability to see what happens in advance proves determinism is a false claim.

Yep, that's far more solid logic. Thank you for the revision.

(As it happens, as far as I am concerned, you and Peelee combined have the full answer: OotS is Doylist deterministic, what with it being a story Rich is telling, and Watsonian free-willed)

Grey Wolf

[factotum]

See, I'm not sure I agree with that. There are definitely limits to what we can compute, but those limits have more to do with the size of the universe (among other things) that would still apply in a non-deterministic universe.

The problem isn't really computational capability but the ability to know what the current state of the universe is. Going back to my weather example from earlier, if you could somehow create a computer with perfect ability to calculate future weather, and you fed into it the exact values for temperature, pressure, wind speed and so on for points spaced one metre apart in the atmosphere--we'll ignore for now the absolute physical impossibility of making those measurements--and you let it run the simulation, it would still be completely different from the *actual* weather within a month, simply because it didn't have the information of what was happening in between those data points. Plus it wouldn't be able to take into account atmospheric variations caused by landslides or even people walking from one place to another.

[Fyraltari]

Snip

At the end of Back to the Future, there are two pasts, the one we are presented to at the beginning that Marty and Doc remember, that is the ‘‘original’’ past where Marty and Doc never went back in time. And then there is the ‘‘new’’ past they created where Marty’s dad punched Biff in the face, etc. This is a sample of two.
The only differences between the two timelines are due to the actions of Doc & Marty. Meaning that Back to the Future presents a deterministic universe where people reacts to external circumstances (i.e. the world) according to internal circumstances (i.e. the self) and given the exact same set of circumstances, the exact same reactions will occur. However it is one who allows for grandfather paradoxes somehow.

The notion of ‘‘libertarian free will’’, meanwhile claims that humans have the ability to make decisions regardless of the circumsrances. This seems absurd to me, as it not only posits that physical reality is at a mesoscopic scale is affected by something outside of it, but also that our decisions are not truly our own but random and that should I be presented with a train that goes where I want to go I would be as likely to go onboard as to jump under it or to strip naked and dance the carioca.

[factotum]

also that our decisions are not truly our own but random and that should I be presented with a train that goes where I want to go I would be as likely to go onboard as to jump under it or to strip naked and dance the carioca.

Reductio ad absurdum much? Of course if you only have one reasonable choice then you're most likely to take that choice--unless you're insane, of course. However, life is very rarely neatly laid out like that, and often there are multiple choices that are, on the surface, equally reasonable. I made a long car journey on Tuesday, and I explicitly made the choice to take a longer route simply because it was one I'd driven before and was thus more confident in navigating it. I could just have easily chosen to fire up the satnav and take the shorter route, and in fact I did do that on the journey back.

[Jaxzan Proditor]

The problem isn't really computational capability but the ability to know what the current state of the universe is. Going back to my weather example from earlier, if you could somehow create a computer with perfect ability to calculate future weather, and you fed into it the exact values for temperature, pressure, wind speed and so on for points spaced one metre apart in the atmosphere--we'll ignore for now the absolute physical impossibility of making those measurements--and you let it run the simulation, it would still be completely different from the *actual* weather within a month, simply because it didn't have the information of what was happening in between those data points. Plus it wouldn't be able to take into account atmospheric variations caused by landslides or even people walking from one place to another.

Well, the area where computational ability comes into play is that the computer here is trying to fully simulate the universe, e.g. by using much more precise data points* as well as account for all of those random variations, to make predictions and in order to do that (with our current limitations) you need a universe-sized computer. Not that I don't agree with your overall point--I definitely should have elaborated more on that "among other things" in my post--it's just that, regardless, none of these are artifacts of determinism specifically--you'd have the same issues in a non-deterministic world.

*And, yes, there is a limit to how precise even a theoretically perfect simulations could be, but that's still not a consequence of a deterministic universe

[The Pilgrim]

At the end of Back to the Future, there are two pasts, the one we are presented to at the beginning that Marty and Doc remember, that is the ‘‘original’’ past where Marty and Doc never went back in time. And then there is the ‘‘new’’ past they created where Marty’s dad punched Biff in the face, etc. This is a sample of two.
The only differences between the two timelines are due to the actions of Doc & Marty. Meaning that Back to the Future presents a deterministic universe where people reacts to external circumstances (i.e. the world) according to internal circumstances (i.e. the self) and given the exact same set of circumstances, the exact same reactions will occur. However it is one who allows for grandfather paradoxes somehow.

Back to the Future is one of the best examples of a non-deterministic universe. During all three movies, the characters are able to alter the future again and again. Much of the plot is about their efforts to restore the original timelines altered due to their time travels. And many punchlines are about the small things that remain changed despite their efforts.

The main plot of the first movie revolves around Doc and Marty having to go through a lot of pain to engage Marty's parents back after being prevented to fall in love due to a minor alteration provoked by their future son. Had the universe of Back to the Future been deterministic, Marty wouldn't have had to do anything as his parents would have fallen in love anyway as they would have been "predestined" to do so. But, on the contrary, Marty finds himself in a race against the clock to engage them back before being rippled out of existence. And because the way Mary's parents fell in love was changed, the whole future of the McFly family was changed also.

At the end of the last movie, Doc pretty much leaves the issue settled when Marty's chick ask him about the meaning of the text from the future fax vanishing. He answers that "It means your future hasn't been written yet, no one's has. Your future is whatever you make it, so make it a good one."

BTW, while during the Back of the Future movies, Doc talks about different timelines to Marty (specially in the second movie), the fact is that there are no alternate universes in Back to the Future. Whenever the timeline is altered, the Ripple Effect adjusts the new reality, and just one universe remains. This is why Doc can, after being sent to 1885, send the letter and the DeLorean to the same Marty in 1955 who just saw him dissapear. If there were alternate universes in Back to the Future, Doc would have only been able to send those items to a Marty from an alternate universe.

[Fyraltari]

Reductio ad absurdum much? Of course if you only have one reasonable choice then you're most likely to take that choice--unless you're insane, of course. However, life is very rarely neatly laid out like that, and often there are multiple choices that are, on the surface, equally reasonable. I made a long car journey on Tuesday, and I explicitly made the choice to take a longer route simply because it was one I'd driven before and was thus more confident in navigating it. I could just have easily chosen to fire up the satnav and take the shorter route, and in fact I did do that on the journey back.
That was an example. On the journey back you made a different decision. because the situation was different. For you to have made a different choice the first time you would have needed to be a very slightly different person. That you do not understand the exact reason you made some choice and not the other does not mean that decision was random, just that you do not have a perfect understanding of your psyche, in other words: like every human, you have a subconscious.

Back to the Future is one of the best examples of non-deterministic universe. The main plot of the first movie is about Doc and Marty having to go through a lot of pain to engage Marty's parents back after being prevented to fall in love due to a minor alteration provoked by their future son. Had the universe of Back to the Future been deterministic, there would have been no plot to the first movie, Marty wouldn't have had to do anything as his parents would have fallen in love anyway as they would have been "predestined" to do so. But, on the contrary, Marty finds himself in a race against the clock to engage them back before being rippled out of existence. And because the way Mary's parents fell in love was changed, the whole future of the McFly family was changed also.

During all three movies, the characters are able to alter the future again and again. Much of the plot is about their efforts to restore the original timelines altered due to their time travels. And many punchlines are about the small things that remain changed despite their efforts.

At the end of the last movie, Doc pretty much leaves the issue settled when Marty's chick ask him about the meaning of the text from the future fax vanishing. He answers that "It means your future hasn't been written yet, no one's has. Your future is whatever you make it, so make it a good one."

BTW, while during the Back of the Future movies, Doc talks about different timelines to Marty (specially in the second movie), the fact is that there are no alternate universes in Back to the Future. Whenever the timeline is altered, the Ripple Effect adjusts the new reality, and just one universe remains. This is why Doc can, after being sent to 1885, send the letter and the DeLorean to the same Marty in 1955 who just saw him dissapear. If there were alternate universes in Back to the Future, Doc would have only been able to send those items to a Marty from an alternate universe.

That’s not an argument for it not being deterministic, that’s an argument for it not being self-consistent (meaning grandfather paradoxes are possible, somehow). The world of Back to the Future is deterministic but chaotic (like the weather), meaning that the slightest change in the set variables meaning, i.e Marty’s dad not being rescued by Marty’s mom (an unaccounted for butterfly in Brazil), means vastly different consequences, i.e. Marty not being born (an unforeseen storm in Texas). But should one have knowledge of all the variables with the required precision, one could make perfect predictions of the system’s state at any given time.

Yes it’s incoherent that things have changed due to their intervention, but that’s kind of the point: Marty and Doc being outsiders of the original 1955 their actions were unaccounted for in the original 1985, but the second 1955 has them and the second 1985 is therefore different from the first, but only with respect to the things they have changed! Marty ran over one pine meaning the Twin Pines Parking Lot became the Lonely Pine Parking Lot, but since neither Marty nor Doc had any further involvement in that parking’s lot history it remain otherwise exactly the same. Had that universe been non-deterministic, the second 1985 could have had anything in the place of that parking lot, but it didn’t.

[Devils_Advocate]

Marty's parents only live through the events of 1955 once.
Well, no, because then it would have been impossible for Marty to change anything. He might have played a self-fulfilling role in things turning out the way that they did, but the 1985 that he returned to would have been exactly the same as the one he left, because everything that he did already happened before he left on his journey into the past, what with 1955 being before 1985. If you're not creating a new version of the past, just participating in the first version, then things can't go differently from last time, because this is last time. And plenty of time travel stories work like that!

Back to the Future, on the other hand, is a story in which it's possible to "change the past", which clearly implies that what you actually do when you "travel into the past" is rewind the universe and then press the play button on that sucka! You just reset everything back to earlier conditions, but also create a copy of the time machine and everything in it in blatant defiance of the conservation of mass. And in a non-deterministic universe, one expects things not to proceed exactly the same from the same initial conditions.

One also expects objects from the time machine not to spontaneously transform when events happen differently. And one certainly doesn't expect newspapers to change but memories to stay the same. See, we're talking about a case where the writers made certain choices in order to create the sort of story that they wanted to tell, not based on what's technically plausible even granting the premise. Back to the Future, in short, is fantasy, not science fiction, because it's not based on logical extrapolation of the phenomenon in play. The characters can visit different times because they are, effectively, different places that are magically related to each other.

Actually traveling into the past (not an alternate past), were such a thing possible, would involve radically different considerations.


Well, unlike *real* prophecies, we assume that the prophecies in the strip are ACCURATE predictions of the future. So that’s one major way the prophecies people are discussing in thread are nothing at all like the dictionary definition of a prophecy.
That argument seems to be of the same basic form as

"Unlike ducks, parrots are known to be able to imitate human speech, so that's one major way that parrots are nothing like the dictionary definition of a bird."

Now, if you can understand why that doesn't make sense to me, hopefully you can see why what you said doesn't make sense to me either.


Second, the prophecies in the strip are all self referential, in the sense that they describe an event that retroactively gives meaning to a prophecy, but fails to give meaning to the event.
That's like saying that every meaningful phrase is self-referential because it describes something that is described by it. That's not what "self-referential" means, dawg. Furthermore, "fails to give meaning to the event"? Dude, it ain't the Oracle's job to tell you how future events fit into the grand scheme of the cosmos or you life or whatever. He just answers questions about things that are gonna happen in the future.


For example, “By saying the right four words to the right being at the right time for all the wrong reasons” or “when the goat turns red strikes true” are meaningless until after the event they describe retroactively gives them meaning.
"Nhggu yhliudabn bhtio;f hdfhaf nurhb78b fbjkha" is a meaningless phrase (that I produced by randomly banging on a keyboard). It fails to refer; we would never recognized it as describing anything. We can only recognize a prophesy as coming true because it is meaningful.

I have no idea what you're trying to get at with all this "retroactive" nonsense. Of course the prophesies are only fulfilled when the things that they refer to happen! How could it possibly be otherwise?


Not only are they meaningless without the event, even after the event the only thing they reveal is that the statements themselves turned out to be true.
Are you getting at the prophesies in OotS not being very helpful? If that's what you mean, that's a reasonable enough generalization, but you're, like, saying it weird.


This is a problem I have with prophecy in fiction generally. I don't think any of the "solutions" raised by people in this thread get around the fact that, if my future actions are 100% predictable, then to all intents and purposes the universe is entirely deterministic. But we know in reality that even predicting something as simple as the weather more than a week or two ahead is impossible, so why should people's future actions be any more predictable? Heck, I might choose to go out or not depending on whether it's raining or not, and as I already mentioned, the weather is a chaotic unpredictable system, so if my actions are being influenced by that, they're equally unpredictable.

Now, I know what someone is about to say: but Thor controls the weather in OotSverse, it's not unpredictable! I was just using weather as an example, there are plenty of other unpredictable things that could influence someone's actions. To my mind, as soon as you introduce 100% reliable prophecy of the kind we've seen, you're immediately making the entire universe and everyone in it run on predictable clockwork paths.
The problem of induction aside, don't we generally feel reasonable in being nigh certain about some things that people did in the past? And we generally don't take that to mean that the past is determined by the present, do we? So why shouldn't it be just as possible to just as reasonably confident about some future actions without the future being determined by the present? Unless you blindly assume that causality is unidirectional, of course, but why would you do that?

[factotum]

Unless you blindly assume that causality is unidirectional, of course, but why would you do that?

I would do that because, until we somehow invent time travel (which I believe is impossible according to the laws of physics as we understand them), causality *is* unidirectional. We can only move into the future one second at a time, and we can't change what happened in the past. We can change what's likely to happen in the future according to the decisions we make.

In any case, my argument is not that the universe is not somehow entirely deterministic, it's that, chaos theory being what it is, it isn't actually possible to make accurate future predictions even if it *is*. No matter how accurate and precise your model of the current state of the universe is, your future prediction will rapidly diverge from reality.

[Fyraltari]

It’s also impossible to shapeshift into a dragon. The OOTS having magic makes the distance between what’s theoretically possible and what’s practically possible much lesser than in the real world.

[The Pilgrim]

(...) Back to the Future, in short, is fantasy, not science fiction, because it's not based on logical extrapolation of the phenomenon in play. The characters can visit different times because they are, effectively, different places that are magically related to each other.(...)

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".

Arthur C. Clarke's Thrid Law of Science Fiction.

The only difference between "fantasy fiction" and "science fiction" is that the former calls magic "Magic", while the later calls magic "Technology".

A few examples:
"Magic Shield" -> "Power up the Shields"
"Magic Missile" -> "Phaser Gun"
"Teleport" -> "Beam us up, Scottie"
"Fireball" -> "Photon Torpedo"
"Disintegrate" -> "Antimatter Missile"
"Wand of Cure Ligth Wounds" -> "Med-Kit"
"Haste" -> "Warp 7"
"Improved Haste" -> "Warp 8"
"Epic Haste" -> "Warp 9"
"Meteor Strike" -> "Reverse Polarity"

That the magic tricks makes logic sense or not doesn't factors in the equation. A lot of fantasy authors attempt to develope a "logical" magic system and give a logical explanation to how magic works, with rules and stuff, D&D among them.

[BaronOfHell]

Of course! Whatever the author wants to have happen, will be exactly what happens.


Isn't this statement not actually proof of non-determinism considering the author, no matter how unlikely, just might change his mind and start applying the OotS as a front to advertise fashion statements, completely abandoning the story as we know it? :p

Edit:

Right. The limit on what we can compute is because our universe is deterministic, which means to compute the future we need a computer the size of the universe to store the state of the universe, and it would only compute the future at the same speed as our universe.

If the oots-verse doesn’t have the same limitation, that means it’s not deterministic.

To know the future as in OotS, and to know all of the future isn't the same thing.
E.g. to know if you will become the best basketball player ever does not require you to know the state of every particle throughout the universe at any given time, since a huge majority of these won't influence your basketball abilities.

Also the laws of physics often do allow for simplifications whereby one can accurately predict how a system will behave without knowing every detail about the system, that is in my opinion something that makes mathematics truly fantastic.

[Dion]

Here’s my thinking. There are at least two kinds of prophecy (in the same way there are at least two kinds of birds):

Falsifiable Prophecy: a falsifiable prophecy is one where an observer can create an experiment to say “is this prophecy false”, and that experiment is guaranteed to produce a result.

Unfalsifiable Prophecy: a prophecy that is not falsifiable. No matter what anyone does, all that can be said is “well, maybe it’s still true because of something that might happens later.”

“When the goat turns red strikes true” is unfalsifiable. If Haley had rolled a 19 instead of a 20, it wouldn’t have proven the prophecy false. Instead, it would have just shown that the prophecy might still be true, but probably meant something else.

[Fyraltari]

‘‘Posthumously’’ and the Oracle’s deaths are clearly falsifiable as well as Xykon attacking Girard’s Gate before Kraagor’s. They all came true so far.

[Dion]

‘‘Posthumously’’ and the Oracle’s deaths are clearly falsifiable as well as Xykon attacking Girard’s Gate before Kraagor’s. They all came true so far.

I would argue that Durkon’s “death and destruction” did not come true.

He named his new hammer “destruction” in an attempt to make it true, but he didn’t actually bring the hammer home with him, so therefore the prophecy was false.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

I would argue that Durkon’s “death and destruction” did not come true.

He named his new hammer “destruction” in an attempt to make it true, but he didn’t actually bring the hammer home with him, so therefore the prophecy was false.

