Question about souls, gods and Roy [Archive] - Giant in the Playground Forums

Peelee

2023-02-02, 01:11 PM

I'm not sure if it's been discussed before, I couldn't find anything with the search feature.

So I have a couple of questions about how the OOTSverse works.

First of all souls - are souls "immortal" in the sense that everyone the gods cashed in from worlds #2 and up, and their souls haven't been explicitly killed off, are they still around? Is Thor sad about lasersnail cause they pulled the plug too late and the Snarl got them or is it cause after a while, souls get used up as batteries and they cease to be?

Which leads me to my next question. If souls persist, then wouldn't the OG deities have like, trillions or quadrillions of souls kicking around? Or more actually. It's been explored in the Hel story that gods need "devotion", that burst of energy when someone dies and ends up in a respective god's realm. But the dead can believe and praise the gods. I wonder if gods get extra devotion when someone like Durkon dies and is resurrected multiple times? That would explain why they give out resurrection spells in the first place, cause once you got a decent enough level soul (and you need to be decent enough level to be resurrected), why risk letting it go back down and having an alignment shift or something. I wonder if that system can be gamed somehow...

Gods - so Thor is like the lawful good god right? Roy is a lawful good northerner, so he falls under Thor's domain? Cause dwarves and Durkon are lawful good, and Durkon went to Valhalla... but Roy didn't? So are the celestial realms further divided by race or is this only due to the bet Thor had with Hel, or is Valhalla still on that same mountain, just a different part of it? I also noticed that Minrah didn't have to scale anything to get into Valhalla, curious. Is that cause dwarves live under so much duress and are just way more lawful and good than the average lawful good person who doesn't have that "die honourably" sword of Damocles hanging over their head?

Roy - so Roy is what we call an "apatheist". When he goes off to his afterlife, there's no mention of any gods. So uhhh. When he dies, who gets his devotion? Speaking of alignments, it seems like there's more gods than squares on the grid. For example, Dvalinn for sure is a lawful good god. But dwarves don't go to him or his afterlife. So uhh, how does Dvalinn sustain himself? Does he share the devotion of dwarves with Thor? How about people who aren't dedicated to any one god, because people who aren't clerics don't seem to be? Who gets their devotion? Do the alignment related gods all share it, or what?
This might help.

I hear what you're saying but you kind of showed that the exact opposite is true in the story. Roy learned a new swordfighting technique from his grandfather. That alone is proof that change and growth still happens after death.

No, Roy learned of a new swordfighting technique in Celestia, which he then mastered after returning to life. Dead souls cannot earn XP, gain levels, learn feats, or increase skills.

EDIT: I went back and read #600 and I can see how the dialogue can lead to the belief that Roy had actually mastered the technique. However, note that in panel #3, Horace reminds him he needs to spend a feat on it. If I had to reconcile that strip with what I said above, I would say that if Roy stayed in Celestia, the knowledge of the trick would have quickly faded from his mind. Even if he learned it over and over again, it would never "stick" in his head for more than a day or two.

Do you mean to say that if the Stickverse had a version of Albert Einstein up in Celestia, that Roy couldn't lean physics from him if he was inclined to find it out?

Yes, that is exactly what I mean.

And when Roy's Archon that further up the mountain greater spiritual enlightenment awaited those who had tired of more base pleasures, does that statement not imply that a soul in heaven can look to better himself, implying that yes, change is possible.

"Spiritual enlightenment" in this case means giving up attachments to the world and accepting that you are no longer part of it. If anything, it is essentially unlearning things; becoming less of an individual with a unique perspective and more of a pure embodiment of alignment. Horace is a little further on that path than Sarah because he's not still engaging in things like random hook-ups, because he understands that nothing matters anymore when you're dead. It is not some sort of eternal learning experience; it's letting go of everything you learned because you don't need it anymore. That is the only change available to dead souls.

And as far as talking to people with a different point of view, doesn't Eugene offer counter proof that statement? Supposing that there was a Eugne-clone identical in all respects to Roy's father, except that there wasn't the unfulfilled Blood Oath barring him from heaven. Would not Eugene-clone and Roy have plenty to disagree about, despite the identical entry in the alignment section of their character sheet?

Is Eugene in Celestia yet?

Hell, Durkon himself is proof that people can have identical alignments and not see eye-to-eye on every issue. That wasn't a short joke, I swear. Roy and Durkon have had disagreements despite their friendship, so I don't see why, out of the entire pool of lawful good creatures, suddenly they are cookie-cutter clones of each other after death.

Because I am saying that is specifically what the afterlife does. It makes you into a cookie-cutter clone of everyone of the same alignment. It may take centuries to do so, but all the people at the top of the mountain? Completely indistinguishable from one another. Arguably, that is the purpose of the D&D afterlife—to turn flawed mortal souls into perfect alignment-batteries, through various methodologies. In the Nine Hells, they torture you until you forget everything else. In Celestia, you meditate until you renounce all worldly concerns. In Valhalla, you party until you can't remember your own name. In Limbo, the chaos drives you mad. In Mechanus, you sit in grey cubicle stamping paperwork until you are bored into oblivion. And so on and so forth.

But more to the point, the difference in viewpoint between Durkon and Roy—assuming that Durkon would even end up in the same afterlife once you take into account his worship of Thor—is peanuts compared to the difference between Roy and Haley. If you feel like you would be totally fine never talking to anyone who doesn't more or less agree with you on everything ever again, then that's great for you, but it's a mistake to assume everyone else feels that way.

Visiting people of a different alignment...didn't Soon promise Miko that Windstriker would come to visit her as often as he was able? Whatever destination Miko ended up in, it probably wasn't Celestia. It was probably one of those less cushy places you mentioned. Yet she's going to be able to receive a visitor from Celestia from time to time, unless Soon was being Jedi-honest and really meant that the horse would visit her as often as he could, which was never. In which case he should go to hell for lying, but I digress. If the gods can issue celestial day passes to horses, why is the same impossible for mortal souls?

Because they don't. Yes, they could, but they don't.

This is not a debate. You asked why X is a certain way in this comic strip. I, the author, am telling you why. Windstriker is not a dead soul, he is a living Celestial creature; he is not bound by the same rules. He needs a pass because he is in the service of the Twelve Gods and will likely be assigned to another paladin at some point, from whom he must get permission before going on a trip. If he were unemployed, he would be free to go to whatever plane he could find a way to travel to. Dead souls have no such freedom.

I know that all analogies break down if you push them hard enough, but this is again one that contradicts something earlier. This time the contradiction is in the first paragraph of your response to me. In this situation the dangerous game of life is playing pro football and the afterlife is this kind of forced retirement. But didn't you just say earlier that you can't improve any skills you have after retirement, but here in your analogy you say that the retired players can learn poetry and basketweaving?

I think a more appropriate analogy is that players who want to play football can continue to do so. Except that they're no longer at risk for traumatic brain injury, damage to their bodies, oh, and we can now form football teams from the bool of the greatest football players across history (shared alignment provision granted). So if we still want to use the football analogy...it's like we can take the list of everyone who ever played for the 49ers and assemble the best teams possible and have them play each other without risk of injury.

No, because I am specifically telling you that is not how it works. If you want to write a story about a world where the afterlife works like that, go ahead. That's not how it works in my story.

Really, you're coming at this entirely backwards. You're saying the afterlife shouldn't have flaws, and therefore Roy should be OK with everyone dying. I'm saying that I require Roy to be not OK with everyone dying in order to continue the story, and therefore the afterlife must have flaws (and here they are). Since the goal here is for me to continue to tell the story I have imagined, my position wins.

Also, the Northern Pantheon has more than nine gods, not including demigods, so there isn't just one Alignment God. And I don't think Thor is Lawful in any event.

hamishspence

2023-02-02, 01:11 PM

OOTS Valhalla (assuming it fills the same role as its equivalent in the Great Wheel cosmology) is a CN bordering on CG afterlife, just as Arcadia is a LN bordering on LG afterlife.

Given Thor's presence - residing there, an element of "Devotion to deity trumps alignment for afterlife purposes" may be in play - with LG dwarves strongly devoted to a CG Thor, going to Valhalla instead of Celestia.

Dasick

2023-02-02, 01:21 PM

Thanks for that Peele

Wow, OOTS afterlife doesn't just have flaws, it majorly sucks.

Being an evil lich doesn't seem like such a bad idea now actually. Sure sign me up for puppykicking at 7 and I can squeeze a monologuing class at 8:30

I was kind of ok with Roy being against everyone dying without knowing that the afterlife sucks. It was such a Roy thing. It made for a better story. I kinda regret jumping into the forums cause the more I spend learning more about OOTSverse the less I like the story :/

OOTS Valhalla (assuming it fills the same role as its equivalent in the Great Wheel cosmology) is a CN bordering on CG afterlife, just as Arcadia is a LN bordering on LG afterlife.

Given Thor's presence - residing there, an element of "Devotion to deity trumps alignment for afterlife purposes" may be in play - with LG dwarves strongly devoted to a CG Thor, going to Valhalla instead of Celestia.

All Dwarves Go To Valhalla, they even made a movie about it. Or was it dogs? I forget

Huh. I thought clerics had to match alignment with the god they chose to worship. Or at the very least, it seems like it would be a better idea for clerics to pick gods that match their alignment

Fyraltari

2023-02-02, 01:23 PM

Dasick

2023-02-02, 01:26 PM

People who worship a specific god, like Durkon and Minrah*, go their domain when they die. People who don't worship a specific god, like Roy, go to the general afterlife that matches their alignment. That is why Durkon and Minrah didn't go to the mountain.

Also, it's a common theory around here that Thor is Chaotic Good.

*ignoring the Bet

So... what happens to the devotion of people like Roy?

Being Chaotic God seems very much in line with what we see Thor do (including constant rules lawyering on behalf of dead dwarves)

I just assumed he was LG because why would an avatar of all that is GOOD AND ORDER that is Durkon choose to worship a CG god :think:

hamishspence

2023-02-02, 01:28 PM

So... what happens to the devotion of people like Roy?

Fuels the plane as a whole, and its natives, the archons.

Huh. I thought clerics had to match alignment with the god they chose to worship. Or at the very least, it seems like it would be a better idea for clerics to pick gods that match their alignment

Only TN clerics have to match a TN deity. Other clerics can be within one step, and various campaign setting specific deities have exceptions to the one step rule (and some limit their clerics, being more restrictive than the one step rule).

Peelee

2023-02-02, 01:30 PM

Thanks for that Peele
Not a celebrity.

Huh. I thought clerics had to match alignment with the god they chose to worship. Or at the very least, it seems like it would be a better idea for clerics to pick gods that match their alignment
3.5 clerics have a one-step rule, though this does have exceptions for certain gods. I'd wager Thor has an exception for dwarves (assuming he's Chaotic, which I do. If he's Neutral Good, he doesn't need any exception).

Fyraltari

2023-02-02, 01:38 PM

Being Chaotic God seems very much in line with what we see Thor do (including constant rules lawyering on behalf of dead dwarves)

I just assumed he was LG because why would an avatar of all that is GOOD AND ORDER that is Durkon choose to worship a CG god :think:

Thor being the one who showed the dwarves how to game the Bet by acting honorably (which, assuming he's cG, he would have done because the Good of doing it massively overshadowed the Lawful) made him very popular among the dwarves. Durkon's hometown, Firmament, housed the last two High Priests of Thor (Hurak and Rubyrock) meaning Thor's church is probably the main game in town when it comes to religion (probably because Thor worship involves skygazing and Firmament is close to the surface). Add to that that Durkon's mom is a devout Thor-worshipper and that Durkon originally joined the church less out of faith and more so that he could eventually heal her missing arm and it's pretty clear why Durkon would join the church of a god with different views than he has about Law and Chaos.

Also, Durkon is terrible at theology.

Peelee

2023-02-02, 01:39 PM

Thor being the one who showed the dwarves how to game the Bet by acting honorably (which, assuming he's cG, he would have done because the Good of doing it massively overshadowed the Lawful)

I'd say gaming bets is chaotic as all get-out. Or, at least, teaching how to game it is.

Fyraltari

2023-02-02, 01:42 PM

I'd say gaming bets is chaotic as all get-out. Or, at least, teaching how to game it is.

Okay but, is it still when the cheat is "rigidly obey this strict code of honour every moment of your waking life"?

Peelee

2023-02-02, 01:52 PM

Okay but, is it still when the cheat is "rigidly obey this strict code of honour every moment of your waking life"?

Agreed. Which is why I changed my stance to "well, telling them 'hey here's how to game the system'" instead.

woweedd

2023-02-02, 01:54 PM

Thanks for that Peele

Wow, OOTS afterlife doesn't just have flaws, it majorly sucks.

Being an evil lich doesn't seem like such a bad idea now actually. Sure sign me up for puppykicking at 7 and I can squeeze a monologuing class at 8:30

I was kind of ok with Roy being against everyone dying without knowing that the afterlife sucks. It was such a Roy thing. It made for a better story. I kinda regret jumping into the forums cause the more I spend learning more about OOTSverse the less I like the story :/

All Dwarves Go To Valhalla, they even made a movie about it. Or was it dogs? I forget

Huh. I thought clerics had to match alignment with the god they chose to worship. Or at the very least, it seems like it would be a better idea for clerics to pick gods that match their alignment

Eh. I mean, I tend to think it's not that bad. Yeah, you will one day fade into non-existence to sustain future life. So what? Are you really willing to prioritize your own self being preserved forevermore over all future life even existing?

Fyraltari

2023-02-02, 01:57 PM

Agreed. Which is why I changed my stance to "well, telling them 'hey here's how to game the system'" instead.

All I'm saying is that if someone says "shaping a society into being the most honour-bond one on the planet is a Lawful action", I wouldn't disagree, but even, so this wouldn't contradict Thor being a CG deity because not doing so would have been very Evil is this case.

Dasick

2023-02-02, 01:59 PM

Also, Durkon is terrible at theology.

Also Durkon choosing to worship a diety based on what society tells him to worship as opposed to one whose personality aligns with his is the most Durkon thing imaginable

Eh. I mean, I tend to think it's not that bad. Yeah, you will one day fade into non-existence to sustain future life. So what? Are you really willing to prioritize your own self being preserved forevermore over all future life even existing?

If the option is on the table, I'm sure most people will consider it. Especially since say, if you're an immortal evil bad guy you can sacrifice innocents by the truckload to keep the whole shebang going. You can make the whole soul farm more efficient anyways

Okay but, is it still when the cheat is "rigidly obey this strict code of honour every moment of your waking life"?

Thor and Loki are such brothers arent they

woweedd

2023-02-02, 02:06 PM

Also Durkon choosing to worship a diety based on what society tells him to worship as opposed to one whose personality aligns with his is the most Durkon thing imaginable

Does it not? Durkon may be a repressed, honor-bound sort, but...He's also a man who loves him a good beer. Need i remind you of the giant golden tankard of ale? In classic dwarven fashion, he works hard, but he parties just as hard.

If the option is on the table, I'm sure most people will consider it. Especially since say, if you're an immortal evil bad guy you can sacrifice innocents by the truckload to keep the whole shebang going. You can make the whole soul farm more efficient anyways
Oh, sure. But, like, i'd argue it's better to prioritize future lives over your individual consciousness being preserved at all costs. Self-sacrifice and all.

Fyraltari

2023-02-02, 02:07 PM

If the fact that the promise of an heavenly reward of unfathomable bliss only lasts for 100,000 years and not literal forever is enough to make you decide to feed people to your magical-lawnmower for as long as you can until people manage to put you down like the public menace you are... you probably weren't going to Celestia anyway.

Edit: Also, as I pointed out last time we had this discussion, no-one is forcing anybody to climb the mountain. We know from Roy's grandad that people can climb down whenever they feel like it too, so you can just stay indefinitely wherever you are happy with.

woweedd

2023-02-02, 02:16 PM

Jasdoif

2023-02-02, 02:19 PM

Fyraltari

2023-02-02, 02:23 PM

I'd imagine that, once you reach the final level, there's no going back. But, regardless, to you, it doesn't feel like oblivion. It feels like the truest happiness and enlightenment you've ever felt, a total culmination of all that you wished to become.

That's how I'd expect it to work, too; if you can entertain the thought of going back, you haven't reached the final level.

Yes, that's my read of it too. You only really move up when you can't stand the thought of staying at your current level for a long time. Which still means that it's purely voluntary.

Also, I will never understand the people who think that oblivion is a terrible, dreadful thing. I mean, if nothing else, it's a good game.

BaronOfHell

2023-02-02, 02:45 PM

To me the difference between any finite number of years and infinity is huge, because for one of those it'll eventually be tomorrow or today, the other is never.
Though I do imagine it would still not be true immortality, more like not aging. Like when the evil adventuring party attacked at Roy's mom's house, I understood afterwards the danger they faced was actually very real.

But, regardless, to you, it doesn't feel like oblivion. It feels like the truest happiness and enlightenment you've ever felt, a total culmination of all that you wished to become.

Doesn't it beg the question of how does oblivion feel?

To me, existence and oblivion are opposites.
If there is oblivion there is no existence. If there is no existence, there isn't anyone to feel anything. So how can a soul which has been obliterated feel anything, when it doesn't exist anymore?

Dasick

2023-02-02, 02:51 PM

you probably weren't going to Celestia anyway.

Just did the test in your signature, let's see

https://www.nodiatis.com/pub/18.jpg (https://www.nodiatis.com/personality.htm)

Huh. Probably not then. I usually get something like a cleric or a druid on one of these

If the fact that the promise of an heavenly reward of unfathomable bliss only lasts for 100,000 years and not literal forever is enough to make you decide to feed people to your magical-lawnmower for as long as you can until people manage to put you down like the public menace you are

Seems like a set up. I mean, it already is a set up and the good gods aren't that different from the evil ones in this setting. They just use different means to turn mortals into batteries, the carrot or the stick. Wasn't there a movie about people resisting reality-creating godlike creatures for turning them into batteries? It had those blue and red floating orbs you touch to gain ultimate arcane power.

You don't even need to be a public menace. A lich doesn't necessarily need to be needlessly evil like Xykon. Do the evil you need to do, help sustain the system for later use. Stay in shadows. Maybe use that magic to dominate local politics. Somewhere in between Tarquin and Xykon minus all the moustache twirling nonsense

Either that or become a god yourself I guess.

woweedd

2023-02-02, 05:41 PM

Just did the test in your signature, let's see

https://www.nodiatis.com/pub/18.jpg (https://www.nodiatis.com/personality.htm)

Huh. Probably not then. I usually get something like a cleric or a druid on one of these

Seems like a set up. I mean, it already is a set up and the good gods aren't that different from the evil ones in this setting. They just use different means to turn mortals into batteries, the carrot or the stick. Wasn't there a movie about people resisting reality-creating godlike creatures for turning them into batteries? It had those blue and red floating orbs you touch to gain ultimate arcane power.

You don't even need to be a public menace. A lich doesn't necessarily need to be needlessly evil like Xykon. Do the evil you need to do, help sustain the system for later use. Stay in shadows. Maybe use that magic to dominate local politics. Somewhere in between Tarquin and Xykon minus all the moustache twirling nonsense

Either that or become a god yourself I guess.
What would you rather they do, roll over and die? They need to eat too. And, besides, without them, we wouldn't exist in the first place. Also, in the OOTS verse, an absence of mustache-twirling may not be a great idea. Half the reason Tarquin got so far is because his insight into story structure allowed him to avoid making lots of the stupid mistakes villains normally make.

Dasick

2023-02-02, 06:47 PM

What would you rather they do, roll over and die? They need to eat too. And, besides, without them, we wouldn't exist in the first place. Also, in the OOTS verse, an absence of mustache-twirling may not be a great idea. Half the reason Tarquin got so far is because his insight into story structure allowed him to avoid making lots of the stupid mistakes villains normally make.

The gods can do a lot more to make the system fair. That's the central concern of goblins anyways They could for example, add some sort of a reincarnation system. You spend some time in the afterlife as a battery, get the memory mostly wiped, pick a new life from a list you earned. With added bonus that you get to try for a higher level this time and get to generate devotion all over. The system is self balancing too - who cares if goblins get the short end of the stick, because there's no strictly goblin soul anyways.

Word of Giant is that he wanted the system to be unfair for the story he is telling, so idk. But if the cosmic justice is unfair, should the mortals just roll over and be good little batteries?

Imo Tarquin is really undermined by moustache twirling, in the sense of just being evil for the sake of being evil. Like lighting slaves on fire to spell out ELAN. It's not even genre savvy cause he knows the good twin bad twin trope. And it's pointless in terms of storytelling. Tarquin explaining that the harsh desert world needs his style of order is severely undercut by him doing things for the evulz

InvisibleBison

2023-02-02, 07:22 PM

The gods can do a lot more to make the system fair.

I don't think they can. The gods didn't create the multiverse, and I don't see any reason why they'd be able to rework it in the way you're suggesting.

Dasick

2023-02-02, 07:29 PM

I don't think they can. The gods didn't create the multiverse, and I don't see any reason why they'd be able to rework it in the way you're suggesting.

Maybe they can't. But we also see that making the system fair isnt exactly on the top of their priorities

What if goblins are usually evil because they got shafted by the cosmos? It's certainly harder to be good, and life is a struggle for them. And then they have to go through the evil afterlife*, but maybe if they were born as dwarves or elves it would have been easier for them to be good.

*Until the Dark One rose to godhood. Which makes him like, an absolute badass and a beast of a deity

Mechalich

2023-02-02, 08:01 PM

What if goblins are usually evil because they got shafted by the cosmos? It's certainly harder to be good, and life is a struggle for them. And then they have to go through the evil afterlife*, but maybe if they were born as dwarves or elves it would have been easier for them to be good.

Goblins are usually evil because they were created by an evil god who generated a set of evil-generating culture circumstances than compels them to chose to either A. be brutally murdered by their fellows for non-conformity B. flee and abandon that culture entirely with no understanding of what the rest of the world has to offer (this is the Drizzt Do'Urden path, and it is hard) or C. conform to evil. Yes, this is in fact awful, but it's what the evil gods want.

OOTS, like most D&D worlds, is balanced between the demands of the good, neutral, and evil gods, and since they collectively exercise veto power over the nature of the world - in OOTS this is extremely explicit since they any time a majority of the gods become sufficiently displeased with the world's status they hit the reset button - and nothing the mortals can do can change it. This means that a roughly equivalent number of souls must suffer the horrors of the evil afterlife (and an equally large number the eternal blandness of the neutral one) at all times. Which souls is largely irrelevant. I'm sure the gods did a world in the past where the goblin-likes were good and the elf-likes were evil, but that's ultimately just window dressing. At the end of the life roughly 1/3 of all mortals each get good, neutral or evil outcomes respectively and will always remain true.

The only way this can change is if the balance of the gods changes such that the good gods triumph over the evil ones and alter the cosmic balance. The dwarf bet, in a sense, actually represents a limited permutation of this kind, in that Thor managed by way of Loki to pull a fast one that ultimately seriously weakened Hel. By contrast the emergence of the Dark One - who by all accounts is an evil deity - actually twists the balance towards evil and the reality that everyone is trying to preserve from the Snarl will actually be worse than all those that came before if they succeed.

brian 333

2023-02-02, 08:41 PM

"Fair" is not the absolute it may appear to be. Your PoV matters very much.

If I plant corn with the intention of boiling it, rubbing salted butter all over it, and eating it, is it fair to the corn? Is it fair to me if the corn's right to not be eaten is invoked and I never get any husks stuck between my teeth?

The Little Red Hen comes to mind. That greedy hoarder won't share her bread, of which she has too much to eat all by herself. Is it fair? Of course I didn't help plant, harvest, or grind the wheat, I had things to do. I didn't make the loaves or bake them because I was busy. But now I'm hungry and she has bread she won't share. Is that fair?

Let us think about the humble potato. I plant the eyes, tend the shoots, protect them from drought and cut-worms. I harvest them and store them in a cool, dry place. Next season I plan to cut them up, plant the eyes, and grow more. I even give some to my friends so they can plant my variety and in that way my potatoes are spread around the world. Is it fair to the potatoes that I eat some? Is it fair to me to have done all that work, only to have the potato declare itself uneatable?

Dasick

2023-02-02, 09:28 PM

Yes, this is in fact awful, but it's what the evil gods want.

That's... pretty horrifying

The only way this can change is if the balance of the gods changes such that the good gods triumph over the evil ones and alter the cosmic balance. The dwarf bet, in a sense, actually represents a limited permutation of this kind, in that Thor managed by way of Loki to pull a fast one that ultimately seriously weakened Hel. By contrast the emergence of the Dark One - who by all accounts is an evil deity - actually twists the balance towards evil and the reality that everyone is trying to preserve from the Snarl will actually be worse than all those that came before if they succeed.

The Dark One's afterlife doesn't seem too bad for the goblins though

Let us think about the humble potato. I plant the eyes, tend the shoots, protect them from drought and cut-worms. I harvest them and store them in a cool, dry place. Next season I plan to cut them up, plant the eyes, and grow more. I even give some to my friends so they can plant my variety and in that way my potatoes are spread around the world. Is it fair to the potatoes that I eat some? Is it fair to me to have done all that work, only to have the potato declare itself uneatable?

Potatoes don't have the capacity to turn into people

For the record, I was a vegetarian for a really long time

woweedd

2023-02-02, 11:18 PM

That's... pretty horrifying

The Dark One's afterlife doesn't seem too bad for the goblins though

Potatoes don't have the capacity to turn into people

For the record, I was a vegetarian for a really long time

As is Rich, and I believe that was the exact analogy he used. The good gods run a free-range ethical farm...But, in the end, the chicjen's gonna get its neck snapped.

Jasdoif

2023-02-02, 11:33 PM

As is Rich, and I believe that was the exact analogy he used. The good gods run a free-range ethical farm...But, in the end, the chicjen's gonna get its neck snapped.Pretty close.

I see it this way:
CG gods are those that advocate for organic and free range farms, but they are not vegetarian; they still eat you in the end :smalltongue:.Bingo.

And I presume everyone who has a moral problem with the gods using the mortal world to generate their sustenance will be going vegan now.

Mechalich

2023-02-02, 11:42 PM

That's... pretty horrifying

Evil gods are evil, and should be horrifying. That the forces of evil are equally strong as the forces of good is a facet of the D&D Great Wheel cosmology, in which no one alignment can ever triumph, or even really truly make gains, against any of the others. This is in fact quite grim, and the symbol of Planescape is not named The Lady of Pain for no reason, and many of Planescape's native factions rejected standard D&D reality in some fashion, positing, essentially, that the universe sucked and should be replaced with a better one (arguments regarding what that would look like or how to accomplish it were, as can be imagined, substantial). Rich, in creating Stickworld, seems to have largely embraced this vision of the multiverse with the significant caveat that a big reveal tearing reality down and replacing it with something ostensibly better may be in the offing (planet in the rift and all that).

