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True and false prophecies as the synthase said, I think, was more of a description of non-knowing. Like they know that some prophecies, for example the ones they made themselves, are false, some have been shown to be false through the years, and what remains of other prophecies that have not come to pass is really just 'well maybe its true, maybe its full of shit, we don't know so lets cover our bases'.
I was forgeting about Celmomas' 'twin-souled' status anyway. It's possible that that enabled some connection with the outside despite Mog.
Well to me the No God is what the Dunyain strive to become:a self moving soul free from the before and the after in short the absolute.However by being this,the No God loses something crucial in the Second apocalypse world:meaning.By being freed of causality and of the cycle that being has no meaning unto itself and thus cannot be defined,and as it cannot define itself it does not truly see meaning in anything/anyone else,thus always hungering for real meaning but unable to find any due to being it's own subject rather than an object to anyone else's reality,but a subject who does not realy know what it is,thus the no god is always questionning,and those incessant questions contest the meaning of things,sowing incertainty and slowly destroying the meaning God/gods gave to creation and even their own realm basically comdemning them into oblivion.And that would also be why Kellhus and Mimara(respectively for the former the understanding of that condition via Dunyain breeding and for the latter the judging eye)are the best persons to take it down.
Hmm.... meaning is crucial - probably onto something with that, AB.
Didn't Bakker once say something about Kellhus along the lines of "looking for meaninglessness in a meaningful world?" Or do I have that backwards?
That's right Triskele. That applies to the dunyain, imo. Kellhus is talking to the world and drawing meaning from twigs in his sandles by the end of TTT."Meaning, purpose. These words name not something given. They name our task."Causality in Earwa is moved by the logos, and it is that sliver of the logos in the souls of men that the gods strive over, that enables sorcery and the hundred to work their will in Earwa.The dunyain work to master this for themselves, to remove all the preconcieved meaning and the hold of TDTCB that causes men to move in their predetermined circles and yield up this power to others.The No-god, OTOH, just wants to snuff it out.
http://www.boomtron.com/2005/05/on-the-spot-interview-r-scott-bakker/Quote The dominant tradition in mainstream literature is to depict protagonists stranded in a potentially meaningless world trying to find some kind of compensatory meaning – usually through some conception of ‘love.’ You’ve literally seen this pattern countless times. Kellhus offered me an opportunity to turn this model on its head. What makes fantasy distinct is that the worlds depicted tend to be indisputably meaningful – in a sense that’s what makes them fantastic! I thought to myself, what would a story of a protagonist stranded in a meaningful world struggling to hold onto meaninglessness look like?
The dominant tradition in mainstream literature is to depict protagonists stranded in a potentially meaningless world trying to find some kind of compensatory meaning – usually through some conception of ‘love.’ You’ve literally seen this pattern countless times. Kellhus offered me an opportunity to turn this model on its head. What makes fantasy distinct is that the worlds depicted tend to be indisputably meaningful – in a sense that’s what makes them fantastic! I thought to myself, what would a story of a protagonist stranded in a meaningful world struggling to hold onto meaninglessness look like?