Nonsense. He came home while dead, killed (or commanded his followers to kill) a bunch of people (thus bringing death), and the ensuing mayhem has meant a number of things have been broken (thus covering the "destruction" clause).

Arguing that the prophecy didn't come true is like arguing that V didn't use four words because two of them were the same word, repeated.

Grey Wolf

[Dion]

Nonsense. He came home while dead, killed (or commanded his followers to kill) a bunch of people (thus bringing death), and the ensuing mayhem has meant a number of things have been broken (thus covering the "destruction" clause)f

Other than the cheap wooden chair he knocked over, I don’t think he destroyed anything.

Definitely false.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

Other than the cheap wooden chair he knocked over, I don’t think he destroyed anything.

Definitely false.

He doesn't need to murder anyone to bring death and destruction. He brought with him an entire team to do it for him. For example, the outer ring of Dvalins' voting chamber is going to need some fixing.

Grey Wolf

[Resileaf]

It's pretty obvious that what is going to be destroyed will be the roof so he can bathe the council room in glorious light to destroy the vampires.

[Dion]

It's pretty obvious that what is going to be destroyed will be the roof so he can bathe the council room in glorious light to destroy the vampires.

Hmm... that raises a question in my mind.

Did Odin predict that Durkon would destroy the roof of the council chamber?

Or did Odin predict that the word “destruction” wouldn’t technically be incorrect when used to to describe the events that happen?

Like, for example, if Durkon naming the hammer “destruction” fulfills the prophecy, then is the prophecy just “well, no-one would ever describe what actually happened as ‘bringing death and destruction to us all’. But I suppose if you did say that, you technically wouldn’t be wrong...”

[Peelee]

I would argue that Durkon’s “death and destruction” did not come true.

He's still there, ya know. The prophecy wasn't, "he will bring death and destruction but only in the first hour or so." See Belkar's complaint to the Oracle: the fact that it hasn't happened yet does not falsify it, because it could still happen in the future.

[The Pilgrim]

Greg, stagecoaching Durkon's corpse, has already brought "Death and Destruction for us all". Specifically, in the form of Hel's Vampires aiming to tamper the voting of the Council, getting the Gods to destroy the World and, thus, bring Death and Destruction to everyone.

Of course, just because someone brings Death and Destruction to your place, doesn't means you must accept the "gift". You can defend yourself and avoid it. Which is what Durkon and his family are about to do.

[Dion]

Greg, stagecoaching Durkon's corpse, has already brought "Death and Destruction for us all". Specifically, in the form of Hel's Vampires aiming to tamper the voting of the Council, getting the Gods to destroy the World and, thus, bring Death and Destruction to everyone.

Huh. It’s almost like the prophecy is so vague it’s literally impossible to know what it means even after it’s completed!

[Fyraltari]

I would argue that Durkon’s “death and destruction” did not come true.

He named his new hammer “destruction” in an attempt to make it true, but he didn’t actually bring the hammer home with him, so therefore the prophecy was false.

Okay. First, he did not name his hammer destruction, he just took it and said it time for destruction.

Second, how does that invalidate anything that I said? I did not mention that prophecy because it (purposefully) open to interpretation and probably not even entirely fulfilled yet. But I brought up several others that were fulfilled in details. The Oracle’s power were precise enough not only to know that Belkar would kill him, exactly when, but also how many kobold he needed for that to trigger the mark and he also could read Haley’s speech by gazing into the future and get everything right. A prophecy or two being loosely worded does not cancel out the others.

[tomaO2]

When you think of it, the OOTS world can be seen as a sophisticated computer program by the gods, who are beings of such unfathomable power and intelligence, that it wouldn't be surprising at all if they had ways of predicting how events would play out. Normal people can't make a prophasy, it needs to be granted by gods. Gods directly interfering muddies the playing field, so they don't do that, generally. They probably also tend to not look into the future because they prefer to be surprised by what ends up happening. The Snarl, also being a higher entity, can also just screw everything up that is near it, possibly this is why the gods can't predict if the OOTS can stop bad things from happening in time, and have to vote on destroying the planet.

I'm pretty sure that the subject of destiny/prophasy is going to be dealt with more in the next book.

At present, all the OOTS have had completed arcs except for one. Roy has dealt with his daddy issues and petty impulses. Hailey has learned to love and trust others. Var has come to understand that her pursuit of unlimited power was a self destructive desire. Durken has come face to face with his worst self, and triumphed over it. Elan has faced his father and realised that he can never have the happy family he wanted.

Then there is Beklar, and his main arc is the growth of himself as a person. Namely, evolving from being just some chaotic evil into something else, and the prophasy of his death also plays into this. "Evolve or die" is the passphrase used to remove the curse, and I don't think it's random. I think it signifies a chance for Beklar to be the first character to outright break a prophasy.

If he remains chaotic evil, then he is destined to die but, if he can evolve his alignment, then perhaps he can be saved. If Beklar dies because he becomes self sacrificing instead, then that, I think, would be another strong indictment that free will is simply a delusion that the mind creates in order to spare a person from going mad.

[Rrmcklin]

Other than the cheap wooden chair he knocked over, I don’t think he destroyed anything.

Definitely false.

It's one thing to be dissatisfied with how Mr. Burlew goes about actually executing these prophecies, but it's another thing entirely to argue that in-story, we have reason to believe they're not actually happening. The story hasn't been ambiguous about any of this at all.

[Dion]

The Oracle’s power were precise enough not only to know that Belkar would kill him, exactly when, but also how many kobold he needed for that to trigger the mark

None of that was part of the prophecy that the oracle gave Belkar.

You can’t just say “oh, I totally knew that was what would happen” after the event and call it a prophecy.


It's one thing to be dissatisfied with how Mr. Burlew goes about actually executing these prophecies, but it's other entirely to argue that in-story, we have reason to believe they're not actually happening. The story hasn't been ambiguous about any of this at all.

What? The prophecy DID absolutely happen. A prophecy is a prediction. The prediction was made, therefore the prophecy happened.

The prophecy didn’t come true. That’s normal. 99.9999% of prophecies never come true. If the prophecy about death and destruction had come true, it would have been pretty strange.

[Rrmcklin]

What? The prophecy DID absolutely happen. A prophecy is a prediction. The prediction was made, therefore the prophecy happened.

The prophecy didn’t come true. That’s normal. 99.9999% of prophecies never come true. If the prophecy about death and destruction had come true, it would have been pretty strange.

Semantic word-play? Really?

The point is these prophecies are coming true, and we've been given no reason to think they aren't. And as others have said, just because Durkon's (probably) isn't completed yet, does not give you reason to say it won't be. Nor will it invalidate the other obvious examples people have given you of ones that have absolutely come true.

This is such a strange hill to die on.

[Fyraltari]

None of that was part of the prophecy that the oracle gave Belkar.

You can’t just say “oh, I totally knew that was what would happen” after the event and call it a prophecy.

But he totally knew what would happen. How could he have set that up otherwise? And how could he understand Haley? Or have known to keep a banishing wand? Or the order in which Xykon would attack the Gates?

[Grey_Wolf_c]

The prophecy didn’t come true. That’s normal. 99.9999% of prophecies never come true. If the prophecy about death and destruction had come true, it would have been pretty strange.

Again: nonsense. Lets check:
1) Did Durkon return home after dying? Yes
2) Did Durkon's return cause Death and destruction to happen? Yes

Therefore, the prophecies were accurate.

What did not happen is Durkon himself causing the death and destruction, which is something you have added to the prophecies. But it is not what the Oracle or Odin predicted. What they did in fact predict has happened.

Grey Wolf

[Dion]

But he totally knew what would happen.

But he never gave a prophecy about it.

Are we talking about prophecy (which, has been carefully pointed out by another poster is defined as a “prediction”, nothing more and nothing less, and to assume it’s anything else is an abuse of the language), or are we talking about knowledge of the future?

[Peelee]

But he never gave a prophecy about it.

He prophesied that Belkar would kill him. All other actions related to his death were taken on the basis of that prophecy.

[Rrmcklin]

But he never gave a prophecy about it.

Are we talking about prophecy (which, has been carefully pointed out by another poster is defined as a “prediction”, nothing more and nothing less, and to assume it’s anything else is an abuse of the language), or are we talking about knowledge of the future?

The question is why are you separating the two? If the Oracle has on-demand knowledge of the future, for what reason do you have to claim "well, his prophecies still might not come true/be false", as you have been doing.

You're majorly splitting hairs here, and it makes no sense.

[Resileaf]

Imo, the Oracle proves that the future is not pre-determined. He foresaw that Belkar would kill him, yes. But as a result of this knowledge, he was able to set his trap to make Belkar trigger the Mark of Justice, something he wouldn't have done if he couldn't see the future.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

Imo, the Oracle proves that the future is not pre-determined. He foresaw that Belkar would kill him, yes. But as a result of this knowledge, he was able to set his trap to make Belkar trigger the Mark of Justice, something he wouldn't have done if he couldn't see the future.

This doesn't follow. If the future is pre-determined, then it was always going to be the case that Belkar would ask, that the Oracle would see that Belkar would kill him, and also see that the Mark of Justice would activate, and that the mark would activate because he would have established the town behind the tower. He had not choice in the matter, that's what was going to happen, so it did.

Alternatively, if there is free will (as we have been told there is, in-story), Belkar made the choice to ask, the Oracle then saw himself being killed by Belkar, and made the choice to tell him as little as possible. Then spent some time and money preparing both his revenge on Belkar and setting up his resurrection. He could've chosen to do neither, or one and not the other, but chose to do both.

Both scenarios are possible in-story.

Grey Wolf

[Dion]

The question is why are you separating the two?.

Because they’re two completely different things?

[Rrmcklin]

Because they’re two completely different things?

Not for the purposes of this discussion, they aren't. For some reason you seem to have disconnected The Oracle actually has knowledge of the future from whether or not his prophecies actually true. Why you've done this, I have no idea, but, but it makes no sense.

Whether or not prophecies will actually happen is not somehow divorced from whether or not the Oracle's abilities are real. We know they're real, and we have been given no reason to believe has given any false prophecies.

[Dion]

Not for the purposes of this discussion, they aren't. For some reason you seem to have disconnected The Oracle actually has knowledge of the future from whether or not his prophecies actually true..

That’s because knowledge of the future isn’t a prophecy, and a prophecy isn’t knowledge of the future. They’re two different things, and they don’t depend on each other, and they can and should be considered separately if one wants to have a meaningful discussion about them.

Edit: also, the death and destruction prophecy doesn’t come from the oracle, so whether or not it comes true isn’t a comment on the oracles abilities.

[Squire Doodad]

That’s because knowledge of the future isn’t a prophecy, and a prophecy isn’t knowledge of the future. They’re two different things, and they don’t depend on each other, and they can and should be considered separately if one wants to have a meaningful discussion about them.

For the sake of this discussion, which is about deterministic viewpoints, they are effectively the same as they play the same role.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

Here’s my thinking. There are at least two kinds of prophecy (in the same way there are at least two kinds of birds):

Falsifiable Prophecy: a falsifiable prophecy is one where an observer can create an experiment to say “is this prophecy false”, and that experiment is guaranteed to produce a result.

Unfalsifiable Prophecy: a prophecy that is not falsifiable. No matter what anyone does, all that can be said is “well, maybe it’s still true because of something that might happens later.”

“When the goat turns red strikes true” is unfalsifiable. If Haley had rolled a 19 instead of a 20, it wouldn’t have proven the prophecy false. Instead, it would have just shown that the prophecy might still be true, but probably meant something else.

By this definition, Durkon's prophecy is falsifiable: if he had returned to his homeland alive, or died by falling in a volcano such that his remains stayed in the South, the prophecy would have been falsified.

Equally, had Belkar died without killing any of the people in the list, it would have been falsified.

Equally, if Xykon had gone to Kraagor's tomb before the other, it would have been falsified.

Not sure that this mental exercise makes any difference, but enough of the Oracle's prophecies are perfectly decidable. And yet they all have come true, precisely.

Grey Wolf

[Rrmcklin]

That’s because knowledge of the future isn’t a prophecy, and a prophecy isn’t knowledge of the future. They’re two different things, and they don’t depend on each other, and they can and should be considered separately if one wants to have a meaningful discussion about them.
Edit: also, the death and destruction prophecy doesn’t come from the oracle, so whether or not it comes true isn’t a comment on the oracles abilities.

Fair point about the Oracle not making the "Death and Destruction" prophecy, but also it doesn't matter because the Oracle claims to get his power from a god who can see the future, Tiamat. And the "death and destruction" came from... Odin, a god who is established to be able to see the future.

And while Odin has his wonkiness, I have yet to see anyone adequately explain to me how Odin just spouting random nonsense about a random dwarf just so happening to be integral to the fate of the world is in anyway logical, interesting, or good story-telling.

I'll say it again, you're playing the semantic game here instead meaningfully addressing anything that has been said to you.

[Dion]

For the sake of this discussion, which is about deterministic viewpoints, they are effectively the same as they play the same role.

Well, I’m not sure what a deterministic viewpoint is. But you can create fantasy settings that include foreknowledge of the future both with and without a deterministic universe. They’re independent options in fantasy universes.

[Dion]

Odin, a god who is established to be able to see the future.

I missed that. Can you direct me to that?

[Squire Doodad]

I missed that. Can you direct me to that?

There's the "Worlds within worlds, yarns winding yarns", the "Odin has a high priest who delivers prophecies", and the fact that its like that in actual mythology.
I'm not going to go dig up the precise strips right now though.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

I missed that. Can you direct me to that?

Odin's prophecy (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1145.html). Spindle's wind the string forward but not back ("I can remember the future, but not the past").

Now you could argue that Thor, and Hurak, and indeed the exposition is all mistaken. But that is quite the claim to make, given how accurate Odin's Prophecy has been, when you do not add extra condition such as "Durkon must be personally involved in both the death and the destruction".

Grey Wolf

[Dion]

So, I’ve seen at least five different explanations in this very thread telling me how Odin’s prophecy was fulfilled, or will be fulfilled, or could be fulfilled.

If we can’t even agree on whether it’s complete or not, how are we agreeing it’s true?

[Grey_Wolf_c]

So, I’ve seen at least five different explanations in this very thread telling me how Odin’s prophecy was fulfilled, or will be fulfilled, or could be fulfilled.

If we can’t even agree on whether it’s complete or not, how are we agreeing it’s true?

Because there is a difference in the details, without a difference in the overall conclusion.

There are far more than five explanations on, say, the causes of the Fire of Rome under Nero. Few doubt it happened.

Grey Wolf

[Squire Doodad]

Because there is a difference in the details, without a difference in the overall conclusion.

There are far more than five explanations on, say, the causes of the Fire of Rome under Nero. Few doubt it happened.

Grey Wolf

This gets the point across pretty well.
There's discussion about why and how something happened, no discussion about whether it did.

[Kish]

The question is why are you separating the two? If the Oracle has on-demand knowledge of the future, for what reason do you have to claim "well, his prophecies still might not come true/be false", as you have been doing.

You're majorly splitting hairs here, and it makes no sense.
As far as I can tell, Dion has a philosophical objection to the idea of prophecies, and/or isn't making a distinction between "in the real world" and "in this fantasy story"...which leads him to make goofy claims in the name of pretending that prophecies aren't real* in OotS.

*Dion, that semantic argument you're halfway through writing: save your keystrokes.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

As far as I can tell, Dion has a philosophical objection to the idea of prophecies, and/or isn't making a distinction between "in the real world" and "in this fantasy story"...which leads him to make goofy claims in the name of pretending that prophecies aren't real* in OotS..

I suspect that Dion has already decided that Odin's prophecy cannot come true, and thus all this is serving the effort of trying to prove said point. Thus their insistence on, say, requiring the prophecy to predict precisely who will cause the destruction, and crowing that it didn't happen in that exact way.

Grey Wolf

[The Pilgrim]

This doesn't follow. If the future is pre-determined, then it was always going to be the case that Belkar would ask, that the Oracle would see that Belkar would kill him, and also see that the Mark of Justice would activate, and that the mark would activate because he would have established the town behind the tower. He had not choice in the matter, that's what was going to happen, so it did.

Alternatively, if there is free will (as we have been told there is, in-story), Belkar made the choice to ask, the Oracle then saw himself being killed by Belkar, and made the choice to tell him as little as possible. Then spent some time and money preparing both his revenge on Belkar and setting up his resurrection. He could've chosen to do neither, or one and not the other, but chose to do both.

Both scenarios are possible in-story.

Grey Wolf

All the events regarding the Oracle and his prophecy on Belkar are really interesting, if one thinks about them.

- The Oracle brought a wand to banish Roy's spirit. In doing so, he allowed him to bypass the Memory Charm. Roy assumed it was unintended, but was it? The Oracle either isn't omniscent (thus blundered by not foreseeing Roy would bypass the Charm) or he is and did it on purpose. For what purpose? Also he gave Roy the info about Belkar's death as a prophecy, so Roy would remember even if the Memory Charm triggered. And he gave it on his own votion, without Roy asking for it. The Oracle wanted Roy to know, and remember. Why?

- The way the Oracle set up the triggering of the Mark of Justice, was actually beneficial for Belkar. Because it triggered inside the bounds of the Memory Charm, the triggering was forgotten by Haley, who would otherwise had abandoned Belkar. This ultimately led to Belkar having his epiphany and beggining his path to redemption, and the Curse being removed by the Priest of Loki. Had the Oracle not triggered it, Belkar would have triggered it later and the Order would have abandoned him, or, worse still, he would have fleed instead of fighting the Thieves' Gild (to avoid triggering the Mark), and Haley would have been killed and Roy's corpse lost.

