The methaphysics of Earwa and the comming of the Inchoroi

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robizeratul

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« on: March 06, 2016, 11:13:23 pm »
These are some ideas/speculation I had while listening to the series on audiobook. I will try my best however my English isn't perfect. I will probably edit this post a few times if people like it. 
 
So, let's start with the metaphysics of this universe. My idea is, that in this world consciousness exists outside of the body. You would call that a soul. So, you need a physical body capable of "tuning in" ( a brain) a medium (space time itself) and a destination( a "soup"of souls). These souls basically exist in a dimension we can't really see. When a person is born, his brain attracts a soul,depending on what he is(and luck) he will get a particular soul.After you die your soul goes back and adds energy to the "pot". Superficial things about yourself are discarded and get mixed in with others(memories etc). "you" however survive, the reason for it is simple, you have been tainted by the "outside outside"(aka the real universe). Knowing what it means to exist your soul wants to exist, it can no longer not be.
 
Like in our universe, some places are more dense than others.The Inchoroi found out about their own damnation with the inverse fire. In there world this force was very weak, it existed(like everywhere) but it didn't manifest itself as magic. Using complicated technologies they where able to look into the "other side". Fire burn stuff, inverse fire burns INTO stuff, in this case, they could burned away the barriers and studied the outside, even if just superficially. 
 
They realized where consciousness comes from, and they realized there's no way to actually escape it. When you die, your soul gets transported there. There is no technology in existence to stop it,even immortality will fail one day. And of course, the more you live,the more you are as a person and the more you will suffer. 
 
They came up with an insane idea. Find a new home for their species. Knowing what damnation means,they where desperate enough to do anything. The idea was to send in seed ships and call in others for help/when it's done. However on Earwa most died in the landing ( and maybe the ship was damaged, they couldn't send a signal) 
 
Why Earwa? Paradoxically,  because the barriers between the real and outside are weak. In the rest of the universe, if you would try to change something it would be like fighting against the laws of physics, no matter how advanced you are, the universe fights back. On Earwa it is possible. Even if the boundaries are thin, you could use that same principle to keep everything out. Think of it like a transaction,everywhere in the universe the outside exchanges energy with the real. On Earwa you get a lot more, but because you get more, the barriers are weakened. All you need to do is keep the population low. If it's low enough, the souls being born will stay here. You will create something like the greenhouse effect for souls. 
 
Paradoxically, the souls are the ones keeping the gate open, because they are constantly going back and forth. IF you would reduce the population drastically Souls would enter but not leave, because the energy required to leave would be to much, it's too much "pressure in the tubes" 
 
Lets say,that the inchoroi somehow manage to close the outside. This would totally destroy them. Remember, intelect/the soul is linked to the outside. If they somehow would create a haven where nothing comes in and nothing goes out, they would practically kill themselves,and when the technologies fail, the soul would just go back to suffering. 
 
That's why Earwa is the only place a shutdown actually works.It has everything in it's favor! The barrier is weak enough that souls could get in and the at the same time you can manipulate the laws of physics in your favor.

MSJ

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« Reply #1 on: March 07, 2016, 03:01:13 am »
Great post! And welcome!
“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,

robizeratul

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« Reply #2 on: March 07, 2016, 10:03:28 pm »
Great post! And welcome!
 
 
thank you! After reading the series and spending some time just thinking about it, this website is a gold mind. Thought I would contribute a bit, since I love the series!

MSJ

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« Reply #3 on: March 07, 2016, 10:15:16 pm »
Awesome! That's a great opening post. Also, you've joined during the Golden Age, RSB is now doing a Q&A, take advantage!
“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,

robizeratul

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« Reply #4 on: March 09, 2016, 01:26:33 pm »
I cannot find it...must be blind

H

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« Reply #5 on: March 09, 2016, 01:35:49 pm »
Awesome! That's a great opening post. Also, you've joined during the Golden Age, RSB is now doing a Q&A, take advantage!

I cannot find it...must be blind

Well, doing a Q&A might be slightly misleading.  We have a section now and Scott has an account for when he feels he is ready and has time.

