Eschaton – The Beginning, Middle, and End of Time

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MSJ

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« Reply #15 on: November 08, 2017, 11:58:54 am »
Madness, what was the reveal?????
“No. I am your end. Before your eyes I will put your seed to the knife. I will quarter your carcass and feed it to the dogs. Your bones I will grind to dust and cast to the winds. I will strike down those who speak your name or the name of your fathers, until ‘Yursalka’ becomes as meaningless as infant babble. I will blot you out, hunt down your every trace! The track of your life has come to me,

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« Reply #16 on: November 08, 2017, 04:32:38 pm »
I can offer an analogy. We see the world with our eyes, but there exist things our eyes cannot perceive. Like neutrino, for example. That's how the Gods are unable to see something. We, humans, can infer the existence of neutrino from our experiments, but it requires a capacity to reason on the level beyond the Gods. It's probably sentience vs. sapience here.

I get the metaphor you're going for but I don't agree. Especially given I can't reconcile the concrete real-world analogy Bakker gave us below.

Madness, what was the reveal?????

You'd have to listen to the second Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast, MSJ.

I think I linked in thread here the exact time he starts talking. But he gives a very specific real-world analogy regarding how the Gods exist in relation to the world of Earwa.
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Wilshire

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« Reply #17 on: November 08, 2017, 05:48:21 pm »
He does? I remember he mentions they are sort of an analogy to our subconscious made manifest, but I don't remember much of a big reveal. Must have missed something.
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TLEILAXU

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« Reply #18 on: November 08, 2017, 07:52:15 pm »
Non-linear, or even more so, semi-linear time is just confusing as all hell, because it fails to logically follow itself.

I can interpret a Block-Universe. Fine. I can interpret as we've attempted to describe, the Gods influencing that Block-Universe from their position Outside and so making all their plays on the Plate simultaneously. I don't get how events inside that Block-Universe might deceive or blind those seeing it from the Outside - that'd be like the features of a map changing in front of your eyes while you plan an attack and you being unaware of that change.

I also get Bakker's recent reveal on the STBYM podcast. I just can't reconcile all these things ;).
Yes, this is the quandary.
Also, would you mind posting the time in in that STBYM podcast when the reveal comes up?
The way I see it, the world is basically a bicameral mind. There's a subconscious Outside that dictates what happens in the Real, although the catch is that the God is sleeping. This is why it's hard to see how the Inchoroi managed to "circumvent" the God unless it was fated to happen, like, I don't know, a tumor in the World eroding the boundaries.

Wilshire

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« Reply #19 on: November 08, 2017, 07:56:53 pm »
a tumor in the World eroding the boundaries.
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H

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« Reply #20 on: November 08, 2017, 09:15:48 pm »
Well, I had, pre-TUC advocated for the possibility that the Hundred do not really see the future, so much as they are capable of discerning the chains of cause and effect that dictate what would (should) happen going forward.

But, as Kellhus describes, the Ark, and so everything that issues forth from Golgotterath, is outside these chains.  So, when they "read" any normal chain, everything seems fine.  But self-moving souls, like Kellhus, or things outside the "natural" world (i.e. Inchoroi) lay outside these "natural" chains of events.  The Hundred aren't aware of the apparatus of their seeing, in the same way that we aren't really all that aware in day to day life of how we see.  We just do.

And, as Bakker talks about in that interview, when he had an issue with his eye, not only is there a loss of perception, but there is a lack of perception of the loss.  In other words, even though the whole cannot be perceived, there is the illusion that it is.  So, when Yatwer "sees" Kellhus dying, it's because that is how it is supposed to be.  But there is more outside the Frame of what Yatwer can perceive.

Think for a moment about visible light spectrum.  We only see what we can see.  We have no inkling, perceptually, that there is more.  In reality, Yatwer does know there is more to see, but she is still blind to exact limit of the seeing.  And so she must take her view of the whole as the whole itself.
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Wilshire

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« Reply #21 on: November 09, 2017, 01:40:46 pm »
The gods seem to conveniently rely on the same cognitive heuristics to discern the world around them as we do, and as with the eye example (happened to me recently), when there's blind spot its not a big black spot, it just doesn't exist and the picture appears whole.