Did the Oracle foresee it and acted on purpose? Did he not, proving that he is far from omniscent? Did Tiamat feed him just enough info to manipulate him into helping the Order?

Questions, questions...

[Dion]

This gets the point across pretty well.
There's discussion about why and how something happened, no discussion about whether it did.

Even Thor and Odin seem to be unclear of if it happened in the comic.

I’m choosing to read it as the nuanced type of storytelling where these things are ambiguous, and not the ham-handed sort where prophecy is unambiguously true.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

Did Tiamat feed him just enough info to manipulate him into helping the Order?

Questions, questions...

It is at least moderately plausible that Tiamat set this up to exact her revenge on the three fiends, if nothing else.


Even Thor and Odin seem to be unclear of if it happened in the comic.

I’m choosing to read it as the nuanced type of storytelling where these things are ambiguous, and not the ham-handed sort where prophecy is unambiguously true.
This story has multiple prophecies that are unambiguously true. Not that it makes the story ham-handed.

Grey Wolf

[Dion]

I suspect that Dion has already decided that Odin's prophecy cannot come true, f

But it did come true. Durkon names his new hammer Destruction.

I think you have decided that you are the only person who has read the comic correctly.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

But it did come true. Durkon names his new hammer Destruction.
At this point, you are just contradicting yourself.


I think you have decided that you are the only person who has read the comic correctly.
Wait, so according to you, there are multiple people who agree with me, but somehow that means I think they must be wrong? Interesting "logic".

No, I do not believe I am the only person reading this correctly. I do however think that you are reading this incorrectly. For the reasons I have given, and that you have not addressed.

Grey Wolf

[Dion]

Wait, so according to you, there are multiple people who agree with me,

Grey Wolf

They all seem to agree that they disagree with my interpretation. I haven’t seen anyone agree with your interpretation.

[The Pilgrim]

It is at least moderately plausible that Tiamat set this up to exact her revenge on the three fiends, if nothing else.

Three Fiends who were able to do what they did because of Tiamat. Didn't she know what would happen when, through the Oracle, she granted ABD the identity of YBD's murderer? It would be not out of character for official D&D Tiamat to don't give a dime about the well being of evil dragons, but she seemed pretty pissed on the IFCC when Darth V exterminated all those black dragons...

What's the deal with Tiamat, anyway? She is the only God who keeps fluent communications with the Dark One, after all.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

They all seem to agree that they disagree with my interpretation. I haven’t seen anyone agree with your interpretation.




Because there is a difference in the details, without a difference in the overall conclusion.

There are far more than five explanations on, say, the causes of the Fire of Rome under Nero. Few doubt it happened.

Grey Wolf
This gets the point across pretty well.
There's discussion about why and how something happened, no discussion about whether it did.


Which bings us to... didn't she know what would happen when, through the Oracle, she granted ABD the identity of YBD's murderer? It would be not out of character for official D&D Tiamat to don't give a dime about the well being of evil dragons, but she seemed pretty pissed on the IFCC when Darth V exterminated all those black dragons...

That's the problem with omniscience without omnipotence. They saw it coming, but couldn't stop it. I can see how that'd make them mad.

Grey Wolf

[The Pilgrim]

That's the problem with omniscience without omnipotence. They saw it coming, but couldn't stop it. I can see how that'd make them mad.

Grey Wolf

But she could. She could have blocked the Oracle from informing ABD. Or had mislead ABD into another target.

Unless... she is not omniscent, neither the Oracle, and the prophecies are just as vage to them as are to the readers.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

But she could. She could have blocked the Oracle from informing ABD. Or had mislead ABD into another target.

Unless... she is not omniscent, neither the Oracle, and the prophecies are just as vage to them as are to the readers.

Blocking the Oracle from delivering the prophecy would fall under omnipotence, though. We know the gods limit their ability to interfere with the world. So she can grant prophecy ability, but can't stop her followers from then using it. Which sometimes means that the prophecies discovered with her gift comes around and bites her in the rear.

Grey Wolf

[Rrmcklin]

Even Thor and Odin seem to be unclear of if it happened in the comic.

I’m choosing to read it as the nuanced type of storytelling where these things are ambiguous, and not the ham-handed sort where prophecy is unambiguously true.

False dichotomy, there. Prophecies can (and has been repeatedly pointed out to you, are) true in the story, without it being ham-handed. More to the point, this particular prophecy not being true, but all of the things just "happening" to work out the way they did to match it, it wouldn't be "nuanced" it would just be contrived and add no actual benefit to the story.


But it did come true. Durkon names his new hammer Destruction.

I think you have decided that you are the only person who has read the comic correctly.

Since when did Durkon name the hammer Destruction? All he said was that he thought it was about time he brought some destruction - by using the hammer (and accessories).

You're the only one being obtuse here.

[The Pilgrim]

Blocking the Oracle from delivering the prophecy would fall under omnipotence, though. We know the gods limit their ability to interfere with the world. So she can grant prophecy ability, but can't stop her followers from then using it. Which sometimes means that the prophecies discovered with her gift comes around and bites her in the rear.

Grey Wolf

But the Oracle closed shop to avoid Xykon. So they have power to deny info if they want.

[Peelee]

But the Oracle closed shop to avoid Xykon. So they have power to deny info if they want.

That was the Oracle, not Tiamat.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

That was the Oracle, not Tiamat.

Yep. My headcanon is that Xykon's response to being given a prophecy he didn't want would involve a death too gruesome to contemplate. Or come back from.

Grey Wolf

[Dion]

Unless... she is not omniscent, neither the Oracle, and the prophecies are just as vage to them as are to the readers.

Wait... isn’t that the starting assumption for all of us?

Was there ever any serious consideration by any reader that anyone anywhere in the comic world knew everything that was going to happen before it happened?

[Devils_Advocate]

I would do that because, until we somehow invent time travel (which I believe is impossible according to the laws of physics as we understand them), causality *is* unidirectional.
Even if that's the case in our own universe, what bearing does that have on the Order of the Stick? Are you under the impression that everything that happens in the comic proceeds in accordance with the laws of physics as we understand them? I had rather assumed that magical phenomena are exempt from those rules, and that divining the future is a magical phenomenon. Do you not share both of those assumptions?


We can only move into the future one second at a time,
Haven't you heard of time dilation?


and we can't change what happened in the past.
We can't change what will happen in the future, either. Change is things being different at different times. In order for the state of the universe at a past or future instant to change, the state of the universe at one time would have to be part of the universe at a different time. Neither last Thursday nor next Thursday can change from yesterday to tomorrow unless last Thursday or next Thursday exists yesterday and tomorrow. But how can a time exist at another time? What would that even mean? Like, this is the inherent premise of a bunch of time travel fiction, but it doesn't make any damn sense. It's like positing a scenario where it's raining in London in New York but not raining in London in Paris. New York and Paris don't each contain their own different Londons, so that's just a fine lot of nonsense, now isn't it?


We can change what's likely to happen in the future according to the decisions we make.
We can change what's likely to have happened in the past through our observations.

For example: Before I flip a coin, I don't know whether it will come up heads or tails. There's a roughly 50% chance of each possibility. After I flip a coin, but before I look at it, I don't know whether it came up heads or tails. There's a roughly 50% chance of each possibility, same as before. But when I look at the coin, I can then make an inference about the past based on the present, and my probability estimates change.

Being able to make similarly reliable inferences about the future not only doesn't break anything but is entirely normal. If I mix two mixtures together, I can predict with high confidence that they'll form a pretty homogeneous mixture after enough time has passed. But I couldn't determine the compositions of the original mixtures from the final one. What seems "off" about prophesy, probably, is that the usual direction of inference is reversed, with future behavior being inferred with an accuracy normally reserved for past behavior. That probably corresponds to a decrease in entropy, which in our universe means an even bigger increase in entropy somewhere else. But if magic is allowed to break the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics anyway, then that isn't an issue for magical prophesy.


In any case, my argument is not that the universe is not somehow entirely deterministic, it's that, chaos theory being what it is, it isn't actually possible to make accurate future predictions even if it *is*. No matter how accurate and precise your model of the current state of the universe is, your future prediction will rapidly diverge from reality.
And my argument is that reliable future predictions don't even require that the future be fully determined by the present. The present being partially determined by the future is sufficient.


The only difference between "fantasy fiction" and "science fiction" is that the former calls magic "Magic", while the later calls magic "Technology".
I suppose that my implied definition is pretty terrible by descriptivist standards. How about "science fantasy rather than hard science fiction", or even just "soft science fiction instead of hard science fiction"?


That the magic tricks makes logic sense or not doesn't factors in the equation.
There's a distinction to be drawn between at least attempting internal consistency in a story and not even trying, but I suppose that I have to concede that it's pretty much independent of genre.


Here’s my thinking. There are at least two kinds of prophecy (in the same way there are at least two kinds of birds):

Falsifiable Prophecy: a falsifiable prophecy is one where an observer can create an experiment to say “is this prophecy false”, and that experiment is guaranteed to produce a result.

Unfalsifiable Prophecy: a prophecy that is not falsifiable. No matter what anyone does, all that can be said is “well, maybe it’s still true because of something that might happens later.”

“When the goat turns red strikes true” is unfalsifiable. If Haley had rolled a 19 instead of a 20, it wouldn’t have proven the prophecy false. Instead, it would have just shown that the prophecy might still be true, but probably meant something else.
I'd leave out the "can create an experiment" part. Not knowing how to bring about criteria that would falsify a prediction doesn't meant that no such criteria exist. Take the Oracle's prophesy to Haley. If she had restored her speech without looking any metaphorical gift horse in its proverbial mouth, then the prophesy would have been falsified. But of course she didn't know how to fix her aphasia; that's why she asked about it! Sometimes you have to wait for an opportunity to test a theory through observation, because creating such an opportunity is beyond your power.

Other than that, though, I agree that falsifiability is a valid and significant distinction (https://existentialcomics.com/comic/285). And Eugene's prophesy to Roy indeed is pretty well unfalsifiable, as it's a "When X, Y" type prophesy where both X and Y are sufficiently unclear to ever be able to conclude with justified confidence "Well, that already happened". If X is sufficiently specific that one might say that it already occurred without any form of Y, or vice versa, then we can imagine observations that would show such a prediction to be incorrect. Contrast Eugene's prophesy to Roy (where both X and Y are too vague) with the Oracle's prophesy to Haley (where X is still vague and metaphorical and refers to Nale as a form of livestock, but Y is clear enough given the question she asked).

Not all of the prophesies in the comic are unfalsifiable -- I think that you'd look pretty silly trying to spin "Xykon will be within a 1000-foor radius of Girard's Gate before Xykon is witin a 1000-foot radius of Kraagor's Gate" as unfalsifiable -- but some are.


For the sake of this discussion, which is about deterministic viewpoints, they are effectively the same as they play the same role.
If reliable prophesy requires foreknowledge of the future and foreknowledge of the future requires determinism, then reliable prophesy implies determinism. But Dion has disputed the first premise by arguing to the effect that sufficiently vague prophesies can be virtually guaranteed to be accurate without foreknowledge. And I dispute the second premise, to the extent that "determinism" means that the future is fully determined by the present!

[Fyraltari]

Edit: also, the death and destruction prophecy doesn’t come from the oracle, so whether or not it comes true isn’t a comment on the oracles abilities.
Yeah, I still don’t understand why you brought it up anyway.

[HorizonWalker]

Durkon Thundershield returned to the Dwarven Lands. As a direct and obvious result of that, people died and a bridge got wrecked. That's... very obviously the prophecy coming true. Durkon's return home brought death and destruction.

[Dion]

Yeah, I still don’t understand why you brought it up anyway.

Because it’s a prophecy, just like “when the goat turns red strikes true”.

[Wizard_Lizard]

If free will is an illusion, I am happy to be fooled.

[Dion]

If free will is an illusion, I am happy to be fooled.

I believe causal determinism is a requirement for free will to exist in our universe.

Without determinism, what happens next doesn’t depend on what occurred in the past.

In other words, without determinism, things just happen because they’re going to happen.

It’s impossible to make meaningful choices without determinism, because your choices can’t have any impact on what happens. What happens is just whatever was going to happen, regardless of your choice.

EDIT: obviously, this doesn’t apply to OotS-verse, where free will and determinism is free to work in other ways.

Also, I haven’t seen evidence that anyone or anything in OotS-verse has complete foreknowledge of what will happen (which is separate from both prophecy or determinism in my mind). A few characters have a very small measure of pre-knowledge, but it seems muddled, unclear, and often not very helpful to them.

[Emanick]

At the end of Back to the Future, there are two pasts, the one we are presented to at the beginning that Marty and Doc remember, that is the ‘‘original’’ past where Marty and Doc never went back in time. And then there is the ‘‘new’’ past they created where Marty’s dad punched Biff in the face, etc. This is a sample of two.
The only differences between the two timelines are due to the actions of Doc & Marty. Meaning that Back to the Future presents a deterministic universe where people reacts to external circumstances (i.e. the world) according to internal circumstances (i.e. the self) and given the exact same set of circumstances, the exact same reactions will occur. However it is one who allows for grandfather paradoxes somehow.

What Existential Comics asserts is not that Marty and Doc had the power to create a new timeline - it is that, merely by being able to observe the original timeline, they should have seen an entirely different series of events play out if free will actually exists. That seems absurd to me, because there is no reason to believe that Marty would have created a new past for his parents merely by being there in 1955 to watch events unfold. If he watched his parents live through the entire week without doing anything to interfere, their timelines would not be split. They would behave exactly the same way, not because they lacked free will, but because A = A. Regardless of whether behavior is predetermined or not, you cannot learn anything by observing that a group of people made the same series of choices in Scenario A as they did in... Scenario A. That's not a novel observation, it's a tautology.

What Back to the Future does show is that people will behave differently when their circumstances change, but since more or less every theory about determinism and free will accounts for this fact, I don't find it particularly significant.


The notion of ‘‘libertarian free will’’, meanwhile claims that humans have the ability to make decisions regardless of the circumsrances. This seems absurd to me, as it not only posits that physical reality is at a mesoscopic scale is affected by something outside of it, but also that our decisions are not truly our own but random and that should I be presented with a train that goes where I want to go I would be as likely to go onboard as to jump under it or to strip naked and dance the carioca.

I don't find the idea of an extramaterial soul with causal power absurd (indeed, I find it the only satisfying explanation for the existence of consciousness), so I don't personally find libertarian free will silly at all. Nor does that conception of the world imply that our decision-making process is random. But since I'm fairly certain that we're not allowed to discuss that sort of thing on these forums, we'd better stick to Back to the Future and Existential Comics.

[woweedd]

The way I understand it is that The Oracle has omniscience...Provided he remembers to "call ahead", as it were. His future sight isn't a passive thing, he has to consciously activate it, not necessarily in the form of a prophecy, but at least having to concentrate on it to look ahead. This is why he didn't see Roy keeping his memory: He didn't bother to check.

[Fyraltari]

Because it’s a prophecy, just like “when the goat turns red strikes true”.
So what!? It's the third time that I tell you that the existence of ambiguously worded prophecies does not invalidate the existence of non-ambiguously worded prophecies like knowing that Durkon would die before going home, Xyko,n would attack Azure City, the Pyramid and the Tomb in that Order, that Beelkar would kill the Oracle at a precise time and be under a precise geas while doing so, knowing that a ghost would be present and refuse to leave while an important client is coming, knowing the exact circumstances of the Oracle's next death and knowing that Vaarsuvius would be on the ocean west of the Southern Continent. If you want to argue that no-one in the OOTS world has exact foreknowledge of (parts of) the future, you need to explain all that,

Also, I haven’t seen evidence that anyone or anything in OotS-verse has complete foreknowledge of what will happen (which is separate from both prophecy or determinism in my mind).
How could prophecy be separrate from foreknowledge? You need the latter to make the former!

A few characters have a very small measure of pre-knowledge, but it seems muddled, unclear, and often not very helpful to them.
The Oracle is doing very well, isn't he?

What Existential Comics asserts is not that Marty and Doc had the power to create a new timeline - it is that, merely by being able to observe the original timeline, they should have seen an entirely different series of events play out if free will actually exists. That seems absurd to me, because there is no reason to believe that Marty would have created a new past for his parents merely by being there in 1955 to watch events unfold. If he watched his parents live through the entire week without doing anything to interfere, their timelines would not be split.
Ah, I think I've found the origin of our disagreement. I think the timelines split when Marty & Doc travelled through time, not at the first action they took while in the past. After all time-travelling is the one action that messes with time. But in any case the first change they create to 1955 was well before they met Marty's parents, when Marty ran over one pine. Hell, that's just the first change to ripple through 1985, the first change they created was the apparition of a two-ton moving car inside a barn, and then breathing air that wouldn't have been breathed at that point, etc. By the time they reach MArty's parents they were already in a second timeline.

They would behave exactly the same way, not because they lacked free will, but because A = A. Regardless of whether behavior is predetermined or not, you cannot learn anything by observing that a group of people made the same series of choices in Scenario A as they did in... Scenario A. That's not a novel observation, it's a tautology.


