It [the God-of-Gods] seems to most resemble a fusion of Demiurgic qualities with that of Hegelian and/or Theosophical "Nature". I'm uncertain whether or not it qualifies as the Absolute -- I'm inclined to believe that if anything is the Absolute, it is the No-God, but I'm by no means certain of that either!

And what of the Meta-God? Was that just a throwaway line meant to be an alternative title to the God-of-Gods, or...something else? I wonder if there might not also be the Hegelian/Theosophical equivalent of Spirit, or "fohat". 

...it turns out that the agent of knowing all along has been Spirit -- even before it knew it was conscious, self-conscious, reason or spirit. Largely, this is a journey of increasing self-awareness. Spirit is thus the active element in consciousness.

In the section called "RELIGION", Hegel will argue that the death and resurrection of Jesus and the reception of the Holy Spirit is the recognition in history that we are the divine Spirit that is consciousness engaged in the task of knowing itself. For Hegel, Jesus is a man who realizes he is God, who dies, and then is "resurrected" as Spirit's self-consciousness in all men that they are Spirit -- meaning they are the conscious part of the universe that makes what surrounds us a "universe" (as a concept for us) and gives things meaning).

For Hegel, this turns out to be necessitated. You can understand this necessity either as a contingent necessity built into the nature of consciousness or as an absolute necessity built into the inevitability of everything that happens in the world. I would tend towards the latter as an interpretation of Hegel's own view.

It's mentioned in one of the answers above, but Spirit is ultimately panentheist or pantheist insofar as it turns out that God is Spirit and we are Spirit and all we do is Spirit. But this is because the objects, etc., we know and perceive are already being imbued with Spirit through our acting and perceiving.

Im not sure if that's helpful for you, but it's a brief sketch of what happens in PhG as it relates to Spirit.

What about "world Spirit"? Well, it turns out World Spirit is the recognition that consciousness is ultimately non-individual. The cultural backgrounds, etc., in which we think make it so that the agency of understanding is not localized but rather occurs within societies and cultures as their agency. For Hegel, this also includes their destiny. World Spirit is the necessity of the unity of rational consciousness that Hegel believed happens inevitably (whether this is contingent or necessary inevitability is a matter of debate).

There's actually a way to talk about this idea with physics: invariants. A well-known invariant is the conservation of mass–energy. In a closed system, we strongly believe that while energy can move from one place to another, it is never created nor destroyed. Barfield claims that we need an invariant to have it be 'evolution' instead of "one-damn-thing-after-another". He doesn't use the word 'invariant'; instead, he uses the word 'spirit'. The spirit stays the same while other things change; indeed, Barfield has the spirit causing the change.

Philosopher Jonathan Pearce recently posted The “I”, personhood and abstract objects, in which he argues against the existence of a "continuous 'I'". In other words, there is nothing to a person which keeps him/her the same person over some time period. There is no continuous 'identity'. If there is no continuous identity of persons, surely there is no continuous identity of groups of people, including villages and nations.

It seems to me that maybe Hegel is using the idea of a spirit to unify a group of people. From what you say, he also has the spirit acting on groups of people, like Barfield. One could say that the spirit very gently manipulates people, a bit like the recent experiment Facebook ran on manipulating people's emotions. Perhaps spirits use some sort of nonlocal causation, which cannot even be identified without "zooming out" enough.

Quote from: TaoHorror on September 11, 2018, 03:51:53 pm

So here's the thing - Moe and Kellhus HAD to know this as well. Your points are valid - but I think this/these point(s) wouldn't have escaped Moe or Kell.

You're still confusing what probability can do, even totally ignoring Earwa metaphysics.

Its really just simply the impossibility of predicting billions of things to get the outcome you want.

Moe's choices were to fail by doing nothing, or to send for Kellhus. There's no chips on the table, there was literally only two choices and one of those options was certain failure.

Kell was in the same situation.

I think you might also be assuming that the PT always yields the same result. It doesn't. As time and knowledge changes, so to does the possible outcomes. Moenghus didn't even know the outcome of the war when he sent for his son. So yeah, that's a huge gamble. The whole thing was a huge gamble, but that doesn't mean it wasn't the best chance he had.

Compare any % success against an assured 100% loss, even if its only 1%, it was still worth it for Moe.

With finite processing power and finite time, assumptions have to be made. Its hard to come up with examples that are easy to understand, but there's TONS of them in any field you are familiar with.

Like baking.  You 'know' that if you bake the same dough for the same time it will yield the same bread.
I'm assuming you ignore the possibility that your oven will break halfway through. Even though it might. And if it breaks, you get no dessert, but the possibility is so remote its not like you keep 3 spare ovens sitting around just in case. But you also don't sit around and not make dessert because your oven might break. If you don't try, you know for sure that you won't get any delicious baked goods. So you take the risk.

Moe, Kellhus, etc., are doing the same thing. Moving forward with partially solved plans without contingencies for the things that are so remote or so insignificant that they can't or don't plan for them.

The possibility of failure does not make trying a worthless endeavor.

Quote from: TaoHorror on September 11, 2018, 03:51:53 pm

That's an awful lot of chips to put on the table for something that could work if without error - they are as at least as smart as you two, so they had to know the liklihood of a TTT ( as you describe it ) being pulled off is next to nill, and not just because they misunderstood the in-world agency of The Outside. Something is amiss. I find these mistakes too rudimentary for Moe/Kell to make - and I don't say that from my awe of their intellect, but that they sport the intellect to make these same points themselves.