Find it here: Author Q&A Board.
I am a warrior of ages, Anasurimbor. . . ages. I have dipped my nimil in a thousand hearts. I have ridden both against and for the No-God in the great wars that authored this wilderness. I have scaled the ramparts of great Golgotterath, watched the hearts of High Kings break for fury. -Cet'ingira

MSJ

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« Reply #6 on: March 09, 2016, 10:26:03 pm »
Quote
Well, doing a Q&A might be slightly misleading.  We have a section now and Scott has an account for when he feels he is ready and has time.

Find it here: Author Q&A Board.

This post is a paradox H. Lol.

ETA: you said a Q&A would be misleading and then go on to direct him to the thread titled Author Q&A.  Maybe a contradiction,  im not good on sorting out which is which.

« Last Edit: March 09, 2016, 10:29:39 pm by MSJ »
“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,

H

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« Reply #7 on: March 10, 2016, 11:03:20 am »
Quote
Well, doing a Q&A might be slightly misleading.  We have a section now and Scott has an account for when he feels he is ready and has time.

Find it here: Author Q&A Board.

This post is a paradox H. Lol.

ETA: you said a Q&A would be misleading and then go on to direct him to the thread titled Author Q&A.  Maybe a contradiction,  im not good on sorting out which is which.

Yeah, it was rather cryptic,  :-[.  What I was trying to say is so far we are doing questions, however answers may come when they come.
I am a warrior of ages, Anasurimbor. . . ages. I have dipped my nimil in a thousand hearts. I have ridden both against and for the No-God in the great wars that authored this wilderness. I have scaled the ramparts of great Golgotterath, watched the hearts of High Kings break for fury. -Cet'ingira

MSJ

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« Reply #8 on: March 10, 2016, 01:46:44 pm »
I understood you, just kidding around.  :)
“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,

H

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« Reply #9 on: March 10, 2016, 02:55:17 pm »
Paradoxically, the souls are the ones keeping the gate open, because they are constantly going back and forth. IF you would reduce the population drastically Souls would enter but not leave, because the energy required to leave would be to much, it's too much "pressure in the tubes"

Indeed, there is reference to the "great cycle of souls" which the No-God seems to have stopped.

One thing to note though, is that the No-God was not part of the "original plan" so to speak.  If it was, it would have come about long before the Apocalypse.  What Wutteät tells us is probably true, that they somehow knew that 144,000 was some kind of "magic number" that would get them the result they wanted, by what mechanism we don't know.  I have a hard time understanding why a low number would have the effect of ending the cycle though, since an end to the cycle would mean an end of birth.  I have doubts that there would be still-births simply because the population is low.  If that were the case, how could the population ever have grown?

This leads me to believe that the 144,000 is separate from the Cycle.  It is a means to the end in a different way.  I've speculated that it's the fact that such a low number means the Consult could somehow rewrite the rules of damnation somehow, but that is filled with more questions and no answers.  Perhaps the 144,000 relates to the Inverse Fire somehow?

The No-God though smacks of Shaeönanra's doing.  I think it was a much later idea, born of him figuring out that one could trap a soul that would then trap other souls.  Trap them most probably in what I would call the "Inside" as opposed to the Outside.  This would probably be where the phrase, “‘The soul that encounters Him, passes no further.’”

At one time, early on, I thought that the No-God would be like a soul-eater, an annihilator.  I don't actually think that any more, it's a soul-repository of sorts, it gobbles up souls, but they are still there, just never passing to the Outside.  I think that the No-God was a double solution, how to reduce the population and be assured the Cycle is broken.
I am a warrior of ages, Anasurimbor. . . ages. I have dipped my nimil in a thousand hearts. I have ridden both against and for the No-God in the great wars that authored this wilderness. I have scaled the ramparts of great Golgotterath, watched the hearts of High Kings break for fury. -Cet'ingira

Odium

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« Reply #10 on: March 11, 2016, 01:04:47 am »
The number is, if nothing else, one of numerous Biblical parallels in the story. TSA sets out to depict a world where the arbitrary truths of our own are instead absolute truths - to show the world our ancient predecessors dwelt in - for this reason, I feel the number is deliberately arbitrary, maybe a nod to that mission. Bakker's own words, related to this:

Quote
For instance, take the ancient Middle-East as described in the Bible. If you were to redraw the shorelines, rivers, and mountain ranges, and to rename the various peoples, nations, and cities -- to change everything, that is, except its fundamental form -- what would you have? A prescientific world where magic and prophecy are possible, where divinity is certain, where individuals have an indisputable place in a cosmic order, and where the end of the world is imminent.