What Back to the Future does show is that people will behave differently when their circumstances change, but since more or less every theory about determinism and free will accounts for this fact, I don't find it particularly significant.
No, the idea of libertarian free-will is that your decisions is not completely subject to circumstances and therefore people could behave the same under differentcircumstances or diffrently under identical ones. It fails however to establish any kind of mecanism under which people could make decisions when faced with identical circumstances, basically positing that people's choices are random. Libertarian free-will is basically seeing a dterministic universe and making a special pleading case for humans not being deterministic based on no evidence.


I don't find the idea of an extramaterial soul with causal power absurd (indeed, I find it the only satisfying explanation for the existence of consciousness), so I don't personally find libertarian free will silly at all. Nor does that conception of the world imply that our decision-making process is random. But since I'm fairly certain that we're not allowed to discuss that sort of thing on these forums, we'd better stick to Back to the Future and Existential Comics.
Yeah, I disagree with everything in your first two sentences, but let's not discuss religion/the soul. I don't think however discussing free-will breaks the forum rules.

[The Pilgrim]

Yep. My headcanon is that Xykon's response to being given a prophecy he didn't want would involve a death too gruesome to contemplate. Or come back from.

Grey Wolf

That's my headcanon too. Xykon was almost certainly going to kill and soulbind the Oracle, because he wouldn't want someone able to locate his philactery to be available to his potential enemies.

Still I find odd that the Oracle went through all that effort to make Belkar trigger the Mark of Justice, which ultimately was helpful to the hobbit halfling, who the Oracle was supposed to dislike. The banishment of Roy I do not think was an overlooking because the Oracle gave the info about Belkar's death as a prophecy so Roy was going to remember anyway. I still have the impression that there was more in that whole scene than we believe.

[Peelee]

That's my headcanon too. Still I find odd that the Oracle went through all that effort to make Belkar trigger the Mark of Justice, which ultimately was beneficial to the hobbit halfling, who the Oracle was supposed to dislike. The banishment of Roy I do not think was an overlooking because the Oracle gave the info about Belkar's death as a prophecy so Roy was going to remember anyway. I still have the impression that there was more in that whole scene than we believe.

Roy was going to remember the prophecy, but not any of the rest. I think that scene illustrates that while the Oracle can see the future, he's not omniscient and can still make mistakes.

[factotum]

Still I find odd that the Oracle went through all that effort to make Belkar trigger the Mark of Justice, which ultimately was helpful to the hobbit halfling, who the Oracle was supposed to dislike.

It might have been ultimately beneficial, but for however many weeks it took them to get from the Oracle's valley to Greysky City, Belkar was very, very sick indeed. Given there was no other way the Oracle could realistically get revenge on Belkar for his death, I think he just chose to do what he could and be happy with it.

[The Pilgrim]

It might have been ultimately beneficial, but for however many weeks it took them to get from the Oracle's valley to Greysky City, Belkar was very, very sick indeed. Given there was no other way the Oracle could realistically get revenge on Belkar for his death, I think he just chose to do what he could and be happy with it.

Yep, probably the Priest of Loki would have removed the Mark to allow Belkar save him, triggered or not. And anyway Hinjo promised Belkar to remove the Mark, so he would have done so at the end of DStP. So the Oracle ensured Belkar went through a bit of pain, yep.

[Fyraltari]

It’s also possible that without the mark triggered, Belkar would have split, gone to Greysky to find someone who would remove the Mark and then gone on to live longer than he is going to.
Edit: or alternatively the world would have blown up without him helping along, he has already been instrumental in freeing Durkon and thwarting Hel.

[Devils_Advocate]

It could be that the Oracle was okay with ultimately helping Belkar by making him less of a jerk, so long as Belkar suffers in the process. Like... nothing about him really indicates to me that he's so hateful towards Belkar that he wants to avoid teaching him any lessons through punishment, because then his life might be better, and oh no, we cant have that!


I believe causal determinism is a requirement for free will to exist in our universe.

Without determinism, what happens next doesn’t depend on what occurred in the past.

In other words, without determinism, things just happen because they’re going to happen.

It’s impossible to make meaningful choices without determinism, because your choices can’t have any impact on what happens. What happens is just whatever was going to happen, regardless of your choice.

EDIT: obviously, this doesn’t apply to OotS-verse, where free will and determinism is free to work in other ways.
How do any of the above considerations apply any less to the world of the comic than to our own world?


So what!? It's the third time that I tell you that the existence of ambiguously worded prophecies does not invalidate the existence of non-ambiguously worded prophecies
And Dion didn't contradict you. Why not take that as a silent admission of error? You've plainly laid out how not all prophesies have been ambiguous, so admitting being wrong about that would just be stating the obvious. No need to harp on it.


How could prophecy be separrate from foreknowledge? You need the latter to make the former!
You need to know the future to know ahead of time that a prediction will be accurate, but an accurate prediction could also be a lucky guess, and inaccurate predictions are possible as well. Even if neither of those is what's going on with any prophesy in OotS, prophesy and foreknowledge can still be conceptually separate things. Unless you define the former to require the latter, at which point we're arguing definitions, which gets us into broader discussion on semantics. And the inherently recursive nature of question "What does 'means' mean?" complicates discussion to such a degree as to warrant its own thread, I think.


Ah, I think I've found the origin of our disagreement. I think the timelines split when Marty & Doc travelled through time, not at the first action they took while in the past. After all time-travelling is the one action that messes with time. But in any case the first change they create to 1955 was well before they met Marty's parents, when Marty ran over one pine. Hell, that's just the first change to ripple through 1985, the first change they created was the apparition of a two-ton moving car inside a barn, and then breathing air that wouldn't have been breathed at that point, etc. By the time they reach MArty's parents they were already in a second timeline.
If their arrival in the past isn't what split the timeline, then the original 1955 already contained a time-traveling Doc and Marty who didn't change anything. And then the timeline was split, not by time travel, but in some other way. That's internally consistent, just pretty much the opposite of parsimonious. Why else would the timeline split? Because the timeline just naturally splits all the time? But in that case also one would expect to observe a different sequence of events than the original, because most forks in the timeline don't lead to the future that you're from.


Libertarian free-will is basically seeing a dterministic universe and making a special pleading case for humans not being deterministic based on no evidence.
It seems like you're claiming that metaphysical libertarians are aware that in general there are no truly random events, but hold an irrational belief that human choices are an exception.

I dispute that the first part of that is an accurate generalization. I suspect that most metaphysical libertarians believe that some behavior of intimate matter is genuinely random as well.


I don't find the idea of an extramaterial soul with causal power absurd (indeed, I find it the only satisfying explanation for the existence of consciousness)
(Attributing consciousness to an extramaterial soul doesn't explain it any more than does attributing consciousness to the brain. Identifying the location or source of a phenomenon isn't the same thing as detailing how it happens.)


But since I'm fairly certain that we're not allowed to discuss that sort of thing on these forums, we'd better stick to Back to the Future and Existential Comics.

Yeah, I disagree with everything in your first two sentences, but let's not discuss religion/the soul. I don't think however discussing free-will breaks the forum rules.
Eh? Religious views on free will and determinism are as religious as religious views on the soul, and non-religious views on the soul are as non-religious as non-religious views on free will and determinism.

[Rrmcklin]

{snip}

How could prophecy be separrate from foreknowledge? You need the latter to make the former!

{snip}

It seems like Dion appears to be equating "prophecy" with "predication" and thus any random guess is considered a "prophecy" to him and thus doesn't require foreknowledge. This is contrary to how everyone else appears to be using the word, because we're not willfully ignoring actual context and misunderstanding the story to prove a point that isn't actually applicable to it.

[Devils_Advocate]

The way that time travel works in Back to the Future doesn't really have any bearing on the comic either, but that hasn't stopped anyone from discussing that. Opposing the "devolution" of threads into side discussions seems like setting oneself up for heaps of disappointment. Furthermore, is not complaining about a side discussion itself a side discussion that does not address the original topic?

Personally, I the way that these conversations can go on so many different tangents. "Life is a side quest! Seize the XP!"

[Dion]

It seems like Dion appears to be equating "prophecy" with "predication" and thus any random guess is considered a "prophecy" to him and thus doesn't require foreknowledge. .

Can you describe what you mean by foreknowledge?

If I prophecize that before the year 2150 I will be dead, few people would claim I possessed much foreknowledge, and nobody would claim I was omniscient.

When the oracle said Durkon would return home posthumously. I don’t think he had any more foreknowledge of how or why that would happen than I would if I said I’ll be dead sometime in the next 130 years.

I think the oracle knows *something* will happen to make his statement true. I think has no idea what will actually happen to make it true.

[Squire Doodad]

Can you describe what you mean by foreknowledge?

If I prophecize that before the year 2150 I will be dead, few people would claim I possessed much foreknowledge, and nobody would claim I was omniscient.

When the oracle said Durkon would return home posthumously. I don’t think he had any more foreknowledge of how or why that would happen than I would if I said I’ll be dead sometime in the next 130 years.

I think the oracle knows *something* will happen to make his statement true. I think has no idea what will actually happen to make it true.

You are grossly misrepresenting what the Oracle does and can do, based on our knowledge. The Oracle essentially said "Durkon (physical body or otherwise) will not be present in the Dwarven Lands until after Durkon has died at least once." No mention of any other condition. The fact that Durkon came back to the Dwarven Lands in itself does not mean much, but the way it happened such that Durkon had already died, and did not return at any other point, means something more.

[Dion]

You are grossly misrepresenting what the Oracle does and can do, based on our knowledge.

And I think people are grossly mistaken about what they see the oracle doing.

Suppose someone told you they were going to spend a month in Colorado hiking, and you said “I predict that at some point you will be at exactly 3,000 meters elevation”.

Suppose they came back from their trip and said “wow, how did you know that I would be on the Pikes Peak trail at 8:32 am in the morning on Tuesday? That’s amazing! But why didn’t you tell me to have a camera ready to take a picture of the elk?”

You’d think they were nuts. You had no idea how or when or where they were going to be at 3,000m. It was just (virtually) guaranteed that they would.

That’s how I see the reaction to the Oracle in this thread. Read what he REALLY is predicting. My default position is that what he ACTUALLY SAYS is the complete and full extent of his knowledge.

Clearly there are cases where he knows quite a lot (like with Belkar’s curse).

But I have no reason to imagine some crazy complicated mechanism that would allow him to know anything more about what would happen to Durkon, Haley, Belkar, or Elan that’s exactly what he said to them.

[Peelee]

My default position is that what he ACTUALLY SAYS is the complete and full extent of his knowledge.

Clearly there are cases where he knows quite a lot (like with Belkar’s curse).

But I have no reason to imagine some crazy complicated mechanism that would allow him to know anything more about what would happen to Durkon, Haley, Belkar, or Elan that’s exactly what he said to them.

The Oracle can explicitly look into the future, and can apparently read the books in that future (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0330.html). So I would say that there is a simple mechanism (reading the books in the future) that allows him to know exactly what would happen to Durkon, Haley, Belkar, or Elan.

[Rrmcklin]

More to the point, the Oracle's business is answering people's questions, not telling them literally every single detail of how things got to that point.

For the most part people seem okay with that because it's the result they care about, not the journey, and even if they did care the Oracle is a jerk who very clearly doesn't like telling more than is asked.

But to claim that the above somehow invalidates or makes ambiguous his knowledge of the future is ridiculous.

[Squire Doodad]

And I think people are grossly mistaken about what they see the oracle doing.

Suppose someone told you they were going to spend a month in Colorado hiking, and you said “I predict that at some point you will be at exactly 3,000 meters elevation”.

Suppose they came back from their trip and said “wow, how did you know that I would be on the Pikes Peak trail at 8:32 am in the morning on Tuesday? That’s amazing! But why didn’t you tell me to have a camera ready to take a picture of the elk?”

You’d think they were nuts. You had no idea how or when or where they were going to be at 3,000m. It was just (virtually) guaranteed that they would.

Durkon did not say "I have been banished from the Dwarven Lands, and my family is probably going to look for my body for the ceremonial burial if they can drum up the cash, will I ever return". He said "Will I ever return to the dwarven lands". The Oracle replying "posthumously" to the first question would be grim at first and then after the vampire bit be more insightful, but easily guessing. For the second question, it is grim and then insightful, but...is highly improbable to be just guessing, because while it is true, the Oracle is far from the Dwarven Lands and so could easily assume Durkon would die in the area where he is. The odds of Durkon dying in a random dungeon, and the odds of his body never returning in the first place, means that it is a far cry from "Information" "Nearly tautological comment based on information".

V's comment is far more interesting, as it has even less predictability. What are the odds of V actually acquiring ultimate arcane powers? Well, given that V was a pretty high level mage for a world where few wizards make it past 10th level...pretty decent. He might not get to "I am as unto a god" tier, but he'd probably master some immensely powerful spells. Then you have the 4 words to the right entity. That is VERY specific. What are the odds of someone making a faustian bargain to get ultimate magical power, when they seem sane now? What are the odds of someone accomplishing something with four words? You could say there's a good chance. You could say it would be probable. But the Oracle evidently does not care to know his clients very well, and so the odds of HIM KNOWING that V would do all this without magical doodads and whatnot are slim to none.

The other comments like the "pair of family reunions" (alluding to Nale and Julia using Sending, which the Oracle would know nothing about without spending way too much time on people he doesn't care about) also explicitly demonstrate the Oracle's abilities.

[Peelee]

Durkon did not say "I have been banished from the Dwarven Lands, and my family is probably going to look for my body for the ceremonial burial if they can drum up the cash, will I ever return". He said "Will I ever return to the dwarven lands".

Pickin' some nits: He asked how he would return to the Dwarven lands. The response makes more sense due to the "how."

[Squire Doodad]

Pickin' some nits: He asked how he would return to the Dwarven lands. The response makes more sense due to the "how."

Thanks for catching that. It still matters little, in retrospect V's question is ever more damming (*rimshot*) of a piece of evidence...for a point that is already in-universe canon and cannot be argued in virtually any way unless one disregards clear and concise information that has been confirmed many times over.

I liked the timeline discussion better.

[Kish]

My default position is that what he ACTUALLY SAYS is the complete and full extent of his knowledge.
That's downright preposterous. No one says the complete and full extent of their knowledge. Ever. You have no idea what I know about Japanese words and phrases because it's never come up.

[Squire Doodad]

That's downright preposterous. No one says the complete and full extent of their knowledge. Ever. You have no idea what I know about Japanese words and phrases because it's never come up.

Or even their full knowledge on a specific topic at hand. What someone says is always incomplete, whether by their own failings or, more commonly, a purposeful omission for whatever reason.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

And I think people are grossly mistaken about what they see the oracle doing.

But I have no reason to imagine some crazy complicated mechanism that would allow him to know anything more about what would happen to Durkon, Haley, Belkar, or Elan that’s exactly what he said to them.

You are the one grossly mistaken and indeed clearly ignoring the evidence in front of you. The Oracle is not doing guesswork. He has been shown capable of predicting the times of his own death down to the exact minute. That is far, far beyond guesswork.

Knowing the exact count of words that would give V ultimate Arcane power is a similar example of something beyond guesswork. As is Haley's answer, and of course Elan's.

Grey Wolf

[Squire Doodad]

You are the one grossly mistaken and indeed clearly ignoring the evidence in front of you. The Oracle is not doing guesswork. He has been shown capable of predicting the times of his own death down to the exact minute. That is far, far beyond guesswork.

Knowing the exact count of words that would give V ultimate Arcane power is a similar example of something beyond guesswork. As is Haley's answer, and of course Elan's.

Grey Wolf

Haley's answer is indeed almost definitely more than guesswork. Elan's is more debatable, if only because Elan is very very optimistic.

[Kish]

Elan's is more debatable, if only because Elan is very very optimistic.
Come again?

Not all the optimism in the world would make the correct answer to "Will this story have a happy ending?" be "Yes" if it was going to end with Xykon killing every other named character.

[Squire Doodad]

Come again?

Not all the optimism in the world would make the correct answer to "Will this story have a happy ending?" be "Yes" if it was going to end with Xykon killing every other named character.

It was more a comment on one being perceived as gullible because of optimism, but it's frankly irrelevant.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

Come again?

Not all the optimism in the world would make the correct answer to "Will this story have a happy ending?" be "Yes" if it was going to end with Xykon killing every other named character.

Or "the gods destroy the world and everyone in it, as they have done billions of times before". Or indeed "The snarl breaks free and devours all souls", both of which are frankly far more statistically likely.

Grey Wolf

[Squire Doodad]

Or "the gods destroy the world and everyone in it, as they have done billions of times before". Or indeed "The snarl breaks free and devours all souls", both of which are frankly far more statistically likely.

Grey Wolf

Yes yes, point taken. The tidbit about Elan's question was unnecessary.

[Dion]

You are the one grossly mistaken and indeed clearly ignoring the evidence in front of you. The Oracle is not doing guesswork. He has been shown capable of predicting the times of his own death down to the exact minute. That is far, far beyond guesswork.

Knowing the exact count of words that would give V ultimate Arcane power is a similar example of something beyond guesswork. As is Haley's answer, and of course Elan's.

I never said the oracle was guessing. I said there's no reason to believe he knows more than he's saying.

Yes, the oracle knew the exact count of words. That doesn't mean he knew which words, or who V would say them to, or why, or when, or anything else beyond the fact that their would be 4 words.

Think about it like math. There are all sorts of theorems in math that tell you that an object must satisfy some factual statement, without telling you how it satisfies that statement. For example, the fundamental theorem of arithmetic is "every natural number can be factored into unique primes". But just because you can look at an number and say unequivocally that it factors into unique primes, that doesn't give anyone the ability to actually know what the primes are.