Note that a D&D world doesn't have to be made this way. In Dragonlance, the good gods are stronger - when they finally get off their lazy butts and do something - than the evil ones. In the Forgotten Realms, the world is maintained by Lord Ao, and the balance of good and evil can shift, to the point that gods can die (and even be slain by mortals under the right circumstances) and therefore the world can at least potentially become a better place, and arguably has. OOTS is plagued by the rule Rich wrote in that the gods can, apparently at any time, vote to destroy the world, which means that any time the good/evil or law/chaos balance shifts enough to get a few neutral deities to vote with the disadvantaged side, it's reboot time.

The Dark One's afterlife doesn't seem too bad for the goblins though

Maybe? We only have the testimony of an extremely biased source - high level clerics get preferential treatment even if the Dark One wasn't trying to put one over on Jirix. Also, assuming the Dark One is based in Stickworld's equivalent of Acheron, it's possible for the afterlife to appear superficially much better than it is. Acheron is the plane of endless unwinnable, utterly pointless warfare - like All Quiet on the Western Front on repeat forever - but even an environment like that can have the occasional good day.

As is Rich, and I believe that was the exact analogy he used. The good gods run a free-range ethical farm...But, in the end, the chicjen's gonna get its neck snapped.

I don't think it's quite right though. If we're comparing souls to chickens, the good gods are running a chicken sanctuary and the chickens they are as happy as chickens can possibly be, but eventually they can tired of scratching and clucking and doing chicken style things and just kind of lay down in the big field; at which point they get ground into fertilizer. The non-divine soul, in Stickworld (and in D&D generally) isn't an immortal soul. It lasts a potentially really long time, but it's not meant to last forever (hypothetically this may be a consequence of there being only three 'divine colors' available, possibly with four the gods could make better mortals, Stickworld is a distinctly 'fallen' reality). Note that even Liches, assuming they don't get destroyed, eventually send their spirits so far from their bodies that they get lost in the cracks of the multiverse and spend eternity insane, alone, and hopeless. There are various means to prolong mortal life, but only divine ascension - which requires transcending mortality in some fundamental way - allows for true immortality. And even that's not a sure thing, since gods are both not guaranteed to persist through reset and can be destroyed by the Snarl.

Dasick

2023-02-02, 11:44 PM

Animals still can't become people

People can become gods in OOTSverse

That's a massive degree of separation right there (although I would consider eating Koko the Gorilla to be uncomfortably close to cannibalism)

"Ethic" consumption of dairy, eggs and honey is entirely possible

Acheron is the plane of endless unwinnable, utterly pointless warfare - like All Quiet on the Western Front on repeat forever - but even an environment like that can have the occasional good day.

Sounds quite fun actually, provided the souls don't die.

Note that even Liches, assuming they don't get destroyed, eventually send their spirits so far from their bodies that they get lost in the cracks of the multiverse and spend eternity insane, alone, and hopeless.

Desire to know intensifies

Beni-Kujaku

2023-02-03, 05:51 AM

Animals still can't become people

People can become gods in OOTSverse

That's a massive degree of separation right there (although I would consider eating Koko the Gorilla to be uncomfortably close to cannibalism)

That's... I'd say not really. First, it's incredibly rare to the point of being negligible. With training, apes can learn sign language, they can make human friends and adopt humans as their children. Dogs can be domesticated and have intelligence comparable to that of a small child. There's no fundamental difference between humans and animals. Humans are animals.
Any definition of "changing into a human" except a gentic one can be fulfilled by an animal.

On the other hand, there is a fundamental difference between gods and mortals. Gods are powered by belief, and mortals are powered by matter. The Dark One became a god after he died, due to overwhelming worship. I'd argue he wasn't even changed into a god than he was created as a god. Gods do not retain a mind of their own (since their whole being is the amalgamation of what mortals think of them, see Loki's inability to tell the truth to Hel), they do not retain a body of their own (since they can shapeshift and change size at will), and the change occuring is sudden (in comparison to, for example, a mortal soul in heaven slowly changing into a paragon of their alignment). This is a situation where the mortal is quite literally consumed by the created god.

If a woman dies giving birth, you wouldn't say she transformed into the baby, just that the baby was born, and the mother was no more. It's very much the same thing for mortals changing into gods.

But the fact that gods are fundamentally different from mortals also plays a big role here. If we somehow stumbled upon a small mouse-like creature, a perfect replica of the ancestor of our race from millions of years ago, in a lost valley full of them, and they escaped and thrived in the world, would it be more unethical to eat them than to eat a sheep because we looked like that before? These mice are as much or less valuable, by any metric except maybe scientific interest, than dogs, or cows, or goats. Mortals are less valuable to gods individually than dogs are to us humans. Why would it be ethical to eat animals and not to eat mortals, even if they were to just chomp on them instead of slowly draining their energy while giving them a near-eternity of bliss?

hroþila

2023-02-03, 07:05 AM

With training, apes can learn sign language
Not really on-topic, but that's a severe overstatement. Apes can learn signs, but they don't learn sign language. They don't have any grammar which is what distinguishes language from a collection of calls. And the degree to which they consciously and intentionally use the signs they do learn to communicate specific things is disputed. The research into ape language is highly controversial.

edit: Kanzi might still count as being able to use language to an extent, but signs aren't how he communicates for the most part.

brian 333

2023-02-03, 08:54 AM

Animals still can't become people.

Apparently they can. (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/awaken.htm) And much more easily than

People can become gods in OOTSverse

We humans tend to think of communication in very specific, androcentric ways. Do dolphins communicate? How about elephants? Dogs?

Do they have language and culture? Do they pass this down to their offspring, and if so, how much is learned behavior?

It is known that chimpanzees raised by humans cannot be returned to the wild, primarily because wild chimpanzees will kill them. Is it because they smell funny? Or is it because they don't speak the same language?

Domestic animals have a broad range of signals that they use to communicate with their humans. We generally don't teach these signals to them, they teach them to us. Do they have a better grasp of the essentials of communication than humans?

Elephants can be taught to paint pictures. But elephants in the wild do not engage in any art form we recognize. Does this mean that they lack culture? Well, there are huge behavioral differences between Namibian elephants and Saharan elephants. Somehow, baby elephants learn how to act like the other elephants around them. Is this 'culture'? Or something else?

The truth is, humans are just learning how humans communicate, (or fail to.) It takes a huge leap of faith to presume the limits of animal communication.

Mechalich

2023-02-03, 09:28 AM

Not everything in a D&D that is intelligent is a mortal being with a soul. Outsiders, for example, are essentially condensed ideology despite having memories and a personality, and when they are destroyed, that's it. Elementals, likewise, are raw stuff that's acquired a mind (elementals are quite happy to exist in the complete absence of deities or mortals, and are generally assumed to cosmically predate both). Fey get even weirder, being a condensation of something that might be considered emotion or wonder or something else equally difficult to define. Additionally, even among beings with souls, the soul itself is subject to both dislocation from the body, and outright destruction by non-divine actors. A Devourer isn't even an especially powerful monster, but it is broadly defined by its ability to consume souls.

Ultimately, D&D lacks any sort of theological consistency (the very existence of Planescape's factions is an exercise in pointing this out) which makes discussions of this nature very difficult. We know some, but not all the rules as they apply specifically to Stickworld. The best overall estimate is that Stickworld is not a very nice place - it's deities appear to be distributed fairly even across the alignment pie - and it is almost impossible to change things for the better unless the balance of said divine alignments is altered. Worth noting that, even if the 'heroes' did something spectacular like saved the world from the Snarl and all ascended to godhood, their own alignment mix means that this would only marginally tilt the world towards good.

Resileaf

2023-02-03, 10:13 AM

Something that keeps coming up in this forum is that the OotS gods eat souls, but unless they are specifically mentioned to do so, the process of souls slowly fueling their afterlives does not in any way involve the gods eating or destroying the souls. The gods eat worship, active or otherwise, and are fueled by mortal souls who believe in them. When a dwarf soul gets sent to Valhalla, Thor doesn't go in the halls and start munching on them when he gets hungry, he just passively gains sustenance from their presence. Everything else is up to the soul and how it interacts with the plane it was sent to.

KorvinStarmast

2023-02-03, 11:03 AM

Not really on-topic, but that's a severe overstatement. Apes can learn signs, but they don't learn sign language. Thank you.

People can become gods in OOTSverse We have seen on screen that a dwarf king can become a demigod, but I think that the deities themselves simply are (per the Crayon Drawings etc) and preceded all of creation. TDO's ascension all the way up to deity, beyond demigod, is a pretty big deal / exception, as is his quiddity.

"Ethic" consumption of dairy, eggs and honey is entirely possible It is also breakfast. :smallsmile: (Although my favorite breakfast on the weekend is a bowl of Irish oatmeal just the way I like it, before anyone else wakes up).

We humans tend to think of communication in very specific, androcentric ways. Do dolphins communicate? How about elephants? Dogs? Communication may not be language, or need not to be language, to be effective. If you have ever watched a large flock of birds fly together and change direction en masse, you can be sure that some form of communication is involved.

But elephants in the wild do not engage in any art form we recognize. There is a subtle artistry in the way that an elephant leaves a mound of feces, but we are such Philistines that we cannot appreciate it. :smallcool:

Not everything in a D&D that is intelligent is a mortal being with a soul. Roy's significant other being a fine example.

Ultimately, D&D lacks any sort of theological consistency (the very existence of Planescape's factions is an exercise in pointing this out) Nor has it any economic consistency. But you might say that it can have a cosmological consistency, if the world building is done well. (And I think that Rich has done good world building).

Something that keeps coming up in this forum is that the OotS gods eat souls I prefer fillet of sole (https://www.framedcooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/2-filet-of-sole-1024x659.jpg). I guess that tastes differ. :smallsmile:

Dasick

2023-02-03, 11:48 AM

Pretty close.

Reading Rich's answers is ruining the story for me lol.

He's wrong about the cosmology not mattering on a couple of counts. The major one is that with this information, Xykon goes from a juvenile one dimensional puppy kicker villain to being the only major character with the right idea. "Be a lich, be a vampire, be a brain in the jar"

Idk, I hate one dimensional evil villains. But I hate stories where the bad guys have a point and the good guys are too much into the whole reactionary upholding status quo thing to ever address it or provide a good enough counter.

That's... I'd say not really. First, it's incredibly rare to the point of being negligible. With training, apes can learn sign language, they can make human friends and adopt humans as their children. Dogs can be domesticated and have intelligence comparable to that of a small child. There's no fundamental difference between humans and animals. Humans are animals.
Any definition of "changing into a human" except a gentic one can be fulfilled by an animal.

In the western culture, it's generally considered horrifying to eat dogs for the reasons you listed. The list of "horrifying to eat animals" is rapidly growing - horses used to be a delicacy, but not so much now. Vegetarianism and veganism in principle is on the rise in the first world, and not counting it, there's plenty of some very old cultures and philosophies that encourage it if they don't demand it.

Second, I said "uncomfortably close", not being the same thing. I was watching a tourism-mentary on the Hadza, really good stuff. They hunt some baboons there. The youtuber keeps commenting how uncomfortable it is to eat the monkey meat because they're so human looking. Those monkeys couldn't use signs, and weren't domesticated or tame, and it was still uncomfortable enough for the youtuber to comment on it.

Third - humans are sentient, animals aren't. That's a much more important categorical distinction than mere biology. Animals as far as we can tell, haven't been able to achieve sentience the same way. And even then many people want to extend the conception of inalienable human rights to them.

Apparently they can. (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/awaken.htm) And much more easily than

Funny. You know what I meant. Rest of your comment - see above.

We have seen on screen that a dwarf king can become a demigod, but I think that the deities themselves simply are (per the Crayon Drawings etc) and preceded all of creation. TDO's ascension all the way up to deity, beyond demigod, is a pretty big deal / exception, as is his quiddity.
Elves have also become gods, quite a few of them given the plural.

Nor has it any economic consistency. But you might say that it can have a cosmological consistency, if the world building is done well. (And I think that Rich has done good world building).

The devil is in the details, and details like this unintentionally cast the story in a completely different light

KorvinStarmast

2023-02-03, 12:12 PM

Elves have also become gods, quite a few of them given the plural. Gods or demigods?

Fyraltari

2023-02-03, 12:21 PM

Gods or demigods?

Aren't demigods gods, just not very powerful?

Tzardok

2023-02-03, 12:35 PM

Aren't demigods gods, just not very powerful?

Under the normal 3.x rules? Yes.

Dasick

2023-02-03, 01:01 PM

Gods or demigods?

They're always mentioned as gods. V worships an ancient elven deity of knowledge.

Man, imagine being an elf wizard, spending your life worshipping a deity of knowledge, but when you die and go to the god's realm? You can't learn jack squat! No new spells, no revelation of arcane mysteries of the universe. That's almost poetic in how a fitting punishment it is for those arrogant knife eared monkeys.

KorvinStarmast

2023-02-03, 01:04 PM

They're always mentioned as gods. V worships an ancient elven deity of knowledge. OK, thanks, I guess I need to review that stuff about the Western pantheon.

Fyraltari

2023-02-03, 01:53 PM

Man, imagine being an elf wizard, spending your life worshipping a deity of knowledge, but when you die and go to the god's realm? You can't learn jack squat! No new spells, no revelation of arcane mysteries of the universe. That's almost poetic in how a fitting punishment it is for those arrogant knife eared monkeys.

Okay, Ysgramor, you need to chill. Sorry, I'm on an Elder Scrolls bend these days.

Mike Havran

2023-02-03, 06:10 PM

He's wrong about the cosmology not mattering on a couple of counts. The major one is that with this information, Xykon goes from a juvenile one dimensional puppy kicker villain to being the only major character with the right idea. "Be a lich, be a vampire, be a brain in the jar"
Not so much. Remember the whole Material world lasts only a few thousand years, give or take. And after it's gone, souls are either consumed by Snarl and cease to exist, or drawn into the plane that matches their alignment most.

I guess the process that transforms the sentient soul into the foundation of the Plane lasts many thousands of years (Horace was enjoying afterlife for about 50 years, got into level 3 and was still indistinguishable from a fresh soul like Roy.

So, trading "immortality" that does not survive current iteration for an alignment that sends you into a crappier afterlife seems like a bad deal to me.

Peelee

2023-02-03, 06:26 PM

Reading Rich's answers is ruining the story for me lol.

He's wrong about the cosmology not mattering on a couple of counts. The major one is that with this information, Xykon goes from a juvenile one dimensional puppy kicker villain to being the only major character with the right idea. "Be a lich, be a vampire, be a brain in the jar"

I gotta say, if the more you learn about an authors intentions for his story while he's still writing his story ruins the story for you, I don't think it's gonna get better for you.

Also, as for cosmology, that's entirely your opinion, and one I do not share at all. At no point did I ever read that and think, "huh, Xykon is right all along".

Mechalich

2023-02-03, 07:26 PM

Also, as for cosmology, that's entirely your opinion, and one I do not share at all. At no point did I ever read that and think, "huh, Xykon is right all along".

Xykon's not correct, but he is self-aware.

If you are evil, and know it, then it doesn't take that many ranks in Knowledge (the planes) to realize that dying is going to suck. Now, the appropriate reaction to a revelation like this ought to be working as hard as possible to achieve some kind of redemption in order to avoid the Lower Planes. 'I don't want to go to Hell so I've got to be good' is a self-serving motive for good deeds, but it is a logical one (and even in a fairly ungenerous philosophical interpretation, ought to be enough to get to a decently neutral afterlife).

Xykon, by contrast, absolutely refuses to even consider repentance. Instead, he's trying to cheat the system by arranging things so he never gets tagged with the 'you died' marker. This makes sense. Lichdom carries an almost inevitable bad end along with it - eventually the phylactery gets destroyed (demiliches are prone to destruction by such factors as 'glaciation' and 'subduction' after tens of thousands of years astral projected) and the soul is lost in madness wandering the dark reaches of the multiverse - but in the meantime (un)life is a whole heck of a lot better than eternal torture at the hands of the fiends.

Ultimately, in the flow chart of D&D life, the Lower Planes are an endpoint to be avoided at all costs. The easy way to do that is 'be a good person' but if that's not in the cards, you might as well try other option that's available. And there certainly are a lot of them.

Kish

2023-02-03, 07:38 PM

Xykon is neither correct nor self-aware. The thought of prolonging his life in any way never even occurred to him; it was all Redcloak. He lied to taunt Vaarsuvius, nothing more.

Fyraltari

2023-02-03, 07:41 PM

Xykon's not correct, but he is self-aware.

If you are evil, and know it, then it doesn't take that many ranks in Knowledge (the planes) to realize that dying is going to suck. Now, the appropriate reaction to a revelation like this ought to be working as hard as possible to achieve some kind of redemption in order to avoid the Lower Planes. 'I don't want to go to Hell so I've got to be good' is a self-serving motive for good deeds, but it is a logical one (and even in a fairly ungenerous philosophical interpretation, ought to be enough to get to a decently neutral afterlife).

Xykon, by contrast, absolutely refuses to even consider repentance. Instead, he's trying to cheat the system by arranging things so he never gets tagged with the 'you died' marker. This makes sense. Lichdom carries an almost inevitable bad end along with it - eventually the phylactery gets destroyed (demiliches are prone to destruction by such factors as 'glaciation' and 'subduction' after tens of thousands of years astral projected) and the soul is lost in madness wandering the dark reaches of the multiverse - but in the meantime (un)life is a whole heck of a lot better than eternal torture at the hands of the fiends.

The funny thing is that it's a lie. We know why he became a a lich, we saw it happen. And it wasn't to avoid the Big Fire Below. Consider the reasons he gives to join in the Plan:

Don't get me wrong, it's a lot more complicated than my usual M. O., but it has a certain scale that I think I've been lacking. I mean, I've been cruising around doing local evil here and there for decades, but I'm not getting any younger. Time to start thinking about a legacy. And what legacy would be better than, "Ruled the whole damn world." [sic]
Emphasis mine.

Does that sound like the words of a man who would do anything to avoid death?

The "do anything to avoid the Big Fire" line is a post-hoc rationalization. He's making stuff up to make himself feel better about being a lich when he doesn't actually like being one.

Edit: Dammit, Kish!

hroþila

2023-02-03, 07:43 PM

Also, Xykon's philosophy only makes sense if you assume he can actually stay undead indefinitely. But even ignoring the fact that the world has an expiration date due to the Snarl, that's not a given, especially in a universe partially governed by the rules of drama. Liches can be destroyed, and on a sufficiently long scale the vast majority of them will be destroyed eventually. He's not escaping the big fire below, he's just kicking the can down the road. And if you actually take the Snarl into account, then the gods are quite likely to destroy the world and everyone in it at some point, rendering Xykon's efforts moot (I mean, the gods are almost certainly not going to destroy this world, but that's still the overwhelmingly most likely scenario from an in-universe point of view).

(It's also worth pointing out that Xykon's words were purely a post hoc rationalization, not an actual philosophy of his)

edit: partially ninja'd

Mechalich

2023-02-03, 07:55 PM

The funny thing is that it's a lie. We know why he became a a lich, we saw it happen. And it wasn't to avoid the Big Fire Below.

It was a lie then, it could easily be the truth now. He's been a Lich for a while, even been blown up a few times.

Also, Xykon's philosophy only makes sense if you assume he can actually stay undead indefinitely. But even ignoring the fact that the world has an expiration date due to the Snarl, that's not a given, especially in a universe partially governed by the rules of drama. Liches can be destroyed, and on a sufficiently long scale the vast majority of them will be destroyed eventually. He's not escaping the big fire below, he's just kicking the can down the road. And if you actually take the Snarl into account, then the gods are quite likely to destroy the world and everyone in it at some point, rendering Xykon's efforts moot (I mean, the gods are almost certainly not going to destroy this world, but that's still the overwhelmingly most likely scenario from an in-universe point of view).

It doesn't require indefinitely; it just requires enough time to evolve into a demilich. Liches who achieve demilichdom don't go to the Lower Planes, their souls get lost in the multiverse when their phylacteries are indeed almost inevitably destroyed by various extremely long-term processes. That's bad, but probably not worse than being tortured until existence hurts too much to continue.

Also, regarding the Snarl, that fate can be avoided by virtue of not being on the Prime Material when it breaks through - Hilgya made this plan explicitly. Xykon thinks his phylactery is in his astral fortress, which would not be subject to the Snarl's destruction. Exactly what the gods do various mortals who pull this stunt is unclear, but it does seem to be an option.

Ruck

2023-02-03, 08:14 PM

I gotta say, if the more you learn about an authors intentions for his story while he's still writing his story ruins the story for you, I don't think it's gonna get better for you.

Also, as for cosmology, that's entirely your opinion, and one I do not share at all. At no point did I ever read that and think, "huh, Xykon is right all along".

Well, Xykon is right if your priority is "maintain existence as a separate entity or consciousness, no matter what the cost." In that sense, thinking he's right might be unintentionally revealing about your priorities.

More broadly, per your first paragraph, there have been multiple times in the last few days Dasick has posted something like "The more I learn about this story and the author's intentions, the less I like it," which suggests OOTS just isn't the story they want it to be and isn't going to be. Or, as a famous fictional businessman once said, "You want it to be one way, but it's the other way."

Kish

2023-02-03, 08:19 PM

It was a lie then, it could easily be the truth now. He's been a Lich for a while, even been blown up a few times.
It will always be a lie that he lifted one fleshy finger to prolong his existence when he was a living sorcerer, rather than needing to be talked into it. That's how the past works.

Psyren

2023-02-03, 08:32 PM

As is Rich, and I believe that was the exact analogy he used. The good gods run a free-range ethical farm...But, in the end, the chicjen's gonna get its neck snapped.

I don't think this analogy really works either. Nobody is "snapping the chicken's neck*." The chicken has free will, and gets to choose when it stops being a chicken. Moreover, unlike a mortal chicken, it can choose to keep being a chicken as long as it wants.

*In the Good planes, anyway.

hroþila

2023-02-04, 05:16 AM

Also, regarding the Snarl, that fate can be avoided by virtue of not being on the Prime Material when it breaks through - Hilgya made this plan explicitly. Xykon thinks his phylactery is in his astral fortress, which would not be subject to the Snarl's destruction. Exactly what the gods do various mortals who pull this stunt is unclear, but it does seem to be an option.
Let's just say I'm sceptical about the long-term prospects of such a plan. We don't know how long the period in between worlds is, but I would imagine the gods have taken into account such an obvious loophole. My headcanon is that it is probably workable for mortals (as they all have a short lifespan compared to the kind of scale the gods may be working with), but it's not a one-way ticket to literal immortality, and I wouldn't bet on anyone making it through to the next world.

Beni-Kujaku

2023-02-04, 05:26 AM

Third - humans are sentient, animals aren't. That's a much more important categorical distinction than mere biology. Animals as far as we can tell, haven't been able to achieve sentience the same way. And even then many people want to extend the conception of inalienable human rights to them.

Yeeeeeeaaaaah, I'd like you to define "sentience" there, boy.

Vahnavoi

2023-02-04, 06:46 AM

Regarding Xykon:

In addition to what was already said above of Xykon the Lich using post-hoc rationalization to taunt V, Start of Darkness makes it abundantly clear, both through displayed events and Xykon's own words, that the process preserved as little of Xykon the Person as it preserved flesh on his bones. Being Top Evil is about how far you're willing to debase yourself... and Xykon debased himself so far he lost his last source of happiness that isn't sadistic desire to see others suffer and die.

It takes a very special person to consider this a fate better than the "big fire below". Redcloak was more right than wrong when he said undead are less persons and more automated weapon systems you aim at people you want gone.

---

Regarding human and animal sentience:

Modern science has shown that sentience is a continuum. Majority of animals (and even many plants) are sentient to some degree, and several species show both self-awareness and intelligence comparable to human children. The new(er) term in fashion to imply a sharp dichtomy between humans and animals is "sapience", but that line isn't considerably clearer than the previous one.

Additionally, at the same time as animal sciences have shown animals are more aware than they've been given credit for, advances in information processing technology and machine learning have shown that even inorganic objects can be granted qualities traditionally thought to be domain of advanced human thinking. You may be more able to strike a conversation with a chatterbox AI than a dog, but the latter has capacity to feel pain and to dream while the former does not.

All that is also massively beyond the point because "humans are sapient, animals are not" does not directly lead to "animals are OK to eat, humans are not". Simplest application of Hume's Guillotine shows this. Some additional clause about what exactly makes sapient beings more worthy than other things is required. The kicker is, for any setting where divine beings are real, it's easy to add or extend a similar clause to separate divine beings from mortals. To paraphrase a differen author: "Individual mortals always die. However, gods may survive, and gods surviving also means mortals as a group survive. Therefore, it is a moral duty for mortals to act in ways that keep the gods alive."

You may not like that, but that does not make it incoherent. In philosophy and science, there's a concept associated with the phrase "biting the bullet". That means accepting conclusions that feel wrong emotionally and intuitively, but are logically sound. A lot of criticisms of D&D alignment and by extension OotS cosmology, including some of Rich's own arguments, fail to show logical incoherence or rational unsatisfyingness of the underlying system. They only show, and completely rely on, personal-level emotional unsatisfyingness and incoherence with conclusions drawn from different systems entirely.

hamishspence

2023-02-04, 06:53 AM

Redcloak was more right than wrong when he said undead are less persons and more automated weapon systems you aim at people you want gone.

Good Deeds Gone Unpunished, with its portrayal of the Ghost character Melisander in the first story (not Deathless, very much a Ghost, with negative energy-type powers) IMO subverted this a bit - Melisander is very much a person, and Hinjo has no problem with her continuing to haunt the new Azure City settlement. Indeed, he insists on paying her for her services, even though, as a Ghost, she has trouble handling anything solid.

Vahnavoi

2023-02-04, 07:02 AM

hamishspence

2023-02-04, 07:17 AM

That's one of the bonus comics in printed books, right? I haven't read it so I can't comment on it directly. Both under D&D rules and folklore, though, different types of undead are, well, different. To wit: a ghost is the incorporeal spirit of someone who was wronged or died tragically, often retaining much of their personality. A lich is an evil sorcerer who did something horrible to their own self to escape death.

So, Redcloak might not be as right about a ghost, while still applying to Xykon.

The one thing they both have in common is that they both retain their original mortal souls - with the soul being in charge, no less, unlike with vampires where the body is "controlled by a malign intelligence" which is not the original mortal soul.

While normally liches have to do the lich transformation to themselves, and have to be evil, plenty of D&D novels and splatbooks subvert this, with there being liches who aren't evil, and liches who have had the transformation forced on them somehow.

Redcloak's beliefs about the controllability of undead, may be blinding him to just how much volition and personhood they can have - including Xykon. Xykon is a person - just an incredibly vile person.

RatElemental

2023-02-04, 09:53 AM

Sounds quite fun actually, provided the souls don't die.

Bad news: There are two main differences between Ysgard and Acheron, and one of them is that the souls who fall in battle on Acheron don't get back up. The other is that they're press-ganged into pointless battles by pointless generals fighting over worthless ground, while in Ysgard you fight whoever you want for whatever reason you want and then at the end of the day go get drunk with them.