What you would have, in other words, is something very similar to Eärwa or Middle-Earth! And this is my point: if you change the details and leave the fundamentals intact, scriptural worlds become fantasy worlds.

Personally, I find this fact extraordinary. It explains, for instance, why so many Biblical literalists have so much difficulty with Harry Potter. If you think the world as described in the Bible is the world, then Harry's world is no longer 'harmless fantasy' -- he might as well be a gunslinger! And it also explains, I think, something of epic fantasy's mass appeal.

I find this to be the best interview he's done about the series, and perhaps the most revealing, to any lurker who might not have chanced upon it and feels curious.

As for the No-God, I believe that ultimately it is another product of Bakker's philosophy. Rather than a soul eater or a repository for souls, I believe the No-God represents the destructive potential of what Bakker calls scientific naturalism upon the world he weaves in TSA (referenced in an earlier part of the answer I quoted). The Solitary God created the cosmos with its words, and sorcerers damn themselves by stealing its voice to rewrite the world. I feel the No-God breaks something in that process, makes the language of the Solitary God meaningless somehow. I also personally believe that it's a metaphor for the semantic apocalypse Bakker postulates on TPB.

I dunno. I'm rambling about something a little tangential to this thread, but I feel like it's necessary to understand Bakker's goals with the universe he created if you want to understand how or why that universe works.

mrganondorf

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« Reply #11 on: April 01, 2016, 01:15:13 am »
Hello robizeratul!  Welcome to the forum!

I really like your notion that the Inverse Fire is burning the boundary between the World and the Outside.  I had just thought of it in bland terms as a kind of window--but burning down the wall is much cooler.

That makes me wonder.  Perhaps the way you make and maintain an Inverse Fire is by creating trauma/obscenities until you have a topoi so focused, it appears as a fire.  To the extent that the Inchoroi want to go on looking through the Inverse Fire, they have to keep adding trauma.  Maybe when the Mangaecca found it, it was burning low from not being tended for awhile and then the Consult stoked it up again.

MAYBE THAT'S HOW YOU MAKE A NO-GOD!  You have to heap trauma up until the fire is so big that you can yank a god through and cram it in the Carapace.  The reason why it's taken 2000 years is that it just takes that long to pile up the trauma again.  They are breeding and torturing slaves inside the Ark, but gosh darnit, it just takes a whole lot of suffering to get the flame hot!

@ Odium - I like your take on the No-God as "scientific naturalism" but I think the story could go either way.  Mog might be the meaninglessness that deflates the meaningful world OR Mog might be the Uber-Meaningful Das Ding that chokes the world in an overflow of meaning.  I agree with you that part of Bakker's project is to show what science does to the world but I think he's also out to demonstrate that a meaning-full world is perhaps not as desirable as one might think.

Callan S.

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« Reply #12 on: August 19, 2016, 12:09:05 am »
'meth-aphysics' - I'm going to choose to believe that was deliberate! >:) I likes it!

Anyway I had a thought about the 144,000 and a real world parallel that I wanted to bang on about - I'm wondering if there is a number of people in a society where people just basically give up trying to figure out what the right thing to do is, because there are so many people with so many differing attitudes that conflict with each other (ie, there is no way to right in one without being wrong in the other) that you get a cultural shift and people simply become stiff minded. They just stick to a way of doing things, because to try and figure out what the right thing to do amongst thousands is to continually be berated with conflicting information that says X is right AND X is wrong.

Though I suspect such an effect starts to happen at a mere 200 person community or so. But the point isn't the exact number, it's the effect and that it starts happening at a certain number.

The Sharmat

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« Reply #13 on: August 19, 2016, 05:10:01 am »
There are also references to the No-God being "discovered/re-discovered" by the Mangaecca instead of created by them. My personal theory is that the No-God was a theoretical conception of the Inchoroi long before Arkfall, but could not be completed through purely technological means. Shaeonanra's understanding of sorcery, after being turned, allowed him to do what he does best. Think sideways and plug the holes, so the No-God could be born as some horrible magi-tech construct.