My default position for any story with accurate prophecy is that the story occurs in a universe where a prophecy is a mathematically true statement (like there are unique prime factors), without necessarily telling you how it's true (like what the prime factors actually are).

The Oracle clearly knows some things in very great detail. But his knowledge of the world is similar to V's ability to throw fireballs. Just because V can throw a fireball, that doesn't make V omnipotent. And just because the oracle can know some things, that doesn't make the oracle omniscient.

[Peelee]

My default position for any story with accurate prophecy is that the story occurs in a universe where a prophecy is a mathematically true statement (like there are unique prime factors), without necessarily telling you how it's true (like what the prime factors actually are).

Which is all well and good, but should have changed when the Oracle said "I can look into the future, read the future books, and have all the answers. (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0330.html)" Or even earlier when he says the entire point of the memory charm is because he rambles and lets soothsayings slip on by all willy nilly (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0329.html).

Either way, there is very much reason to believe he knows more than he's saying.

[Lacuna Caster]

It’s impossible to make meaningful choices without determinism, because your choices can’t have any impact on what happens. What happens is just whatever was going to happen, regardless of your choice.

Also, I haven’t seen evidence that anyone or anything in OotS-verse has complete foreknowledge of what will happen (which is separate from both prophecy or determinism in my mind). A few characters have a very small measure of pre-knowledge, but it seems muddled, unclear, and often not very helpful to them.
I think this is more a general symptom of characters not being allowed to derive any useful information from prophecy because acting intelligently on said information would inevitably alter the foreseen future (or conversely cause it to be fulfilled in various contrived bull**** ways.) I'm not... crazy about prophetic visions as a plot device for this reason.

With that said, I do think the Oracle having effective or near-total omniscience is pretty heavily implied by the text. He's just kind of a jerk about it.

[Peelee]

I think this is more a general symptom of characters not being allowed to derive any useful information from prophecy because acting intelligently on said information would inevitably alter the foreseen future (or conversely cause it to be fulfilled in various contrived bull**** ways.) I'm not... crazy about prophetic visions as a plot device for this reason.

I can totally understand that, and I kind of like that that wasn't so much an issue in OotS; Roy acted intelligently to the prophecy, but got his question wrong, which was an amusing inversion. Durkon and V didn't care about anything but the end result of their prophecies, and even as they realized they were happening welcomed them; Haley simply took the advice, and that resolved her issues; Elan just asked as general a question as he could, I'd lump him in there with Durkon and V; and Belkar, well, he was always wanting his to come true regardless.

Now, the dragon, she totally acted intelligently on hers, and that ended up biting her in the rear hard, but that was hardly her fault.

[denthor]

Simply put it is a story. The author writes the story. Do yes a book or a movie never changes once completed.

[Fish]

If the Oracle were omniscient, he wouldn’t always be in the shower when visitors arrive.

[Devils_Advocate]

My default position for any story with accurate prophecy is that the story occurs in a universe where a prophecy is a mathematically true statement (like there are unique prime factors), without necessarily telling you how it's true (like what the prime factors actually are).
That's kind of like the idea of wishes interpreting and fulfilling themselves. It doesn't really take the implementation of wishes out of the hands of sentient beings in general so much as it turns wishes into sentient beings of their own. Similarly, it is hard to see how whatever mechanism generates prophesies does not know future events for all intents and purposes. So while an oracle may not be personally aware of future happenings, that just passes the proverbial buck.

In the real world, the writer or game master or whoever ensures that the wish or prophesy or what have you corresponds to what happens. You can attribute the in-setting work of ensuring this correspondence to a "mindless" force, but that "unaware" force will still walk and quack in a suspiciously duck-like fashion.


I think this is more a general symptom of characters not being allowed to derive any useful information from prophecy because acting intelligently on said information would inevitably alter the foreseen future (or conversely cause it to be fulfilled in various contrived bull**** ways.) I'm not... crazy about prophetic visions as a plot device for this reason.
Well, obviously no accurate prophesy can be self-defeating, because if it were self-defeating it wouldn't be accurate! A question about the future can't be correctly answered by any self-defeating prophesy, but it can potentially be correctly answered by any number of self-fulfilling prophesies. If you don't like that, then don't ask questions about the future! Ask questions about the present or the past instead!

[Kyutaru]

The way I see prophecies is that the only reason the prophecy came true at all is because of how the prophecy was interpreted in the first place.

So many instances in fiction where the prophecy had "multiple interpretations" didn't matter. The prophecy already knew which interpretation would play out. It knew the actors that would rebel against it and in doing so lead to its conclusion. It knew the misinterpretations that would create the exact circumstances that lead to it being fulfilled. This is because there is literally no other way the prophecy could exist.

When one looks at the future, the future changes because you looked at it. So you look again and it changes again, but simultaneously you never looked at it because it would be a paradox. The only future you can look at it therefore is the one that works out in the end for whatever reason. Looking at it is the catalyst that shifts the world in the direction of its fulfillment in the first place. Nothing you do will avert what was seen because then you wouldn't have seen it. Now there are certainly things that CAN avert the prophecy but these are actions that will NOT be taken and the prophecy already knows that. Some foil will exist to prevent its prevention, or the very act of attempting to prevent it is what will cause it to happen.

That doesn't mean you can't fight the future. Because remember, misinterpretations can happen. You may think the prophecy spells the end of the world when really that's just what you think you saw. So you go about trying to change the future and that itself leads to the true events that you misunderstood. In fighting the future, the future changes from your perspective when actually it was the same future all along. You saw your girlfriend get killed? She only looked dead. She's fine. You fighting the future is what made that happen even though it was always going to happen that way in the first place, because the future knew you would fight it and "change" her fate.

The verse is a troll and laughs while maniacally cackling "Just as Planned" because we're all just pawns.

[Peelee]

If the Oracle were omniscient, he wouldn’t always be in the shower when visitors arrive.

He knows he's in a parody, so making jokes like that are probably worth it to him.

[HorizonWalker]

He knows he's in a parody, so making jokes like that are probably worth it to him.

An alternative, more "serious" answer is that just because you know what your schedule is doesn't mean you can't forget it in the moment you decide "hm, time for a shower."

[Resileaf]

He has to activate his foresight to see what's coming up. In his day-to-day life, he doesn't bother to check what's coming up (except for when he's going to die), but when he has reason to see in the future, he does so. So he doesn't know ahead of time who Belkar is, but when he meets him, and figures out "Wow, that guy is a jerk", he'll go look in the future to see how bad he gets it, and will taunt Belkar with that knowledge.

[Peelee]

He has to activate his foresight to see what's coming up. In his day-to-day life, he doesn't bother to check what's coming up (except for when he's going to die), but when he has reason to see in the future, he does so. So he doesn't know ahead of time who Belkar is, but when he meets him, and figures out "Wow, that guy is a jerk", he'll go look in the future to see how bad he gets it, and will taunt Belkar with that knowledge.

He actually does know ahead of time who Belkar is, because one of the first things he says before actually listening to their questions is that Belkar's going to die.

Now, I do think he does have to actively check, but I think he checks who is upcoming appointment are, and does background checks on them (see also that he made them pay cash upfront - also a joke, but he clearly knew who they all were), which is also why he would totally clear the dragon while booked it out of town when Xykon showed up.

[Kish]

The way I see prophecies, is that it depends on the specific story.

It takes a lot of wishful thinking--or a very fixed attitude toward prophecies in every story--to treat the Oracle's prophecies and/or the High Priest of Odin's prophecy in this story as something other than true.

[Rrmcklin]

The way I see prophecies, is that it depends on the specific story.

It takes a lot of wishful thinking--or a very fixed attitude toward prophecies in every story--to treat the Oracle's prophecies and/or the High Priest of Odin's prophecy in this story as something other than true.

I think this sums up my feelings as well. If you like stories that treat things as more ambiguous or try twists, that's fair, but that's not this story. Better to accept that than to tortuously try and claim we aren't supposed to view it that way.

[Devils_Advocate]

Reductio ad absurdum much? Of course if you only have one reasonable choice then you're most likely to take that choice--unless you're insane, of course. However, life is very rarely neatly laid out like that, and often there are multiple choices that are, on the surface, equally reasonable. I made a long car journey on Tuesday, and I explicitly made the choice to take a longer route simply because it was one I'd driven before and was thus more confident in navigating it. I could just have easily chosen to fire up the satnav and take the shorter route, and in fact I did do that on the journey back.
Whether or not you know something, whether ahead of time or otherwise, isn't at all the same as whether it's determined by anything. Not knowing whether P equals NP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_versus_NP_problem) doesn't mean that there's not a correct answer to "Does P = NP?" So not being able to predict all decisions ahead of time isn't evidence for libertarian free will. In other words, a universe being wholly deterministic doesn't mean that its inhabitants' actions can always be predicted. You've argued as much yourself in this very thread!

But being able to predict some decisions ahead of time does seem like evidence against libertarian free will. Unless one seriously wants to argue "We have free will, but free will avoids doing anything that gives convincing evidence of its existence (https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/the-straight-dope/Content?oid=872412)."


The world of Back to the Future is deterministic but chaotic (like the weather), meaning that the slightest change in the set variables meaning, i.e Marty’s dad not being rescued by Marty’s mom (an unaccounted for butterfly in Brazil), means vastly different consequences, i.e. Marty not being born (an unforeseen storm in Texas). But should one have knowledge of all the variables with the required precision, one could make perfect predictions of the system’s state at any given time.

Yes it’s incoherent that things have changed due to their intervention, but that’s kind of the point: Marty and Doc being outsiders of the original 1955 their actions were unaccounted for in the original 1985, but the second 1955 has them and the second 1985 is therefore different from the first, but only with respect to the things they have changed! Marty ran over one pine meaning the Twin Pines Parking Lot became the Lonely Pine Parking Lot, but since neither Marty nor Doc had any further involvement in that parking’s lot history it remain otherwise exactly the same. Had that universe been non-deterministic, the second 1985 could have had anything in the place of that parking lot, but it didn’t.
But aren't Chaos Theory and the Butterfly Effect all about how small initial changes propagate through everything until everything is different in a totally unpredictable way? Even if Marty had only made changes to things that were somehow totally isolated from everything else, which isn't even the case, one would expect those things to be unpredictably altered. He changed what happened to his parents enough that the odds of them conceiving Marty in particular should be astronomically low.

Determinism is insufficient to account for how things play out. There must also be destiny, which pulls things back onto their fated paths. Except that destiny doesn't apply to time travelers, or it would arrange for them not to change anything.

And... that's pretty much it! All of the inconsistencies produced are the result of destiny trying to apply to everything else while also not applying to time travelers, even though those objectives are fundamentally at odds with one another.


Agency doesn't require metaphysical freedom; it requires a lack of metaphysical freedom, at least to a degree. For example, if our utterances were wholly constrained, but instead could be anything, we would only produce gibberish, and not even gibberish of our choosing! Random noises would not be based on our intentions, and thus would not be chosen. We are only free to use language because our utterances are constrained by our intentions.

I believe causal determinism is a requirement for free will to exist in our universe.

Without determinism, what happens next doesn’t depend on what occurred in the past.

In other words, without determinism, things just happen because they’re going to happen.

It’s impossible to make meaningful choices without determinism, because your choices can’t have any impact on what happens. What happens is just whatever was going to happen, regardless of your choice.
Libertarian free will only seems to require that our intentions be uncaused, not that our actions be uncaused, so it's compatible with our intentions causing our actions.


Clearly there are cases where he knows quite a lot (like with Belkar’s curse).

But I have no reason to imagine some crazy complicated mechanism that would allow him to know anything more about what would happen to Durkon, Haley, Belkar, or Elan that’s exactly what he said to them.
How does the Oracle knowing more than he reveals require any more crazy or complicated of a mechanism than knowing the things that he does reveal? You seem to be basically implying that it's harder to make predictions that you don't share with others. Which... huh? Potential backwards causality means that "But he has to make the predictions before he can share them" isn't much of an objection in this context, but do you have some reason to think that giving information to others somehow makes it true in this case?


Religious views on free will and determinism are as religious as religious views on the soul, and non-religious views on the soul are as non-religious as non-religious views on free will and determinism.
Actually, let me go ahead and try to give an example of what I'm talking about, in the form of a dialogue:

Prima: It seems to me that conscious experience must be something other than the behavior of matter. Our perceptions are plainly a different type of phenomenon than the movement of particles and the exchange of forces between them.

Secunda: Nonsense. The concept of a philosophical zombie -- something in all ways physically identical to an ordinary person, but not conscious -- is like the concept of something in all ways physically identical to an ordinary cat, but not furry. Why should we believe the abstract quality of consciousness to be an abstraction of anything but the behavior of matter any more than the abstract quality of furriness?

P: Ah, but the abstract concept of furriness is not contained within the cat's body, but within a mind. In order for the abstraction to apply, it must first exist. Our understanding of the physical requires the existence of the mental, because understanding itself falls into the latter category.

S: But there is no rational basis to presuppose that the mental is not ultimately a subcategory of the physical, rather than a separate category. A philosophical zombie, behaving as it does by definition identically to a real person, can equally well write philosophy papers about consciousness. Do you really suppose that real persons write philosophy papers about consciousness that are correct by coincidence?

P: Ah, well, that is an issue with epiphenomenalism. But epiphenomenalists are weirdos like that. The general understanding is that the soul affects the body, as well as being affected by it.

S: If we are talking about a phenomenon that both causes and is caused by the behavior of matter, then I must wonder in what sense it can be considered to be non-physical. It seems to me that this "soul", if it exists, is no less material than gravity. What would distinguish it as apart from the physical universe? We have time and time again observed violations of the laws of physics as we had understood them; when this happens, we say that we got the laws wrong, and attempt to formulate laws that are consistent with our observations. It is difficult to imagine an observation that would instead have to be described by saying "This phenomenon is outside the laws of nature".

P: The difference is that physical forces like gravity are inherently interactions between pieces of matter, and thus cannot exist without matter. I cannot conceive of gravity without physical objects, but I can conceive of a mind that does not interact with matter. In this and in countless other regards, mental phenomena are conceptually distinct from physical phenomena.

S: But an event is a change, or changes, in state. If nothing has changed, then nothing has happened. "Matter", it seems to me, is what we call that which has states and experiences changes between them. We can imagine matter radically different from that with which we are familiar -- matter that is truly continuous rather than composed of fundamental particles, for instance -- but everything that happens must still happen to something. The mind must be embodied in something, even if it is not embodied in the brain. And I see no good reason to think that matter as we are familiar with it is somehow insufficient to serve as the hardware for the mind's software. It is difficult to see how I could be fully confident that it is sufficient without first understanding how consciousness works; and I do not understand how consciousness works. But, similarly, unless you have some sort of detailed model that explains consciousness, I do not see how you can rationally conclude that...
And so on and so forth. None of this involves any appeal to any dogma. To the contrary, the interlocutors' dispute is entirely about what can be reasonably inferred from ordinary experience.


Choice involves at the very least two options. If there is only one option, it's a false choice.

If my choice could be predicted with 100% certainity, that would mean I'm an automaton, not a person.
Let me see if I've got this right: If you definitely will do everything that you will do, then you have no choice to do otherwise, and therefore no free will. Thus, you can only have free will in the present if the future is indeterminate. Is that the argument?

If that's so, then I have to wonder... Do you think that the past is indeterminate? Or do you think that everyone now dead never exercised free will in life? After all, if they definitely did everything that they did, then they had no choice to do otherwise, and therefore no free will, right?

The idea that there's one definitive past seems to be widely held conventional wisdom. But predestiny doesn't seem to be any more of a problem for free will than postdestiny. And how can you believe in the latter but not the former? There's no reason to think that this exact moment in time is special such that the expanse of time before it is different than the expanse of time after it, is there? Like... "The universe has had one definitive sequence of events, up until right... now! No, now! No, NOW! No, wait... right NOW!" etc. Hopefully you get the point: The phrase "the present" has referred to a different time every time that you've said it, and there's no reason to think that any particular "present" is special.

This is the question implicitly raised by time travel into the past. That scenario prompts you to judge the past by the same standards as the future by positing the past becoming the future relative to your "personal timeline". But time travel isn't a necessary part of the question. Instead of asking "If you were to visit the past, would you not see events unfold as destined?", we can just say "Hey, didn't events unfold as destined in the past?"

Earlier I drew a distinction between predeterminism and predestination, which I really should have explained further. See, by "predeterminism" I mean that the future is determined by -- in a sense, encoded in -- the present. By "predestination" I mean that there are non-tautological truths about the future, just like there are non-tautological truths about the present. The primary argument for this is from the law of excluded middle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_excluded_middle). E.g either I will have oatmeal for breakfast tomorrow, in which case it is predestined that I shall, or I will not have oatmeal for breakfast tomorrow, in which case it is predestined that I shall not. A lot of people take predestination in this sense for granted because they take the law of excluded middle for granted. And the idea that some things are going to happen is pretty compelling. After all, if instead nothing is going to happen, doesn't that mean that there is no future, and time is coming to an end right now? No, wait, now! No, wait, right n... etc. (Again.)

