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Post by Meletiti Entelecheiai on May 21, 2015 23:57:14 GMT
(On a side note, with the Orz introducing other Truths anyway, I think that ME might conclude that the WoD might also work on a Truth somewhere between his own and, say, Leaf's.
Technically, in his paradigm, everyone's in a different Truth (literally), but the Leaf-Andrew-Botanical-etc cluster of mostly-physical worlds form a Truth-cluster the same way Daevinity is a world-cluster.
... I might bring that up IC in the world classification thread, actually.)
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Post by Daniel H on May 22, 2015 0:00:41 GMT
If everybody is in a separate Truth, how are they different from the concept of worlds? Or do you mean even Leaf and Nifl have different Truths?
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Post by Meletiti Entelecheiai on May 22, 2015 0:21:44 GMT
If everybody is in a separate Truth, how are they different from the concept of worlds? Or do you mean even Leaf and Nifl have different Truths? In my mind, they're similar things, but orthogonal to each other. You have a Truth and you have a World, both, which is kind of like your x-coordinate and your y-coordinate. Your Truth is kind of like your genre, your metacausality, the sort of things that can be true and the general flavor of your universe; your world is a particular set of events, a general population and history. It's like, you could imagine the Lord of the Rings, and then you could imagine someone rewriting the Lord of the Rings as a steampunk novel, and that would be the same world but different Truths. (... Well, these are derived attributes. The original definition, by which I'm trying to derive consequences, is just that your Truth is "what's ontologically basic": in pure physics worlds that's just matter and energy, in more loose sci-fi worlds you get things like minds or wonky exceptions like Vorkosigan wormholes or things like summoning circles and names, in magic worlds you get all sorts of things like souls and concepts.) Anyway, ME is in a different world from the rest, but that's barely relevant because he's also in a different Truth, so you'd never find him by switching worlds. The bit about "nonexistence" is part of the Entelechy model of how Truths and Worlds interact - you can be in the same world, but operating on a different Truth, and, well, it's like trying to prove that 2+2=5 in our world, you can't do it or interact with anything that operates on those rules. Anyway, aside from that - in Entelechy, yes, individual people have different Truths, a la Nasuverse Reality Marbles, but generally most of them are close enough that doesn't much matter, and anyway the Truth of the Universe overwhelms their personal definitions. You have to have a whole lot of power to make your own Truth actually matter, and then of course there are universes that just operate on different Truths natively. |
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Post by Mother Starlight on May 22, 2015 4:19:52 GMT
I had not envisioned the multiverse as x-and-y-ish like that. I'd assumed that different worlds generally tend to have different Truths; for example, in Dungeon, "in your inventory" is ontologically basic. So I'd've said that Truth is one of the ways in which worlds can differ.
The... case law... established so far seems to suggest that people, objects, and magic tend to bring bits of their Truth with them when they travel between worlds, so that (for example) Leaf can use magic.
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Post by Meletiti Entelecheiai on May 22, 2015 4:36:05 GMT
Mm. I might have to rethink things a bit.
The way I was envisioning it, that's actually an aspect of the Truth of their universe, in that they allow alternate Truths to persist, in much the same way that Entelechy allows its own Truth to be modified. If you brought a Dungeon spellbook into MagicPhD's universe, for example, I had gotten the impression that that wouldn't work.
Okay, so, explaining things more so that people can help me sort my ideas out: The idea I have is that the Entelechy is sort of like a different perspective on existing information. Like, the multiverse is like one of those dual-compiling programs, where you have a program written in C, but the spaces and tabs and newlines are also a program in Whitespace. So you can compile the same program two different ways and get two totally different results.
So the Entelechy is sort of-kind of "overlaid" on the other worlds - that's what I mean by "another Truth". When Meletiti is reaching out to other Truths, he's testing other "recompilations" of the data, looking for Truths with interesting people in them. He's not in any particular world because the whole concept of worlds is part of a different perspective; he has his own concept of many worlds that spans the Entelechy, which all vaguely follow the Entelechy's magic system (except that Entelechy's magic system is open-ended enough that subsets of it can produce basically any fictional world.)