Something, something, blind brain theory, something something social ecology crash space heuristics.
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stuslayer

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« Reply #22 on: November 09, 2017, 04:08:09 pm »
Like dark matter, we can't detect it but we observe it's effects...?

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« Reply #23 on: November 09, 2017, 06:17:43 pm »
Like dark matter, we can't detect it but we observe it's effects...?
Not even that. We can't detect it, and we don't see any affects at all.
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stuslayer

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« Reply #24 on: November 09, 2017, 06:31:27 pm »
So, would this seem to imply that the Gods do not think, have no insight etc. and can only react to what they can perceive? Trying to get my head around this (I'm new to discussing this stuff!! Apologies if my posts are a little naive), it would seem that the Gods lack the capability to reason things out or think in abstract - this is why the NG is invisible to them?

SmilerLoki

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« Reply #25 on: November 09, 2017, 06:35:04 pm »
So, would this seem to imply that the Gods do not think, have no insight etc. and can only react to what they can perceive? Trying to get my head around this (I'm new to discussing this stuff!! Apologies if my posts are a little naive), it would seem that the Gods lack the capability to reason things out or think in abstract - this is why the NG is invisible to them?
So far this assumption seems to be correct, but there is little clarity on the matter.

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« Reply #26 on: November 09, 2017, 06:44:15 pm »
So, would this seem to imply that the Gods do not think, have no insight etc. and can only react to what they can perceive? Trying to get my head around this (I'm new to discussing this stuff!! Apologies if my posts are a little naive), it would seem that the Gods lack the capability to reason things out or think in abstract - this is why the NG is invisible to them?
So far this assumption seems to be correct, but there is little clarity on the matter.

Right. Or, something approaching that. There's a line in TUC where the dunyain-consult mention that the Gods lack the cognative ability to discern their presence, even as they affect the world.

I recently had my own brief encounter with partial blindness in my eye. Its a surreal experience because there's no 'hole' in your vision, there simply isn't any vision there and it seems like you're seeing everything. And you can't force yourself to 'see' the blank space either, close the bad eye and you see everything, close the good eye and open the bad, and you see everything (even though a piece is missing). I can obviously tell that something isn't there, and can manipulate it around so that the blankness is covering something that exists, but no matter how hard I try I can't 'see' that its missing. Hard to explain, but this is largely the phenomenon I think we're dealing with regarding the gods.
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SmilerLoki

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« Reply #27 on: November 09, 2017, 06:50:18 pm »
I recently had my own brief encounter with partial blindness in my eye. Its a surreal experience because there's no 'hole' in your vision, there simply isn't any vision there and it seems like you're seeing everything. And you can't force yourself to 'see' the blank space either, close the bad eye and you see everything, close the good eye and open the bad, and you see everything (even though a piece is missing). I can obviously tell that something isn't there, and can manipulate it around so that the blankness is covering something that exists, but no matter how hard I try I can't 'see' that its missing. Hard to explain, but this is largely the phenomenon I think we're dealing with regarding the gods.
This sounds fascinating, though I'm sure it's not a pleasant experience, and for that I'm sorry.

Wilshire

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« Reply #28 on: November 09, 2017, 08:40:46 pm »
Slightly terrifying, yes. But you know, it was either nothing important or a life changing emergency that needed immediate medical attention. I assumed the former and ignored it for 3 hours and it went away :P. I might *not* be very smart but at least I'm too cheap to go to the hospital ... wait, neither of these things are good.

Anyway, I'm back to normal as far as I can tell.
« Last Edit: November 10, 2017, 03:23:17 pm by Wilshire »
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TaoHorror

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« Reply #29 on: November 10, 2017, 03:15:23 pm »
Slightly terrifying, yes. But you know, it was either nothing important or a life changing emergency that needed immediate medical attention. I assumed the former and ignored it for 3 hours and it went away :P. I might be very smart but at least I'm too cheap to go to the hospital ... wait, neither of these things are good.

Anyway, I'm back to normal as far as I can tell.

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