KorvinStarmast

2023-02-04, 10:38 AM

Bad news: There are two main differences between Ysgard and Acheron, and one of them is that the souls who fall in battle on Acheron don't get back up. The other is that they're press-ganged into pointless battles by pointless generals fighting over worthless ground, while in Ysgard you fight whoever you want for whatever reason you want and then at the end of the day go get drunk with them. I will be interested in the sales brochure for the travel package to Ysgard. :smallsmile:

Psyren

2023-02-04, 04:11 PM

The one thing they both have in common is that they both retain their original mortal souls - with the soul being in charge, no less, unlike with vampires where the body is "controlled by a malign intelligence" which is not the original mortal soul.

While normally liches have to do the lich transformation to themselves, and have to be evil, plenty of D&D novels and splatbooks subvert this, with there being liches who aren't evil, and liches who have had the transformation forced on them somehow.

Redcloak's beliefs about the controllability of undead, may be blinding him to just how much volition and personhood they can have - including Xykon. Xykon is a person - just an incredibly vile person.

I don't think Redcloak is entirely wrong in his assessment of most undead in D&D and OotS. Even for the ones that aren't just straight up hijacked by a vile spirit, something happens to them during the reanimation-with-negative-energy process that renders them... twisted. Ghosts being an outlier to that (which they certainly are in most editions, being able to be any alignment etc) doesn't mean he is wrong about the rest.

brian 333

2023-02-04, 06:52 PM

The town Roy's Mom exists in has all the carnal pleasures in which she wants to indulge. Eventually she will tire of lost codpieces piling up in the corner and move up to the next town. I'm guessing Eric will have 'grown up' in her eyes, and move on as well. Eventually, she will tire of whatever is going on there and move up to the next town.

This does not seem like such a horrible thing. This seems, to me, like a chance to be and do everything you ever wanted to do in life. Having done it as many times as you like, eventually you grow out of the desire to do it some more.

Example, as a kid I inherited two brothers' worth of Legos. I spent hours building things. It has been thirty years or so since I last played with Legos, and I probably would only do so if a child wants me to do so. I'm otherwise done with them.

Life is like that. You grow out of things and move on. Celestia gives you time to move on from everything you find to be unimportant. You become more and more what you find really important, and the unimportant things just don't interest you anymore.

Contrast that with the Evil afterlives, where you are tormented until you know nothing else. There is no up-side to that.

Xykon is right. Avoiding The Fire Down Below is better than any Evil afterlife. He just didn't figure that out until it was too late to do anything but buy time. Eventually, probably after he's done most of the work himself, he will go exactly where he is avoiding and face exactly what he wants to avoid.

woweedd

2023-02-04, 06:53 PM

The one thing they both have in common is that they both retain their original mortal souls - with the soul being in charge, no less, unlike with vampires where the body is "controlled by a malign intelligence" which is not the original mortal soul.

While normally liches have to do the lich transformation to themselves, and have to be evil, plenty of D&D novels and splatbooks subvert this, with there being liches who aren't evil, and liches who have had the transformation forced on them somehow.

Redcloak's beliefs about the controllability of undead, may be blinding him to just how much volition and personhood they can have - including Xykon. Xykon is a person - just an incredibly vile person.

Indeed. Redcloak is deluding himself just as much as Tsukiko was about the controllability of undead. He's just better at rationalizing. That's the thing with having high Wisdom: Doesn't mean you know the right choice, sometimes, it just means you're better at rationalizing the thing you already want.

tomandtish

2023-02-05, 04:43 PM

I will be interested in the sales brochure for the travel package to Ysgard. :smallsmile:

Come to Ysgard.
Travel to a brand new plane.
Meet exciting new people...
And kill them...
And drink with them...
And be killed by them...
And drink with them....
etc.

RatElemental

2023-02-05, 09:30 PM

Come to Ysgard.
Travel to a brand new plane.
Meet exciting new people...
And kill them...
And drink with them...
And be killed by them...
And drink with them....
etc.

Don't forget the tag line: Party until you can't remember your name or who you were, leaving behind all earthly attachments and sense of self to join the eternal mosh-pit and power the plane with your very essence.

Psyren

2023-02-06, 02:47 AM

Life is like that. You grow out of things and move on. Celestia gives you time to move on from everything you find to be unimportant. You become more and more what you find really important, and the unimportant things just don't interest you anymore.

Contrast that with the Evil afterlives, where you are tormented until you know nothing else. There is no up-side to that.

Xykon is right. Avoiding The Fire Down Below is better than any Evil afterlife. He just didn't figure that out until it was too late to do anything but buy time. Eventually, probably after he's done most of the work himself, he will go exactly where he is avoiding and face exactly what he wants to avoid.

I'll take this a step further: Good afterlives give you as much time as you want to choose when you're ready to move on - but the kinds of people who end up in Good afterlives will eventually, over a long enough time horizon, willingly choose that sacrifice.

The one thing all the OotS gods have in common is that they need to consume mortal souls to live. (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1232.html) Even if mortals don't know that while they're alive, they'll find that out once they cross over; it's not a secret, and even if it was, dead mortals would still notice more and more of their friends/family reaching the summit of Mount Celestia and not coming back down, or entering the heart of forest in Arborea and never re-emerging etc.

Knowing that their gods need the raw materials of their soulstuff to survive, these Good-aligned petitioners also know what will happen if they don't eventually surrender it and merge with the plane - too many of them doing so means that the Good gods will starve. And since the Evil and Neutral gods aren't nearly as permissive when it comes to waiting around for their petitioners to willingly pass on, that means that only the Good gods would die off, putting Good Itself in jeopardy. And that's something truly Good beings would very likely sacrifice themselves to prevent.

brian 333

2023-02-06, 08:12 AM

I don't think it is a sacrifice, in the case of the Good deities.

We see Hel squishing dwarf souls. Maybe some of them are thankful that their torment is over, but the rest are trying to avoid the thumb. With the Good deities we see nothing like that. The souls are simply growing older and older.

Eventually, the old souls pass on. They become the energy of their plane in much the same way that people who die of old age decay and become fertilizer for the next crop.

There is no sacrifice involved. It is just the circle of life extrapolated into the afterlife.

KorvinStarmast

2023-02-06, 08:42 AM

Don't forget the tag line: Party until you can't remember your name or who you were, leaving behind all earthly attachments and sense of self to join the eternal mosh-pit and power the plane with your very essence.
Be the brawl, Danny, be the brawl.

Resileaf

2023-02-06, 10:22 AM

The one thing all the OotS gods have in common is that they need to consume mortal souls to live. (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1232.html) Even if mortals don't know that while they're alive, they'll find that out once they cross over; it's not a secret, and even if it was, dead mortals would still notice more and more of their friends/family reaching the summit of Mount Celestia and not coming back down, or entering the heart of forest in Arborea and never re-emerging etc.

This again? No, the OotS gods don't eat souls, they just get get passive nourishment from their presence in their afterlife.

Fyraltari

2023-02-06, 10:43 AM

This again? No, the OotS gods don't eat souls, they just get get passive nourishment from their presence in their afterlife.

The gods absorb the energy of the planes, the planes absorb the souls. It's a shortcut, but it's not essentially wrong to say the gods eat the souls.

Beni-Kujaku

2023-02-06, 10:55 AM

The gods absorb the energy of the planes, the planes absorb the souls. It's a shortcut, but it's not essentially wrong to say the gods eat the souls.

About the same way plants eat people because they get nourishment from biological wastes in the ground.

Fyraltari

2023-02-06, 11:00 AM

About the same way plants eat people because they get nourishment from biological wastes in the ground.

I think you've just made Metastachydium's day.

Resileaf

2023-02-06, 11:04 AM

The gods absorb the energy of the planes, the planes absorb the souls. It's a shortcut, but it's not essentially wrong to say the gods eat the souls.

Not even, the gods don't absorb the energy of the planes, they absorb passive worship that the soul emits during its time in the afterlife.

About the same way plants eat people because they get nourishment from biological wastes in the ground.

It's more the way plants feed on light through photosynthesis. There's technically some eating going on, but the sun isn't being harmed by it.

Fyraltari

2023-02-06, 11:25 AM

Not even, the gods don't absorb the energy of the planes, they absorb passive worship that the soul emits during its time in the afterlife.

You might want to tell to Thor and Durkon (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1232.html):

Thor: Plants absorb sunlight, animals eat plant, people eat animals, other people defeat them and gain levels. Then the worms eat everyone.
Durkon: An' tha Gods skim tha souls off tha top. Tha more levels, tha better the souls.
Thor: Pretty much. We don't keep making these worlds for fun.
Durkon: Then Redcloak's right. 'E's food fer us an we're food fer ye. Tha world's a big ol' soul farm.
Thor: Ok: see again, that's unnecessarily pejorative.

He then goes on to describe how goblins weren't purposefully put in the position of "food" for PC.

It remains true that the souls don't endure forevermore in the afterlives and that it is the souls being absorbed by them that allows the Planes to sustain the gods. The souls are food for the gods. Or fuel. Or any other metaphor you want.

Resileaf

2023-02-06, 11:30 AM

You might want to tell to Thor and Durkon (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1232.html):

Thor: Plants absorb sunlight, animals eat plant, people eat animals, other people defeat them and gain levels. Then the worms eat everyone.
Durkon: An' tha Gods skim tha souls off tha top. Tha more levels, tha better the souls.
Thor: Pretty much. We don't keep making these worlds for fun.
Durkon: Then Redcloak's right. 'E's food fer us an we're food fer ye. Tha world's a big ol' soul farm.
Thor: Ok: see again, that's unnecessarily pejorative.

He then goes on to describe how goblins weren't purposefully put in the position of "food" for PC.

It remains true that the souls don't endure forevermore in the afterlives and that it is the souls being absorbed by them that allows the Planes to sustain the gods. The souls are food for the gods. Or fuel. Or any other metaphor you want.

The energy the gods feed off of does not affect the soul in any way though. They get something out of the soul being there, but it's not getting harmed from what the gods absorb.

Fyraltari

2023-02-06, 11:41 AM

The energy the gods feed off of does not affect the soul in any way though. They get something out of the soul being there, but it's not getting harmed from what the gods absorb.
Assuming this holds true for Hel and her ilk, this is usually not the reason people bring up gods eating souls.
Edit: Also, if the eating metaphor is good enough for the comic, it is good enough for the discussions about the comic.

Besides, I think it's more likely the gods only absorb the energy after the soul's been completely absorbed by the plane and therefore stopped existing as a discrete entity. If true then the gods' nourishment don't bring any harm to the soul in the same way that eating a steak brings no harm to the ox (it's already dead).

Peelee

2023-02-06, 11:50 AM

Also, if the eating metaphor is good enough for the comic, it is good enough for the discussions about the comic.

Thor made a distinction between absorbing and eating. Durkon then used eating as a metaphor and Thor decried that as unnecessarily pejorative.

It should not be surprising, then, that some people object to the eating metaphor as Thor did.

Resileaf

2023-02-06, 11:51 AM

Yes, the food metaphor is a good starting point, but it doesn't take into account all the nuance of the system.

Fyraltari

2023-02-06, 12:00 PM

Thor made a distinction between absorbing and eating. Durkon then used eating as a metaphor and Thor decried that as unnecessarily pejorative.

It should not be surprising, then, that some people object to the eating metaphor as Thor did.

No, what Thor objected to as unnecessary pejorative is the notion that goblins are lower than the PCs on this particular food web. That's what he argues against in his next sentence. Thor is not adverse to food metaphors, he says they used (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_web) to explain this system with a pyramid diagram (https://cdn1.sph.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/30/2012/10/WebMedium-1024x950.jpg).

Peelee

2023-02-06, 12:12 PM

No, what Thor objected to as unnecessary pejorative is the notion that goblins are lower than the PCs on this particular food web. That's what he argues against in his next sentence. Thor is not adverse to food metaphors, he says they used[/URL] to explain this system with a pyramid diagram.

I'm assuming the joke of "the food pyramid was a bad teaching aide" thing didn't land for you?

Fyraltari

2023-02-06, 12:27 PM

I'm assuming the joke of "the food pyramid was a bad teaching aide" thing didn't land for you?
Nah it did. But the food pyramid is a bad teaching aid about food. Thor didn't get rid of it because what they were talking isn't comparable to feeding.

Peelee

2023-02-06, 12:37 PM

Nah it did. But the food pyramid is a bad teaching aid about food. Thor didn't get rid of it because what they were talking isn't comparable to feeding.

Again, Thor specifically made a distinction between absorbing and eating, never said the gods ate souls, and objected to Durkons statement about humans "eating" goblins.

I don't think it's out of hand to not want to go with the eating analogy when Thor himself doesn't especially if you claim that if it's good enough for the comic it's good enough for the discussion. It's not good enough for the comic. We see that.

dancrilis

2023-02-06, 12:39 PM

Durkon then used eating as a metaphor and Thor decried that as unnecessarily pejorative.

No, what Thor objected to as unnecessary pejorative is the notion that goblins are lower than the PCs on this particular food web.

I think what Thor was objecting to was Durkon calling the world 'a big ol' soul farm' - where Thor called it an ecosystem, he found boiling it down to a 'soul farm' to be pejorative and unnecessary.

As for souls as food - I don't think Thor had any real objection to that, with the understooding that it was a metaphor rather then literal, i.e things break down and are reused even souls (on consideration without the gods souls would presumedly still break down in the planes).

Fyraltari

2023-02-06, 12:52 PM

Again, Thor specifically made a distinction between absorbing and eating
He really doesn't, though "Plants absorb sunlight, animals eat plants, people eat animals" treats "absorb" and "eat" as comparable if not identical.

never said the gods ate souls, and objected to Durkons statement about humans "eating" goblins.
No, he objects to the notion that goblins are food for dwarves and never the opposite. In a broader sense, he criticizes Redcloak for attributing malicious intent to an accidental design flaw (that the goblins consistently lose), i other words for failing to apply Hanlon's Razor. Thor never corrects Durkon's use of food as a metaphor . He says "pretty much", meaning that it is, for all intent and purposes, correct.
I don't think it's out of hand to not want to go with the eating analogy when Thor himself doesn't especially if you claim that if it's good enough for the comic it's good enough for the discussion. It's not good enough for the comic. We see that.[/QUOTE]

Not only is it good enough for the comic, it is good enough for the author:

I see it this way:
CG gods are those that advocate for organic and free range farms, but they are not vegetarian; they still eat you in the end .
Bingo.

And I presume everyone who has a moral problem with the gods using the mortal world to generate their sustenance will be going vegan now.

Jasdoif

2023-02-06, 12:52 PM

The energy the gods feed off of does not affect the soul in any way though. They get something out of the soul being there, but it's not getting harmed from what the gods absorb.I think of it more like RTGs (https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/cassini/radioisotope-thermoelectric-generator/); souls decay into the general substance of the plane of the afterlives, and that decay produces energy that be can tapped into...regardless of whether gods tap into it or not.

I feel like if the gods had the ability to alter the fundamental nature of souls and the afterlives, they'd have eliminated their own need to eat...or their ability to be mentally influenced by their followers across worlds. Instead, I think it's far more likely their own existences are bound by those laws of...unnature?

No, what Thor objected to as unnecessary pejorative is the notion that goblins are lower than the PCs on this particular food web. That's what he argues against in his next sentence.I thought Thor was responding to the "world's a soul farm" bit as unnecessarily pejorative (specifically the implication that Thor only cares about his followers for how much he can eat, I imagine), and opened the next sentence with "The point is" to move the topic of conversation to what he wanted to talk about (which, funnily enough, is a less pejorative variant of "You're missing the point" as an opener).

Psyren

2023-02-06, 01:05 PM

This again? No, the OotS gods don't eat souls, they just get get passive nourishment from their presence in their afterlife.

"Eventually repurpose into an alignment battery," then, if "consume" is distasteful. My larger point is that souls don't stay as the discrete entities they were as mortals forever, and all the afterlives are designed to do that. The Good ones are only unique in that they give their souls total agency in the matter, rather than being forced into it via eternal torture, violence, monotony, confusion etc. And for me at least, that inherent volition makes all the difference.

EDIT: Thanks for the Giant quote, Fyraltari

About the same way plants eat people because they get nourishment from biological wastes in the ground.

...Yes? And what do you suppose would happen if every plant stayed a plant forever with none of them ever returning to the soil? Eventually, the soil they were planted in would fail.

Fyraltari

2023-02-06, 01:11 PM

Thanks for the Giant quote, Fyraltari

Thank Jasdoif, our resident banana quoted it upthread.

Resileaf

2023-02-06, 01:20 PM

As for souls as food - I don't think Thor had any real objection to that, with the understooding that it was a metaphor rather then literal, i.e things break down and are reused even souls (on consideration without the gods souls would presumedly still break down in the planes).

Without the gods, souls wouldn't exist. Fundamentally in the OotS setting, everything is made of ideas. The planes exist because they're ideas that are so powerful they became places. The gods exist because those ideas eventually gained form and sentience. The mortals exist because those sentient ideas decided to come together and create worlds on which they place ideas made of the essence of every plane that become people. Those people then get ideas of their own and affect the world, the gods and the planes. When people die, all their experiences and ideas travel with them to the plane they fit in the most and their ideas slowly filter through into the fabric of the plane until there are no ideas left and the mortal soul becomes the very plane it lives in.

The effect mortals have on gods is because their beliefs and ideas strengthen or weakens the fabric of what the god is made of: ideas. The more ideas and the stronger they are, the more powerful the god becomes. With fewer ideas, the god weakens. Because the god was formed as a concept from the planes, what the plane 'thinks' of the god keeps that god existing as well. This is what it means when a god 'eats' a soul, it just means that the soul's ideas continue to help the god exist, and as long as the soul exists in a plane, those ideas continue to fuel the god. Without ideas to maintain it, the sentient idea ceases to exist.

Fun fact: the word 'idea' ceases to have any meaning if repeated often enough.

Jasdoif

2023-02-06, 01:28 PM

Fun fact: the word 'idea' ceases to have any meaning if repeated often enough.I have no idea what this 'idea' idea is supposed to idealize; it's not ideal.

KorvinStarmast

2023-02-06, 01:29 PM

I'm assuming the joke of "the food pyramid was a bad teaching aide" thing didn't land for you? I got it, and enjoyed it.

I don't think it's out of hand to not want to go with the eating analogy when Thor himself doesn't especially if you claim that if it's good enough for the comic it's good enough for the discussion. It's not good enough for the comic. We see that. That's my take as well.

Without the gods, souls wouldn't exist. Fundamentally in the OotS setting, everything is made of ideas. The planes exist because they're ideas that are so powerful they became places. The gods exist because those ideas eventually gained form and sentience. The mortals exist because those sentient ideas decided to come together and create worlds on which they place ideas made of the essence of every plane that become people. Those people then get ideas of their own and affect the world, the gods and the planes. When people die, all their experiences and ideas travel with them to the plane they fit in the most and their ideas slowly filter through into the fabric of the plane until there are no ideas left and the mortal soul becomes the very plane it lives in.
{snip}
Fun fact: the word 'idea' ceases to have any meaning if repeated often enough. I enjoyed your post. FWIW, here's a link to the etymology of the word idea (https://www.etymonline.com/word/idea).

Mechalich

2023-02-06, 02:45 PM

I think of it more like RTGs (https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/cassini/radioisotope-thermoelectric-generator/); souls decay into the general substance of the plane of the afterlives, and that decay produces energy that be can tapped into...regardless of whether gods tap into it or not.

It may be possible to extend this metaphor. Since souls presumably predate gods in the D&D-based cosmology upon which Stickworld is based. Souls traveling to the Outer Planes is rather like those planes accumulating concentrations of fissile material. Eventually critical mass was reached and the gods were born. The gods then realized that they could increase their power by producing additional mortals rather than simply allowing them to build up naturally.

I feel like if the gods had the ability to alter the fundamental nature of souls and the afterlives, they'd have eliminated their own need to eat...or their ability to be mentally influenced by their followers across worlds. Instead, I think it's far more likely their own existences are bound by those laws of...unnature?

It was theorized in at least a couple of Planescape supplements that just as mortal-to-divine ascension was possible divine-to-something-greater ascension was also possible. Considering that D&D gods have multiple stages in which they increase substantially and fundamentally in power as they acquire more worshippers, this seems possible. Stickworld is somewhat more limited, of course, since it contains only one prime material world at any given time, but Thor did establish the Snarl itself as in some sense 'above the gods.'

It's also time limited, in that while the world may be a soul farm, the farm doesn't usually get to run for all that long before they have to up-stakes and move the farm somewhere else, effectively losing the whole 'crop' in the process, and this severely weakens the gods, as seen in the case of Odin. In theory, if the world was able to persist for longer - like much longer, millions of years instead of thousands - then perhaps the gods would evolve sufficiently to break free of this constraint.

Vahnavoi

2023-02-07, 01:53 AM

As some noted before, I don't feel Thor is objecting to saying gods eat people.

He's objecting to sentiment behind "just food" and "soul farm": the idea and implication that being "food" makes mortals unworthy.

That value statement, whether implicit or explicit, is why some audience members get angry at the gods for eating mortals. But it doesn't really follow from the system itself. If anything, often it's a case of audience members projecting their own attitudes about food on the gods.

To make this obvious, all that is required is considering various different attitudes towards food. To some people, food is precious, even holy: not a scrap ought to be wasted, one should be thankful for what one gets, respect it, respect its source and the work that went into it. To others, it is but a consumer product, all that matters is that it satisfies their desires and does it now, for as little cost to themselves as possible. So on and so forth.

KorvinStarmast

2023-02-07, 08:38 PM

To make this obvious, all that is required is considering various different attitudes towards food. To some people, food is precious, even holy: not a scrap ought to be wasted, one should be thankful for what one gets, respect it, respect its source and the work that went into it. I see you have met my mother and father (or people a lot like them). They grew up during the Great Depression. That concisely summarizes their PoV.

Dasick

2023-02-07, 08:57 PM

I see you have met my mother and father (or people a lot like them). They grew up during the Great Depression. That concisely summarizes their PoV.
Nay, Vahnavoi has met my grandparents, who were but wee lads and lasses during a devastating genocidal war.

I mean, that viewpoint summarizes most people in the world I think. If you don't think of food as something precious, you're the odd one out.

That being said, I don't think that hits the crux of the issue. Word of Giant and the comic itself pretty much goes along with the idea that the gods are running a chicken farm (CG gods run a free range one). But if you're a chicken and suddenly you realize that you're going to be soup one day, you don't go "Oh wow, it's such a great honour to give my life so that such a wonderful civilization can continue! And besides, my life here is so much better than out there in the woods among the predators, where it would be short nasty and brutish". You become horrified at this and try to escape (or at least, someone like Tolkien might argue that you have a moral duty to escape).

Imagine for a second that a race of demons exists side by side with humans. The demons need to eat humans, and if they don't they lose their sentience and return to base instinct. They would gladly devour each other, their loved ones, friends and family, without human meat. Eventually humans and demons reach a compromise, that humans live in the human world, they give demons a stock of humans for food, and demons live on demon world, and no one will breach the promise the two races make to each other. Demons farm humans. They set up fake "orphanages" where selected humans do their best to provide kids with 13 years of pure childhood bliss before they are "adopted" aka killed for meat (because a happy childhood lets their brains develop the best). When the kids find out about this set up? What should they do? Should they just enjoy the few years they have left because the world outside is hostile and full of demons and they can never go back to the human world (because the humans are jerks and they will kill them on sight anyways to maintain the truce)? Should they be glad that the demons try to minimize their suffering, and tha before eating them, they express extreme gratitude to their demon gods through a thanksgiving ceremony? Should the kids be happy that when demons eat them they can have normal relationships with others of their kind, instead of acting like ravenous beasts and devouring one another? Really?

The manga/anime is called Promised Neverland. It's really good.

Well, Xykon is right if your priority is "maintain existence as a separate entity or consciousness, no matter what the cost." In that sense, thinking he's right might be unintentionally revealing about your priorities.

See above. If you're a chicken on a farm and you realize you're going in the great soup bowl below... Even if you run away into the woods and some fox eats you anyways, that can still be considered a moral win and sticking it to the man. The gods of OOTSverse, even the supposedly good ones, are clearly shown to not care very much about mortals beyond the gods need to get the food pyramid stuff out of them. They only grant miraculous powers to their followers because they need belief, praise and dedication, so they expend their power juice because projected return on investment is greater. Thor only cares about the situation with the goblins because to him its a means to an end - the end being sealing the Snarl.

The mortals owe no more allegiance to these gods than if only neutral or only evil gods existed. If only evil gods existed, sure, ensuring their existence ensures he existence of humans. Kinda how the existence of humans ensures the existence of domesticated cows and chickens who won't really do so well if released into the wild. You know, maybe in the scenario presented, you might just need to "bite the bullet" and accept that worshipping evil gods and doing their will is the morally correct course of action. But this scenario has no real world applicability.

More broadly, per your first paragraph, there have been multiple times in the last few days Dasick has posted something like "The more I learn about this story and the author's intentions, the less I like it," which suggests OOTS just isn't the story they want it to be and isn't going to be. Or, as a famous fictional businessman once said, "You want it to be one way, but it's the other way."

Yeah actually. Xykon having that throwaway line, coupled with the recent tantrum about how "the only thing that matters is the ability to kill everyone who stands in my way and I'm only doing the snarl thing to tell gods to **** off" set up a much more complex character than just a cardboard cutout evil villain who does things for the evulz. While not particularly deep, it creates enough of an illusion of depth to make this character more interesting than absolute 0. The extra background stuff... I don't know, what's the point of outright saying "oh yeah, whatever illusion of depth existed to Xykon, I must squish it here and now - that guy is just born evil ok"?

The idea that "some people are just evil" is both wrong (we should do more to understand why people act in a way we don't want them, so that we can properly incentivize them) and also the main reason why the message of "you shouldnt judge people by their green skin colour" needs to be said in the first place. Art isn't business, and if you're trying to teach moral lessons, you have a responsibility to get it right.

Yeeeeeeaaaaah, I'd like you to define "sentience" there, boy.

The quality that makes eating animals morally ok but caniballism to be universally reviled.

I don't think this analogy really works either. Nobody is "snapping the chicken's neck*." The chicken has free will, and gets to choose when it stops being a chicken. Moreover, unlike a mortal chicken, it can choose to keep being a chicken as long as it wants.

*In the Good planes, anyway.

If you don't have any other options, it's not exactly free will. Besides, as Roy's Archon points out, they do things like intentionally make people feel guilty about enjoying the lower mountain pleasures. It's not to conform to their expectations, its to nudge them along to climb higher.

Vahnavoi

2023-02-08, 03:28 AM

But if you're a chicken and suddenly you realize that you're going to be soup one day, you don't go "Oh wow, it's such a great honour to give my life so that such a wonderful civilization can continue! And besides, my life here is so much better than out there in the woods among the predators, where it would be short nasty and brutish".

Why not? You realize this is an apt descriptor of how many people actually feel about their lives? A literal chicken can't reach that conclusion because it has neither the time nor cognitive capacity for that - the immediate terror of its existence precludes it. But a human isn't a chicken.

For the record, I've read entirety of Promised Neverland. The series couldn't actually follow through with its own premise and give a firm answer to those questions. Instead, it opted for a late-series reframing of the conflict and then a rather classic Deus Ex Machina to give itself some semblance of a happy ending.