But then I've also been talking about the Truth as a way-things-work, a metacausal statement about how your world exists. Whitespace doesn't have the same conveniences as C; it's almost pure assembly, and only just barely Turing complete. Your "compilation" limits the sort of worlds that can appear; just about anything can appear in Entelechy's Truth, but you'll never get something that isn't vaguely Earthlike out of the World of Darkness because it's super-humanocentric, and I really doubt that MagicPhD's universe would have high-fantasy alts that don't boil down to weird field equations at some point.
And then you have Truths that are really close to each other, like C and C++, so that even though two worlds are in different Truths they're close enough that it still makes sense to talk about them like they're two worlds in the same truth. Like a barely diagonal line, in that x and y metaphor.
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Post by Daniel H on May 22, 2015 4:56:56 GMT
I’m not sure you share all the background assumptions about how many worlds work, so I’ll cover those now in case that helps.
Each world is a different universe. Some (mostly the Earth-containing ones) run on similar or identical physics to each other; some run on vastly different physics from each other (see: Garden). Many of the ones with similar physics still don’t have the same exact physics and can have different ontologically basic units (summoning circles, various runes, a specific concept of subspace, a human-level mind, etc.). Sometimes you get to worlds which have pretty much identical physics, like Daevinity and Inferno (the world Andrew visited in Milliways).
When you take something from one world to another, it will usually continue working: if Lantern took some glass to another world, it would still continue having a negative weight even in most worlds without such glass. There are exceptions (like taking things into Fractal), but mostly things still work.
It does not make sense to talk about Andrew’s position in Nexus because he does not have a position in Nexus; to me, this feels identical to not being able to talk about ME’s position in Nexus. Since WoD and Fractal are both worlds, it does not make much sense to talk about worlds within the world-system of World of Darkness or high-fantasy worlds which are not Fractal boiling down to weird field equations with mageons.
Some worlds, like Daevinity and Inferno, are so close to each other that it makes sense to talk about the set of Daevinity-like worlds. In Effulgence, this is seen as “Sunshine-family worlds”, which are worlds that are like the Buffyverse.
If you say that each world has a different Truth but some of them are close, then you are setting up an isomorphism between Truths and worlds. If you want to say that the Entelechy contains a lot of worlds, then either they correspond to a cluster in MWF parlance (or a world sheath in glowfic parlance), or there is something more fundamentally different about the Entelechy than there is about any of the other world clusters.
Based on how I understood the concept before today, I think that if you want the concept of a different Truth to be meaningfully separate from the concept of a different world (or cluster or sheath), then all the other worlds need to be in the same Truth. I am no longer sure I understand what you mean by a different Truth, though.
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Post by Meletiti Entelecheiai on May 22, 2015 6:04:14 GMT
Mm.
Honestly, I feel like I knew exactly what I meant in the beginning, and then said "yeah, sure, why not" a few too many times. And also was a little leery of unilaterally declaring all other worlds to be in the same separate Truth.
Part of what I mean about position is - there exists a "world coordinate" which you can move through. You can be in Andrew's world, or in Leaf's world, but not both at the same time barring gates and the like. Being in the Entelechy just isn't like being in any particular world at all; it has its own worlds, but they all have the property of not really being in any particular world. I feel like you could get from Andrew's world to Leaf's world by walking in the right direction after shifting to the Entelechy, even aside from teleportation spells.
If putting everyone else in the same other Truth is an option, that's probably what works best.
(Honestly, in retrospect, it probably makes the most sense for Entelechy to just be another world, but now we've gotten this far and anyway I do like the conceit.)
