Board Thread:The Last Sovereign Discussion/@comment-27713488-20180327004110/@comment-31763506-20180409022652

Simple thoughts first.

I'm now coming around to the idea that Esthera and not Fheliel is the most likely harem member in the leaders list between Sarai and the elves. My money is now on the team swapping Riala's shard for hers somehow.

I think it's a bad idea to start naming unnamed characters which have only been teased after hypothetical apocalyptic events. That's tantamount to canonization of spec.

Whatever else Alonon might or might not be. he appears to still be mortal or at least to believes himself to be, since he has been grooming Tyna as his successor for some time.

The philosophical questions regarding "Destiny" are complex and profound, and I personally hope that SierraLee doesn't fall into the error that a lot of scholars in the humanities make by conflating Determinism and Indeterminism with Fatality and "Freedom", but it's a trap that has caught many good authors before. Alonon's conversation with Varia seems to indicate that there's some confusion on the subject. Destiny and Fate are usually overloaded with the concepts of intention and purpose in philosophical and ethical naval-gazing.

If you're a determinist who believes that the entirety of the physical universe is the inevitable working out of the consequences of the laws of physics, then you shouldn't get angry that there's rain storm that forced the cancellation of that picnic you wanted to have with your girlfriend. You don't scream "Curse your black heart, barometric pressure, solar input fueled vaporization and prevailing winds! You've thwarted me for the last time!" But if you believe in Zeus, there's someone to blame. Most people's objections to their having a "fate" is the clear implication that their "destiny" is being controlled by some outside agency.

But Alonon says that Varia's "Destiny" is not being controlled by an outside agency. There's no purpose. He also says that there is no chance governing what happens, so it's not an indeterministic universe. So is what's happening to Varia a natural deterministic consequence of the physical/magical laws of the universe of TLS? OK, then what's the problem? No one is controlling her destiny.

If you want to try a genuinely toy deterministic universe where the laws of physics and their consequences are known perfectly, look for a Langton's Ant program. There's a theoretically infinite 2 dimensional grid of squares that can be colored black or white, and an ant that occupies a single square and can face four directions. If the ant is standing on a white square, it turns right, steps forward and flips the color of the square it enters. If it is standing on a black square, it does the same thing except that it turns left. Regardless of the starting pattern of black and white squares that the digital ant is given (so long as the pattern is of finite size), it eventually, after 10,000 steps or so "builds a highway", and gets into a repetitive pattern of 104 steps that gradually sets it on course to make an infinitely long diagonal line shape of white and black squares. It can't be mathematically proven that the ant will always do this, but every experiment has shown it doing so. So in a trivial sense, it appears that the destiny of the ant is to build a highway.

But Chris Langton, the creator of the program, didn't set out to create a system that would ensure a digital ant would build a highway. He chose about the simplest programmatic rules he could and let it rip. There's no intent or purpose in the ant's destiny, and there's no sense in which Langton is controlling it. Of course, the ant has no control over its destiny either, but an ant that was capable of exerting some kind of control over its own behavior would be an AI.

The question of free will and moral responsibility is mostly a failure of imagination in our own mental programming. We aren't Laplacean Demons, so our finite minds can't grasp the gargantuan complexity in the oceans of atoms that make up the world we live in. A physical ant is not in a very good position to contemplate the complexity of the network of 250,000 nerve cells that constitute its own brain. When people like John Searle try to imagine an intelligence made of circuitry, what they come up with are mere caricatures. They imagine simple systems of non-living, non-intelligent life which obviously can't be intelligent in the way they themselves are. So magic gets invoked and an immaterial mind capable of "meaningful choice" is conjured up, sometimes with goofy appeals to quantum level indeterminism, sometimes not. And anything less than that magical consciousness, separate from and independant of the material universe is dismissed as not being "real freedom".

Sorry, that kinda got away from me.

Of course, it's easy to imagine a universe where the lives of its inhabitants are governed by a complex set of mathematical rules designed by a guiding intelligence that controls the destiny of everyone in it. We call them video games. But I don't think a 4th wall breach is SL's intention here.