But of course a dichotomy is false when based on a hidden, unnecessary assumption. The above assumes that there's either a future or no future. But there are numbers other than one and zero! Perhaps more than one possible future is real. Maybe in one of them I have oatmeal for breakfast tomorrow but in another I don't. In that case, "I" effectively becomes ambiguous, because there will be more than one "me". In other words, "I will have oatmeal for breakfast tomorrow" has more than one meaning, because "I" has more than one meaning. Like saying "The dog fetched the ball" when there are multiple dogs and multiple balls and nothing really picks any of them out as "the".

And if time only branches forwards and not backwards, then there are multiple futures but only one past, and without the present being special. Because in that case, each past moment had multiple futures of its own that aren't part of your timeline, because they lie on alternate branches.

Here's the kicker, though: If they are indeed real, then all of those alternate futures are all part of the totality of everything that will exist, so it's really just predestined that all of those different versions of events happen! And if the present determines which futures are possible, and all of those futures happen, then the present actually determines the total future too; all future events, taken together, are collectively predetermined. It's just that each future version of you only gets to experience one version of history, just like you're presently unaware of all of the alternate presents where things went differently.

[Squire Doodad]

Everything is not pre-determined. Why? Because [spoilers].

If you want to look at it one way though, everything is predetermined literally on account of the fact that its a story written by someone who isn't just rolling dice to figure out what happens next.

[factotum]

But being able to predict some decisions ahead of time does seem like evidence against libertarian free will. Unless one seriously wants to argue "We have free will, but free will avoids doing anything that gives convincing evidence of its existence (https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/the-straight-dope/Content?oid=872412)."


Um, yes, that's my entire argument, so not sure why you're seemingly contradicting me? The example I gave was intended to show that, with thousands of people making free will decisions every moment of every day, it's just infeasible to somehow predict what will happen, any more than we can reliably predict the weather.

[skim172]

The act of prophecy is what makes the prophecy true.

There is a range of infinite possibilities for the future. And this remains the case - until the present, when it becomes known. Once it is known, then the range of possibilities collapses, into a single outcome that is now "true". Prior to that, it is simply "uncertain".

Under typical circumstances, this outcome only becomes known in the present. The timeline becomes set once the future rolls into the present. But if one engages in prophecy or divination - when one looks forward into the future, one gains knowledge of what is to come. And so by the same mechanism, gaining knowledge of the future then sets the one "true" outcome of the future. It is thus by gaining knowledge of the future that makes it the future.

The oracles, the prophets, and the seers are - without realizing it, without understanding it - writing the future that they are trying to foresee. They foresee an outcome - and that outcome becomes known - and thus the future is set.

So what is the mechanism? How is the future outcome decided?

In the present - under normal circumstances - the single "true" outcome is created by the collective decisions and acts of the living beings who experience it. Consciously or unconsciously, they build their timeline, their decisions ultimately resulting in one true outcome. The present is a construct of the decisions and acts of all. As they gain knowledge of it, they collectively create the outcome.

Similarly, then, we can deduce that when the future is foretold, the future outcome is set by those who are gaining knowledge of it. But in the present, all beings gain knowledge of the present simultaneously. When seeing the future, only the seer and the questioner are they who are gaining knowledge of the future. And subconsciously, it is their minds which determine the outcome. As the only two minds who are gaining the knowledge of the outcome, they have great influence and power over what that outcome will be.

Those who seek to know the future - the questioners - are necessarily anxious. Concerned. Worried. Apprehensive. Afraid. Frightened enough of the future to seek to use arcane magics to know the future.

And it is these minds that shape the future in their acts of divination. Is it any wonder then, that prophecies and oracles in fantasy stories only seem to portend doom, disaster, death, and the greatest of worries come to life?

When that priest of Odin foresaw a young dutiful honest dwarf bringing death and destruction - he made that future real.

And when the gods seek to foresee if the Snarl would destroy their latest iteration of the mortal world - each time, they make those futures real.

It is our worries and fears, amplified by the forces of magic and divination, that look forward into the future, and its range of infinite, uncertain possibilities - and selects the worst of the outcomes.



//The preceding nonsense brought to you by stealing concepts and ideas wholesale from multiple works of sci-fi and fantasy

[brian 333]

Just because there is a way to view the future, it doesn't mean free will is absent.

Imagine an event. A thousand decisions detemine its outcome, and people make them on the fly continuously. I go into the futue not knowing the results of my actions and choices, making the best decisions I can. Then I see the results. If I see the results first I still have to make the best decisions I can, on the fly, to achieve the results. And so will everyone else.

Nothing has changed. I still have to exercise free will to achieve the forseen event.

[Dion]

The oracle knew durkon would be dead when he returned home.

I can’t see why that should mean the oracle knew durkon would be a vampire.

[Rrmcklin]

{scrubbed}

[Dion]

Imagine a statement about he future. A million billion possible futures may exist where that statement is true.

Just because a statement about the future is true that doesn’t mean that only one possible future exists.

[jwhouk]

I think what really happened was that the Kobold got a peek at the Giant's storyline notes.

[Dion]

I think what really happened was that the Kobold got a peek at the Giant's storyline notes.

The Giant tells Tiamat, and Tiamat tells The Oracle, and The Oracle tells us (through the comic).

Which makes perfect sense to me, because not everything is predetermined. The Giant still has a thousand billion possible futures to choose from, and can even change his mind on major plot lines.

The statements conveyed from The Giant to Tiamat to The Oracle to us just have to be technically true in the end, somehow.

[Peelee]

The Giant tells Tiamat, and Tiamat tells The Oracle, and The Oracle tells us (through the comic).

In that case, the Oracle absolutely knew (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?294096-The-MitD-outwitting-Xykon/page9&p=15709954#post15709954) that Durkon was going to be a vampire.:smallamused:

[Doug Lampert]

In that case, the Oracle absolutely knew (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?294096-The-MitD-outwitting-Xykon/page9&p=15709954#post15709954) that Durkon was going to be a vampire.:smallamused:

How so? Just because the Giant knew, doesn't mean he told Tiamat or that Tiamat told the oracle.

[woweedd]

In that case, the Oracle absolutely knew (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?294096-The-MitD-outwitting-Xykon/page9&p=15709954#post15709954) that Durkon was going to be a vampire.:smallamused:
And the problem with that is...?

[Peelee]

And the problem with that is...?

Nothing whatsoever.

[Dion]

In that case, the Oracle absolutely knew (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?294096-The-MitD-outwitting-Xykon/page9&p=15709954#post15709954) that Durkon was going to be a vampire.:smallamused:

That’s... actually pretty cool.

It helps answer a question I’ve had for a while of “what is ACTUALLY pre-determined in OotS”.

[Squire Doodad]

That’s... actually pretty cool.

It helps answer a question I’ve had for a while of “what is ACTUALLY pre-determined in OotS”.

Yeah. Burlew holds his cards for a long time, I wouldn't be surprised if you told me "Julio was originally introduced with the idea that he was involved with Elan's dad". Still, the idea that Durkon's plot has been determined by a single pun, and that there's a story and character (and more, of course, but more indirectly) that is created for the sole purpose of fulfilling that goal? That is impressive.

[Devils_Advocate]

Libertarian free will only seems to require that our intentions be uncaused, not that our actions be uncaused, so it's compatible with our intentions causing our actions.
To expand on this point:

One might think that the only way in which our intentions can be free is for them to be random or semi-random. Sure, we can look at whether our actions are determined by our intentions, but the only question with regard to our intentions themselves is whether they're undetermined. Right?

Well, no. Just like how we can look at whether our actions are determined by our intentions, we can look at whether our intentions are determined by our intentions. We often intend for ourselves to have certain intentions later on, don't we? And if someone currently intends as they intended to intend, then their intentions are free in just the same way in which their actions are free when they act as they intended to act.

Gandhi wants not to commit murder. As a result of this desire, he also wants his mind not to change such that he wants to commit murder, as then he might murder someone, which he wants not to do. Gandhi's mind may be more "free" in a metaphysical sense if it has the potential to rebel against itself and spontaneously decide to murder someone, but such potential certainly seems to reduce Gandhi's agency.

The kicker here is that some people apparently prefer that their intentions be quasi-randomized. So for them, that randomization does correspond to more agency! But not because one's intentions being more of a crapshoot generally grants people more agency or constitutes freedom in any generally desirable sense. Rather, it's because we're more free when our minds behave more as we want them to, and for whatever reason, they want their minds to be randomized at least a little.


Um, yes, that's my entire argument, so not sure why you're seemingly contradicting me?
I'm not even sure what you mean by "that" at this point. If you mean that libertarian free will is a jealous phenomenon, then I'm arguing that jealous phenomena are, in general, not real, and there doesn't seem to be any good reason to think that this is an exception.

If, on the other hand, "that" is meant to refer to my argument that libertarian free will isn't real, then in what way do I seem to be contradicting you?

If I come off as weirdly trying to disagree with you despite not contradicting anything you say, you're not just imagining that. And the reason for it is that you came off as weirdly trying to disagree with Fyraltari despite not contradicting anything that he said. My implied disagreement was with your implied disagreement. If you disagree with Fyraltari for some unstated reason, what is that reason? If you don't disagree with him, then why is your reply phrased like an attempted rebuttal?

[Linneris]

Of course! Whatever the author wants to have happen, will be exactly what happens.

On a more serious note, here’s my personal head canon for any fictional universe with “true” prophecies which are otherwise unexplained:

The fictional universe is not deterministic, and are an infinite uncountable set of possible futures. But the fictional setting also has “strange attractor statements”, which are statements that converge to true in all (or most) futures.

In other words, there might be a billion billion billion different ways that prophecy might be true. And for most of them, people might say, “huh! I guess that, given that specific wording, that prophecy did technically turn out to be a true statement after all. That’s ironic!”

There’s no way to know *how* a prophecy becomes true, and the characters in the story still have a huge amount of freedom to choose their future. But regardless of what path is chosen, the prophecy (usually) comes true (somehow).

Unless the author explains different, I just figure that for whatever reason, the physical laws of a particular fictional universe are setup to make these hypothetical strange attractors exist, and to give some entities the ability to perceive them. But they don’t actually predict the future in a meaningful way.

This is how I rationalize it as well.

In a setting of mine, the Fates can't brute force the future into a specific path, but they can see every possible future, and thus only make a prophecy if it comes true in every possible future in which the prophecy is made (since the very act of revealing it to the world changes the future and can influence its completion, in an Oedipus Rex fashion).

[mjasghar]

If the Oracle were omniscient, he wouldn’t always be in the shower when visitors arrive.
Just because people have schedules doesn’t mean they can stick to them
He can know they are turning up at 10 am and decide to shower and get freshly cleaned clothes ready but take too long
Omniscience doesn’t equal omnipotence
With regards to other points made here
Back to the Future - my reading of the underlying reasoning is that entity causing the change is resistant to that change as long as they allow the flow of time to create the possibility that they would still exist
Marty changes his parents futures. In one possibility he did so in such a way they never got together and so he could have become a loop in time that is cut out of the flow and faded. What happens is he gives them a better life. This causes his brother and sister to have better outcomes. However, for this all to have happened requires a Marty who was shaped by that other timeline. Does that timeline exist still? Perhaps. But in the new timeline Marty has existed previously and seemingly with the same general personality. It would be fascinating to see how he coped with his life - there would be daily issues of memories he should have. Maybe they slowly filter through and his first life becomes a dream?
Of course the reasoning behind all of this is simple - any time travel story requires a view point character who cannot change his being and so allows the viewer or reader to understand that changes that have been made. There are exceptions in many short stories about time travel, but in those the change is emphasised in the narrative.
Generally the time traveller is immune to the changes to avoid paradox - the best example is doctor who where it’s all waived away by the concept of the Vortex and artron energy.

[Wizard_Lizard]

Whether or not you know something, whether ahead of time or otherwise, isn't at all the same as whether it's determined by anything. Not knowing whether P equals NP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_versus_NP_problem) doesn't mean that there's not a correct answer to "Does P = NP?" So not being able to predict all decisions ahead of time isn't evidence for libertarian free will. In other words, a universe being wholly deterministic doesn't mean that its inhabitants' actions can always be predicted. You've argued as much yourself in this very thread!

But being able to predict some decisions ahead of time does seem like evidence against libertarian free will. Unless one seriously wants to argue "We have free will, but free will avoids doing anything that gives convincing evidence of its existence (https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/the-straight-dope/Content?oid=872412)."


But aren't Chaos Theory and the Butterfly Effect all about how small initial changes propagate through everything until everything is different in a totally unpredictable way? Even if Marty had only made changes to things that were somehow totally isolated from everything else, which isn't even the case, one would expect those things to be unpredictably altered. He changed what happened to his parents enough that the odds of them conceiving Marty in particular should be astronomically low.

Determinism is insufficient to account for how things play out. There must also be destiny, which pulls things back onto their fated paths. Except that destiny doesn't apply to time travelers, or it would arrange for them not to change anything.

And... that's pretty much it! All of the inconsistencies produced are the result of destiny trying to apply to everything else while also not applying to time travelers, even though those objectives are fundamentally at odds with one another.



Libertarian free will only seems to require that our intentions be uncaused, not that our actions be uncaused, so it's compatible with our intentions causing our actions.


How does the Oracle knowing more than he reveals require any more crazy or complicated of a mechanism than knowing the things that he does reveal? You seem to be basically implying that it's harder to make predictions that you don't share with others. Which... huh? Potential backwards causality means that "But he has to make the predictions before he can share them" isn't much of an objection in this context, but do you have some reason to think that giving information to others somehow makes it true in this case?


Actually, let me go ahead and try to give an example of what I'm talking about, in the form of a dialogue:

Prima: It seems to me that conscious experience must be something other than the behavior of matter. Our perceptions are plainly a different type of phenomenon than the movement of particles and the exchange of forces between them.

Secunda: Nonsense. The concept of a philosophical zombie -- something in all ways physically identical to an ordinary person, but not conscious -- is like the concept of something in all ways physically identical to an ordinary cat, but not furry. Why should we believe the abstract quality of consciousness to be an abstraction of anything but the behavior of matter any more than the abstract quality of furriness?

P: Ah, but the abstract concept of furriness is not contained within the cat's body, but within a mind. In order for the abstraction to apply, it must first exist. Our understanding of the physical requires the existence of the mental, because understanding itself falls into the latter category.

S: But there is no rational basis to presuppose that the mental is not ultimately a subcategory of the physical, rather than a separate category. A philosophical zombie, behaving as it does by definition identically to a real person, can equally well write philosophy papers about consciousness. Do you really suppose that real persons write philosophy papers about consciousness that are correct by coincidence?

P: Ah, well, that is an issue with epiphenomenalism. But epiphenomenalists are weirdos like that. The general understanding is that the soul affects the body, as well as being affected by it.

S: If we are talking about a phenomenon that both causes and is caused by the behavior of matter, then I must wonder in what sense it can be considered to be non-physical. It seems to me that this "soul", if it exists, is no less material than gravity. What would distinguish it as apart from the physical universe? We have time and time again observed violations of the laws of physics as we had understood them; when this happens, we say that we got the laws wrong, and attempt to formulate laws that are consistent with our observations. It is difficult to imagine an observation that would instead have to be described by saying "This phenomenon is outside the laws of nature".

P: The difference is that physical forces like gravity are inherently interactions between pieces of matter, and thus cannot exist without matter. I cannot conceive of gravity without physical objects, but I can conceive of a mind that does not interact with matter. In this and in countless other regards, mental phenomena are conceptually distinct from physical phenomena.

S: But an event is a change, or changes, in state. If nothing has changed, then nothing has happened. "Matter", it seems to me, is what we call that which has states and experiences changes between them. We can imagine matter radically different from that with which we are familiar -- matter that is truly continuous rather than composed of fundamental particles, for instance -- but everything that happens must still happen to something. The mind must be embodied in something, even if it is not embodied in the brain. And I see no good reason to think that matter as we are familiar with it is somehow insufficient to serve as the hardware for the mind's software. It is difficult to see how I could be fully confident that it is sufficient without first understanding how consciousness works; and I do not understand how consciousness works. But, similarly, unless you have some sort of detailed model that explains consciousness, I do not see how you can rationally conclude that...
And so on and so forth. None of this involves any appeal to any dogma. To the contrary, the interlocutors' dispute is entirely about what can be reasonably inferred from ordinary experience.



Let me see if I've got this right: If you definitely will do everything that you will do, then you have no choice to do otherwise, and therefore no free will. Thus, you can only have free will in the present if the future is indeterminate. Is that the argument?

If that's so, then I have to wonder... Do you think that the past is indeterminate? Or do you think that everyone now dead never exercised free will in life? After all, if they definitely did everything that they did, then they had no choice to do otherwise, and therefore no free will, right?

The idea that there's one definitive past seems to be widely held conventional wisdom. But predestiny doesn't seem to be any more of a problem for free will than postdestiny. And how can you believe in the latter but not the former? There's no reason to think that this exact moment in time is special such that the expanse of time before it is different than the expanse of time after it, is there? Like... "The universe has had one definitive sequence of events, up until right... now! No, now! No, NOW! No, wait... right NOW!" etc. Hopefully you get the point: The phrase "the present" has referred to a different time every time that you've said it, and there's no reason to think that any particular "present" is special.

This is the question implicitly raised by time travel into the past. That scenario prompts you to judge the past by the same standards as the future by positing the past becoming the future relative to your "personal timeline". But time travel isn't a necessary part of the question. Instead of asking "If you were to visit the past, would you not see events unfold as destined?", we can just say "Hey, didn't events unfold as destined in the past?"