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Post by Daniel H on May 22, 2015 6:15:20 GMT
I see two states of affairs I could understand now, and either one is compatible with ME’s past posts. You or others might think of other potential situations, but something should be decided on. - All worlds except the Entelechy are in one Truth, and the Entelechy in another Truth. The Entelechy’s Truth contains many worlds, like the “standard” Truth, but the two cannot interact with each other without considerable effort from both sides (ME’s original spell combined with Mother Starlight). This would mean the Entelechy did not exist as a world the keeper could find, that ME could never get a Milliways door, that gate wouldn’t work to anywhere in the Entelechy, etc.
- The Entelechy is a standard world cluster. The word “Truth” as ME uses it is approximately synonymous with “cluster” as everybody else uses it. ME has not yet realized that all of us in our different worlds are in fact from different Truths; he had assumed that we were all in different worlds as he knew them from ME being a cluster. He meant to cast a spell to find one other interesting Truth, and instead found several. He is currently in the process of realizing that all these worlds are different Truths, and that not all of them have separate worlds within their Truths.
I think your last post was saying that the first one was acceptable, and that the parenthetical was saying you should have gone with the second. I slightly prefer the second one, but I am not running the Entelechy or the forum, and Andrew isn’t really going to be affected by the decision either way. Were you thinking of something other than one of these two possibilities I list? |
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Post by Meletiti Entelecheiai on May 22, 2015 6:18:56 GMT
My last post was essentially saying that I like and prefer the first one, but was leery of enforcing it as it seemed like it was treading on other authors' toes, and that the second one was less ... "offensive" (not quite the right word, sorry) and simpler, but less fun for me to play. (Man, I really envy ME's Perfect Comprehension right now  ). |
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Post by Leaf on May 22, 2015 11:12:48 GMT
Hmm.
Why not a little of both?
It seems like "Truth" as far as I understand the term is approximately synonymous with world-cluster, but you can fold a lot of interesting stuff into that "approximately". In particular, if you want the Entelechy to be a cluster with an especially weird and unique relationship to other clusters, I don't see any reason to deny that. Then "Truth" and "cluster/sheaf" and Effulgence's "world-family" become names for distinct but related and somewhat-overlapping concepts. "Truth" seems like it falls somewhere in between cluster and family in the external parlance, but has connotations of its own based in its origins. The concept of a Truth doesn't apply perfectly to Entelechy-external clusters or families of worlds, and the concept of a world-cluster or world-family doesn't apply perfectly to the Entelechy, but each can be imagined in terms of the other without much loss of data.
(I won't speak for Milliways and so on, but I wouldn't be naturally inclined to say that the keeper's ability to see into worlds is Truth-local. She already has the Deep Sky and Esthfora, both of which are very unique weird worlds in their own separate ways. Her concept - I'm tempted to say her Truth, but I still don't understand the term quite well enough - is that of the ultimate multiversal scrapheap, and a particular world being particularly weird in its relationship to the rest of the worlds doesn't feel like it interferes with that.)
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Post by Mother Starlight on May 22, 2015 14:48:26 GMT
I don't quite see how the two interpretations work out to be different in practice. They seem like equally valid interpretations of the same facts. (meta-Truths, ha.)
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Post by Daniel H on May 22, 2015 15:34:30 GMT
The first interpretation, in practice, says that the Entelechy is not a world or cluster. It is more like an entirely separate multiverse. The second interpretation, in practice, says that the Entelechy is a normal cluster of worlds.
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Post by Mother Starlight on May 22, 2015 15:52:47 GMT
I don't see how that's a practical difference rather than a different labeling scheme. What's an empirical test that could distinguish between those two cases?
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Post by esthfora on May 22, 2015 15:59:27 GMT
Well, the kind of stuff listed in the first bullet point - whether Milliways and standard interdimensional travel can access the Entelechy as easily as any other world-cluster or not.
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Post by Mother Starlight on May 22, 2015 16:07:17 GMT
I think that those effects could be equally caused/explained by the Entelechy being a particularly distant cluster.
On the other hand, the idea that one can cross ordinary intercluster space by crossing physical space within the Entelechy does seem like a practical difference, and I see no particular reason to disallow that. So I guess that means I'm okay with interpretation 1.
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