The series could have, for contrast, gone all in to support the hunter demon's side and promote a world where human farms are abolished, and demons and humans both return to a state of nature where they fight and kill each other as mutually respectful rivals. It would've been equally coherent to the underlying themes and message.

But this scenario has no real world applicability.

You'd be wrong about that. If raising a species to eat can be justified by the eater perpetuating that species, it follows that eating species in ways that threaten their existence are NOT justified. So, for example, unsustainable farming practices and hunting species to extinction are unjustified and immoral.

Psyren

2023-02-08, 09:39 AM

If you don't have any other options, it's not exactly free will. Besides, as Roy's Archon points out, they do things like intentionally make people feel guilty about enjoying the lower mountain pleasures. It's not to conform to their expectations, its to nudge them along to climb higher.

You do have another option; unlike every other afterlife (and life for that matter), you can stay at your current level of existence indefinitely. That few do so on a long enough time horizon doesn't mean it's not an option.

And please, the "guilt" parts are mild at best, barely a punchline. Sara certainly doesn't seem inhibited or repressed in any way.

Peelee

2023-02-08, 10:06 AM

And please, the "guilt" parts are mild at best, barely a punchline. Sara certainly doesn't seem inhibited or repressed in any way.

Also Roy's Archon mentions that is becuase the people who are the right fit for that plane expect that. It's not a universal amongst all Good afterlives.

Dasick

2023-02-08, 03:39 PM

Why not? You realize this is an apt descriptor of how many people actually feel about their lives? A literal chicken can't reach that conclusion because it has neither the time nor cognitive capacity for that - the immediate terror of its existence precludes it. But a human isn't a chicken.

Up above I answered Beni Kujaku's answer in an obvious cop out, in big part because I'm not sure I can define sentience without breaking or at least skirting the spirit of the forum's rules.

Many people feel that way about their lives, but I don't think that's a correct position. And that people resign themselves to that fate, is in some sense more horrifying than the fate in question. It was shocking for me to realize that so many people basically hold Cyrus' position in the Matrix. In the manga, I've definitely found the position of Mom and that black haired kid to be extremely unsettling and I think that was the point.

For the record, I've read entirety of Promised Neverland. The series couldn't actually follow through with its own premise and give a firm answer to those questions. Instead, it opted for a late-series reframing of the conflict and then a rather classic Deus Ex Machina to give itself some semblance of a happy ending.

The series could have, for contrast, gone all in to support the hunter demon's side and promote a world where human farms are abolished, and demons and humans both return to a state of nature where they fight and kill each other as mutually respectful rivals. It would've been equally coherent to the underlying themes and message.

That's a fair criticism, and the existence of the evil blooded girl was a massive cop out as well. And I do find it interesting that the demon you're referring to holds the position he does. He doesn't need to eat humans, but eating humans is so deeply ingrained in their culture, spirituality and religion that he is still motivated to do so. I've actually met people who vehemently object to vegetarianism on "spiritual" grounds.

In general, a lot of stories set up interesting premises but then chicken out of actually resolving the issue. Even the general freedom manga writers have as opposed to Disney Pixar doesn't seem to help the issue.

The Promised Neverland premise itself is set up to parallel human-animal relations, not sure if intentionally so, but vegans for example often have to take B12 supplements, and those are made with animal products I think? There's also a lot of theories about how we evolved to be sentient, and a lot of them have to do with consuming fish or meat (which could be just a rationalization though).

You'd be wrong about that. If raising a species to eat can be justified by the eater perpetuating that species, it follows that eating species in ways that threaten their existence are NOT justified. So, for example, unsustainable farming practices and hunting species to extinction are unjustified and immoral.

We're talking from the perspective of farm animals. Animal Farm is another story that explores this, but for obvious reasons I'm going to pretend it doesn't exist, except for to say, imagine if animals could make their own societies or run their own farms. Domesticated animals don't owe any allegiance to us humans because through breeding we are keeping their species alive. If animals can escape this situation, they should. If some chicken runs away because it considers it better to be eaten by some fox and deny humans the meat, in some sense it can be said to advance the cause even if it's motivation is pure spite. We don't know the extent to which it's possible to do so in OOTS, but I think that the position of "this system is a setup and since all of you are od'ed on bluepills and are potential system agents anyways, I have no qualms about doing whatever it takes to stick it to the gods" (that's not Xykon's position, but it would make for an interesting villain)

You do have another option; unlike every other afterlife (and life for that matter), you can stay at your current level of existence indefinitely. That few do so on a long enough time horizon doesn't mean it's not an option.

And please, the "guilt" parts are mild at best, barely a punchline. Sara certainly doesn't seem inhibited or repressed in any way.

Coercion, compliance and manipulation techniques extend far past crude "forcing" methods. The illusion of choice, the prison inside the mind, these are simply more effective forms of control. Kind of how Redcloack is making Xykon think he is making his own choices, whereas in reality he's a more advanced autonomous weapon Redcloack has learned to point in the right direction (which is a counterpoint to me saying Xykon is a boring villain - since undead aren't people, he's not really a villain just a rogue bit of evil magic). That the gods for example, don't allow souls from one realm to mingle with souls from other realms is the smoking barrel that they intend to coral dead souls into becoming batteries one way or another, sooner rather than later. Or, taking Word of Giant again, that the free range farm offers chickens the illusion of freedom doesn't mean the farmers are just letting the chickens do whatever, and all the limits put on chickens are in the end, meant to result in a better meat product. If souls could mingle with differently aligned souls it would disrupt or prolong the process of them becoming indistinguishable alignment tuned batteries, so gods put a major kibosh on it.

Peelee

2023-02-08, 04:13 PM

KorvinStarmast

2023-02-08, 04:28 PM

There's also a lot of theories about how we evolved to be sentient, and a lot of them have to do with consuming fish or meat (which could be just a rationalization though). The correlation between higher brain function and increased protein and caloric intake (thanks to fire) about 1.8 to 2 million years ago was pretty well laid out in a Sci Am article some years back. I am sure the research gets attacked for non scientific reasons that I won't go into here. But I need to offer a caveat to this: larger brains and higher brain function may have still come after baseline sentience was established, so the link between sentience (which is a somewhat nebulous term) and advanced reasoning capacity due to larger brains may be mixed together a bit.

...then the Good afterlives seem like a pretty nice retirement package. If you are into mountain climbing, or fishing, one in particular seems to be a superb retirement package. :smallcool:

Peelee

2023-02-08, 04:42 PM

The correlation between higher brain function and increased protein and caloric intake (thanks to fire) about 1.8 to 2 million years ago was pretty well laid out in a Sci Am

Scientific American always comes out too early. I prefer Sci Pm.

Dasick

2023-02-08, 05:01 PM

Dasick, I have a question. How are the afterlives horrifying of you start from the position that you will not have some form of eternal life? Because that seems to be the crux here, and even for undead (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/inevitable.htm), assuming D&D until shown otherwise, there will be Maruts that will eventually hunt down undead who last long enough. If you assume that your consciousness will end at some point, which is effectively guaranteed, then the Good afterlives seem like a pretty nice retirement package.

That's not the starting position though.

Consider this comic (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0633.html). V says "eternity" and "immortal soul". Given how pedantic and verbose V is, even in this situation, I don't think it's unreasonable to conclude that V means "eternity" and "immortal soul" - that is, this character is literally willing to endure literal eternity for the sake of the souls of his children (whom he assumes will also suffer for eternity as a result of necromantic magic used by the dragon).

We have the rulebooks and lore supplements and Word of Giant at our fingertips. The people of OOTSverse are comparatively speaking in the dark here, even those who dedicate themselves to religious service or unraveling the mysteries of that universe. Even Roy who got to see the other side doesn't really remember much about it.

So you make your life choices with the assumption that "eternity" means ETERNITY and "immortal" means IMMORTAL (which further accentuates the horror of the Snarl and the fate of the denizens of the first world and all those worlds the gods failed to cash out not to mention Soon's wife, and it makes for a much stronger case for the gods to pull the plug), and then no one bothers to point out that technically that's not the case, because the set up benefits them... that's not an honest deal, no matter how good it is. If the deal was "be good or worship good gods and you will enjoy however long in the afterlife doing the activities outlined below. that's the best we can do given the nature of things, honest to us", then yeah, fair enough. But the gods don't say that do they? Not even the LAWFUL ones, despite following and outlining the letter and spirit of deals is their entire schtick. Because if the forums are any indication, quite a few beings on the mortal plain would be more like Eugene or Roy or Hylga or even closer to Xykon (or how I used to interpret Xykon anyways), and the gods don't want that. Quite a few more mortals would be looking for ways to escape the soul farm, or try to deny the gods in some spiteful manner, or even change the nature of the universe all together and render gods less important somehow (that's a plot for a number of fantasy stories). No matter how good of a deal is, if you're signing up for one thing, but its another thing, that's not a fair deal.

I've referenced a couple of works of fiction where the premise is basically this scenario and it's assumed to be horrifying and people going along are cast as villains. While I don't think that's entirely the case here, the parallels and similarities are pretty strong.

Peelee

2023-02-08, 05:05 PM

That's not the starting position though.

Consider this comic (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0633.html). V says "eternity" and "immortal soul". Given how pedantic and verbose V is, even in this situation, I don't think it's unreasonable to conclude that V means "eternity" and "immortal soul" - that is, this character is literally willing to endure literal eternity for the sake of the souls of his children (whom he assumes will also suffer for eternity as a result of necromantic magic used by the dragon).

Conversely: V is wrong. "Pedantic and verbose" do not mean "not prone to exaggeration, especially when concerning his own self-importance". V is acting like that is a brave and noble sacrifice they are making, and it is in character for V to build themselves up this way - if they are sacrificing, it is the ultimate sacrifice, superlative to any other.

Notwithstanding that we know from author commentary that V is wrong.

But let's forget all that. Let's say we live in Peeleeverse, which functions exactly as Stickworld except there is an absolute 100% guarantee for everyone no matter what that they will cease to exist at some point. So, again, with the starting position of "your soul is not immortal and you will not have eternal life", why are the Good afterlives objectionable?

Dasick

2023-02-08, 05:09 PM

Conversely: V is wrong. "Pedantic and verbose" do not mean "not prone to exaggeration, especially when concerning his own self-importance". V is acting like that is a brave and noble sacrifice they are making, and it is in character for V to build themselves up this way - if they are sacrificing, it is the ultimate sacrifice, superlative to any other.

Notwithstanding that we know from author commentary that V is wrong.

But let's forget all that. Let's say we live in Peeleeverse, which functions exactly as Stickworld except there is an absolute 100% guarantee for everyone no matter what that they will cease to exist at some point. So, again, with the starting position of "your soul is not immortal and you will not have eternal life", why are the Good afterlives objectionable?

That V (and it can be safely assumed, pretty much everyone else) is wrong on this matter is the *point*. V and everyone else is making an assumption about how to live their lives based on incorrect assumptions, and the gods don't bother to correct it or clarify the matter because it benefits them and would cause trouble to do so anyways.

Maybe most people would continue to follow their alignments and worship the gods they worship if they knew that it was the case. But the deal they are presented with isn't honest, it's not upfront about that part. Which conversely casts the gods in a lot more shady light

Peelee

2023-02-08, 05:12 PM

That V (and it can be safely assumed, pretty much everyone else) is wrong on this matter is the *point*. V and everyone else is making an assumption about how to live their lives based on incorrect assumptions, and the gods don't bother to correct it or clarify the matter because it benefits them and would cause trouble to do so anyways.

Maybe most people would continue to follow their alignments and worship the gods they worship if they knew that it was the case. But the deal they are presented with isn't honest, it's not upfront about that part. Which conversely casts the gods in a lot more shady light

A.) V is wrong most likely because they are self-aggrandizing and hyperbolizing for effect. Given that clerics can literally hop on over to the other planes, it's not unlikely that how it works is common knowledge.
2.) I note you are avoiding the question.

Dasick

2023-02-08, 05:35 PM

A.) V is wrong most likely because they are self-aggrandizing and hyperbolizing for effect. Given that clerics can literally hop on over to the other planes, it's not unlikely that how it works is common knowledge.

*Sufficiently high level clerics. And Durkon still manages to blow pretty much every knowledge(religion) check despite being so high level and being privy to the Universes' Most Guarded secrets (hmm, I wonder why the gods guard this secret so zealously HMM)

Which, are pretty rare. It's made a point several times how rare it is for say, wizards or whatever to survive to 10th level, and plenty of discussion on the forums concluded with "you know what, OOTS is either the highest level adventuring party, or in the top 1 percentile". Which is consistent with a "soul farm" world that's a massive grindhouse of monsters and adventurers, since most adventuring parties don't have plot armour and adventuring is a pretty high risk profession despite the jokes and plot conveniences and jokes about plot conveniences and revolving doors of heaven. Even then, it's a feudal society and in a feudal society, you need 10 people to farm to support someone else doing another thing. So we can assume even being a low level adventurer that's unimportant and dies in way that no body cares or has any significance, we're talking about being in the top 10-1% of the population.

They have magic and divine miracles, but most people don't have access to those.

It's a toss up if V is being pedantic or self aggrandizing here, but consider other characters, below. Given how much Roy's and Durkon's opinion is challenged by the revelations about the workings of the cosmos, it's fair to say it's unlikely to be common knowledge.

2.) I note you are avoiding the question.

The main horror part is part and parcel of the whole situation where (as Roy puts it) the gods, even the supposedly good aligned ones don't really have the collective benefit of mortals as their top priority, or as Durkon puts it, their souls are just food for gods (he seems to be pretty upset by the XP farm similarity and doesn't like how much Thor's answer isn't a firm no) or betting chips to be splashed around (he's also pretty upset about it. I wonder if his decision to become a cleric would have been altered in any way by this knowledge?). And as Rich says, his story requires that the afterlife has a flaw, and for Roy and Durkon to be upset about finding out how the cosmos works.

That the mortals don't know how the universe works, and that they are allowed to believe convenient false things about it is part of the issue here. If the mortals knew all these things about the gods, there would be a lot more anti-theistic sentiment in that universe. But, if they were upfront about it, I guess it would be better. It would at least be a fair deal. Except for the whole "soul farm" thing, where people generally think being farmed undermines their dignity.

Peelee

2023-02-08, 05:57 PM

*Sufficiently high level clerics. And Durkon still manages to blow pretty much every knowledge(religion) check despite being so high level and being privy to the Universes' Most Guarded secrets (hmm, I wonder why the gods guard this secret so zealously HMM)

Which, are pretty rare. It's made a point several times how rare it is for say, wizards or whatever to survive to 10th level, and plenty of discussion on the forums concluded with "you know what, OOTS is either the highest level adventuring party, or in the top 1 percentile". Which is consistent with a "soul farm" world that's a massive grindhouse of monsters and adventurers, since most adventuring parties don't have plot armour and adventuring is a pretty high risk profession despite the jokes and plot conveniences and jokes about plot conveniences and revolving doors of heaven. Even then, it's a feudal society and in a feudal society, you need 10 people to farm to support someone else doing another thing. So we can assume even being a low level adventurer that's unimportant and dies in way that no body cares or has any significance, we're talking about being in the top 10-1% of the population.

They have magic and divine miracles, but most people don't have access to those.

It's a toss up if V is being pedantic or self aggrandizing here, but consider other characters, below. Given how much Roy's and Durkon's opinion is challenged by the revelations about the workings of the cosmos, it's fair to say it's unlikely to be common knowledge.

The main horror part is part and parcel of the whole situation where (as Roy puts it) the gods, even the supposedly good aligned ones don't really have the collective benefit of mortals as their top priority, or as Durkon puts it, their souls are just food for gods (he seems to be pretty upset by the XP farm similarity and doesn't like how much Thor's answer isn't a firm no) or betting chips to be splashed around (he's also pretty upset about it. I wonder if his decision to become a cleric would have been altered in any way by this knowledge?). And as Rich says, his story requires that the afterlife has a flaw, and for Roy and Durkon to be upset about finding out how the cosmos works.

That the mortals don't know how the universe works, and that they are allowed to believe convenient false things about it is part of the issue here. If the mortals knew all these things about the gods, there would be a lot more anti-theistic sentiment in that universe. But, if they were upfront about it, I guess it would be better. It would at least be a fair deal. Except for the whole "soul farm" thing, where people generally think being farmed undermines their dignity.
So all of your arguments on this are based on nothing but supposition that you then extrapolate as absolute truth. Gotcha.

Dasick

2023-02-08, 06:04 PM

So all of your arguments on this are based on nothing but supposition that you then extrapolate as absolute truth. Gotcha.

Roy's and Durkon's perception of gods is challenged by the revelations of the cosmic secrets

The plot requires the afterlife (and gods) to be flawed

Durkon is pretty upset that Thor doesn't deny the soul farm analogy and dwarfish souls being betting chips*

These are facts of the story. The rest is me being verbose and trying to explain the significance of it

*as most people would feel it undermines their inherent dignity

Precure

2023-02-08, 06:22 PM

Problem with immortality is how unfit tbis to human mind. People would be bored to death after few centuries, and dissolve into energy would be a better outcome for them.

Dasick

2023-02-08, 06:31 PM

Problem with immortality is how unfit tbis to human mind. People would be bored to death after few centuries, and dissolve into energy would be a better outcome for them.

Statistically speaking, for reasons I won't elaborate on for obvious reasons, most people would hard disagree with that statement or make a claim about it being a physical limit that can be overcome.

Even then, a lot of people believe that it's possible to achieve digital immortality by digitizing one's consciousness and uploading it to the cloud. And since this digital consciousness would be acting in the real world, their consciousness being able to learn and improve itself, and acting in real civilization which is constantly evolving and changing, and not being confined to some kind of an amusement park designed to bore individuals into seeking spiritual suicide as planar batteries, people excited about the coming "singularity" don't find the prospect of becoming too bored to want to be conscious to be a problem.

Mechalich

2023-02-08, 06:33 PM

So you make your life choices with the assumption that "eternity" means ETERNITY and "immortal" means IMMORTAL

Human intelligences (and by extension basically all fantasy species operating in a world like Stickworld) are not generally capable of properly conceptualizing really large numbers. Eternity is, to almost everyone, 'a really long time,' that's it. The difference between 'live for 100,000 years' and 'live for 100,000,000 years' is simply not something we are capable of properly parsing, full stop. People make like choices based on the idea that 'eternity' means 'as long as I can imagine,' when they cannot, in fact, imagine all that much.

People in the good afterlives do in fact get to live for as long as they can imagine. Basically, so long as they keep finding things interesting they'll continue to exist. The neutral afterlife is similar, only the available options are more constrained - on Mechanus everyone gets exactly the same amount of afterlife, on Limbo, everyone gets one of random length. The evil afterlife, by contrast, is nasty, brutish, and short. That actually makes sense too, since a relatively small proportion of souls qualify as 'evil' the evil deities need to cycle through their share at much greater speeds than the good ones.

Kish

2023-02-08, 06:34 PM

Problem with immortality is how unfit tbis to human mind. People would be bored to death after few centuries, and dissolve into energy would be a better outcome for them.
An assertion as easy to make as the contrary, and as completely unsupported. I suggest you fight a duel with Dasick.

Dasick

2023-02-08, 06:42 PM

Human intelligences (and by extension basically all fantasy species operating in a world like Stickworld) are not generally capable of properly conceptualizing really large numbers. Eternity is, to almost everyone, 'a really long time,' that's it. The difference between 'live for 100,000 years' and 'live for 100,000,000 years' is simply not something we are capable of properly parsing, full stop. People make like choices based on the idea that 'eternity' means 'as long as I can imagine,' when they cannot, in fact, imagine all that much.

Fair point. My argument is part and parcel of the gods in OOTSverse being jerks and a lot of factors we see Roy and Durkon learn change their perspective. Maybe "eternity" vs "really long time" is a small thing you can gloss over, but combined with everything else we see the supposedly good gods casually do, it's more of another point.

People in the good afterlives do in fact get to live for as long as they can imagine. Basically, so long as they keep finding things interesting they'll continue to exist.
See the post above, I think you were writing when I posted that?

The neutral afterlife is similar, only the available options are more constrained - on Mechanus everyone gets exactly the same amount of afterlife, on Limbo, everyone gets one of random length. The evil afterlife, by contrast, is nasty, brutish, and short. That actually makes sense too, since a relatively small proportion of souls qualify as 'evil' the evil deities need to cycle through their share at much greater speeds than the good ones.

It's much harder to stay good and lawful. Plus, we know for a fact that Fenris almost always creates creatures like goblins who breed fast, live short lives, and are presumably usually evil (Fenris is an evil god, right? I presume when gods make things, they make them tilted towards their alignment/worship). Plus there's quite a bit of usually evil creatures, probably as many as usually neutral or usually good ones, and considering they have to put up a good fight for the adventurers, they need to be able to consistently reach reasonably high levels (although Hel does remark that its rare for an undead cleric to gain enough levels to be useful for wrt godsmoot, so who knows - but then, how does the balance of good and evil work in this cosmos? good is quantity over quality and evil vice versa?)

An assertion as easy to make as the contrary, and as completely unsupported. I suggest you fight a duel with Dasick.

If I pick weapons its going to be AoE2:AoC

Or if we want it to be topical I suppose we could roleplay out an epic struggle which represents the philosophies through the physical struggle if someone wants to DM that

It's easy enough to support this assertion (or its opposite), especially since humans have been kinda obsessed with immortality for all of recorded history and plenty of nerds who know a thing about a thing (including philosophy. despite the "bad science", alchemy treatises remain really interesting and insightful) have worked tirelessly on it, and continue to do so tirelessly (see point about digitized consciousness)

Precure

2023-02-08, 07:16 PM

It's easy enough to support this assertion (or its opposite), especially since humans have been kinda obsessed with immortality for all of recorded history and plenty of nerds who know a thing about a thing (including philosophy. despite the "bad science", alchemy treatises remain really interesting and insightful) have worked tirelessly on it, and continue to do so tirelessly (see point about digitized consciousness)

Of course people desire immortality, because our lives are too short, we have very little time for fun and play until we get old and sick, and then we're too busy to keep ourselves healthy and living. That's not comparable with a person who stayed in Celestia for a long time. For an example, since it's easier to watch every tv show on the net now, I've got bored with it and trying other things that felt different. Being in Celestia is like that except there is nothing new left to do or consume anymore.

Peelee

2023-02-08, 07:17 PM

Roy's and Durkon's perception of gods is challenged by the revelations of the cosmic secrets

The plot requires the afterlife (and gods) to be flawed

Durkon is pretty upset that Thor doesn't deny the soul farm analogy and dwarfish souls being betting chips*

These are facts of the story. The rest is me being verbose and trying to explain the significance of it

*as most people would feel it undermines their inherent dignity

The plot requires the afterlife to not be perfect.

Again,I f you are not guaranteed eternal life, that's not a bad deal. I specifically offered you a question where you know this and you never answered, so I am forced to assume your only issue is that they are being lied to about how the afterlife works (which is not guaranteed). And even if they are being lied to about how it works, that doesnt change that they are still not going to have eternal existence. Given that they won't get that anyway (again Maruts exist in Stickworld until/unless we are told they don't, so using alternate methods to expand your lifespan also doesn't grant absolute immortality, and the people who go through apotheosis also don't last through new world versions), and given that regardless, by the time one starts to get "consumed" they don't care about that one way or the other - the good ones are too happy to care and the bad ones are too out of their mind to care - then, if anything, it's a kindness to those who go to the evil and some of the neutral afterlives.

Dasick

2023-02-08, 07:32 PM

The plot requires the afterlife to not be perfect.
I don't see the difference between "flawed" and "not perfect"

I specifically offered you a question where you know this and you never answered, so I am forced to assume your only issue is that they are being lied to about how the afterlife works (which is not guaranteed). And even if they are being lied to about how it works, that doesnt change that they are still not going to have eternal existence.

Its still a soul farm. The gods still use souls as gambling chips. The gods, even the supposedly good ones, still seem to care about mortals as more of an afterthought. If you dedicate your life to the reverence of a supreme being, it's quite a spit in the face to find out that being has absolutely no respect for your dignity (that was the punchline for a lot of situations where Durkon is "interpreting signs" and then its a cutaway where Thor was just doing random things for fun)

I said upthread that I guess the difference between "eternity" and "really long time" is moot, its more of a straw that breaks the camel's back. The gods in OOTSverse are jerks, and the mortals have every reason to want to alter or change the system, or engage in pointless rebellious activities (which might shake things up enough to change the status quo - goths and vandals and protestors smashing windows, or people self immolating to make a point). Even if immortality is not on the table, there's quite a lot wrong with that set up, and given what we don't know, there's quite a lot to try to change to it.

Of course people desire immortality, because our lives are too short, we have very little time for fun and play until we get old and sick, and then we're too busy to keep ourselves healthy and living. That's not comparable with a person who stayed in Celestia for a long time. For an example, since it's easier to watch every tv show on the net now, I've got bored with it and trying other things that felt different. Being in Celestia is like that except there is nothing new left to do or consume anymore.

Modern 1st world middle class-ish or economically adjusted lifestyle more or less affords people to get bored watching every tv show or whatever (i have no clue how you do that, I have rewatched the same set of movies and shows a hundred times and have no plans to stop). But the nerds are still plinking away at the ol' immortality thing (consciousness digitization). The important difference is that immortality in "the flesh" so to speak would not restrict someone to an amusement park possibly designed to become boring eventually. There's also the argument that survival itself makes otherwise boring existence exciting, so having to survive a really long time vs being stuck in an afterlife for a long time are quite possibly entirely different experiences (trend of slapping survival or roguelite mechanics on every possible videogame concept loosely supports this assertion) - this point is in hindsight an answer to Peelee in a way

That's not to mention that there are ahem, techniques designed to bore one out of one's mind in order to increase one's tolerance to boredom.

Peelee

2023-02-08, 07:36 PM

I don't see the difference between "flawed" and "not perfect"
"Flawed" has clesr negative connotations. I would not call, for example, retiring to the Bahamas flawed. I would call retiring to the Bahamas not perfect.

Its still a soul farm.
.... And? Again, take Peelee verse which is the exact same thing as Stickworld except you know the deal. You will not exist forever. Guaranteed. You know this. There will eventually be nothingness. Why is this still horrifying? You are not being culled, you are not sitting around being happy and then suddenly getting the scythe. If you were good, you choose your own time frame. If you were bad, you are mercifully free of torment at some point. What, exactly, is more horrifying about this then about, say, your physical body eventually being worm food?

Dasick

2023-02-08, 07:47 PM

"Flawed" has clesr negative connotations. I would not call, for example, retiring to the Bahamas flawed. I would call retiring to the Bahamas not perfect.

Possibly a bad case of sour grapes but I would not want to retire to the Bahamas (I don't realistically see that as an option anyways), I would prefer to live my life in a way that does not require or make me want to "retire"

.... And? Again, take Peelee verse which is the exact same thing as Stickworld except you know the deal. You will not exist forever. Guaranteed. You know this. There will eventually be nothingness. Why is this still horrifying? You are not being culled, you are not sitting around being happy and then suddenly getting the scythe. If you were good, you choose your own time frame. If you were bad, you are mercifully free of torment at some point. What, exactly, is more horrifying about this then about, say, your physical body eventually being worm food?