Earlier I drew a distinction between predeterminism and predestination, which I really should have explained further. See, by "predeterminism" I mean that the future is determined by -- in a sense, encoded in -- the present. By "predestination" I mean that there are non-tautological truths about the future, just like there are non-tautological truths about the present. The primary argument for this is from the law of excluded middle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_excluded_middle). E.g either I will have oatmeal for breakfast tomorrow, in which case it is predestined that I shall, or I will not have oatmeal for breakfast tomorrow, in which case it is predestined that I shall not. A lot of people take predestination in this sense for granted because they take the law of excluded middle for granted. And the idea that some things are going to happen is pretty compelling. After all, if instead nothing is going to happen, doesn't that mean that there is no future, and time is coming to an end right now? No, wait, now! No, wait, right n... etc. (Again.)

But of course a dichotomy is false when based on a hidden, unnecessary assumption. The above assumes that there's either a future or no future. But there are numbers other than one and zero! Perhaps more than one possible future is real. Maybe in one of them I have oatmeal for breakfast tomorrow but in another I don't. In that case, "I" effectively becomes ambiguous, because there will be more than one "me". In other words, "I will have oatmeal for breakfast tomorrow" has more than one meaning, because "I" has more than one meaning. Like saying "The dog fetched the ball" when there are multiple dogs and multiple balls and nothing really picks any of them out as "the".

And if time only branches forwards and not backwards, then there are multiple futures but only one past, and without the present being special. Because in that case, each past moment had multiple futures of its own that aren't part of your timeline, because they lie on alternate branches.

Here's the kicker, though: If they are indeed real, then all of those alternate futures are all part of the totality of everything that will exist, so it's really just predestined that all of those different versions of events happen! And if the present determines which futures are possible, and all of those futures happen, then the present actually determines the total future too; all future events, taken together, are collectively predetermined. It's just that each future version of you only gets to experience one version of history, just like you're presently unaware of all of the alternate presents where things went differently.

You know, if I could meet some pf those other mes, I wpuld probably attempt to severey injure them for being so lucky.

[GloatingSwine]

Maybe prophecy is Dune style.

The future is fixed at the point that a prescient individual observes it. So only things specifically observed by a prescient like the Oracle are determined and anything not so observed are still undetermined.

[mjasghar]

Maybe prophecy is Dune style.

The future is fixed at the point that a prescient individual observes it. So only things specifically observed by a prescient like the Oracle are determined and anything not so observed are still undetermined.

No
This is a story with the endings pretty much fixed in the authors head
So it will happen but as it’s written over a period of time Rich may decide to alter things so they are technically true
As an example I think (willing to be corrected) he would not have that scene where the group lets Belkar kill some random bloke for convenience sake. At that point he was still having Belkar be the murder hobo joke about how role-playing groups let people get away with stuff so that they can keep playing together

[Schroeswald]

Didn’t Spoiler Alert reveal something about Sangwaan’s prophecy powers? Never read it but I think I’ve heard something vague about that.

[GloatingSwine]

No
This is a story with the endings pretty much fixed in the authors head
So it will happen but as it’s written over a period of time Rich may decide to alter things so they are technically true
As an example I think (willing to be corrected) he would not have that scene where the group lets Belkar kill some random bloke for convenience sake. At that point he was still having Belkar be the murder hobo joke about how role-playing groups let people get away with stuff so that they can keep playing together

The thread is clearly looking for diagetic answers, so trying to look smug by giving non-diagetic ones is not helpful to the original inquirer.

[woweedd]

The thread is clearly looking for diagetic answers, so trying to look smug by giving non-diagetic ones is not helpful to the original inquirer.
I mean, 4th-wall breaking is common in-comic, particularly as regards The Oracle: He explicitly states that he can read Haley's speech by "looking forward to the point where this particular strip is complied into a book and reading the translation". Or his noting the difference between a real-world year and in-comic year. And unlike other 4th-wall gags, these ones are actually called out as unusual by other characters, which leads me to read them as diegetic. So...It's entirely possible that IS how his powers work on a diegetic level

[mjasghar]

Give me a diagetic explanation of how a character obtained a diamond for a raise dead spell by taking it from a cover strip of the comic

[KorvinStarmast]

Is everything pre-determined in OOTS world?

Yes (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0251.html) and no (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0201.html).


Yes, that's the point of a prophecy. You say something vague and people interpret it. Yes. The story of Oedipus and a similar thing done by Robert Jordan in Waste of Time Wheel of Time: prophesy is only partly understood by those receiving it.
(As it happens, as far as I am concerned, you and Peelee combined have the full answer: OotS is Doylist deterministic, what with it being a story Rich is telling, and Watsonian free-willed)
My answer was pithier, but I think it fits your template. :smallcool:

How so? Just because the Giant knew, doesn't mean he told Tiamat or that Tiamat told the oracle. Giant gets to talk to dragons. Nice deal. (Also, this post put me to thinking about a story from a few decades ago by R.A McAvoy: Tea With a Black Dragon.

Give me a diagetic explanation of how a character obtained a diamond for a raise dead spell by taking it from a cover strip of the comic The self aware parody world was already established "in world" and the breaking of the fourth wall as a thing that happens was established in book 1. (Lawyers taking the ililthid away).

In world, fourth wall breaking is part of how this world works. :smallcool:

(And we see here an argument for ultimate power (the power of the narrator) being a very doily-ist (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0033.html) structural component of this tale. )

[mjasghar]

My comment was directed at the person who was basically saying we need an in world explanation to cover something that is entirely due to the realities of writing and production

[KorvinStarmast]

My comment was directed at the person who was basically saying we need an in world explanation to cover something that is entirely due to the realities of writing and production
I wasn't sure which post that was referring to, so I just riffed off of that as a general idea. (I now see that it was a response to woweed, or was it to gloating swine?). In an on line forum, we sometimes reply to a post and as we are so doing, a few other replies in between. (So I use the quote function a lot to be clear).

[Schroeswald]

My comment was directed at the person who was basically saying we need an in world explanation to cover something that is entirely due to the realities of writing and production

But it um, wasn’t? That is not what the statement you responded to was Gloating Swine giving a possible (diagetic) explanation for how prophecies work in the Oots world (it’s like Dune), and then you said:

No
This is a story with the endings pretty much fixed in the authors head
So it will happen but as it’s written over a period of time Rich may decide to alter things so they are technically true
As an example I think (willing to be corrected) he would not have that scene where the group lets Belkar kill some random bloke for convenience sake. At that point he was still having Belkar be the murder hobo joke about how role-playing groups let people get away with stuff so that they can keep playing together
Disagreeing with the completely diagetic explanation with completely non-diagetic logic, you basically responded to the assertion that perhaps only what you see in the future has to happen with the idea that Rich might change what the prophecies meant over the writing of the strip, which doesn’t actually disprove anything gloating swine said (diagetic and non-diagetic), was pretty smug, and the idea that the reason Rich made the prophecies vague was so he could change his mind is IMO ridiculous, when you make prophecies in a work of fiction it’s vague for obvious storytelling reasons, I am almost that every prophecy we have seen come true came true much the same as Rich planned when he gave it (with small changes for little details, maybe V’s four words were slightly different, maybe the destruction was meant to be all Greg).

[mjasghar]

Thank you for completely missing my point

[Schroeswald]

Thank you for completely missing my point

Okay then, what is your point, and spell it out for me as simple as possible because I can’t see it.

[mjasghar]

You’re not interested in a debate, instead you repeat personal attacks so no.

[Schroeswald]

I am interested in debating you, but since I clearly don’t understand your argument I would like to understand it better because what I read seemed smug, silly and a very bad argument against what Gloating Swine said.

[woweedd]

Give me a diagetic explanation of how a character obtained a diamond for a raise dead spell by taking it from a cover strip of the comic
They already had the diamonds needed, and they only lost them for the purposes of that joke. It was just a random gag, might as well never have happened, aside from giving us a good joke.

[Morgana]

No, simply because that would go against pretty much everything Rich tries to achieve with his writing. How would characters not having free will work towards conveying any of the messages Rich has explicitedly said he was trying to convey in his work? Why would he go to such great lengths to show characters breaking away from expectations and defying odds if all of them were just puppets on a string? The type of cynism that would come with the inevitability of everything is frankly extremely out of place in a story like this, and would just serve to add a needless layer of cynism, something that Rich actively strives to avoid doing.

[Morgana]

Also just cause the comic has some meta elements doesn't mean that the ending being already planned in the real world means that free will doesn't exist inside the story. Tarkin's whole thing was that he failed to understand that while following narrative rules to some extent, the people he was hurting weren't just characters, and as far as the comic is concerned although self aware at times the stickverse is actually a real place with real people that don't exist just as props for a story, and have aspirations and agency of their own.

[woweedd]

No, simply because that would go against pretty much everything Rich tries to achieve with his writing. How would characters not having free will work towards conveying any of the messages Rich has explicitedly said he was trying to convey in his work? Why would he go to such great lengths to show characters breaking away from expectations and defying odds if all of them were just puppets on a string? The type of cynism that would come with the inevitability of everything is frankly extremely out of place in a story like this, and would just serve to add a needless layer of cynism, something that Rich actively strives to avoid doing.
What about the Oracle? Or Odin?

[Morgana]

Oracle isn't omniscient, otherwise Tiamat would be rulling the world by now, and there's no evidence to determine either can accurately predict the future to a fineprint

[woweedd]

Oracle isn't omniscient, otherwise Tiamat would be rulling the world by now, and there's no evidence to determine either can accurately predict the future to a fineprint
He can predict the moment of his death down to the minute. Plus, you know, the massive number of successful prophecies, and his explicitly stated ability to read future books, which, unlike other 4th-wall breaks, is acknowledged as unusual in-universe, implying it's diagnetic.

[KorvinStarmast]

implying it's diagnetic.
Let's leave L. Ron Hubbard out of this. :smallcool:

[Dion]

He can predict the moment of his death down to the minute. Plus, you know, the massive number of successful prophecies, and his explicitly stated ability to read future books, which, unlike other 4th-wall breaks, is acknowledged as unusual in-universe, implying it's diagnetic.

So are you saying you believe the Oracle is omniscient, i.e has complete, total, and absolute knowledge of all events future and past?

Does he, for example, know exactly how many bits will be drawn on sigdi’s axe in the next comic?

[HorizonWalker]

So are you saying you believe the Oracle is omniscient, i.e has complete, total, and absolute knowledge of all events future and past?

Does he, for example, know exactly how many bits will be drawn on sigdi’s axe in the next comic?
That's more than a bit disingenuous. You're the one saying omniscient and then posing a question that we will never get an answer to in an attempt to discredit a specific theory that, again, you're the one who raised.

[KorvinStarmast]

So are you saying you believe the Oracle is omniscient, i.e has complete, total, and absolute knowledge of all events future and past? From what the kobold oracle has done on screen, he appears to have to go into a partciular state in order to get the view into the future. (Assist from Tiamat, it appears). That suggests to me that the oracle has a limited form of prescience, not omniscience, and that it isn't walking around 24/7 knowing all possible futures.


Does he, for example, know exactly how many bits will be drawn on sigdi’s axe in the next comic? That's irrelevant to the topic of the thread.

[Dion]

That's more than a bit disingenuous. You're the one saying omniscient.

No, you’ve misread the thread. Woweed and Morgana were discussing the question of whether or not the oracle was omniscient.

The question of omniscience was certainly not raised by me first, and I confess to bristling at the accusation that discussing it is disingenuous.


That's irrelevant to the topic of the thread.

Ah... I’ll bring it back on point, then. Does the oracle know how many blades rey’s Lightsaber will have in the next movie?

[woweedd]

From what the kobold oracle has done on screen, he appears to have to go into a partciular state in order to get the view into the future. (Assist from Tiamat, it appears). That suggests to me that the oracle has a limited form of prescience, not omniscience, and that it isn't walking around 24/7 knowing all possible futures.

That's irrelevant to the topic of the thread.
Not really. Oh, he's not all-knowing: He needs to willingly think ab out the future to see it, hence his propensity for getting interrupted, but he doesn't need to be in the trance to do it: He knew Belkar was gonna die, and when, literally within seconds of meeting him, or his knowledge that Roy and Elan have "family reunions" coming up. Routine check-forward on new clients, to ensure payment and such. So he doesn't need the trance, but he does need to think ahead enough to check: That's how Roy got around the memory charm, as The Oracle didn't bother to ensure it would effect him.

[KorvinStarmast]

Not really. yes, really.

Does he, for example, know exactly how many bits will be drawn on sigdi’s axe in the next comic?
Whatever the amount of omniscience the Oracle may or may not possess, it is limited to "in world" of the OoTS world, not how Rich will draw the comic using bits and pixels.

That isn't even fourth wall breaking: its a cartoon character (not real) predicting its creator's(real) next move.
That sentence by Dion, it's irrelevant to the discussion of the level of an in world (not real) omniscience measurement.

[woweedd]

yes, really.
Whatever the amount of omniscience the Oracle may or may not possess, it is limited to "in world" of OoTS world, not how Rich will draw the comic. That's the context.
I was disputing the part where he needs to enter a trance, which he clearly doesn't, judging by, for instance, his power to understand Haley.

[KorvinStarmast]

I was disputing the part where he needs to enter a trance, which he clearly doesn't, judging by, for instance, his power to understand Haley. OK, I am not sure how that reads as "omniscient" rather than "plot service" but I have no dog in that fight. But let's examine some in world ideas here

1. I am pretty sure that there is a "comprehend languages" spell, and I will guess that there are feats that do something similar but I am not 3.5e expert so I can't point you to them.
2. Tiamat may have bestowed "comprehend languages" on the oracle.
3. There is a D&D 5e monk class feature that lets you understand all languages, but I am not sure if there is a 1 to 1 mapping of that to a similar 3.5e skill. Ya don't need omniscience, just a class feature.
Tongue of the Sun and Moon (5e)

Starting at 13th level, you learn to touch the ki of other minds so that you understand all spoken
languages. Moreover, any creature that can understand a language can understand what you say.
Given that 3.5e is a bit more 'overpowered' than 5e, I'd guess a monk in that edition has something similar.

EDIT:
OK, it is a level 17 Monk Class Feature in 3.5e per the SRD.

[woweedd]

OK, I am not sure how that reads as "omniscient" rather than "plot service" but I have no dog in that fight. But let's examine some in world ideas here

1. I am pretty sure that there is a "comprehend languages" spell, and I will guess that there are feats that do something similar but I am not 3.5e expert so I can't point you to them.
2. Tiamat may have bestowed "comprehend languages" on the oracle.
3. There is a D&D 5e monk class feature that lets you understand all languages, but I am not sure if there is a 1 to 1 mapping of that to a similar 3.5e skill. Ya don't need omniscience, just a class feature.
Tongue of the Sun and Moon (5e)

Given that 3.5e is a bit more 'overpowered' than 5e, I'd guess a monk in that edition has something similar.
(I'll check the SRD in a bit)
He explicitly states how he does that. He's reading the translations. Occam's Razor. Or, for that matter, how do you explain him knowing Belkar's eventual fate and Roy and Elan's forthcoming family meetings ahead of time?

[KorvinStarmast]

He explicitly states how he does that. He's reading the translations. Fourth wall breaking, as with Haley's diamond retrieval.

[woweedd]

Fourth wall breaking, as with Haley's diamond retrieval.
Yeah, except, in The Oracle's case, other characters actually do note his actions as unusual, suggesting it's meant to be taken literally. Plus, you didn't answer my other questions: he knew Belkar's death and his own death, down to the year, and, in the latter case, minute. He can clearly see without needing a trance: He just needs to check.

[Dion]

Whatever the amount of omniscience the Oracle may or may not possess, it is limited to "in world" of the OoTS world, not how Rich will draw the comic using bits and pixels.

I’ll keep a note that this is your personal headcannon. The actual powers of the oracle seem to disagree, however. He claims to be able to actually read the comic before it’s printed, and to be able to actually see the artwork.

But all this discussion is beyond my capacity to understand regardless. Apparently we have moved on to discussing different “amounts” of omniscience; perhaps there are different cardinalities of infinite power, like Aleph Null Omniscience, Aleph One Omniscience, etc.

Cardinality of infinite power is not something I can comfortably imagine, so perhaps it’s time I left the thread.

[KorvinStarmast]

Yeah, except, in The Oracle's case, other characters actually do note his actions as unusual, suggesting it's meant to be taken literally. Plus, you didn't answer my other questions: he knew Belkar's death and his own death, down to the year, and, in the latter case, minute. He can clearly see without needing a trance: He just needs to check. He had also run into the Order before, so he had plenty of time to do some due diligence on a group who he might encounter later. Omniscience not required.
Powerful diviniation magic? Sure, that's required.

Also, in the future, please be advised that I am not required to "answer your other question."
I suggest you not try to badger me.
I find it rude.

@Dion: no, not head canon. (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0331.html)

[woweedd]

He had also run into the Order before, so he had plenty of time to do some due diligence on a group who he might encounter later. Omniscience not required. Powerful diviniation magic? Sure. Required.
No. He hasn't. He said some of that in his first appearance. He mentioned Belkar's forthcoming death within seconds of meeting him. And i'm not implying he's omniscient, per say. He has theoretically limitless knowledge, but he needs to check forward, like Google: he can get any knowledge, no trance required, but he needs to send a search quarry, and he usually doesn't bother, because, you know, lazy. And he obviously didn't know the Order were coming, since he got interrupted. As for your other point, that was a counter-argument. You kinda need to answer it, or you're conceding at least a little of my point. A counter-argument that only addressed the parts of your opponent;s argument you know how to rebuttal is a bad counter-argument.

