Subject: Re: RJ Speech update From: jsn@concentric.net (John S. Novak, III) Organization: Cynics Central Date: 27 Oct 1999 19:38:11 PDT Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan On Wed, 27 Oct 1999 23:52:49 GMT, Robert McNeil wrote: >But it wouldn't have done that. If the rowers hadn't been rowing for >that few minutes the boat wouldn't have been in position to get >balefired... >Am I just dumb or am I missing something? The only point you're really missing here is that Balefire simply cannot be made to make any sense, under any set of causality rules at all. You have restated the Zeroth Balefire Paradox. It's far more fundamental than silly things like "What if I balefired my father?" I have little doubt that this is the real cause for conflict between the Creator and the Dark One. (All caps mostly eliminated, for clarity's sake) "You know, Creator dude, I like what you've done here, for the most part. I like the cyclical helixy time motif-- that's an interesting dodge on the fate vs free will thing. I like the use of reincarnation-- that's good use of resources. Souls are expensive, you know. But, er...." "Yes? You dare question my Creation?" "How do I put this delicately...?" "OUT WITH IT!" "Well, I took a look at the source code. Have you really thought about the way the One Power and the actual Wheel of Time interact? Here, take a look at this-- this looks like a kind of a pretty crude editting tool, right?" "Yes, but--" "Yeah, but look closer. Who has permission to invoke this?" "Everyone." "Ah. Yeah. But Creator baby, that's the problem. Don't you see it?" "No, what's the problem? YAH gave his creatures the ability to edit themselves. One flock of his are just starting to get the hang of it, and lots of interesting things are happening, now." "Look, don't bring YAH into this. YAH is an elegant operating system designer, but he's not too clear on the ethical--- look, never mind YAH. The point is, YAH may let his critters self-edit, but even he doesn't let them play with causality editors. Don't you grasp the difference between chemical editting and temporal editting?" "Whose universe is this, anyway? And who asked you, anyway? All you do is go around nitpicking silly little details. I saw you playing with YAH's critters, trying to break YAH's ethical systems. You're pretty fucking Adversarial about all this sht, but I don't see _you_ designing anything." "This isn't about me, and it isn't about YAH's inability to design an ethical system. It's about _your_ seeming inability to design a stable set of physics. Look, you left this loophole open, right?" "Yes, but--" "And you admit that you want to leave it open, to see what happens, right?" "Yes, and--" "I will TELL you what will happen. You have allowed for meat-based intelligence. You have allowed meat-based intelligence to invoke the One Power. You have provided an infinite time line with infinite variations. Eventually, one of these pieces of meat WILL figure out how to do this. Being meat, he WILL teach it to someone else, and then everyone will be able to do it. And being meat, they WILL use it on their surroundings and themselves." "I already hardcoded--" "Yeah, yeah, you hardcoded against one piece of meat editting himself back out of the picture. I know. Real elegant code there, by the way-- that alone is going to stunt their philosophical development. But say Meat A pisses off Meat B. Thirty seconds later, Meat B edits Meat A out of the picture sixty seconds back. So Meat A could never have done the thing that pissed off Meat B. So Meat B never edits him out. So Meat A DOES do the thing that pissed off Meat B. You see?" "They wouldn't--" "Don't tell me they wouldn't. They would. I know meat. I've designed more meat based sentiences than you can easily imagine. They would. They will." "Well, that will tend to gum things up a little, but the system as a whole has enough garbage collection in it to handle that and recover." "Personally, I looked at your code, and I think all that will happen is that you get a temporal singularity, which is bad enough. But what happens when they start building amplifiers? Remember, they're meat. They're clever. But they're not too terribly wise, sometimes. Under your structures, they'll be able to edit back years into their past. And they'll be able to do it to millions of themselves at a time." "You're just a cynic." "Damn right. But I'm right. I'm always right." "Not this time." "Care to make a wager?" "You're on." "Done, then. In three cycles, one of these critters will figure it out and use it. That will let me in. In no more than three more cycles, I'll have provoked them into using it so much that the whole system will implode into a ball of temporal idiocy and general system faults. You doubt? Well just look how long it took me to subvert YAH's little religious structures..." -- John S. Novak, III jsn@concentric.net The Humblest Man on the Net