The gods are still jerks though, even the supposedly good ones. They could run a much more fair "farm", and they could show a lot more respect to mortals, but they kinda don't really care until Redcloack discovers a Snarl shaped gun to point in their general direction

So someone deciding to dedicate their life to change how things work, or even engage in pointless rebellion still makes sense on an emotional level.

Peelee

2023-02-08, 07:54 PM

Possibly a bad case of sour grapes but I would not want to retire to the Bahamas (I don't realistically see that as an option anyways), I would prefer to live my life in a way that does not require or make me want to "retire"
Shall I just assume that you get the point I'm making but don't want to address it?

The gods are still jerks though, even the supposedly good ones. They could run a much more fair "farm"
How? Again, the only possible issue here is that the mortals may not know about it, and by the time they experience it they won't care in any event.

It really seems like you're making a mountain out of a molehill here.

Mechalich

2023-02-08, 08:02 PM

The gods are still jerks though, even the supposedly good ones.

Stickworld is a compromise system. It has roughly 50-60 deities (18 the Northern Pantheon has 18 that vote in the godsmoot). At any time a majority of the gods of any two pantheons, so a mere 20 deities, can destroy the world and start over. Some of the gods are jerks, because, you know, they're evil (or not-very-accommodating versions of neutral), as is to be expected. Because the gods must operation in a coalition with a majority sufficient to keep the world going, even without the threat of the Snarl, the world is inherently going to flawed.

That's to be expected. Stickworld is not a fantasy world operating under the aegis of an omnipotent creator deity. It is a 'flawed' universe in the sense that evil has just as many votes as good. We simply do not know what a system developed entirely by the good deities would look like because that option is not on the table.

So someone deciding to dedicate their life to change how things work, or even engage in pointless rebellion still makes sense on an emotional level.

Yes, it is logical in the context of Stickworld to try and find a way to alter the divine balance. The problem is that any such move is an all or nothing attempt, since otherwise the gods destroy the world to preserve the status quo. The horror element is not anything about the world as it is. It's that because of the infinite reboots option, nothing can really change. Any time any side starts 'winning' the cosmic battle of ideologies, the other side simply flips the table.

Redcloak's Plan is the sort of incredibly extreme action necessary to actually alter the balance, but only because it has the potential to wipe away the 'infinite reboots' option.

Dasick

2023-02-08, 08:23 PM

Shall I just assume that you get the point I'm making but don't want to address it?

I get the point. My response can be expanded to mean "if I'm going to spend a really long time in existence before eventually fading out of it due to natural processes, I'd rather remain gaining XP and levels, learning and discovering new things, interacting with people from the entire alignment spectrum, overcoming real challenges and not set up amusement park pieces, and generally speaking growing, shaping the world around me, being surprised by new scenarios, doing something meaningful, and generally living life to it's fullest"

Which brings me back to the original point - given what we know about the afterlives and that everyone eventually fades, Xykon's got the right idea*. That liches and vampires end up overriding the personality of the original product is a big issue, but maybe overcomable? There's a lot of different kinds of undead and magic. Or, if you're basically your worst day incarnate maybe you won't fade as much when the vampire spirit takes over? Or if you Durkon hard enough you could be yourself and a vampire? There's a lot of ways to game or bend if not break the system in the setting as presented.

*yeah yeah I get it that he's not allowed to be not a cardboard cutout and that taunt is demonstrably just a taunt and not what Xykon believes. Something something broken clocks something something twice scaly

How? Again, the only possible issue here is that the mortals may not know about it, and by the time they experience it they won't care in any event.

It really seems like you're making a mountain out of a molehill here.

We simply do not know what a system developed entirely by the good deities would look like because that option is not on the table.

Ignore the fact that everyone fades at some point. I didn't know that, and it was pretty clear that the gods, even the good ones are being jerks. That's a critical point to the story. They don't care about the mortals. The situation with the goblins isn't something that exists because the evil and neutral gods demand it exists and they have an equal voice and the good gods have to suck it up. The situation exists because none of the gods, not even the good ones, cared enough to intervene or do anything about it (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1232.html)(page 2 panel 3). "They're not my constituents?" thinks Thor, and ignores the issue because he's too busy getting drunk and pawing Sif and making bets of questionable alignment character or catering to the beings who will end up in his afterlife and give him that sweet soul juice.

You might argue that even good gods can't afford to spend the juice when they dont have a PROI, but Thor doesn't say that to Durkon. Thor is still a being of GOOD and that grants him with enough of a conscience to be honest with himself and Durkon and not offer up any post hoc rationalizations.

Good gods can do a lot more to deserve the worship of their followers, to hold themselves to the high standards they hold mortals to (given their power, and what we know about power and responsibility, the standards to which gods should be held are way above anything a mortal should even have to worry about). Sure, if they did the best they could and everyone still fades, fair, you did the best you could. But they're not doing the best they could.

That it takes a Redcloack pointing the Snarl to get them to think that they should do better is pretty damning. The mortals owe no allegiance to the good gods who behave this way (much less to neutral and evil ones who create entire races that they intend to torture into submission), and more of them should do what Redcloack is doing. Sure, they might just destroy the world, but the threat of mortals rebelling might be enough of an incentive for them to start caring if the mortals keep doing that.

Peelee

2023-02-08, 08:38 PM

I get the point. My response can be expanded to mean "if I'm going to spend a really long time in existence before eventually fading out of it due to natural processes, I'd rather remain gaining XP and levels, learning and discovering new things, interacting with people from the entire alignment spectrum, overcoming real challenges and not set up amusement park pieces, and generally speaking growing, shaping the world around me, being surprised by new scenarios, doing something meaningful, and generally living life to it's fullest"
Ah. Aging does not exist in the fantasy world, I take it?

Ignore the fact that everyone fades at some point. I didn't know that, and it was pretty clear that the gods, even the good ones are being jerks.

Not really. They're just not catering you in the highly specific way you want to be catered to.

Ruck

2023-02-08, 08:48 PM

The alternative to "the mortals the gods create eventually reach an afterlife where eventually their existence as a separate being ends and they provide soul food for the gods" is "the mortals never exist at all and the gods die out from lack of belief." Which is preferable, from anyone's perspective?

Dasick

2023-02-08, 08:51 PM

Ah. Aging does not exist in the fantasy world, I take it?

In your metaphor retirement is the afterlife. And in me quite possibly stretching the metaphor too far, not retiring is using a number of magical means to prolong one's life, including maybe becoming some kind of a freewilled undead that's not going to require consuming your original spirit maybe? Like, there's a lot of magic and rules and obscure rules and obscure magic

Not really. They're just not catering you in the highly specific way you want to be catered to.

Weird thing to say considering I'm somewhat paraphrasing Durkon and Roy.

Durkon is the one who gets Thor to admit that well, they could have prevented the goblin situation, but they didn't care enough. Durkon is also pretty upset to find out that dwarf souls are used as gambling chips in a stupid bet( Strip 1209 Panel#7 (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1209.html)) Durkon thinks the situation with goblins and monsters should be changed somehow (panel 4 (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1255.html))

Roy is the one who feels like he has no allegiance to those who created him just because they created him, and that they should be held to the standards they hold others to. Strip #1195, Panel 10 (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1195.html)

The alternative to "the mortals the gods create eventually reach an afterlife where eventually their existence as a separate being ends and they provide soul food for the gods" is "the mortals never exist at all and the gods die out from lack of belief." Which is preferable, from anyone's perspective?

The alternative is, good gods can put in more effort into being you know, GOOD, and preventing unfair situations they totally can.

Someone deciding to say screw the system and fighting a pointless war against gods is unlikely to succeed and wipe out existence for everyone forever. But it is likely to get the gods' attention and to make them consider their actions

I mean, half the punchlines with Durkon is some cutaway to completely undermine whatever divine signs he was reading or how he was trying to find meaning in his suffering or misfortune, when in reality there is none and Thor was just goofing around

Windscion

2023-02-08, 09:24 PM

Of course people desire immortality, because our lives are too short, we have very little time for fun and play until we get old and sick, and then we're too busy to keep ourselves healthy and living. That's not comparable with a person who stayed in Celestia for a long time. For an example, since it's easier to watch every tv show on the net now, I've got bored with it and trying other things that felt different. Being in Celestia is like that except there is nothing new left to do or consume anymore.

This is basically the premise of Season 4 of The Good Place.
Chidi
Solves the problem by convincing heaven to allow souls to die.

Dasick

2023-02-08, 10:20 PM

This is basically the premise of Season 4 of The Good Place.
Chidi
Solves the problem by convincing heaven to allow souls to die.

Its worth pointing out that the gods of OOTSverse create the creatures and races - their biology and psychology, and in the case of Hel and Durkula, its implied she hand crafted the vanpire spirit.

Seems like its quite possible that the gods design beings who will get bored of eternity eventually, or will have a tendency to meld into the alignment battery being

RatElemental

2023-02-08, 10:37 PM

Ah. Aging does not exist in the fantasy world, I take it?

It does, but it was presumably invented by the gods (or at least was not prevented). If elans exist, then there exist mortals who are impervious to age. If they don't, there still exist mortals who are impervious to age: vampires. Every mortal race could have been created biologically immortal and only ended up in the afterlife through violence or misadventure. The resulting overpopulation issue could presumably be solved either by making the material plane actually infinite in size, or by limiting birth rates like with the elves.

The topic of discussion here is the gods themselves; The current state of the system is not what we're limited to here. Honestly, wouldn't be surprised if one of the uncountable billions of previous worlds was inhabited by ageless mortals.

The alternative to "the mortals the gods create eventually reach an afterlife where eventually their existence as a separate being ends and they provide soul food for the gods" is "the mortals never exist at all and the gods die out from lack of belief." Which is preferable, from anyone's perspective?

There are some philosophies which would answer this with "the latter." I don't entirely disagree with them.

Mechalich

2023-02-08, 11:09 PM

The topic of discussion here is the gods themselves; The current state of the system is not what we're limited to here. Honestly, wouldn't be surprised if one of the uncountable billions of previous worlds was inhabited by ageless mortals.

Maybe, maybe not. It depends on how well the god-independent aspects of the D&D cosmology hold, which is a little tricky, especially since Redcloak keeps summoning off the periodic table.

In the traditional D&D cosmology, the Inner Planes exist independently of, and are believed to predate, all deities, mortals, and the very Prime Material itself - with the Prime Material being, in effect, a very large demiplane that acquired full planar status via spontaneous generation. The Prime is produced by matter and energy drawn from the Inner Planes and in order to maintain independent existence has to contain a balance of those elements. Within this context, the level of permutation in world design available to the gods is distinctly not limitless. For example, a plane with all ageless mortals would have a massive deficiency of negative energy, which might prevent it from existing at all.

brian 333

2023-02-08, 11:16 PM

The idea that the gods don't care about mortals beyond the chicken farm analogy is contradicted in comic. Marduk cares, (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1139.html) and so does Thor. (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1140.html)

What is very much overlooked in many arguments put forward in this thread is the idea that sapience, sentience, self awareness, and similar concepts are relative. A fish is aware of it's potential death and avoids bigger fish. A cat may not be aware of the fish's degree of awareness when it tries to snag a snack from the goldfish bowl, but it is certainly aware of it's potential death from the coyote. Cattle are intelligent, social, and very much aware of the danger from strange humans.

The degree of difference in sapience between a human and a deity is greater than the difference between a fish and a human.

"That's why I'm a vegetarian!" you shout defiantly. And yet, vegetation grows in soil which is a colony of many organisms which break down the dead remains of formerly living organisms.

You vegetarians are, like the OotS deities, consuming the energy of formerly living creatures, some of which were self aware and sentient. At least the deities in OotS aren't pretending to virtue when they do it.

Vahnavoi

2023-02-09, 05:17 AM

Up above I answered Beni Kujaku's answer in an obvious cop out, in big part because I'm not sure I can define sentience without breaking or at least skirting the spirit of the forum's rules.

You don't need to define sentience. I already know what sentience and sapience mean. What you need to explain is why that matters. Hume's guillotine separates "humans are sapient, animals are not" from "it is immoral to eat humans but okay to eat animals".

For contrast, the moral framework founded on perpetuation of groups and species doesn't particularly care about that. "Individual humans and individual animals will always die. However, humans as a species and animals as species may survive. Therefore, it is acceptable for individual humans to eat individual animals, and vice versa, as long as this does not threaten existence of any species."

In that framework, all living things have the same moral duty. Sentience may put limits to an individual creature's ability to physically follow it, but it does not change what the duty is.

Many people feel that way about their lives, but I don't think that's a correct position. And that people resign themselves to that fate, is in some sense more horrifying than the fate in question. It was shocking for me to realize that so many people basically hold Cyrus' position in the Matrix. In the manga, I've definitely found the position of Mom and that black haired kid to be extremely unsettling and I think that was the point.

The reason why many people found Cypher to have a point is because the original Matrix missed the mark on its own philosophy. It's a great movie, but was fairly criticized for promoting a naive black-and-white us-versus-them mindset, which is why it became a favorite of various conspiracy nutters.

The makers of the Matrix actually agreed with the criticism and Animatrix, Reloaded and Revolutions directly address some of it. They missed the mark on Reloaded and Revolutions for other things, but the internal philosophical deconstruction of the original's message is actually quite neat.

And what does the hero do at the end? Does he flee from the inevitable? Does he continue to rebel, does he destroy both the machines and the world they maintain?

No. Instead, he accepts the inevitable and strikes peace with the machines, so that the world can continue to exist without undue conflict. Why? Because he chose to.

We're talking from the perspective of farm animals. Animal Farm is another story that explores this, but for obvious reasons I'm going to pretend it doesn't exist, except for to say, imagine if animals could make their own societies or run their own farms. Domesticated animals don't owe any allegiance to us humans because through breeding we are keeping their species alive. If animals can escape this situation, they should. If some chicken runs away because it considers it better to be eaten by some fox and deny humans the meat, in some sense it can be said to advance the cause even if it's motivation is pure spite. We don't know the extent to which it's possible to do so in OOTS, but I think that the position of "this system is a setup and since all of you are od'ed on bluepills and are potential system agents anyways, I have no qualms about doing whatever it takes to stick it to the gods" (that's not Xykon's position, but it would make for an interesting villain).

Any story that puts humans in the position of farm animals, always comments on how humans ought to treat their own farm animals. A story where "evil gods" are found to be justified because they perpetuate existence of humans, implies humans are justified when they perpetuate existence of other animals, and are not justified when they do not. Basic recursion and emulatory principle at work.

As for farm animals not owing any allegiance to humans... why not? I already explained this above: it's possible to imagine a framework where every living thing has the same moral duty. Again, sentience may put limits to an individual creature's physical ability to follow it, but it does not change what the duty is.

So, a chicken might be excused for running away, because in its tiny mind it thinks it must get away for there to be chickens tomorrow. But, humans have the right to kill, eat or recapture that chicken, as long as that means there will be both humans and chickens tomorrow. Indeed, humans have moral duty to recapture that chicken, if doing so is necessary to save chickens from extinction.

If the chicken, at any point, expands its mind sufficiently to understand its own position fully, it no longer follows it should escape. Whether or not it should escape depends on whether doing so would satisfy its moral duty.

Humans are not fowl. A human often already is capable of group- and civilization-level reasoning. A human is capable of understanding the inevitability of their individual demise and choosing to serve ends that transcend the self. A human is therefore not excused for escaping against moral duty. Certainly not if done out of spite. That, would be outright Evil.

brian 333

2023-02-09, 09:10 AM

The theory of evolution refutes the idea that the survival of any species is necessary or is necessarily a virtue. If all species have a 'right' to exist, then let's see how humans and smallpox virus vigorously defend the rights of each other.

Evolution does not care about species. Humans should care because we do not know the consequences of removing a particular species from our environment. Removing the wolf, for example, has had consequences for the Quaking Aspen (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/the-biggest-living-thing-on-earth-is-being-nibbled-to-death) due to the overpopulation of deer. But, in the absence of Aspen trees, deer do just fine, and so do humans.

Adaptability, not homeostasis, is the key to species survival. Unfortunately, it is also the key driver of speciation, which means that along the way some species cease to exist due to evolving into something else.
Let's use another North American example: Pronghorn. They are the fastest land animal in the Americas due to evolutionary pressure from a cheetah-like predator. Over the years, pronghorns got faster and faster, and the cat which specialized in hunting them eventually could not keep up. We still have pronghorns. Their cheetah-like predator (https://www.nps.gov/articles/american-cheetah.htm) exists now only as fossils. (Bad pronghorns!) But along the way, the precursor animal species which became pronghorns also went extinct.

In OotS evolution is less apparent. However, we do see evidence of it. Thor used to be a ginger, Odin went crazy when his food source changed, and Hel is dying off due to a lack of worship. The elf deities and Dvalin are new entities apparently.

Humans tend to think in very short intervals of time. We don't like change. Now is the way it has always been and any change is bad, (unless we are the younger generation changing it to suit our superior values, but we will resist when our children discard our values for new ones!)

Humans have human-centric morality. We don't care that the deer, and the deer tick, prefer a lack of wolves in their environment. We like Aspen trees, therefore wolves or wolf-analogues are necessary to curtail the deer population.

Why should the OotS deities be held to a higher moral and ethical standard?

Precure

2023-02-09, 12:07 PM

But the nerds are still plinking away at the ol' immortality thing (consciousness digitization).

Because, obviously, they didn't get or have enough time to be bored to death. No one has.

This is basically the premise of Season 4 of The Good Place.
Chidi
Solves the problem by convincing heaven to allow souls to die.

Which is what Celestia and (probably other good planes) choose to do.

Its worth pointing out that the gods of OOTSverse create the creatures and races - their biology and psychology, and in the case of Hel and Durkula, its implied she hand crafted the vanpire spirit.

Seems like its quite possible that the gods design beings who will get bored of eternity eventually, or will have a tendency to meld into the alignment battery being

That sounds like a conspiracy theory, and incompatible with the idea of free will.

KorvinStarmast

2023-02-09, 12:36 PM

Why should the OotS deities be held to a higher moral and ethical standard? As I see it, they can't be held to any moral or ethical standard, since they write the rules and then change the rules each time that they create a new world ... which has happened millions or billions of times. They are not humans, and they are not mortals. They are a different kind of being. As co creators of each and every iteration of the world (Fenris (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1232.html), as but one example, but Freya(??) and the Monkey (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0274.html) also) they choose how the baselines and rules vary.

The only reason a deity gives any credence to what a living mortal does or does not like seems to be very self serving: will it increase, decrease, or leave stable the amount of worship (nourishment) the deity receives.

Vahnavoi

2023-02-09, 04:06 PM

The theory of evolution refutes the idea that the survival of any species is necessary or is necessarily a virtue. If all species have a 'right' to exist, then let's see how humans and smallpox virus vigorously defend the rights of each other.

Theory of evolution does nothing of the sort because it is not a moral theory. You have to invoke something beyond evolution to bridge the gap left by Hume's guillotine. As such, all the evolutionary trivia is pointless for the current discussion I was having with Dasick.

As a purely pragmatic matter, it actually quite easy for humans to preserve populations of microbes, such as viruses, while minimizing their influence on human populations. That microbes cannot return the favor is irrelevant; their inabity to follow moral duty does not free humans from it.

Why should the OotS deities be held to a higher moral and ethical standard?

It was rather the point of the framework you tried criticize that humans and gods can be held to the exact same standard, in a way that leaves plenty of room for ethical consumption of other beings.

---

The only reason a deity gives any credence to what a living mortal does or does not like seems to be very self serving: will it increase, decrease, or leave stable the amount of worship (nourishment) the deity receives.

This cannot be true given how OotS gods are described as functioning. Since gods are formed around ideals and beliefs, and these ideals and beliefs exist in a feedback loop with how mortals perceive them, the only god that acts only out of rational self-interest is the god of rational self-interest. So far, such a god is nowhere in sight. All other gods must have other motives, and at least some of them must be comprehensible to mortals, simply for the reason that at least some mortals believe them to have them.

This, in turn, means that gods easily fall under scrutiny of mundane moral philosophies. Indeed, since D&D alignment is in play, some gods personify existing moral philosophies. Which god you'd find most deserving of worship would be the one that you believe to be closest to your own, and if enough people share your thoughts, that god would act accordingly.

KorvinStarmast

2023-02-09, 05:19 PM

This, in turn, means that gods easily fall under scrutiny of mundane moral philosophies. Indeed, since D&D alignment is in play, some gods personify existing moral philosophies. Which god you'd find most deserving of worship would be the one that you believe to be closest to your own, and if enough people share your thoughts, that god would act accordingly. I don't think so, particularly given that the alignment of Odin remains unknown, and much argued, and that Hel got conned into doing something self defeating and possibly self killing.
I do not feel that "absolute" anything applies to the gods. They make deals with each other that serve their own self interest (no backsies rule) and compromise to prevent another Snarl eruption. Their motive there is self preservation.

A hint that we have of moral constraint is Loki's rant near the end of Book Six about how he's more or less forced to be devious since his worshippers count on him being that way.
I see that as mostly self serving.

Dasick

2023-02-09, 07:02 PM

The idea that the gods don't care about mortals beyond the chicken farm analogy is contradicted in comic. Marduk cares, (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1139.html) and so does Thor. (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1140.html)

Crying and "being sad" isn't the same as actually caring.

Thor makes a point that he remembers everyone who prayed to him (to the exclusion of everyone else), but it's also shown in the comic that whenever Durkon calls upon him, the joke is usually that Thor is doing some thing that's the exact opposite of caring. Which, you could pretend that Thor never almost gave Elan cancer, but Durkon mentions it right in the comic you link.

What is very much overlooked in many arguments put forward in this thread is the idea that sapience, sentience, self awareness, and similar concepts are relative. A fish is aware of it's potential death and avoids bigger fish. A cat may not be aware of the fish's degree of awareness when it tries to snag a snack from the goldfish bowl, but it is certainly aware of it's potential death from the coyote. Cattle are intelligent, social, and very much aware of the danger from strange humans.

The degree of difference in sapience between a human and a deity is greater than the difference between a fish and a human.

"That's why I'm a vegetarian!" you shout defiantly. And yet, vegetation grows in soil which is a colony of many organisms which break down the dead remains of formerly living organisms.

You vegetarians are, like the OotS deities, consuming the energy of formerly living creatures, some of which were self aware and sentient. At least the deities in OotS aren't pretending to virtue when they do it.

I assume that's aimed at me because I mentioned around page 2 of this thread that I used to be a vegetarian for this reason.

The problem with your logic is that if you basically erase the difference in sapience between humans and fish, as you just did, then what's the issue with say, killing a whole bunch of people and taking their stuff? Especially if those people speak a different language and have different cultural customs. Maybe my side needs the farmland or the resources or whatever, and whoever lives there can be compost (this being the default moral stance for almost all recorded history... you wanna go back to that?). And since all people go into the ground, decay, and end up being eaten by plants which are eaten either directly by humans or by animals humans eat, hey, what's the issue with solving world hunger by just culling populations to a sustainable level and feeding them to everyone else? We're just eliminating the middle man.

The reason why civilizations have such strong moral codes and such strong taboos is cause once you start bending and breaking them, it threatens the "social contract" needed for the entire thing to run. People participate in the game of "society" because they get something out of it, you can't really get them to play along in any other way.* If you enjoy falling asleep in your house without wondering if someone is going to break in during the middle of the night, slit your throat and take all your stuff, or if you enjoy being able to go to the grocery store without being abducted and taken apart for spare parts, it's in your best interests to shore up the moral pillars as best as you can. This is not an exaggeration, this is how life is like for a lot of places out in the world, where brutal senseless violence is a common occurrence and people live in terror. Any attempt to deconstruct or analyze the validity of these pillars threatens or weakens them, because once you have a critical mass of people who start bending or exploiting the social structure, then it becomes obvious that going along with it is just not in one's best interests. It's a civilization wide prisoner's dilemma, and it's kind of a miracle that it's going as well as it's going.

The reason we care about being moral to animals is because our empathy is more of an AoE effect than a targeted one. Psychopaths usually start out by torturing animals before moving on to people. Having strong taboos against torturing animals means that anyone with strong antisocial tendencies becomes much more visible. On the other hand, someone who finds it difficult to kill an animal is going to have a lot more trouble killing or harming other people (it also works to overcome dehumanizing propaganda, as the idea of comparing enemies to animals loses it's punch when you're for animal welfare anyways). If we start failing to make the distinction between different levels of sentience, it erodes the distinction between human and animal, it erodes the distinction between "my side" and "the other"

*Belkar's story arc actually illustrates the point very well. He wants to kill Elan for xp, but then Roy enforces his "arbitrary morals" by threatening Belkar with more violence. The "arbitrary morals" exist because the alternative is a life that is nasty, brutish and short for everyone involved. Sure, the morals are arbitrary and don't make perfect sense, you can spend all day picking them apart. But the alternative is a dog eat dog world. Likewise, when Belkar goes all hippie vision quest, Shojo explains to him why its in his interest to play along with this game and these rules. And now, after seeing Durkon save Belkar, Belkster is realizing that owning up to his misdoings and growth require pain and discomfort, and he is slowly learning the reason behind the "arbirtrary" rules.

You don't need to define sentience. I already know what sentience and sapience mean. What you need to explain is why that matters. Hume's guillotine separates "humans are sapient, animals are not" from "it is immoral to eat humans but okay to eat animals".

For contrast, the moral framework founded on perpetuation of groups and species doesn't particularly care about that. "Individual humans and individual animals will always die. However, humans as a species and animals as species may survive. Therefore, it is acceptable for individual humans to eat individual animals, and vice versa, as long as this does not threaten existence of any species."

We take this position to it's natural conclusion, and combined with advances in technology we're looking at horrors that will make colonialism and 20th century seem like a walk in the park. If survival of humans as a species is the only thing that matters, well then, there go individual human rights. If you're concerned about The Greater Good and the well being of the species, you might as well advocate for a return to a feudal society (well, the cyberpunk future we're heading into is basically that) or some kind of a slave owning thing because most people aren't particularly good at choosing things which are good for the society as a whole (or even for themselves, it could be argued)

Above I explain why compassion and empathy to animals matters.

It's also worth pointing out that "the rule of the strong" has emergent morality to it. No matter how strong the alpha ape is, 3 or 4 apes working together can tear him to shreds. No matter how strong the king and his knights are, they still need to eat, and even if they violently crush the peasant rebellion, there goes the harvest. It's why we are even talking about things like universal human rights and human dignity in the first place.

The reason why many people found Cypher to have a point is because the original Matrix missed the mark on its own philosophy. It's a great movie, but was fairly criticized for promoting a naive black-and-white us-versus-them mindset, which is why it became a favorite of various conspiracy nutters.

The makers of the Matrix actually agreed with the criticism and Animatrix, Reloaded and Revolutions directly address some of it. They missed the mark on Reloaded and Revolutions for other things, but the internal philosophical deconstruction of the original's message is actually quite neat.