Of course they considered it. That's what the whole hyper-intelligent thing allowed them to do. Account for and control thousands of more variables than a human. That doesn't make them omnipotent though.

Quote from: TaoHorror on September 11, 2018, 03:51:53 pm

If the message is simply we'll never be able to out maneuver the gods, no matter how smart we get, I guess I'll accept that. Just seems there's more mystery beyond what happens next. The war between the sorcerers and TNG will be fun to read - but something's up.

The point to me seems to be that no matter how seamingly powerful something is, nothing is infinite.
Moenghus had 30 years and was killed by his son or if you prefer, killed by his first mistake - Cnaiur.
Kellhus had 30 years and was killed by Ajokli, of if you prefer, Kelmomas.
Koringhus was the smartest, strongest, fastest dunyain ever and commited suicide over the very idea that he might be wrong.
Maithanet was killed by a god despite his prowess.
The Consult, despite  centuries of planning, AI tech, and quite possibly the smartest human at the helm, were outsmarted by a handful of bound slaves.
The New Consult, in turn, despite their combined intellectual might and atomic age technology, were very nearly destroied by Ajokli.
Ajokli, in his turn, despite thousands of years of planning, was brought down by Kelmomas and a chorae.

The entire series is about snatching failure form the jaws of victory.
Or in another light, overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds.
Its a story about hope - that no matter how bad, how overwhelmed, how defeated, the faintest glimmer of the possibility of success is enough.

Quote from: TaoHorror on September 11, 2018, 03:51:53 pm

Of course, there is a ton of stuff going on, philosophical treatises abound and I love all of that stuff. Just talking about the arc of the story, the gist of the Duynain, if you will. Like I said, if the "moral" of the story is never think yourself too smart as "higher" agencies have the drop on us no matter what, then ok - just seems too pat from a story perspective. Someone's plan is being executed ... I think.

If the same story was written from a more traditional point of view, you could cast the Dunyain as the heroes, killing the evil inchoroi, their evil renegade defectors, and killing the gods to bring about eternal Heaven on Earth.

If anything, the moral of the story is that Perspective makes all the difference.

ETA:
It also appears to be about how important missing information is. It's definitely possible someone or something is still running the show, and if they are, I assume we haven't been made fully aware of them

If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid with regard to external things. Don't wish to be thought to know anything; and even if you appear to be somebody important to others, distrust yourself. For, it is difficult to both keep your faculty of choice in a state conformable to nature, and at the same time acquire external things. But while you are careful about the one, you must of necessity neglect the other.

“For who is it that made the heavens crimson and the sun golden, who has given light to the moon and the stars with it, who has dried the earth in the midst of the many waters, who set you yourself among the things and who has sought me out in the perplexity of my thoughts?”

A couple of ideas on why this might have been:

1. He knows too much.  As things turned out, Kellhus' experiments with the Daimos ended up being pretty important to the story.  So providing his perspective might have been too much a tip of the hat. 

2. Optics.  Of all Kellhus' atrocities, none were more concerning to his flock than his experiments with the Daimos.  The Decapitants in particular were hard to square with his role as Prophet.   So it might have made sense to keep Iyokus at arms' length.

no way. Chorae do not destroy a soul and remove it from the game. If they did that would undermine the main metaphysical tension that drives all the factions in the story to go to war over damnation.

We have two inchoroi left, both mages through grafting. The entire purpose of the inchoroi's millennia long campaign through space was to avoid hell.

If they could pick up a chorae and have it incinerate their soul and send them to oblivion instead of hell they would have done it on the spot. They could have skipped all the nonsense with the apocalypses and the no god and just disappeared. No eternity in hell so all good. Maybe they slightly prefer the idea of killing the gods and living forever on Earwa as immortal bio freaks, but that's just a preference. Their guiding purpose is avoiding hell and they'd be happy to die on the spot if it meant avoiding damnation. Or similarly, think of all the failed attempts the nonmen investigated to find oblivion over hell.

I feel like it's the opposite. There's no way Kellhus found the rare treasure of oblivion.


-Either he's full on dead and he's in hell in the outside being munched on by demons.
-Or he's full on dead and he's in the outside munching on demons.
-Or he's not really dead, and he pulled some Daimos bullshit to keep himself on the inside. Maybe in the decapitant like people are saying.

But I always thought the idea that Kellhus cheated and is still in the inside in the decapitant or whatever was super crazy. I definitely thought he was done, at least story wise. He's dead and he's not going to be a driving factor anymore. But that requires him going to hell.

So if Bakker says he's not in the outside, that seems like a big reveal to me. That seems to strongly indicate that it's daimos trickery of some kind.

The assumption here is that there is a "little man" or "homunculus" inside the brain "looking at" the movie.The reason why this is a fallacy may be understood by asking how the homunculus "sees" the internal movie. The obvious answer is that there is another homunculus inside the first homunculus's "head" or "brain" looking at this "movie". But that raises the question of how this homunculus sees the "outside world". To answer that seems to require positing another homunculus inside this second homunculus's head, and so forth. In other words, a situation of infinite regress is created. The problem with the homunculus argument is that it tries to account for a phenomenon in terms of the very phenomenon that it is supposed to explain.