Also this:http://www.sfdiplomat.net/sf_diplomat/2007/08/conservative-fa.htmlhttp://www.sfdiplomat.net/sf_diplomat/2007/02/the_aesthetics_.htmlRSB was active in the comments section, in the second link we have:QuoteThe question of epic fantasy's SPECIFIC appeal, it seems to me, is primarily a social, historical, and psychological one.So getting back to your question regarding worlds and laws. Humans are hardwired to anthropomorphize. Among the many specialized inference systems possessed by our brains, we have 'intentionality detection' systems, which we use to track various kinds of agents as opposed to natural events, which have their own inference systems. Our brain literally has modules dedicated to understanding events according to the modalities of intent or according to the modalities of cause. The thing is, our intentional inference systems are (and this is an uncomfortable fact) hyperactive: they regularly impute intent to events which are in fact causal.Now before the institutionalization of science in the Enlightenment, we really had no way of knowing this, so as a result, we universally understood the world at large in intentional terms. Only as science provided us with its astonishingly reliable and powerful picture of the ways that causal processes monopolize natural events (the so-called 'disenchantment of the world') were we able to recognize the kinds of wholescale anthropomorphizing underwriting our worldviews. In other words, the institutional dominance of science is what allowed us to see these kinds of worlds as FANTASTIC.Thus the connection of fantasy worlds to the worlds of scripture (myth that is believed) and myth (scripture that is disbelieved). It's no accident that Middle-earth, Homeric Greece, Biblical Israel, and Vedic India all share such similar ontological structures. They all use the same inference systems to interpret the 'world' - the signature difference is that Middle-earth is a classic example of what psychologists call 'decoupled cognition,' which is just a fancy way of referring to the capacity to think 'as if' that underwrites all fiction. Middle-earth is, in a very real sense, 'scripture otherwise.'The laws of these worlds are quite literally social and psychological as opposed to natural. This is one of the keys to their appeal, I think. Fantasy worlds are intrinsically meaningful worlds - this is what makes them fantastic. They are not worlds of things, but of AGENTS and ARTIFACTS. There's literally not a 'thing' - understood in the strict sense - to be found in fantasy or scriptural worlds.Since this is our default way of understanding the world (the scientific worldview requires oodles of training), the primordial way, the 'escapism' of fantasy is not so much an escape as a return to worlds that make immediate sense. And this is part of what makes fantasy the antithesis of modernism, if you define the latter as narrative forms involving the struggle of a protagonist trying to find coherent meaning in an apparently meaningless world. (The Prince of Nothing, btw, tries to turn this toothless saw on its head.) The 'great clomping foot of nerdism,' as Harrison puts it (at once evincing and reinforcing the general bias against forms of decoupled cognition without obvious utility), is nothing more than the 'as if denial' of the scientific worldview, a return not to happier times, but to more comprehensible ones. In epic fantasies, we often like our illusions to run deep.I can go on and on about this - there's many parallel stories to be told here.In terms of content, the laws of fantasy worlds are CONCEPTUALLY different, which is just to say they engage different inference systems. In terms of composition, where hard SF uses what I call pseudo-cognitive transition rules to build speculative versions of the stochastically mechanistic world we've gained thanks to the Enlightenment, epic fantasy uses 'associative elimination rules' to build alternate versions of the intentional worlds we've lost thanks to the Enlightenment.- Scott Bakker
The question of epic fantasy's SPECIFIC appeal, it seems to me, is primarily a social, historical, and psychological one.So getting back to your question regarding worlds and laws. Humans are hardwired to anthropomorphize. Among the many specialized inference systems possessed by our brains, we have 'intentionality detection' systems, which we use to track various kinds of agents as opposed to natural events, which have their own inference systems. Our brain literally has modules dedicated to understanding events according to the modalities of intent or according to the modalities of cause. The thing is, our intentional inference systems are (and this is an uncomfortable fact) hyperactive: they regularly impute intent to events which are in fact causal.Now before the institutionalization of science in the Enlightenment, we really had no way of knowing this, so as a result, we universally understood the world at large in intentional terms. Only as science provided us with its astonishingly reliable and powerful picture of the ways that causal processes monopolize natural events (the so-called 'disenchantment of the world') were we able to recognize the kinds of wholescale anthropomorphizing underwriting our worldviews. In other words, the institutional dominance of science is what allowed us to see these kinds of worlds as FANTASTIC.Thus the connection of fantasy worlds to the worlds of scripture (myth that is believed) and myth (scripture that is disbelieved). It's no accident that Middle-earth, Homeric Greece, Biblical Israel, and Vedic India all share such similar ontological structures. They all use the same inference systems to interpret the 'world' - the signature difference is that Middle-earth is a classic example of what psychologists call 'decoupled cognition,' which is just a fancy way of referring to the capacity to think 'as if' that underwrites all fiction. Middle-earth is, in a very real sense, 'scripture otherwise.'The laws of these worlds are quite literally social and psychological as opposed to natural. This is one of the keys to their appeal, I think. Fantasy worlds are intrinsically meaningful worlds - this is what makes them fantastic. They are not worlds of things, but of AGENTS and ARTIFACTS. There's literally not a 'thing' - understood in the strict sense - to be found in fantasy or scriptural worlds.Since this is our default way of understanding the world (the scientific worldview requires oodles of training), the primordial way, the 'escapism' of fantasy is not so much an escape as a return to worlds that make immediate sense. And this is part of what makes fantasy the antithesis of modernism, if you define the latter as narrative forms involving the struggle of a protagonist trying to find coherent meaning in an apparently meaningless world. (The Prince of Nothing, btw, tries to turn this toothless saw on its head.) The 'great clomping foot of nerdism,' as Harrison puts it (at once evincing and reinforcing the general bias against forms of decoupled cognition without obvious utility), is nothing more than the 'as if denial' of the scientific worldview, a return not to happier times, but to more comprehensible ones. In epic fantasies, we often like our illusions to run deep.I can go on and on about this - there's many parallel stories to be told here.In terms of content, the laws of fantasy worlds are CONCEPTUALLY different, which is just to say they engage different inference systems. In terms of composition, where hard SF uses what I call pseudo-cognitive transition rules to build speculative versions of the stochastically mechanistic world we've gained thanks to the Enlightenment, epic fantasy uses 'associative elimination rules' to build alternate versions of the intentional worlds we've lost thanks to the Enlightenment.- Scott Bakker
Real cool commentary... links r ded .