And what does the hero do at the end? Does he flee from the inevitable? Does he continue to rebel, does he destroy both the machines and the world they maintain?

No. Instead, he accepts the inevitable and strikes peace with the machines, so that the world can continue to exist without undue conflict. Why? Because he chose to.

Or maybe the machines play him like a fiddle and Neo and the rest of the crew are still inside the Matrix and never left it. It's one of the more popular explanations for why Neo starts developing magic powers towards the end of the Revolutions.

Imo, the Reloaded and Revolutions were good movies and don't deserve the scorn heaped on them, but I'm not sure I should start defending movies universally hated again :D

The reason the Matrix became a favourite of conspiracy nutters (and literally everyone else) is because it's a monumental work of myth and narrative that taps into the feelings of dissatisfaction so many experience. Our lives, our environments, our economies, our relationships, they all feel so fake at times, so inauthentic (this is why "authentic" is one of those marketing buzzwords that gets people's attentions. We don't want to be wooden puppets, we want to be real boys). If you like the movie, if it resonates with you, you agree on an emotional level that there's something wrong going on. Agreeing with Cypher is saying to yourself "well, I feel like there is a lot of wrong with the world, but I'm going to take these feelings and shove in a stone sarcophagus and drop it in the middle of the ocean and never think about it again". Not a wise move by any means, even if outright rebellion and revolution is not a wise move either. We know there's some kind of a problem and ignoring it won't make it go away.

Any story that puts humans in the position of farm animals, always comments on how humans ought to treat their own farm animals. A story where "evil gods" are found to be justified because they perpetuate existence of humans, implies humans are justified when they perpetuate existence of other animals, and are not justified when they do not. Basic recursion and emulatory principle at work.

Animal Farm was not at all about how humans ought to treat their own farm animals and that's all I'm going to say about it. But it uses our ability to empathize with animals and see how they are mistreated to make it's point, and that empathy is a very important feature to maintain our civilization.

Why should the OotS deities be held to a higher moral and ethical standard?

Dunno, ask Roy. Or Durkon.

Because, obviously, they didn't get or have enough time to be bored to death. No one has.

That's really not true. There's plenty of people so tired and bored of life, they very actively work to sabotage it. If you ask a bunch of teenagers doing drugs and engaging in crime why they're doing it, a middle level analysis will have them say something along the lines of "i dunno i was bored i guess"

That sounds like a conspiracy theory, and incompatible with the idea of free will.
More like, we don't really know the limits of how gods created things, and it's not explored because it's not relevant to the story (except that it is)

It could be that the gods can't change the nature of created mortals that much. It could be that they have to make them this way because otherwise they expend too much energy without enough return and starve and existence ceases to exist. Either way none of them care too much about it.

As I see it, they can't be held to any moral or ethical standard, since they write the rules and then change the rules each time that they create a new world ... which has happened millions or billions of times.

It's implied that their ability to write the rules is severely limited. The laws of alignment are more fundamental than the gods are

Vahnavoi

2023-02-10, 02:13 AM

I don't think so, particularly given that the alignment of Odin remains unknown, and much argued, and that Hel got conned into doing something self defeating and possibly self killing.
I do not feel that "absolute" anything applies to the gods. They make deals with each other that serve their own self interest (no backsies rule) and compromise to prevent another Snarl eruption. Their motive there is self preservation.

A hint that we have of moral constraint is Loki's rant near the end of Book Six about how he's more or less forced to be devious since his worshippers count on him being that way.
I see that as mostly self serving.

Loki is the clearest example for my case: he's self-serving because he stands for a self-serving philosophy, yet we also know he cannot always act of rational self-interest because his actions have to fit preconceptions of people who believe in him.

You cannot take Loki's attitude and extrapolate it to gods of other alignments.

Characterizing the deals gods make with each other as self-serving is fair, but the reason for that is that the pool of deal-makers includes self-serving gods, such as Loki. It does not follow gods don't have other motives. Indeed, just calling what they did with the Snarl a compromise emphasizes that they do have such other motives. Thor pretty much says so, when he explains how and why Good gods have their hands tied behind their backs.

---

We take this position to it's natural conclusion, and combined with advances in technology we're looking at horrors that will make colonialism and 20th century seem like a walk in the park.

Naked appeal to emotion. This is exactly why I brought up "biting the bullet" in the first place. Just because something is emotionally horrifying (to you), does not make it immoral. An analogy can be made to bad-tasting medicine: some medical treatments are viscerally unpleasant, yet also the best available treatment for their respective illnesses.

Beyond that, it's without substance. Or did you actually calculate the path leading to preservation of maximal number of species?

If survival of humans as a species is the only thing that matters, well then, there go individual human rights. If you're concerned about The Greater Good and the well being of the species, you might as well advocate for a return to a feudal society (well, the cyberpunk future we're heading into is basically that) or some kind of a slave owning thing because most people aren't particularly good at choosing things which are good for the society as a whole (or even for themselves, it could be argued)

Where does any of this follow from? Did you actually calculate that a feudal slave-owning society would be more friendly to other species than one that respects human rights? Did you neglect to notice that even nations that purport to support human rights already restrict people for the exact reason you named?

Invoking social contract theory and human rights theory explains a lot of where you're coming from, but they don't make for a good refutation for the framework I'm contrasting your ideas with. Why? Because social contract theory is about how to make humans act as a group. It is already part of the theory that individual interest can be made subservient to greater goods.

This conflict between the individual and the group, in AD&D alignment, is codified in the conflict between Chaos and Law. The concept of "greatest good for the greatest number (of non-evil thinking beings) (and least worst for everyone else)" is specifically baked into the concept of Lawful Good. The corollary being that if you do indeed conclude that a feudal slave-owning society would be the best for overall world stability in OotS, Thor (or whoever) could be its Lawful Good god-king, with no philosophical issues whatsoever. You can find Lawful Good wanting, but that does not mean Lawful Good is incoherent. Most often, it just means you wouldn't be either Lawful or Good in the context of AD&D alignment.

Or that's what the case would be, if Rich followed AD&D definitions exactly, but he doesn't.

Above I explain why compassion and empathy to animals matters.

That's all fine and dandy but it doesn't answer the question I asked. I asked you what makes sentient creatures more valuable than non-sentients, not what makes compassion and empathy valuable to sentients.

It's also worth pointing out that "the rule of the strong" has emergent morality to it. No matter how strong the alpha ape is, 3 or 4 apes working together can tear him to shreds. No matter how strong the king and his knights are, they still need to eat, and even if they violently crush the peasant rebellion, there goes the harvest. It's why we are even talking about things like universal human rights and human dignity in the first place.

If you believe conventional morals can be extrapolated from "might makes right", why do you think they cannot be extrapolated from "group-level interest trumps individual interest"? Especially since the process you're describing is founded on groups organizing to take down individuals.

Or maybe the machines play him like a fiddle and Neo and the rest of the crew are still inside the Matrix and never left it. It's one of the more popular explanations for why Neo starts developing magic powers towards the end of the Revolutions.

It's a popular fan theory, yes, but it's not an explanation the movie itself gives, nor is it necessary for anything in it. Actual on-screen evidence suggests that Neo is hacking into the wireless communications of the machines.

The philosophical implication of choosing to believe he's in yet another layer of deception, leads to "it's conspiracies all the way down!" thinking. In the context of this discussion, it would be the equivalent of continuously trying to dodge the bullet (heh).

Agreeing with Cypher is saying to yourself "well, I feel like there is a lot of wrong with the world, but I'm going to take these feelings and shove in a stone sarcophagus and drop it in the middle of the ocean and never think about it again". Not a wise move by any means, even if outright rebellion and revolution is not a wise move either. We know there's some kind of a problem and ignoring it won't make it go away.

Not really. The most important part of Cypher's dialogue is him placing value in the Matrix, in the world of sensory experience, over more abstract "reality". This finds discussion even in contemporary discussions about the simulation hypothesis. Shortly: even if you live in a simulation, it still makes sense to act as if and value that world as if it's real, because it isn't given there is an "escape" for "you". In Cypher's case, there wasn't, and Reloaded vindicates his criticism of Morpheus.

This ties to the above point above Neo. Even if Neo was in another layer of a simulation, it would still make sense to act the way he did. The entire point of Sati as a character is to underline that there's something worth saving even in the simulated world, and thus continuing to rebel against it in a way that would destroy it is untenable.

Animal Farm was not at all about how humans ought to treat their own farm animals and that's all I'm going to say about it. But it uses our ability to empathize with animals and see how they are mistreated to make it's point, and that empathy is a very important feature to maintain our civilization.

I wasn't talking about Animal Farm, I was talking about the earlier story idea you pitched. I agree Animal Farm is not "about" human-animal relations - as a satire and an allegory, it is just about humans. The point remains the same.

Dasick

2023-02-10, 02:26 PM

Naked appeal to emotion. This is exactly why I brought up "biting the bullet" in the first place. Just because something is emotionally horrifying (to you), does not make it immoral. An analogy can be made to bad-tasting medicine: some medical treatments are viscerally unpleasant, yet also the best available treatment for their respective illnesses.

Beyond that, it's without substance. Or did you actually calculate the path leading to preservation of maximal number of species?

Well, we already had two ideologies last century rise to power who thought they calculated the path towards doing what's maximally good for our species (and others as well). End result was a world war and a whole bunch of genocide, not to mention human rights violations, and by some miracle we barely avoided a global thermonuclear conflict

You can say that those people calculated the path the wrong way, but then, we know that it's possible for someone with the wrong idea to amass enough power to cause a lot of trouble, and the thing about the impending ecological disaster we face, is that it creates exactly the kind of conditions for wrong kind of people to rise to power.

That being said, the prevalence of the dystopia genre means that it's emotionally horrifying to a lot more people than just me; likewise people writing these things aren't emotional simpletons; quite a few of them know a thing or two, and if we take some of the older works like Fahrenheit, it has a pretty decent record of being able to predict things, whether technological advancements or social developments.

Invoking social contract theory and human rights theory explains a lot of where you're coming from, but they don't make for a good refutation for the framework I'm contrasting your ideas with. Why? Because social contract theory is about how to make humans act as a group. It is already part of the theory that individual interest can be made subservient to greater goods.

This conflict between the individual and the group, in AD&D alignment, is codified in the conflict between Chaos and Law. The concept of "greatest good for the greatest number (of non-evil thinking beings) (and least worst for everyone else)" is specifically baked into the concept of Lawful Good. The corollary being that if you do indeed conclude that a feudal slave-owning society would be the best for overall world stability in OotS, Thor (or whoever) could be its Lawful Good god-king, with no philosophical issues whatsoever. You can find Lawful Good wanting, but that does not mean Lawful Good is incoherent. Most often, it just means you wouldn't be either Lawful or Good in the context of AD&D alignment.

Or that's what the case would be, if Rich followed AD&D definitions exactly, but he doesn't.

Getting people to act in a moral way is much harder than determining what the moral way is, so coming up with ways to get people to do something is the meat and potato of creating viable moral frameworks.

The simplest solution is always the most direct one. You can solve pretty much any issue with force and violence. For example, other species are threatened by human activity? Rainforests being cut down to raise cows and plant soybeans? Simple, just cull the excess population, and turn them into food. We can use some as fertilizer for the plants for the rainforest to regrow. Poachers hunting endangered species? Shoot them. Napalm the towns close enough to the habitats that make poaching economically unviable. Torture the poachers to find out who they sell their stock to, then capture and torture those people, and so on and so forth. You kill a couple of million of people in the process and you might just take out everyone involved in the poaching industry. Production and shipping of consumer goods produces too much pollution? Simple, you don't get consumer goods. Or anything else that creates demand for or produces pollution. People unhappy? That's what riot police is for

I don't think I need to elaborate as to why we don't do that or why it's not considered a viable solution. Even if we ignore the storyline about V using familicide to do just that, once you start down the "one less share (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yqvbv-SB4bg)" mentality and establish brutal, thorough violence as a solution, you will have to live the rest of your life looking over your shoulder worried if someone else won't just apply that solution to you

That's all fine and dandy but it doesn't answer the question I asked. I asked you what makes sentient creatures more valuable than non-sentients, not what makes compassion and empathy valuable to sentients.

Well, first of all, human behaviour isn't driven by pure rationality. It's driven by associations, habits, emotions, and other soft and squishy things. Even if there was no value in sentience, treating other creatures with compassion and empathy is still extremely valuable because it reinforces the compassion and empathy instinct and makes unwanted behaviour less likely to manifest.

Second, sentience/reason/learning is the cornerstone of any moral framework. You can't be moral if you don't understand what morality is; to improve one's understanding is a prime directive to be moral, because you should work as best as you can eliminate all the situations where you acted immorally but didn't know that. If you dedicate yourself to constantly seek knowledge you also improve your ability to solve issues and come up with solutions which are better for everyone else; you reduce the risk of having to pick a lesser evil by improving the chance of you coming up with a different solution altogether. And the development of one's willpower and discipline means that whenever tempted with a wrong choice due to emotional reasons, you can make the rational moral choice and take the bitter medicine.

Sentience has been the main way to define humans as different from animals since ancient times, and still is. Since human behaviour is still driven by our emotions (willpower is a limited resources), if we want sentience in humans to be valued, we should put sentience on an almost divine pedestal. This is why for example, even if we don't consider dogs to be sentient, we see enough of ourselves in them, and enough sentience to recognize dogs as friends, as loyal, and conversely eating a dog as a betrayal of the dog's loyalty. Loyalty being such an important attribute to us, we don't want people in society who demonstrate their ability to break loyalty even if it's to a dog. After all, as the saying goes - "if you want to know who a person truly is, look at how he treats those he has power over".

Likewise, many people choose to misuse their sentience in a way that makes them indistinguishable from animals in this regard, not particularly thinking ahead or too much and just following their instincts. If we go by "well, this is what makes sentience valuable, and only those who display it have value", then we're back to colonial era morality. Worse even, since if such people are no different from animals, we can cull them and eat them no problem.

If you believe conventional morals can be extrapolated from "might makes right", why do you think they cannot be extrapolated from "group-level interest trumps individual interest"? Especially since the process you're describing is founded on groups organizing to take down individuals.

Groups only exist so long as everyone in the group plays along with the Prisoner's Dilemma. The moment even just a couple of people start deviating, it threatens the existence of a group as a whole. Therefore individual incentives to maintain the group are vitally important to the group interests. You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, unless you're ready to start breaking every egg to make your super group omelet.

This actually ties to the point the Matrix was making. That the machines tried to just "brute force" the solution by putting humans into the perfect world, which humans promptly rejected. That the Architect needed the Oracle, the male needed the female, the logical rationality needed the emotional intuition, the machine needed the human in order to devise a Matrix humans won't reject, and then it needed the Oracle to do the whole The One prophecy to create a synthesis solution to the problem. The machines solve the situation by allowing people the ability to reject their proposal. There is no group interests trumping individual interests, there is a solution that satisfies both.

Which, going back to the comic and the situation with gods and afterlives, this is what's missing there.

It's a popular fan theory, yes, but it's not an explanation the movie itself gives, nor is it necessary for anything in it. Actual on-screen evidence suggests that Neo is hacking into the wireless communications of the machines.

The philosophical implication of choosing to believe he's in yet another layer of deception, leads to "it's conspiracies all the way down!" thinking. In the context of this discussion, it would be the equivalent of continuously trying to dodge the bullet (heh).

I sincerely doubt the machinery installed in Neo had the capability to start hacking things over wifi. Especially since he had to be plugged into the Matrix

I suppose you can argue that they've been entering the Matrix wirelessly from the flying ship, but then, they had the entire flying ship to boost the signal and whatever.

Not really. The most important part of Cypher's dialogue is him placing value in the Matrix, in the world of sensory experience, over more abstract "reality". This finds discussion even in contemporary discussions about the simulation hypothesis. Shortly: even if you live in a simulation, it still makes sense to act as if and value that world as if it's real, because it isn't given there is an "escape" for "you". In Cypher's case, there wasn't, and Reloaded vindicates his criticism of Morpheus.

This ties to the above point above Neo. Even if Neo was in another layer of a simulation, it would still make sense to act the way he did. The entire point of Sati as a character is to underline that there's something worth saving even in the simulated world, and thus continuing to rebel against it in a way that would destroy it is untenable.

Well, unless Plato was just telling nerds to go touch grass, the allegory of the cave is applicable. Actually, The Matrix is based on a whole bunch of erm ahem "philosophies" which suspect the real world is illusory in some sense and believe there is a way to escape it.

But beyond that, consider the point I made about the necessity of knowledge and understanding to morality. If you have a moral obligation to seek knowledge and understanding, you have a moral obligation to question the reality of your surroundings, the soundness of your sanity, the authenticity of what you experience. Likewise if you know for certain there is something off and something more going on, you have a moral obligation to seek to understand that.

Consider Lao Tze and the dream he had about being a butterfly. "Was I a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?" The significance of this question is that, by asking this question, by question his experience, Lao Tze fulfils his moral obligation.

I wasn't talking about Animal Farm, I was talking about the earlier story idea you pitched. I agree Animal Farm is not "about" human-animal relations - as a satire and an allegory, it is just about humans. The point remains the same.

The Promised Neverland's author never intended to make a pro-vegan story. I think for the reasons I've discussed above, it's closer to the Matrix. The cop outs suck tho.

Peelee

2023-02-10, 02:37 PM

The Mod on the Silver Mountain: Let's back away from real-world examples.

brian 333

2023-02-10, 11:06 PM

Dasick

2023-02-10, 11:35 PM

Tarquin makes the point about breaking a few eggs.

The question is, how many broken eggs would Elan accept, vs. would Tarquin accept not breaking them at all? It seems absolutism leaves no room for compromise, and force or total capitulation eventually become the only possible choices.

Tarquin's position made a whole lot of sense, and it is an interesting question and would have made for an interesting dynamic and story. Too bad he started doing the whole chaotic puppy kicker thing. I guess brutally murdering citizens was something Malak requested for his god? He talks about his plans for the post unification continent.

Which was a massive cop out because it sidestepped the natural question "ok high and might good heroes, what do you do about the {scrubbed} situation in the western continent" because eating a phoenix is EVIL (somehow more so than just eating regular birds) and Tarquin is a HYPOCRITE ha!

My money is that the rift is going to be used to greenify the desert, and so the entire conflict will be forgotten in favour of more cardboard cutout villains. Maybe we can get a Frank Herbert switcharoo of "HA! Greening the desert is actually bad because you need ALL of the different natural environments, and you fools doomed this planet!"

Vahnavoi

2023-02-11, 10:22 AM

Well, we already had two ideologies last century rise to power who thought they calculated the path towards doing what's maximally good for our species (and others as well). End result was a world war and a whole bunch of genocide, not to mention human rights violations, and by some miracle we barely avoided a global thermonuclear conflict.

Even if I agreed the people in question did calculate what you claim they did, it would still not let you off the hook. What policies lead to maximal amount of species surviving is amenable to empirical study, which also means that empirical information changes the calculation. You have more and different empirical information than people 25, 50, or 100 (etc.) years ago did, so you cannot withdraw behind past calculations done with past information to make your case.

You can say that those people calculated the path the wrong way, but then, we know that it's possible for someone with the wrong idea to amass enough power to cause a lot of trouble, and the thing about the impending ecological disaster we face, is that it creates exactly the kind of conditions for wrong kind of people to rise to power.

If a rocket scientist misplaces a number and causes a spacecraft to explode, that proves they made an error. It does not prove their formula was wrong or that trying to build a spacecraft is wrong. Same principle applies. In order for your argument to be anything more than a slippery slope fallacy, you would need proof that the error is inevitable. More, that proof would need to be something that applies specifically to this moral theory, and not all others. "Belief X is wrong because someone somewhere can interpret it wrong" is not an argument against any specific theory because it applies to all of them.

That being said, the prevalence of the dystopia genre means that it's emotionally horrifying to a lot more people than just me; likewise people writing these things aren't emotional simpletons; quite a few of them know a thing or two, and if we take some of the older works like Fahrenheit, it has a pretty decent record of being able to predict things, whether technological advancements or social developments.

That doesn't give me a reason to care. To continue the medicine analogy, a medicine can taste awful to literally everyone, and still be the most effective treatment. On the flipside, there can be an treatment that is adored by everyone because it feels good, despite being ineffectual. Fiction cannot make your case, no matter how complex or emotionally appealing, you need empirical proof. Time doesn't allow me to analyze the specific example of Fahrenheit, my apologies for that.

Getting people to act in a moral way is much harder than determining what the moral way is, so coming up with ways to get people to do something is the meat and potato of creating viable moral frameworks.

And? That's not an argument for or against any specific moral framework.

The simplest solution is always the most direct one. You can solve pretty much any issue with force and violence. For example, other species are threatened by human activity? Rainforests being cut down to raise cows and plant soybeans? Simple, just cull the excess population, and turn them into food. We can use some as fertilizer for the plants for the rainforest to regrow. Poachers hunting endangered species? Shoot them. Napalm the towns close enough to the habitats that make poaching economically unviable. Torture the poachers to find out who they sell their stock to, then capture and torture those people, and so on and so forth. You kill a couple of million of people in the process and you might just take out everyone involved in the poaching industry. Production and shipping of consumer goods produces too much pollution? Simple, you don't get consumer goods. Or anything else that creates demand for or produces pollution. People unhappy? That's what riot police is for.

I don't actually agree. Organized use of force is neither simple nor easy. Saying you can solve anything with sufficient force is a truism - it's trivially true, but worthless, as it leaves entirely open how one would do that for any given thing. Your specific examples require massive logistical effort, the sort which has actually lead to nations suffering bankrupcy. It's not clear these would actually the most efficient ways to maximize number of surviving species.

I don't think I need to elaborate as to why we don't do that or why it's not considered a viable solution.

Yes, you actually need to, since in order for your argument to work, you have to prove all these things are actually necessary and efficient ways to serve the moral duty under discussion. If they aren't, you cannot raise them as "natural conclusion" of following the moral duty.

Even if we ignore the storyline about V using familicide to do just that, once you start down the "one less share (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yqvbv-SB4bg)" mentality and establish brutal, thorough violence as a solution, you will have to live the rest of your life looking over your shoulder worried if someone else won't just apply that solution to you.

You have not shown this attitude to follow from the moral duty under discussion.

Well, first of all, human behaviour isn't driven by pure rationality. It's driven by associations, habits, emotions, and other soft and squishy things. Even if there was no value in sentience, treating other creatures with compassion and empathy is still extremely valuable because it reinforces the compassion and empathy instinct and makes unwanted behaviour less likely to manifest.

Now we're getting somewhere, but I still have to point out you run into a contradiction almost immediately. You cannot continue "even if sentience has no value..." by listing as valuable traits such as compassion and empathy that are domain of sentient beings. Furthermore, saying they are valuable because they make "unwanted behaviour less likely to manifest" requires you to define unwanted behaviour.

For contrast, in the framework concerned with survival of species, unwanted behaviour is that which threatens survival of species, and sentience (including sentient traits such as compassion and empathy) is valuable where it helps beings act in accordance with moral duty. But this does not close the door on eating sentient beings when there's no conflict with moral duty.

Second, sentience/reason/learning is the cornerstone of any moral framework. You can't be moral if you don't understand what morality is.

Once more, with feeling: why not? (https://existentialcomics.com/comic/443)

It is possible for a non-sentient phenomenom, such as rain, to create good outcomes, such as fertile crops. It is possible for a non-sentient object, such as a painting, to possess virtues, such as beauty. It is possible for a non-sentient object, such a rock, to follow rule-like path, as it does when it falls in a trajectory dictated by gravity.

It is, therefore, possible to imagine a world where things can be good or evil simply as a result of what they are and how they behave under laws of nature. In such a world, sentience at most draws a distinction between such naturally good or evil entities, and free-acting entitities that can theoretically go either way.

To improve one's understanding is a prime directive to be moral, because you should work as best as you can eliminate all the situations where you acted immorally but didn't know that. If you dedicate yourself to constantly seek knowledge you also improve your ability to solve issues and come up with solutions which are better for everyone else; you reduce the risk of having to pick a lesser evil by improving the chance of you coming up with a different solution altogether. And the development of one's willpower and discipline means that whenever tempted with a wrong choice due to emotional reasons, you can make the rational moral choice and take the bitter medicine.

Those are good reasons for a sentient being to act in an information-seeking way, but it does not actually show only sentient creatures can be moral or that sentients are more valuable than non-sentients. It is already possible, today, to create an electronic computer program that seeks information, improves its performance according to its utility function, and makes decisions to solve problems. Yet, as far as anyone can tell, such programs are less able to feel pain, compassion, empathy or joy than mundane animals.

Sentience has been the main way to define humans as different from animals since ancient times, and still is.

This is quite suspect given the many different ancient beliefs regarding animal cognition.

Since human behaviour is still driven by our emotions (willpower is a limited resources), if we want sentience in humans to be valued, we should put sentience on an almost divine pedestal. This is why for example, even if we don't consider dogs to be sentient, we see enough of ourselves in them, and enough sentience to recognize dogs as friends, as loyal, and conversely eating a dog as a betrayal of the dog's loyalty. Loyalty being such an important attribute to us, we don't want people in society who demonstrate their ability to break loyalty even if it's to a dog. After all, as the saying goes - "if you want to know who a person truly is, look at how he treats those he has power over".

Once again, you have a promising start, but then proceed to answer the wrong question again. Again: you need to explain what makes sentience more valuable than non-sentience. Your explanation about dogs misses its mark, as you veer off to argue it wouldn't be okay to eat them even if they weren't sentient. I'm not going to grant you any that. Consider: there are tribes of humans who see cannibalism as a sacred rite. Elders volunteer to be eaten by friends and family so their knowledge and strength is passed on. For a more mundane example, people voluntarily donate their organs to friends and family, sometimes even if this means their own demise. These examples alone are enough to show that when you argue "eating the dog would be a betrayal of the dog's loyalty", there are some unexamined premises to what you consider friendship and loyalty to be. Crucially, for the context of this discussion, you aren't examining any situation where a human would eat a loyal dog - such as a situation where eating the dog is necessary for the human to survive back to safety to take care of the dog's pups.

Groups only exist so long as everyone in the group plays along with the Prisoner's Dilemma. The moment even just a couple of people start deviating, it threatens the existence of a group as a whole. Therefore individual incentives to maintain the group are vitally important to the group interests. You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, unless you're ready to start breaking every egg to make your super group omelet.

This point is more in favor of me than you. To wit: there are both classic and evolutionary game theory models on iterated Prisoner's Dilemma that show co-operation is a better strategy than defection. This is congruent with the moral duty of compromising short-term individual interest for the sake of long-term group gain.

This actually ties to the point the Matrix was making. That the machines tried to just "brute force" the solution by putting humans into the perfect world, which humans promptly rejected. That the Architect needed the Oracle, the male needed the female, the logical rationality needed the emotional intuition, the machine needed the human in order to devise a Matrix humans won't reject, and then it needed the Oracle to do the whole The One prophecy to create a synthesis solution to the problem. The machines solve the situation by allowing people the ability to reject their proposal. There is no group interests trumping individual interests, there is a solution that satisfies both.