[AutomatedTeller]

Prophecy is nearly always vague. Durkon's prophecy from the Oracle wasn't "you will return to your homeland as a vampire", it was that he would return home posthumously. V's prophecy was to get ultimate power by saying the right 4 words at the right time for the wrong reasons... not that V would, in fact, say those words.

it might be that in all possible futures, Durkon would die. In some, his body would be returned and then his clan would rise up in anger that he was exiled and died away from home, bringing death and destruction.

I don't think that the prophecies given have made the OOTS world graven in stone. And no prophecies that I've ever read in literature have been anything but muddled. A not-uncommon reaction to prophecy is for the bad guy to say "well, if I had won, they would have said I fulfilled prophecy"

[woweedd]

Prophecy is nearly always vague. Durkon's prophecy from the Oracle wasn't "you will return to your homeland as a vampire", it was that he would return home posthumously. V's prophecy was to get ultimate power by saying the right 4 words at the right time for the wrong reasons... not that V would, in fact, say those words.

it might be that in all possible futures, Durkon would die. In some, his body would be returned and then his clan would rise up in anger that he was exiled and died away from home, bringing death and destruction.

I don't think that the prophecies given have made the OOTS world graven in stone. And no prophecies that I've ever read in literature have been anything but muddled. A not-uncommon reaction to prophecy is for the bad guy to say "well, if I had won, they would have said I fulfilled prophecy"
The Oracle has demonstrated fairly specific knowledge of the future before, enough that he was able to set up the town of LMOBH a year in advance and note his forthcoming death to the minute. The Oracle isn't the vague promotions sort. If there's anything he doesn't know about the future, it's because he didn't bother to check. for instance, the answer to V's question of how shall I attain ultimate arcane power, by being ANYTHING OTHER THEN NO, states that, at the very least, there was no possible future where V didn't make the choice that gave them same, or, for that matter, made it for a good reason.

[KorvinStarmast]

No. He hasn't. He said some of that in his first appearance. Roy and Durkon, he'd met before. (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0329.html)


He mentioned Belkar's forthcoming death within seconds of meeting him. And i'm not implying he's omniscient, per say.
1. The term is 'per se' (it's borrowed from another language)
2. We seem to agree that the Oracle is not omniscient, or that omniscience is not a necessary assumption.
3. Having met Roy before in company of Durkon, he can have cast a minor diviniation type of magic along the lines of
"will this one visit again?"
and when the answer comes back yes he casts another minor diviniation spell
"OK, who is with him" and there you are he takes a peak at the others who will be visiting.
No omniscience is required, just good due dliligence the practical use of divination magic. (Yes, off screen but plausible).

[woweedd]

Roy and Durkon, he'd met before. (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0329.html)


1, The term is 'per se' (it's borrowed from another language)
And we seem to agree that the oracle is not omniscient. Good.
I don't think we do. I'm saying that, intestinal, he is omniscient and just doesn't bother to use it. "If there's anything he doesn't know about the future, it's because he didn't bother to check". And why would a minor divination spell tell him Belkar isn't gonna live to old age? And, for that matter, he clearly knows the future without his trances: He says that he blabs about it so often, he needs a spell to ensure no one can remember it.

[KorvinStarmast]

I don't think we do. I'm saying that, intestinal, he is omniscient and just doesn't bother to use it. "If there's anything he doesn't know about the future, it's because he didn't bother to check". And why would a minor divination spell tell him Belkar isn't gonna live to old age? Which takes me back to you agreeing with my point, it seems. This ability to see into the future is a function of the effort he puts into it. It is at best "limited omniscience" and better described (IMO) as prescience that is a result of the practical application of divination magic.

Which compared to you or me, would appear (in contrast to to our limited predictive powers) to resemble omniscience.

[woweedd]

Which takes me back to you agreeing with my point, it seems. This ability to see into the future is a function of the effort he puts into it. It is at best "limited omniscience" and better described as prescience that is a result of the practical application of divination magic.

Which compared to you or me, would appear in contrast to resemble omniscience.
I mean, sure, if that's what you're arguing. it's the weird stuff about him using "minor divination magic" and only being able to see in the trances, whereas I think he's able to see whenever he wants, provided he bothers to check. Thus, his knowledge of Belkar is "This Halfling seems like a jerk: I hope he dies soon...Oh look, he does! Neat".

[KorvinStarmast]

I mean, sure, if that's what you're arguing. it's the weird stuff about him using "minor divination magic" and only being able to see in the trances, whereas I think he's able to see whenever he wants, provided he bothers to check. Thus, his knowledge of Belkar is "This Halfling seems like a jerk: I hope he dies soon...Oh look, he does! Neat". Thanks for the conversation. I think our work is done here. :smallsmile:

[mjasghar]

Or maybe we could take a piece of evidence from the comics
Self aware fantasy parody
Self aware allows us to explain 4th wall breaking as part of the actual meta physics of Oots
That’s why we have the whole using stories idea
That’s why we have people literally saying a spell’s name for minutes

[KorvinStarmast]

That’s why we have the whole using stories idea Would an example of what you are referring to be Tarqin bellowing "this is a terrible ending" as the Mechane sails off with Elan?

[RatElemental]

As far as we can be totally sure of, the oracle's trance just designates which prophecies visitors will remember when they leave the valley.

There is a possible explanation for all the things he knows though if he does have to trance for them: He can see his own future. Which means he knows which clients will show up before they do. Which means he knows whose futures to check before they get there.

[KorvinStarmast]

As far as we can be totally sure of, the oracle's trance just designates which prophecies visitors will remember when they leave the valley.

There is a possible explanation for all the things he knows though if he does have to trance for them: He can see his own future. Which means he knows which clients will show up before they do. Which means he knows whose futures to check before they get there. Also a plausible impact of being a practitioner in divination magic.

[factotum]

Also a plausible impact of being a practitioner in divination magic.

I don't think the Oracle practices any kind of magic--when he's resurrected after being killed by Belkar he says he'll need to get his Expert level back. His divination abilities are presumably a direct gift from his god rather than anything to do with his own abilities.

[HorizonWalker]

I don't think the Oracle practices any kind of magic--when he's resurrected after being killed by Belkar he says he'll need to get his Expert level back. His divination abilities are presumably a direct gift from his god rather than anything to do with his own abilities.

They're explicitly a gift from Tiamat- Belkar and Haley were there to get Roy resurrected, and the Oracle told them he wasn't any kind of caster, and couldn't do it.

Then he had a pair of lizardfolk teleport in to raise him from the dead, and not Roy, because the Oracle doesn't like Roy.

[KorvinStarmast]

His divination abilities are presumably a direct gift from his god rather than anything to do with his own abilities. How is that not diviniation magic? :smalleek:

[Peelee]

They're explicitly a gift from Tiamat- Belkar and Haley were there to get Roy resurrected, and the Oracle told them he wasn't any kind of caster, and couldn't do it.

Then he had a pair of lizardfolk teleport in to raise him from the dead, and not Roy, because the Oracle doesn't like Roy.

Huh.... that just made me realize:

So I've long maintained that the green glowy thing is less the Oracle divining the answers and more a "this will be the only thing that can pass through the memory charm" effect (possibly both, but definitely the latter). However, not physically passing through the memory charm allows for memories to be retained, as we see when the Oracle dismisses Roy. However, the Oracle has to know this, since that's how he relies on his continued life; the cleric and wizard need to teleport in and out to remember the next appointment.

So, did the Oracle really make a mistake, or did he just want to make it seem like he did?

[Morgana]

Fourth wall breaks aren't consistent powers characters can recall upon whenever they want, otherwise Haley could at any time take whatever item she had previously from another strip, which would be an extremely powerful ability, and there's no reason she'd only do that once. Ultimately the Oracle reading future books was mostly just a joke. If Tiamat can literally grant an ability to recall any information from anywhere, she'd be rulling the pantheon at this point, and considering how Thor was able to remember every single one of his worshippers, it's reasonable to say Tiamat would easily be aware of everything that will ever happen. Something she is not, cause we've seen her show surprise before.

[woweedd]

Fourth wall breaks aren't consistent powers characters can recall upon whenever they want, otherwise Haley could at any time take whatever item she had previously from another strip, which would be an extremely powerful ability, and there's no reason she'd only do that once. Ultimately the Oracle reading future books was mostly just a joke. If Tiamat can literally grant an ability to recall any information from anywhere, she'd be rulling the pantheon at this point, and considering how Thor was able to remember every single one of his worshippers, it's reasonable to say Tiamat would easily be aware of everything that will ever happen. Something she is not, cause we've seen her show surprise before.
Not if the other side has some degree of omniscience too. Odin and Rooster also seem to be prophet gods, and THREE all-knowing beings cannot co-exist without ceasing to be all-knowing.

[Morgana]

Again, none of their actions seem to indicate that of all knowing gods. And their prophetic abilities aren't nearly as potent as the Oracle's, arguably excluding Odin if he wasn't starved from the previous worlds. Tiamat literally gambled a third of her black dragons, and it's not really a gamble if you know it's going to pay off in the end, something she clearly doesn't.

[Dion]

Ultimately the Oracle reading future books was mostly just a joke.

Sure. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

[woweedd]

Again, none of their actions seem to indicate that of all knowing gods. And their prophetic abilities aren't nearly as potent as the Oracle's, arguably excluding Odin if he wasn't starved from the previous worlds. Tiamat literally gambled a third of her black dragons, and it's not really a gamble if you know it's going to pay off in the end, something she clearly doesn't.

Yes, but, if the Oracle has any blindspots regarding the future, that don't boil down to him being too lazy to check, we haven't seen it. Plus, as I said, if THREE Gods are omniscent...Then they can't be. Two "omnis" cannot co-exist

[Morgana]

I think you're replying to the wrong person? I never said he was lazy, I just straight up think he doesn't know everything, and couldn't even if he wanted to

[woweedd]

I think you're replying to the wrong person? I never said he was lazy, I just straight up think he doesn't know everything, and couldn't even if he wanted to
I was pointing that out as, to me, the one limit of his knowledge: He's lazy. So, i'm disagreeing. He has demonstrated no signs of having limits beyond that.

[factotum]

How is that not diviniation magic? :smalleek:

Because magic has a very specific meaning in D&D, and it comes in the form of spells cast by clerics, druids, wizards, bards, sorcerers etc. Anything else is not magic even if it looks like it--for example, if a creature has the ability to cast something like a spell but hasn't got a spell-casting class, it will be described as having a "spell-like ability" rather than having a spell. That's my understanding of it, at any rate.

[mjasghar]

Supernatural abilities can be suppressed by anti magic effects
I think you mean extraordinary abils

[Dion]

I hate internet arguments.

Suppose we were having a discussion about how X-wings turn in space.

First, someone points out that an airplane only “banks” in at atmosphere to use aerodynamics to change direction. It’s silly for X-wings to “bank” in space.

Someone else will argue that an airplane can’t possibly “bank” anywhere, because banking is defined in the dictionary as making deposit or credit transactions at a financial institution, and an airplane can’t do that. If we all just read the dictionary, we would understand how stupid we sound.

And then a third person will insist that with advances in AI, there’s no reason an X-wing can’t be autonomous being with the legal right to make financial transactions.

And someone will explain that these advances in AI explain why an X-wings banks in turns.

[Morgana]

But yeah, if Tiamat can see any moment in time, there's no reason why she would be gambling the lives of a third of her black dragons. Reminder that she didn't even knew about V's deal, something that an all knowing entity would for sure be aware of, especially when it pertains to so many of her most powerful servants being killed off. Also, the fiend has to make a promise for her that they'd kill 5 metallic dragons for each ones lost, which implies that this is a thing that isa beyond her knowledge.

[KorvinStarmast]

Because magic has a very specific meaning in D&D, in 3.5, maybe, if you are hair splitting. (5e does try to explain that, but it took a dev writing up a Sage Advice article to almost do so successfully. Almost)

Su and Ex abilities are magic.
Using a magic item is using magic.
The whole of the multiverse is suffused with magic.
Being able to use powers from a deity like Tiamat is magic.
Being able to predict the future like that is magic.
It's all magic.
It doesn't have to be a spell to be magic.

[RatElemental]

in 3.5, maybe, if you are hair splitting. (5e does try to explain that, but it took a dev writing up a Sage Advice article to almost do so successfully. Almost)

Su and Ex abilities are magic.
Using a magic item is using magic.
The whole of the multiverse is suffused with magic.
Being able to use powers from a deity like Tiamat is magic.
Being able to predict the future like that is magic.
It's all magic.
It doesn't have to be a spell to be magic.

But if the Oracle only has one kind of magic then there is no trances and then also "minor divination magic"

Ability to see the future is actually quite rare in divination spells anyway. Most grant minor bonuses based on prescience that extends seconds, or information about the the current locations of creatures and objects, or advice from one's deity, or identifying the properties of an item, or just enhancement to your own vision. The ones that do see the future are very vague too, and the most powerful one I can find only looks as far as a week in advance.



But yeah, if Tiamat can see any moment in time, there's no reason why she would be gambling the lives of a third of her black dragons. Reminder that she didn't even knew about V's deal, something that an all knowing entity would for sure be aware of, especially when it pertains to so many of her most powerful servants being killed off. Also, the fiend has to make a promise for her that they'd kill 5 metallic dragons for each ones lost, which implies that this is a thing that isa beyond her knowledge.

It could be that Tiamat doesn't have prescience even while granting it to her follower. The gods grant powers to mortals they don't have all the time, such as Hel granting control weather to Greg. The SRD rules about gods even go so far as to make casting cleric spells a thing most gods can't do even though the ability to grant those is what defines you as a god. Though I'm pretty sure those rules aren't in effect.

[mjasghar]

in 3.5, maybe, if you are hair splitting. (5e does try to explain that, but it took a dev writing up a Sage Advice article to almost do so successfully. Almost)

Su and Ex abilities are magic.
Using a magic item is using magic.
The whole of the multiverse is suffused with magic.
Being able to use powers from a deity like Tiamat is magic.
Being able to predict the future like that is magic.
It's all magic.
It doesn't have to be a spell to be magic.

Sorry but you’re partly wrongly as I said before
From the SRD
Extraordinary abilities are nonmagical, though they may break the laws of physics. They are not something that just anyone can do or even learn to do without extensive training.

These abilities cannot be disrupted in combat, as spells can, and they generally do not provoke attacks of opportunity. Effects or areas that negate or disrupt magic have no effect on extraordinary abilities. They are not subject to dispelling, and they function normally in an antimagic field.

Using an extraordinary ability is usually not an action because most extraordinary abilities automatically happen in a reactive fashion. Those extraordinary abilities that are actions are standard actions unless otherwise noted.

Spell like abilities work like the spell they replicate with certain exceptions
Supernatural ones are magical but only affected by anti magic fields - not spell resistance or dispels

[KorvinStarmast]

Sorry but you’re partly wrongly as I said before
From the SRD

Extraordinary abilities are nonmagical, though they may break the laws of physics. That is what magic is, though. (See Vaarsuvius' various musings on making the laws of physics sit in a corner and cry).
(Though as I noted above, if one is going for hair splitting then I see your point).

[Breccia]

I was under the impression that the overall storyline was based on it not being predetermined. I mean, even the gods are voting.

[Fyraltari]

I was under the impression that the overall storyline was based on it not being predetermined. I mean, even the gods are voting.

So what? These gods are not omnipotent nor omniscient nor did they make the rules of the universe. There isn't that much difference between thel and very powerful mortals.

[Dion]

So what? These gods are not omnipotent nor omniscient nor did they make the rules of the universe. There isn't that much difference between thel and very powerful mortals.

That agrees with how I read the story too. But... maybe I’m reading it wrong?

People on this thread are arguing that Odin can’t be omniscient because Tiamat is already omniscient, and the properties of the OofS universe are setup to make it impossible for multiple omniscient beings to exist simultaneously.

They’re arguing about stuff that I'm just not seeing in the strip at all. Maybe I’m missing something important.?

[Peelee]

So what? These gods are not omnipotent nor omniscient nor did they make the rules of the universe. There isn't that much difference between thel and very powerful mortals.

The gods are a source of divine magic. Very powerful mortals are not. Just as an example.

[Fyraltari]

That agrees with how I read the story too. But... maybe I’m reading it wrong?

People on this thread are arguing that Odin can’t be omniscient because Tiamat is already omniscient, and the properties of the OofS universe are setup to make it impossible for multiple omniscient beings to exist simultaneously.

They’re arguing about stuff that I'm just not seeing in the strip at all. Maybe I’m missing something important.?

Are they? I must have missed that. Anyway I don’t see how that follows. But I don’t think there is anybody in OOTS verse who is omniscient that is who knows everything. But I think it was clearly established that Odin, Tiamat and Rooster can know anything and grant that ability to chosen followers.

[Morgana]

If they can know anything, then why are they never portrayed as such? Why didn't the rooster allowed their seer to see everything that was going to happen during the battle of Azure city? Why doesn't Tiamat realize that her plan isn't going to work in the end?(as I doubt this comic eill end with Tiamat winning), hell, considering how Thor was shown as being able to count all the worlds they destroyed, it's safe to assume that any god that could see the future this clearly could very well be aware of everything.

Also, why didn't the gods knew that the Snarl was going to be formed? Why didn't Odin predict that the last world wouldn't use magic?