hah, glad I saved the text, RSB had tons and tons of comments on the second article.I think the articles were called the Aesthetics of Fantasy and Conservative Fantasy. The original article (this was all pre-HBO) was a critique of ASOIAF based on making Ned Stark into a hero for executing the kid at the beginning of GOT, and that this sort of conservative bypass of any sort of judicial process and just getting to the killing as somehow noble and higher was a bad thing.http://web.archive.org/web/20100928002957/http://www.sfdiplomat.net/sf_diplomat/2007/08/conservative-fa.htmlcomments by Wert, Ran, Larry etcMay take some more thorough poking around the wayback machine to find the other article and it's comments, might be a good idea to save stuff from the first, but I didn't see Bakker in particular on that article, he was commenting on the second linkedit boom found the article, RSB is first commenter: http://web.archive.org/web/20100928211911/http://www.sfdiplomat.net/sf_diplomat/2007/02/the_aesthetics_.html
I will endeavour to find them . Sounds interesting.
Quote from: MadnessI will endeavour to find them . Sounds interesting.Since this is a new page you might not see the edit I just posted:http://web.archive.org/web/20100928211911/http://www.sfdiplomat.net/sf_diplomat/2007/02/the_aesthetics_.html
Lol, went back and read your edit. Cheers, duder, will make for interesting reading later .
On another note, going back to the idea of God/No-God as states of the same entity, could the No-God simply be the God dragged into a reality where one is forced to acccept the arrow of time?The No-God asks "what do you see?" and "what am I?" The notion of seeing reminds [me] of Calasso's interpretation of Hinduism focusing on the idea of two beings in the Mind - the mind that acts and the mind that watches. Or as Bakker put it, the "watcher and watch[ed]" that anchors sorcery.What if the God, outside of time, has no need for origin or ending, a perfect circle? Dragged into linear time the God now is aware that thoughts follow thoughts. The circle is now an ouroboros, serenity replaced by an obsession to catch the origin of one's own thinking.The Circle dreams and we get creation. The Ouroboros metaphorically devours itself and we get the Angel of Endless hunger.I think there are hints pointing in this direction:In TWP, Akka is trapped in an Uroborian Circle. This prevents him from utilizing sorcery. It negates his ability to grasp the clarity of meaning necessary for sorcery. What would happen if the God was in similar straits?After being possessed by Aurang in TTT, Esmi worries about the things she hungered for. Kellhus assures her those weren't her desires, she merely suffered them. Esmi asks "Then how does any desire belong to me?" as she suddenly becomes aware that desire's origin lies outside the purview of conscious thought.In the same book, IIRC Moe worries that Kellhus is touched by the No-God. Kellhus says "Thoughts come. I know they are not my own." Yet IIRC TDTCB begins with [a] quote that notes thoughts [always] come of their own volition, intruding onto the conscious mind.Dunyain, as Inri notes to Maitha, are always reflecting, always trying to catch the origin of their thoughts. Cnauir notes the Dunyain are like sharks, always swimming toward the goal. The way he describes [Kellhus] calls back to the idea of endless hunger.Seswatha notes that the circuit of watcher and watched is the foundation of all sorcery. This would mean this circuit fixes meaning, and when this circuit is broken presumably sorcery fails. When the God fails to apprehend Its own perfection, then Its magic - the entirety of the onta - fails. [Its only hope is to be recognized by the watchers, the shards of Itself which are the souls of men. This is why it demand-begs through the unsouled -sranc, bashrag, wraccu - to know what the ensouled see.]