Except people are only allowed to reject the proposal to the degree that it does not threaten the overarching system. If it is indeed true that the solution satisfies both individual and group interests, then there is a level where following the moral duty under discussion is congruent with what you consider individual good, and your criticism of said moral duty falls apart, because you can no longer argue all the things you are horrified at are said duty's "natural conclusion". At least under terms of the Matrix franchise, there is a conclusion where some people are perfectly fine remaining in the Matrix and fueling the machines.

Which, going back to the comic and the situation with gods and afterlives, this is what's missing there.

Untrue. Don't forget that the people who opt out of the Matrix still die. They don't exist forever and ever. So you can't use the fact that everyone eventually gets absorbed into an alignment plane to say people in OotS verse don't have a choice as to whether they live on the terms of the gods or not: they do explicitly have that choice.

And, on the flipside, they do have the choice to just accept that they will be food to the gods. Just like a person can be happy in the Matrix, despite this meaning they fuel the machines.

I sincerely doubt the machinery installed in Neo had the capability to start hacking things over wifi. Especially since he had to be plugged into the Matrix

I suppose you can argue that they've been entering the Matrix wirelessly from the flying ship, but then, they had the entire flying ship to boost the signal and whatever.

It's explicitly noted in Revolutions, while Neo and Bane are interacting with the Limbo/Matrix despite not being plugged in, that their brain patterns are equivalent to someone plugged in. This, after being explicitly told (in Neo's case) and shown (in Bane's) that they are machine plants. So, we have onscreen evidence of them achieving the very thing you're doubting.

There are also several scenes, starting with the original, that focus on Neo's machine implants and the radio communications between Sentinels. The original even shows Sentinels receiving a radio signal from Agents inside the Matrix, to the degree of implying the Agents are avatars of the Sentinels. Neo stopping the Sentinels at the end of Reloaded is a rather deliberate and obvious contrast to how he stopped Smith in the original, and comes after he broke into the Source, a rather obvious reference to hacking a program's source code.

Applying Mr. Smith's razor, don't put a human to do a machine's job. Or, rather, don't explain with magic something that can be explained with a Bluetooth connection.

Well, unless Plato was just telling nerds to go touch grass, the allegory of the cave is applicable. Actually, The Matrix is based on a whole bunch of erm ahem "philosophies" which suspect the real world is illusory in some sense and believe there is a way to escape it.

But beyond that, consider the point I made about the necessity of knowledge and understanding to morality. If you have a moral obligation to seek knowledge and understanding, you have a moral obligation to question the reality of your surroundings, the soundness of your sanity, the authenticity of what you experience. Likewise if you know for certain there is something off and something more going on, you have a moral obligation to seek to understand that.

Consider Lao Tze and the dream he had about being a butterfly. "Was I a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?" The significance of this question is that, by asking this question, by question his experience, Lao Tze fulfils his moral obligation.

You're backtracking. I can grant you all that, because it precedes, but does not answer, the question: is there something of value in the virtual world? That's the difference between the naive take on the original, and the internal deconstruction of the sequels. Again, the point of Sati is to show there is something worth saving in the virtual world, and that it is why Neo goes to strike peace with the machines, rather than continue rebelling.

The corollary for OotS that even if every mortal knew the deal with gods, it's reasonable for them to think there is value in the world they created, and thus accept that they will eventually be eaten by the gods for that world to keep existing.

woweedd

2023-02-11, 10:52 AM

I would question what people woukd want the Gods to do: they gitta eat too.

brian 333

2023-02-11, 12:39 PM

Anymage

2023-02-11, 03:20 PM

The mistake here is the idea that the gods eat souls. This is akin to eating milk, butter, and cheese, then claiming you are eating prime rib.
'But the soul becomes part of the plane...' is very much like accusing you of eating Caesar because some plants grew from his grave.

Even if good gods don't directly eat souls*, Thor openly admitted that they create worlds that encourage conflict because said conflict creates stronger and more ultimately nourishing souls. The gods could've created a post-scarcity utopia, or at least a lot nicer place, but they didn't because they need the nourishment. And of course that doesn't change all the times that even good gods have been small minded or self-centered to the detriment of others, quite aside from the nature of afterlives.

However, hoping that being abstractly political while avoiding real-world examples stays board safe, I can't help but think of people who, being upset that the candidates of their preferred political party don't more perfectly match their ideals, either intentionally sit out or protest vote for somebody else. At best that sends the message that your vote doesn't count and that courting you should be less of a priority, at worst that leads to your least preferred candidate winning the election and getting to help set policy that you most likely disagree with. Redcloak's storming the gates of heaven certainly did get the gods' attention, but also stands a very decent chance of getting him killed along with every goblinoid as well as his god. Roy is focused on doing what good he can on the local level, while Durkon is essentially doing what he can to effect change from the inside. When the world is deeply flawed, it's worth asking what you're doing to improve it instead of just shaking your fist at whoever's in charge for not having made it perfect.

*(I wonder how much evil gods would actively eat souls, vs. to what degree the lower planes are just nasty because they're filled with nasty people and gods are the biggest players there. Would Hel actually grab a handful of dwarf souls to munch on, or does she just enjoy tormenting them and their accelerated breakdown into nihilistic apathy just a side benefit?)

hamishspence

2023-02-11, 03:32 PM

*(I wonder how much evil gods would actively eat souls, vs. to what degree the lower planes are just nasty because they're filled with nasty people and gods are the biggest players there. Would Hel actually grab a handful of dwarf souls to munch on, or does she just enjoy tormenting them and their accelerated breakdown into nihilistic apathy just a side benefit?)

The early 3.5ed splatbook Complete Divine, at least, suggests that archfiends and evil gods routinely snack on souls like they're candy.

Resileaf

2023-02-11, 03:35 PM

Fyraltari

2023-02-11, 05:26 PM

Considering that the evil (and possibly neutral) gods would always aim for worlds of conflict, what are good gods supposed to do? Make their followers not get stronger when they defeat opponents?

That's not an option. The universe follows D&D rules, the gods have no say in that.

Ruck

2023-02-11, 07:27 PM

There are some philosophies which would answer this with "the latter." I don't entirely disagree with them.

Well, I think that ship has sailed here. And I don't think the gods are keen on the idea of letting themselves go extinct.

This is basically the premise of Season 4 of The Good Place.
Chidi
Solves the problem by convincing heaven to allow souls to die.

Yeah, I didn't really care for it. Other people I know have explained it better than I, but

the idea that the only value of being alive is to consume all the things you want to consume, and then the purpose is lost once you've done that, is, to be charitable, a concept I don't agree with. To be less charitable, it seems like an empty way to experience life, completely bypassing the value in the relationships we build and the service we do unto others, which is where real fulfillment lies. This limited concept of a life lived and a moral framework outside of that of the consumer seems to be a problem with Michael Schur's book on moral philosophy, as well.

RatElemental

2023-02-12, 03:04 AM

because eating a phoenix is EVIL (somehow more so than just eating regular birds) and Tarquin is a HYPOCRITE ha!

I think that would be because Phoenixes are A.) Sentient, and B.) The liver had to be harvested via vivisection to prevent it immolating.

They probably couldn't use anesthetic either because then that would have ended up in the liver or something.

Well, I think that ship has sailed here. And I don't think the gods are keen on the idea of letting themselves go extinct.

I'm well aware, it wouldn't be much of a story if the gods allowed themselves to die off and then nothing happened forever. That doesn't change the philosophical stuff though.

brian 333

2023-02-12, 12:18 PM

Even if good gods don't directly eat souls*, Thor openly admitted that they create worlds that encourage conflict because said conflict creates stronger and more ultimately nourishing souls. The gods could've created a post-scarcity utopia, or at least a lot nicer place, but they didn't because they need the nourishment. And of course that doesn't change all the times that even good gods have been small minded or self-centered to the detriment of others, quite aside from the nature of afterlives.

However, hoping that being abstractly political while avoiding real-world examples stays board safe, I can't help but think of people who, being upset that the candidates of their preferred political party don't more perfectly match their ideals, either intentionally sit out or protest vote for somebody else. At best that sends the message that your vote doesn't count and that courting you should be less of a priority, at worst that leads to your least preferred candidate winning the election and getting to help set policy that you most likely disagree with. Redcloak's storming the gates of heaven certainly did get the gods' attention, but also stands a very decent chance of getting him killed along with every goblinoid as well as his god. Roy is focused on doing what good he can on the local level, while Durkon is essentially doing what he can to effect change from the inside. When the world is deeply flawed, it's worth asking what you're doing to improve it instead of just shaking your fist at whoever's in charge for not having made it perfect.

*(I wonder how much evil gods would actively eat souls, vs. to what degree the lower planes are just nasty because they're filled with nasty people and gods are the biggest players there. Would Hel actually grab a handful of dwarf souls to munch on, or does she just enjoy tormenting them and their accelerated breakdown into nihilistic apathy just a side benefit?)

The problem is well presented, but is there a solution? Or is it just a description of how the world sucks? (I admit to a fascination with the latter; everyone knows the world sucks, but every proposed solution just makes it suck differently.)

The gods can have tofu and seaweed, or caviar and prime rib. The cost is the same; however, the world may not survive long, and the tofu diet doesn't build up the fat reserves necessary to survive the times between worlds.

Anymage

2023-02-12, 04:36 PM

The problem is well presented, but is there a solution? Or is it just a description of how the world sucks? (I admit to a fascination with the latter; everyone knows the world sucks, but every proposed solution just makes it suck differently.)

That was pretty much my point. The world sucks and the people in charge are fallible. People in the world are not wrong to be upset, and Durkon notably is at how often Thor cannot unequivocally deny some of the harsher statements. However despite that, raging at the heavens and wanting to storm the gates is one of the least effective things that people on the ground could do to make things better.

tomandtish

2023-02-12, 06:28 PM

Loki is the clearest example for my case: he's self-serving because he stands for a self-serving philosophy, yet we also know he cannot always act of rational self-interest because his actions have to fit preconceptions of people who believe in him.

You cannot take Loki's attitude and extrapolate it to gods of other alignments.

Mickey Zucker Reichert's Renshai series has a decent example of this. The forces in question are Law (most of the Norse gods) and chaos (Loki). Loki points out how difficult it is to be persuasive when he has to totally champion a cause that the world only needs in moderation.

PontificatusRex

2023-02-13, 12:03 AM

So, I haven't read every post so maybe this has been mentioned, but there's a number of belief system out there that regard union with existence as the greatest goal, not oblivion. Literally becoming part of Heaven could be regarded as the ultimate reward, even if the souls are acting as a power source to keep the plane and the gods going. When a battery loses its ability to push electrons around the electrons don't disappear, they just do something else.

Mickey Zucker Reichert's Renshai series has a decent example of this. The forces in question are Law (most of the Norse gods) and chaos (Loki). Loki points out how difficult it is to be persuasive when he has to totally champion a cause that the world only needs in moderation.

Interesting idea, though I gotta say anyone who regards the Norse pantheon as inherently Lawful in bent should read the Icelandic viking-era sagas. That was one seriously individualistic, "You can't tell me what to do" culture.

Doug Lampert

2023-02-13, 11:09 AM

Interesting idea, though I gotta say anyone who regards the Norse pantheon as inherently Lawful in bent should read the Icelandic viking-era sagas. That was one seriously individualistic, "You can't tell me what to do" culture.

True, but that general individualistic preference made the handful of rules they had seem even more important. The Norse pantheon is definitely SUPPOSED to be lawful (at least according to the norse).

In Norse mythology and religion, geographical spaces and psychological states are often classified as being either innangard (pronounced “INN-ann-guard”; Old Norse innangarðr, “within the enclosure”) or utangard (pronounced “OOT-ann-guard”; Old Norse útangarðr, “beyond the enclosure”). A place or a state of mind is innangard if it’s orderly, civilized, and law-abiding. If, on the other hand, it’s chaotic, wild, and anarchic, it’s utangard. Pre-Christian Germanic society had an overwhelming preference for the innangard, but this preference was by no means an absolute one; it was recognized that the utangard had its place as well, as long as it could be kept in check. (https://norse-mythology.org/concepts/innangard-and-utangard/)

The Norse pantheon is innangard, specifically within the walls of Asgard. The giants are utangard, to the extent that one of their kings is Utgard-Loki.

tomandtish

2023-02-13, 02:27 PM

So, I haven't read every post so maybe this has been mentioned, but there's a number of belief system out there that regard union with existence as the greatest goal, not oblivion. Literally becoming part of Heaven could be regarded as the ultimate reward, even if the souls are acting as a power source to keep the plane and the gods going. When a battery loses its ability to push electrons around the electrons don't disappear, they just do something else.

Interesting idea, though I gotta say anyone who regards the Norse pantheon as inherently Lawful in bent should read the Icelandic viking-era sagas. That was one seriously individualistic, "You can't tell me what to do" culture.

In that series the primary forces are "Law" and "Chaos". Law is generally viewed as "good" while chaos is generally viewed as "evil". So think of it more on original basic D&D terms. There are actually characters/groups described as evil and good, but it's fairly subjective.

Windscion

2023-02-13, 05:45 PM

the idea that the only value of being alive is to consume all the things you want to consume, and then the purpose is lost once you've done that, is, to be charitable, a concept I don't agree with. To be less charitable, it seems like an empty way to experience life, completely bypassing the value in the relationships we build and the service we do unto others, which is where real fulfillment lies. This limited concept of a life lived and a moral framework outside of that of the consumer seems to be a problem with Michael Schur's book on moral philosophy, as well.

I didn't like it the first time either. Seemed too buddhist (nonattachment). After I though about it, I decided that the point was that that you got a chance to work thru the traumas of your life and put them away. You still had to do the work, or go to hell The Bad Place to marinate in your own juices for eternity. Then you check out the writer chickens out. Still not a great moral, but better than my first take.

Dasick

2023-02-20, 10:53 PM

Even if I agreed the people in question did calculate what you claim they did, it would still not let you off the hook. What policies lead to maximal amount of species surviving is amenable to empirical study, which also means that empirical information changes the calculation. You have more and different empirical information than people 25, 50, or 100 (etc.) years ago did, so you cannot withdraw behind past calculations done with past information to make your case.

If a rocket scientist misplaces a number and causes a spacecraft to explode, that proves they made an error. It does not prove their formula was wrong or that trying to build a spacecraft is wrong. Same principle applies. In order for your argument to be anything more than a slippery slope fallacy, you would need proof that the error is inevitable. More, that proof would need to be something that applies specifically to this moral theory, and not all others. "Belief X is wrong because someone somewhere can interpret it wrong" is not an argument against any specific theory because it applies to all of them.

That doesn't give me a reason to care. To continue the medicine analogy, a medicine can taste awful to literally everyone, and still be the most effective treatment. On the flipside, there can be an treatment that is adored by everyone because it feels good, despite being ineffectual. Fiction cannot make your case, no matter how complex or emotionally appealing, you need empirical proof. Time doesn't allow me to analyze the specific example of Fahrenheit, my apologies for that.

Slippery slope "fallacy", like many other logical fallacies isn't [sic]. As in, being a logical fallacy don't invalidate a line of reasoning or even make it a bad line of reasoning. It disqualifies it from being a logical proof, but the utility of logical proofs is highly dubious. For starters, logical proofs often require some very precise axioms about how the world functions, and it's very tricky, if not impossible to nail that. The real world is simply too complex to calculate things with this level of precision.

And that's exactly my point. Sure, we have more data than before. But the question of say, what course of action leads to maximizing species diversity over a long enough period of time is still so incredibly complex. All that we've learned in the past 100 years actually just shows to highlight how little we know, with many unforeseen situations arising which require wildlife preservation specialists to do 180 (and sometimes 360) on policies and what they considered to be effective methods of pursuing better biodiversity. But even beyond that, having knowledge and being able to apply is isn't the same thing, not by a long shot - for example, sometime between 1969 and now, NASA lost the technology necessary to put people on the moon (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16MMZJlp_0Y). So us having more knowledge doesn't mean that someone who can put it all together perfectly can even get to a position to do so.

The idea that someone could calculate this path and then follow it perfectly... it's possible sure. It's just infinitely more likely that this person is going to make a mistake somewhere and we have a rough idea of how badly those mistakes will affect everyone. A lot of people today doubt if the space exploration programs really were worth the investment in money and lives lost during the accidents. But the biggest difference between us and astronauts who died during those mis launches? The astronauts knew what they were getting into, and they went along with it anyways. I'm not on board with any large scale plan that deviates from conventional morality, on account of how difficult it is to get right and how disastrous the consequences will be if they don't get it right. A lot of people are not on board with it, which is what I meant with the dystopia genre reference.

And? That's not an argument for or against any specific moral framework.

"Nice on paper but good luck making it happen" seems like THE argument against a framework.

I don't actually agree. Organized use of force is neither simple nor easy. Saying you can solve anything with sufficient force is a truism - it's trivially true, but worthless, as it leaves entirely open how one would do that for any given thing. Your specific examples require massive logistical effort, the sort which has actually lead to nations suffering bankrupcy. It's not clear these would actually the most efficient ways to maximize number of surviving species.

Bankruptcy is a thing for peace-time economies. War-time economies and logistics, especially of the "total war" kind are a lot simpler and efficient. Convince enough people it's their moral duty to do so and you can get to it.

That's just the most bruteforce way to accomplish it though, there are many other creative ways. If someone decides that is the correct course of action, someone with enough power and influence, there are so many ways to accomplish it.

Yes, you actually need to, since in order for your argument to work, you have to prove all these things are actually necessary and efficient ways to serve the moral duty under discussion. If they aren't, you cannot raise them as "natural conclusion" of following the moral duty.

I don't particularly feel like defending the position of why mass killings of people are always wrong, in part because the forum rules make it difficult to express my thoughts on the subject matter.

Imagine that for whatever reason, you calculate that moral duty compels you to commit some kind of an atrocity, millions of people will die but you think it's the only way to preserve high levels of biodiversity or even humans as a species. The question is, do you go along with that, or do you think that the situation is so complex that you're more likely to be wrong than right? And what about human rights? As near as I can tell, the answer is always that the situation is too complex to make such calculations, it's never justified.

You have not shown this attitude to follow from the moral duty under discussion.

People have lines that once crossed are crossed. If you demonstrate willingness to "bite the bullet", it creates a precedent. Other people will be more likely to bite the bullet, and its entirely possible that the bullet bitten will be extremely unfortunate for you personally.

Now we're getting somewhere, but I still have to point out you run into a contradiction almost immediately. You cannot continue "even if sentience has no value..." by listing as valuable traits such as compassion and empathy that are domain of sentient beings. Furthermore, saying they are valuable because they make "unwanted behaviour less likely to manifest" requires you to define unwanted behaviour.

For contrast, in the framework concerned with survival of species, unwanted behaviour is that which threatens survival of species, and sentience (including sentient traits such as compassion and empathy) is valuable where it helps beings act in accordance with moral duty. But this does not close the door on eating sentient beings when there's no conflict with moral duty

Once more, with feeling: why not? (https://existentialcomics.com/comic/443)

It is possible for a non-sentient phenomenom, such as rain, to create good outcomes, such as fertile crops. It is possible for a non-sentient object, such as a painting, to possess virtues, such as beauty. It is possible for a non-sentient object, such a rock, to follow rule-like path, as it does when it falls in a trajectory dictated by gravity.

It is, therefore, possible to imagine a world where things can be good or evil simply as a result of what they are and how they behave under laws of nature. In such a world, sentience at most draws a distinction between such naturally good or evil entities, and free-acting entitities that can theoretically go either way.

This really depends on what you mean by "good" and "evil"

If we take for example, Plato's idealism, then sure. Things are good or bad in as much as they manage to capture the ideal form they are projecting. While this isn't unlike how I think about good and evil, I tend to avoid arguing in this fashion because A) it's a pain trying to prove anything about what the ideal forms should be to people who don't necessarily agree and B) actually discussing things as I view them goes too far into forbidden topics. And either way, it's like trying to yell in Greek at people who only understand Chinese, not particularly useful to anyone

Which is why I prefer to discuss morality as a kind of contract between humans. We all agree that some things are good and bad, and it allows us to do civilization stuff where everyone profits from collective cooperation of the Prisoner's Dilemma. Or put another way, you can only choose the optimal solution to the Prisoner's Dilemma if everyone agrees on what the basic parameters of it are. Discussing the merits of a contract or a contract system is much easier with regards to empirical observation anyways. It approximates how I think about these things well enough. In which case, sentience is the pre-requisite for having a seat at the negotiation table, as the ability to negotiate and follow rules is what makes the concepts of "good and evil" work in the first place.

That being said, sentience, the ability to understand what good and evil is, is still superior to non-sentence, because a good sentient creature can make other things more in line with the good outcome as a result of it's understanding.

This is quite suspect given the many different ancient beliefs regarding animal cognition.

You can say they overestimated them, but that they ascribed human characteristics to non humans (not just animals but trees and rocks and natural phenomena too) is extremely telling

Once again, you have a promising start, but then proceed to answer the wrong question again. Again: you need to explain what makes sentience more valuable than non-sentience. Your explanation about dogs misses its mark, as you veer off to argue it wouldn't be okay to eat them even if they weren't sentient. I'm not going to grant you any that. Consider: there are tribes of humans who see cannibalism as a sacred rite. Elders volunteer to be eaten by friends and family so their knowledge and strength is passed on. For a more mundane example, people voluntarily donate their organs to friends and family, sometimes even if this means their own demise. These examples alone are enough to show that when you argue "eating the dog would be a betrayal of the dog's loyalty", there are some unexamined premises to what you consider friendship and loyalty to be. Crucially, for the context of this discussion, you aren't examining any situation where a human would eat a loyal dog - such as a situation where eating the dog is necessary for the human to survive back to safety to take care of the dog's pups.

The example you give is "a sacred rite", which is very different from cannibalism due to hunger. In a hard situation, you don't want to be wondering if people will decide to kill you and eat you. But if everyone accepts that it's a sacred rite, it's less of an issue, because you're not worried about being eaten, it's something you want to happen. Note that in this situation, dogs don't really understand or can accept it. Dogs work under a much simpler premise of expectations of what loyalty is. Dogs generally don't understand or can accept very abstract situations where some harm to it will come to benefit it's progeny or pack (although when they do understand it, they generally go for the sacrifice option anyways). But I'm not talking about these kinds of situations. I'm talking about why a lot of people see eating dogs as abhorrent.

Going back to the astronaut analogy - there's a massive difference between voluntarily accepting some kind of a bad outcome, and having it be forced upon you.

Going back to the comic - the (supposedly good) gods don't particularly give anyone a way out, and if it's impossible, they don't care enough to create a situation which is more fair to everyone involved. So, I think characters who want to rock the boat and force the gods to put more effort into making the situation more fair are entirely justified.

This point is more in favor of me than you. To wit: there are both classic and evolutionary game theory models on iterated Prisoner's Dilemma that show co-operation is a better strategy than defection. This is congruent with the moral duty of compromising short-term individual interest for the sake of long-term group gain.

That relies on the fact that co-operation, ie long-term group gain benefits the individual .

Except people are only allowed to reject the proposal to the degree that it does not threaten the overarching system. If it is indeed true that the solution satisfies both individual and group interests, then there is a level where following the moral duty under discussion is congruent with what you consider individual good, and your criticism of said moral duty falls apart, because you can no longer argue all the things you are horrified at are said duty's "natural conclusion". At least under terms of the Matrix franchise, there is a conclusion where some people are perfectly fine remaining in the Matrix and fueling the machines.

Untrue. Don't forget that the people who opt out of the Matrix still die. They don't exist forever and ever. So you can't use the fact that everyone eventually gets absorbed into an alignment plane to say people in OotS verse don't have a choice as to whether they live on the terms of the gods or not: they do explicitly have that choice.

And, on the flipside, they do have the choice to just accept that they will be food to the gods. Just like a person can be happy in the Matrix, despite this meaning they fuel the machines.

I think it's strongly implied that people who choose to remain in the Matrix are wrong. The whole "they can turn into an Agent at any time" thing really drives the point home.

But even beyond that, based on what I said about the moral duty to have better knowledge and understanding, so that you can know what good and bad is in the first place, I say that staying in the Matrix is the wrong choice - because you give up that ability. Sure, you can say that you trust the machines to make the optimal choice for you, but how much do you really understand about machines to be able to trust their judgment? How do you know the machines aren't glitched out or off in some important way? You must take on personal responsibility and see it for yourself, even if the end result of your journey is "yep, the machines are 100% correct and the best I can do in the grand scheme of things is be a battery, plug me back in"

It's explicitly noted in Revolutions, while Neo and Bane are interacting with the Limbo/Matrix despite not being plugged in, that their brain patterns are equivalent to someone plugged in. This, after being explicitly told (in Neo's case) and shown (in Bane's) that they are machine plants. So, we have onscreen evidence of them achieving the very thing you're doubting.

There are also several scenes, starting with the original, that focus on Neo's machine implants and the radio communications between Sentinels. The original even shows Sentinels receiving a radio signal from Agents inside the Matrix, to the degree of implying the Agents are avatars of the Sentinels. Neo stopping the Sentinels at the end of Reloaded is a rather deliberate and obvious contrast to how he stopped Smith in the original, and comes after he broke into the Source, a rather obvious reference to hacking a program's source code.

Applying Mr. Smith's razor, don't put a human to do a machine's job. Or, rather, don't explain with magic something that can be explained with a Bluetooth connection.

Imo it's less magical that Neo is still in the Matrix when he's doing his miracles than it being some kind of ultrapowerful Bluetooth connection.

Likewise Neo and Bane interacting with the Matrix while not being plugged in makes more sense if the Matrix is layered.

IMO my interpretation makes the story much better, but I don't really see it as central.

You're backtracking. I can grant you all that, because it precedes, but does not answer, the question: is there something of value in the virtual world? That's the difference between the naive take on the original, and the internal deconstruction of the sequels. Again, the point of Sati is to show there is something worth saving in the virtual world, and that it is why Neo goes to strike peace with the machines, rather than continue rebelling.

The corollary for OotS that even if every mortal knew the deal with gods, it's reasonable for them to think there is value in the world they created, and thus accept that they will eventually be eaten by the gods for that world to keep existing.

There is a world of difference between knowing a deal and accepting it, and it being forced on you. "Oh yeah well if you know, you'd go along with it anyways" is such a scummy cop out, because if it wouldn't have changed anything, why not say it outright?

But it's pretty logical to assume that if the mortals had a better idea of what will happen, quite a few more of them would be more rebellious or scrutionous of the gods. We see this with Durkon, who was a very dwarfy dwarf, and how much his opinion of the gods and the situation is changing due to the revelation he's having. If even someone like Durkon finds it world shattering, how about the rest of the mortals?

The mistake here is the idea that the gods eat souls. This is akin to eating milk, butter, and cheese, then claiming you are eating prime rib.
'But the soul becomes part of the plane...' is very much like accusing you of eating Caesar because some plants grew from his grave.

Durkon makes the food comparison several times and Thor doesn't call him out. It's safe to assume that Thor doesn't think of it as distinct enough to object.

Consuming the by-products of sentient beings, (worship, devotion, etc.,) is not the same as consuming the sentient being. If it were, all mammals and some birds would be irredeemably evil.

Hold on, weren't you saying further down the thread that hey, they're just doing what they have to? How would it make them evil if they HAD to do so?

The gods could've created a post-scarcity utopia, or at least a lot nicer place, but they didn't because they need the nourishment.
Post scarcity utopia sounds absolutely mind numbingly boring

However, hoping that being abstractly political while avoiding real-world examples stays board safe, I can't help but think of people who, being upset that the candidates of their preferred political party don't more perfectly match their ideals, either intentionally sit out or protest vote for somebody else. At best that sends the message that your vote doesn't count and that courting you should be less of a priority, at worst that leads to your least preferred candidate winning the election and getting to help set policy that you most likely disagree with.

Yeah I never bought this. My rule of life is always, when given a choice between two evils, the greater evil is the lesser one. Just rip off the bandaid and get it over with. Elections are decided by razor thin margins, I can wait for someone to figure out that I'm part of an untapped voting block that they could steamroll their way to victory.

Yeah, I didn't really care for it. Other people I know have explained it better than I, but

the idea that the only value of being alive is to consume all the things you want to consume, and then the purpose is lost once you've done that, is, to be charitable, a concept I don't agree with. To be less charitable, it seems like an empty way to experience life, completely bypassing the value in the relationships we build and the service we do unto others, which is where real fulfillment lies. This limited concept of a life lived and a moral framework outside of that of the consumer seems to be a problem with Michael Schur's book on moral philosophy, as well.

100%

Which is why the afterlives presented in OOTS seem to suck majorly to me.

I think that would be because Phoenixes are A.) Sentient, and B.) The liver had to be harvested via vivisection to prevent it immolating.

They probably couldn't use anesthetic either because then that would have ended up in the liver or something.

There's a lot of things people eat that they don't have to. That livers have to be cut out of a live creature doesn't really make it unnecessarily cruel, because it's what's necessary to eat it.

A phoenix being sentient seems kind of a moot point when the "good" adventurers themselves never think too hard about the sentient creatures they kill to gain XP and levels. Even the familicide being an "evil" thing is something that V only sees as a result of seeing it kill the Draketooth clan, V doesn't really feel any remorse for killing a teenage dragon for a bunch of metal, or his grieving mother, "cause their scales aren't shiny". They literally did a home invasion and murder

That was pretty much my point. The world sucks and the people in charge are fallible. People in the world are not wrong to be upset, and Durkon notably is at how often Thor cannot unequivocally deny some of the harsher statements. However despite that, raging at the heavens and wanting to storm the gates is one of the least effective things that people on the ground could do to make things better.

Redcloack's stunt might be the kind of thing that will make the gods more considerate going into the future. It's difficult to judge about the effectiveness of it at the moment. It could also be that when Xykon is defeated and he is brought to the negotiation table by force, it ends up massively benefiting goblins anyways, which never would have happened if he didn't do what he did. Hell, goblins already have Gobbtopia, as a result of Redcloack following the plan, so who knows.

Ruck

2023-02-21, 05:24 AM

Yeah, I didn't really care for it. Other people I know have explained it better than I, but

the idea that the only value of being alive is to consume all the things you want to consume, and then the purpose is lost once you've done that, is, to be charitable, a concept I don't agree with. To be less charitable, it seems like an empty way to experience life, completely bypassing the value in the relationships we build and the service we do unto others, which is where real fulfillment lies. This limited concept of a life lived and a moral framework outside of that of the consumer seems to be a problem with Michael Schur's book on moral philosophy, as well.

I didn't like it the first time either. Seemed too buddhist (nonattachment).

100%

Which is why the afterlives presented in OOTS seem to suck majorly to me.

See, these two points tie together for me:

I would have liked it if it had been more Buddhist, about actually attaining a detachment from worldly things and finding peace and oneness that way-- enlightenment, if you will. But it was more like heaven was just a place to check off a bucket list of all the things you wanted to do and consume before developing ennui and, essentially, choose to kill yourself (even though you're already dead, but you know what I mean). And everyone else is supposed to be fine with that, that these people they've spent eternity with and developed these meaningful relationships with will just choose non-existence when they're bored of it all, as though there is no value in the relationships themselves. It isn't nonattachment; it's existential boredom.

Someone I know wrote this (https://www.the-solute.com/film-on-the-internet-the-servant/#comment-5206740737) and it helped me develop my own thoughts on the ending; I think these excerpts add on to the point I'm making here nicely:

And it's frustrating because the answer to the show is right there. All these people make all these great sacrifices to their fellow man, work their whole lives building themselves into these perfect wise enlightened souls, and then they go into heaven and they can have all the earthly pleasures they can imagine, but the experience is ultimately empty and morally atrophying. Because meaning is derived from our service to others! It's the whole underlying theme of your entire show and instead of reshaping paradise as a place where the enlightened work in fruitful meaningful service of the less fortunate, instead our heroes put the demons in charge of everything and reestablish death.

It's interesting how little the show's image of heaven differs from its image of hell. This is a consumerist heaven. One that can give you all the things you want and all the experiences you want, but nothing more. It's amazing how little our heroes change through the eons. They don't make new friends. They briefly reunite with family but when it's time for the bullet it's only the 6 regulars that show up (I know, limitations of a sitcom). I find it interesting that there are no children in heaven. I understand that might be too dark of a place for the show to go, but we have all these couples paired off and no kids. No life after death, after all. Eleanor and Chidi read every single philosophical text. Every one. And presumably they can magic up Kant and Locke and the Buddha himself and get clarification on any tricky points. And they are basically unchanged by this. However many millennia pass, and they're still wearing the same clothes. One thing I laughed at that wasn't a joke was when Eleanor, after thousands of lifetimes of blissful monogamy with Chidi, still referred to herself as his "girlfriend". I guess they're still not ready for a bigger commitment.

These relationships, just like this heaven, is ultimately about pleasure. Not about building a family or a community or a better world. It's hedonistic, a conservative hedonism (no orgies in this paradise) but hedonistic nonetheless. We are consumers of life, not participants, and eventually at some point it's time to turn off the TV and go to bed. I believe Hegel said that.

Anyway, I think the OOTS Lawful Good afterlife, from what I can tell, is closer to the Buddhist notion. You only move up the mountain at your own pace; when you move past the need for experiences and earthly pleasures, you don't just wink out, but you actually move up the mountain to seek that greater knowledge and state of being. Ultimately, it's not perfect-- and in this case, it's not supposed to be-- but it at least allows room for spiritual enlightenment beyond material pleasure, which The Good Place's heaven, in the end, does not seem to.

MoiMagnus

2023-02-21, 05:41 AM

Post scarcity utopia sounds absolutely mind numbingly boring

I think you overestimate how much "post scarcity utopia" (without immortality) would be different from IRL's life of "higher middle class peoples".

Even if there is no material scarcity, time is still limited, social relations are still complex to handle (with all the happiness and drama that comes from them), and peoples can still find "purpose" in a lot of careers related to social constructs (artists, authors, entertainers, scientists, etc). And depending on how your "post scarcity" works, you might still need peoples to take the time to build/renovate houses, prepare food, etc.

Ruck

2023-02-21, 05:48 AM

hamishspence

2023-02-21, 05:49 AM

A phoenix being sentient seems kind of a moot point when the "good" adventurers themselves never think too hard about the sentient creatures they kill to gain XP and levels. Even the familicide being an "evil" thing is something that V only sees as a result of seeing it kill the Draketooth clan,

V shows some compassion for the actual black dragons killed by it, and not just the hybrids and their kin.

https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0866.html

brian 333

2023-02-21, 08:40 AM

Durkon makes the food comparison several times and Thor doesn't call him out. It's safe to assume that Thor doesn't think of it as distinct enough to object.

Hold on, weren't you saying further down the thread that hey, they're just doing what they have to? How would it make them evil if they HAD to do so?

Thanks for making my exact point!

Everything requires the death of something else to survive. Lions kill to eat, plants wait for the lion to die to eat it. Neither could live without the death of something else.

So, why are we being hyperbolic when it comes to the deities? After all, they are not cannibals. The Good gods don't even kill to live. They consume the equivalent of milk and mulch. (I would make some beetle references here, but there are squeamish readers.) That the Evil deities do kill, (Hel squishing dwarf souls,) only makes them the moral equivalent of lions.

"But sentience!"

This concept requires drawing arbitrary lines. Is a cow sentient? A sunflower? Drawing lines means a cow and lion, which are as nearly as I can tell equally sentient, are committing some kind of moral crime by eating one another. (Obviously, the cow eats the lion by eating the grass that eats the lion, much like the Good OotS deities eat the Good souls after they merge with their planes.)

The degree of sentience seems to make a difference to some. I get that. We are culturally opposed to eating our neighbors, and we seem to think of humans as the only sentient beings. So, naturally, every sentient being becomes human.

For some, the difference between humans and cows is enough to make eating cows acceptable. Others claim cows are too sentient to ethically consume and eat only plants. But the difference in sentience between the deities and their mortal creations is greater than the difference between humans and a field of wheat. The wheat field would not even exist except for the effort of the human, who planted it for the express purpose of eating it. Is the fact that each individual stalk of wheat is in its own way self aware significant?

Why not?

Peelee

2023-02-21, 08:49 AM

(I would make some beetle references here, but there are squeamish readers.)
Oh c'mon, Ringo Starr isn't that bad.

brian 333

2023-02-22, 12:21 AM

Oh c'mon, Ringo Starr isn't that bad.

True, and Eric Clapton was a real
legend. And some of the other guys were not so bad either.

Ruck

2023-02-22, 12:35 AM

Oh c'mon, Ringo Starr isn't that bad.

It took me long enough in my life to realize "Beatles" was a pun, but longer still to realize it was also a play on Buddy Holly and The Crickets.

True, and Eric Clapton was a real
legend. And some of the other guys were not so bad either.

Clapton's not a Beatle. At best he's a Domino.

brian 333

2023-02-22, 12:48 AM

Clapton's not a Beatle. At best he's a Domino.

While My Guitar Gently Weeps was considered one of the best Beatles songs, and is still ranked in the top 50 guitar solos up to this day.

Ruck

2023-02-22, 12:53 AM

While My Guitar Gently Weeps was considered one of the best Beatles songs, and is still ranked in the top 50 guitar solos up to this day.

Admittedly, I forgot he played on that. (Which is understandable, as he is not credited.) Still wouldn't call him a Beatle though. (And I only call him a Domino because, for my money, if anyone in that band was Derek it should be Duane Allman.)

(I'm not a Clapton fan, as you may be able to tell.)

brian 333

2023-02-22, 01:14 AM

Admittedly, I forgot he played on that. (Which is understandable, as he is not credited.) Still wouldn't call him a Beatle though. (And I only call him a Domino because, for my money, if anyone in that band was Derek it should be Duane Allman.)

(I'm not a Clapton fan, as you may be able to tell.)

Okay, I like you.

Allman Bros was awesome. I still cry when I sing The Ballad of Curtis Lowe.

Y'all watch for motorcycles when you drive.

Peelee

2023-02-22, 07:03 AM

While My Guitar Gently Weeps was considered one of the best Beatles songs, and is still ranked in the top 50 guitar solos up to this day.

I agree, George Harrison was a hell of a songwriter.

brian 333

2023-02-22, 08:09 AM

I agree, George Harrison was a hell of a songwriter.

Bah!

My Sweet Lord! Can we get any more repetitive? (I apologize for giving you that earworm.)

Almost anything good written by Harrison was recorded by Clapton. Feel free to disagree, I can't prove you wrong because Harrison took the credit, (and the royalties.)

Peelee

2023-02-22, 08:20 AM

Bah!

My Sweet Lord! Can we get any more repetitive? (I apologize for giving you that earworm.)

Almost anything good written by Harrison was recorded by Clapton. Feel free to disagree, I can't prove you wrong because Harrison took the credit, (and the royalties.)

Not sure what your point is. Just because Morgan Freeman records the audio reading doesnt mean its not Stephen King's book.

Ruck

2023-02-22, 08:36 AM

Not sure what your point is. Just because Morgan Freeman records the audio reading doesnt mean its not Stephen King's book.

It's not even true. Even if you wanted to claim that was Clapton on "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun" (I can find nothing even suggesting it was), he certainly wasn't on "Within You, Without You," or "Love You To," etc.

brian 333

2023-02-22, 04:33 PM

It's not even true. Even if you wanted to claim that was Clapton on "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun" (I can find nothing even suggesting it was), he certainly wasn't on "Within You, Without You," or "Love You To," etc.

Okay, please allow me to revise my statement: I can't prove you wrong because the actual facts do not support my hyperbole!

Harrison and Clapton collaborated a lot, each making the other better. By far I prefer Clapton's style, but there is no question that Harrison was a huge influence on the music of his day and many artists who followed.

So, I'm not a huge fan of The Beatles, but I don't dislike their music. I just took a joke too far.

For my favorite collaborators, Betts and Allman top the list.

Individual guitarists who are awesome are hard to rate because there are many variables, but Knopfler and Rossington come to mind.

Dasick

2023-02-22, 11:39 PM

I think you overestimate how much "post scarcity utopia" (without immortality) would be different from IRL's life of "higher middle class peoples".

Even if there is no material scarcity, time is still limited, social relations are still complex to handle (with all the happiness and drama that comes from them), and peoples can still find "purpose" in a lot of careers related to social constructs (artists, authors, entertainers, scientists, etc). And depending on how your "post scarcity" works, you might still need peoples to take the time to build/renovate houses, prepare food, etc.

Yeah, I mostly think of how much more time and opportunity I'd have to do things that don't revolve around survival and subsistence.

You know that saying, "you are what you eat"? I think it's more accurate "you are how you eat". Food is just so important to us, subsistence and survival is deeply ingrained in us. So is conflict, so is risk and danger. Our monkey brains just aren't designed or evolved for a post-scarcity Utopia. Actually, going by the standards of the first world, it's basically here as low as upper lower class. Its much harder to starve in the modern first world, and it's ridiculously easy to eat oneself into an early grave.

But beyond that, the survival/subsistence/scarcity adds an extra layer of meaning to what we do. My father says that the best food in the world is pasta made over a campfire. People still garden, and hunt, and fish, and they really do feel like the food they get that way just tastes better, is better somehow. It's because it's ingrained with meaning. You toiled and sweated under the sun for the garden, you put a little bit of yourself in it, the suffering you endured is part of what makes it taste better. When you hunt or fish, the risk of going empty handed changes the entire experience. In remaining bushmen societies, hunting itself is tied to a moral/social system. You take a risk to do something for the tribe, you make sacrifices, you work hard, and then you share the results with everyone. That's what drives relationships in those kinds of societies, and I bet it's what drives relationships in our societies as well. That caring for someone cost you something.

But I don't want comfort. I want (meaning), I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.

(Although I can't argue that a post-scarcity utopia free of conflict might not make the best setting for a D&D game or a fantasy story.)

It did make a very interesting setting for Fight Club though.

Regarding your take on the Good Place - I am reminded of an interesting way to conceptualize heaven and hell, I think it was a metaphor in a fantazy book or something. In it, the afterlife is the same, you just get sorted by the people you are like. And it is like a long banquet table with the most delicious food imaginable. Only problem is, you are seated too far away and can't get closer, and the spoon you have is too long and awkward to try to eat without dropping the food all over yourself. "Hell" is when everyone just sits there and suffers. "Heaven" is when the people see their neighbours hungry, forget their own hunger, and they feed them, and so everyone is fed by one another.

V shows some compassion for the actual black dragons killed by it, and not just the hybrids and their kin.

https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0866.html

He says "if they chose more peaceful existence". Peaceful by what standards, the Order did an armed break and entry with intention to commit robbery. The Black Dragon was way within his rights to use lethal force in defense of his home. Notice how there is a human settlement not too far from the forest and the forest is full of bandits, and the presence of the dragon surprises the OOTS, so the dragon family, a mother trying to raise a son (her only memory of her husband who was made into a trophy piece of armour) can't be out destroying everything with fire too hard. Seems to me like they already were choosing a peaceful existence.

When the dragon explains to V how much the loss of her son caused her pain, V's reaction is, to put it mildly asinine. "Do what you will I won't give you the satisfaction (of a reckless robber and murderer feeling remorse for his sin?)" Even given the time to think things over, V doesn't consider his initial victims to be victims or deserving consideration.

Thanks for making my exact point!

Everything requires the death of something else to survive. Lions kill to eat, plants wait for the lion to die to eat it. Neither could live without the death of something else.

So, why are we being hyperbolic when it comes to the deities? After all, they are not cannibals. The Good gods don't even kill to live. They consume the equivalent of milk and mulch. (I would make some beetle references here, but there are squeamish readers.) That the Evil deities do kill, (Hel squishing dwarf souls,) only makes them the moral equivalent of lions.

"But sentience!"

This concept requires drawing arbitrary lines. Is a cow sentient? A sunflower? Drawing lines means a cow and lion, which are as nearly as I can tell equally sentient, are committing some kind of moral crime by eating one another. (Obviously, the cow eats the lion by eating the grass that eats the lion, much like the Good OotS deities eat the Good souls after they merge with their planes.)

The degree of sentience seems to make a difference to some. I get that. We are culturally opposed to eating our neighbors, and we seem to think of humans as the only sentient beings. So, naturally, every sentient being becomes human.

For some, the difference between humans and cows is enough to make eating cows acceptable. Others claim cows are too sentient to ethically consume and eat only plants. But the difference in sentience between the deities and their mortal creations is greater than the difference between humans and a field of wheat. The wheat field would not even exist except for the effort of the human, who planted it for the express purpose of eating it. Is the fact that each individual stalk of wheat is in its own way self aware significant?

Why not?

First of all, there's obviously a matter of degree. Like I mentioned before, a lot of people find eating dogs to be abhorrent. Actually a lot of people find eating cows to be abhorrent, and akin to eating one's surrogate mother (due to the whole milk drinking business). There's no universal animal our there that's taboo to eat in every culture, but a lot of cultures it seems have some taboo about eating certain kinds of animals due to our tendency to anthropomorphize them. So it's not a single binary, it's a sliding scale, with wheat and plants at the bottom (because even though they feel pain, we still have to eat something)

Second of all, we're apex predators. We worked hard to get where we are at. The story of humanity is the story of how we came to be this way, and how we kicked nature and all it's predators and diseases right into the mouth and broke it's jaw and taken out it's stinger. The idea that something can eat humans is quite simply put, an affront to the spirit of what it means to be a human. It's deeply offensive. Yeah, I don't care if it's self serving or "hypocritical", we will eat cows but if someone wants to make us cows we will fight it. Just how any wild prey animal won't just give up on life, it will fight and sometimes kill it's predators.

Third of all, even if its just how things work, it's pretty clear that the supposedly good gods in OOTSverse aren't terribly committed to making things the best they could be for mortals. If I am to commit to worshipping a being, and eventually using my very soul to power that being, I think that it needs to be a two way street. Maybe someone is content to just drink oneself into oblivion, reward enough for a life of service and honour. What I would want from a deity is, if not a reciprocation of devotion and loyalty, then at least to be a being worthy of worship. If my soul is going to end up dissolving and powering one thing or another, then at least let it be meaningful in it's dissolution, let it matter. If I am a cow to be eaten, I wouldn't want to be eaten by some hypocritical jerk, I'd want to die so that someone worthy of existence can continue to live. No? Then why should I play by the rules?

hamishspence

2023-02-23, 12:58 AM

When the dragon explains to V how much the loss of her son caused her pain, V's reaction is, to put it mildly asinine. "Do what you will I won't give you the satisfaction (of a reckless robber and murderer feeling remorse for his sin?)" Even given the time to think things over, V doesn't consider his initial victims to be victims or deserving consideration.

This quote:

The idea that something can eat humans is quite simply put, an affront to the spirit of what it means to be a human. It's deeply offensive. Yeah, I don't care if it's self serving or "hypocritical", we will eat cows but if someone wants to make us cows we will fight it. Just how any wild prey animal won't just give up on life, it will fight and sometimes kill its predators.

illustrates exactly why V didn't give the adolescent dragon any consideration - it ate Haley (before being forced to vomit her up).

Ruck

2023-02-23, 05:22 AM

You know that saying, "you are what you eat"? I think it's more accurate "you are how you eat". Food is just so important to us, subsistence and survival is deeply ingrained in us. So is conflict, so is risk and danger. Our monkey brains just aren't designed or evolved for a post-scarcity Utopia. Actually, going by the standards of the first world, it's basically here as low as upper lower class. Its much harder to starve in the modern first world, and it's ridiculously easy to eat oneself into an early grave.

We're probably getting too close to real-world issues to continue, but I'll just say:

1)I don't agree, and my stance is more "How would we know we can't handle a post-scarcity utopia? We've certainly never tried it."
2)You added a lot of other aspects of the human condition to my post beyond "subsistence and survival." Suffice it to say, I do not think humans would be unable to handle not having to spend half of their waking lives working crappy jobs to pay rent and buy food.

Okay, please allow me to revise my statement: I can't prove you wrong because the actual facts do not support my hyperbole!

Harrison and Clapton collaborated a lot, each making the other better. By far I prefer Clapton's style, but there is no question that Harrison was a huge influence on the music of his day and many artists who followed.

So, I'm not a huge fan of The Beatles, but I don't dislike their music. I just took a joke too far.

For my favorite collaborators, Betts and Allman top the list.

Individual guitarists who are awesome are hard to rate because there are many variables, but Knopfler and Rossington come to mind.

Ah, I didn't mean to take it too far, I just sometimes get fixated on certain aspects of a post that I want to discuss. I like the Beatles well enough; I've never been a real guitar-god kind of guy anyway. Even in rock a lot of my leaning are towards pop-- I like melody and harmony and tight song structure. I like good musicianship, too, but not just for the sake of the musicianship; it has to be in service of a meaningful work and not just a way of showing off technique.

MoiMagnus

2023-02-23, 05:52 AM

But beyond that, the survival/subsistence/scarcity adds an extra layer of meaning to what we do. My father says that the best food in the world is pasta made over a campfire. People still garden, and hunt, and fish, and they really do feel like the food they get that way just tastes better, is better somehow.

But I'm convinced it also tastes better because it's a choice. We live in a low-scarcity world, which give us a safety net to enjoy "eating pasta over a campfire" while being on holiday in the wild without the stress of it being your only choice, and fully knowing that this is temporary and that we will be able to get back to the comfort of civilisation if we ever need it.

Running to the limit of your body is much more enjoyable when you do it for sport than when you do it with a predator behind you. Peoples like climbing "dangerous" walls, but outside of the few exceptions that are addict to danger, they feel much better when they know that they are actually safe and that the danger is limited to small injuries we know how to heal.

Yes, in a post-scarcity world, peoples will often simulate scarcity to improve their life. But that actually "improve their life" because they can get the best of both worlds and not suffer any real bad consequences. It's like the tourist effect where you visit a crappy place and find it great to live there because for you it's a one-week trip so you don't get the pain of living there for all your life.

Dasick

2023-02-23, 01:31 PM

This quote:

illustrates exactly why V didn't give the adolescent dragon any consideration - it ate Haley (before being forced to vomit her up).

Fair enough and good point.

I guess if someone climbs in a bear's den and gets mauled my reaction is going to be less "he's got a taste for human flesh, we gotta kill it!" and more "what a bunch of idiots, good riddance"

But actually humans as a general rule will hunt down and kill animals that kill or harm humans regardless of the circumstances and how much the hurt human was being an idiot or a jerk.

We're probably getting too close to real-world issues to continue, but I'll just say:

1)I don't agree, and my stance is more "How would we know we can't handle a post-scarcity utopia? We've certainly never tried it."
2)You added a lot of other aspects of the human condition to my post beyond "subsistence and survival." Suffice it to say, I do not think humans would be unable to handle not having to spend half of their waking lives working crappy jobs to pay rent and buy food.

Modern first world conditions are essentially post scarcity. Depending on where exactly you live, it takes some real dedication to starve or freeze to death if your socio economic class is above a very low threshold. For example of the extreme end of things, I know a guy, he's homeless. He lives in a tent in a park, puts bags of leaves around it for insulation in winter, gets a ton of food that's left behind in walmart carts or is thrown out every day, and he just begs people for money to get drunk. Sure, it's no way to live. Guy has serious mental issues and needs a lot more help, care and support, which in a real post scarcity utopia he would receive. But he's not going to freeze or starve (unless some alcohol related accident happens). I've been told that in Denmark, one can only be homeless if you choose to be essentially (idk how true it is, and if true why expats exist to tell me such stories). There's a couple other things I wanna bring up but I won't cause it's a massive can of worms.

There's also been a ton of studies on mice and rats on how well they handle 'post scarcity', and the answer is "not very well". If you consider that in the absence of human testing which might be very unethical we should rely on such studies, it's not a good indicator.

I would argue that working a crappy job to pay rent and buy food is not survival, it's pretty far removed from it. And I would argue that it's precisely the issue. Human psychology knows to reward us for doing things that it can recognize as hunting, foraging, and tending plants. Motion, movement, strain, new things, certain landscapes, our psychology floods our brains with happy hormones for a lot of things associated with those activities. It also doesn't understand that sitting and clicking keyboard -> yummies. Actually it understands that if you have a lot of food you need to stuff your face with it and then be lethargic and lazy to conserve energy. There are already so many traps for our psychology that you need a lot of training and/or effort to avoid, and these traps are a result of less scarcity. So we can somewhat extrapolate it.

But I'm convinced it also tastes better because it's a choice. We live in a low-scarcity world, which give us a safety net to enjoy "eating pasta over a campfire" while being on holiday in the wild without the stress of it being your only choice, and fully knowing that this is temporary and that we will be able to get back to the comfort of civilisation if we ever need it.

Running to the limit of your body is much more enjoyable when you do it for sport than when you do it with a predator behind you. Peoples like climbing "dangerous" walls, but outside of the few exceptions that are addict to danger, they feel much better when they know that they are actually safe and that the danger is limited to small injuries we know how to heal.

Yes, in a post-scarcity world, peoples will often simulate scarcity to improve their life. But that actually "improve their life" because they can get the best of both worlds and not suffer any real bad consequences. It's like the tourist effect where you visit a crappy place and find it great to live there because for you it's a one-week trip so you don't get the pain of living there for all your life.

I hate being a tourist. I much prefer to go to a place, study the language, get a job, live like everyone else to get a feel for it.

I'm also very consciously moving away from safety nets and low scarcity scenarios. I've never been an adrenalin junkie, because those activities always felt fake. But at the same time, real danger, real hardship, uncertainty, lack of a safety net, the situations in life where I am closest to it, are the ones I remember more fondly and frankly like the most. I love sports. But also I've been chased by things that have a serious ill intent, and been involved in streetfights with unclear rules of lethality. I can't in good conscience recommend such activities but, that it happened was an enriching experience and I am better for it, even if my failure at the time would have left to severe injury or worse. If all goes well, in a couple of years I will have minimized my contact with civilization, or at least will be living in parts of civilization which are still far away from effective post scarcity.