Predictamancy

[memnarch]

...

In any universe where every event can be perfectly predicted and one path was always "meant" to occur, it means the story had no point.

The thing is, we're looking at things from outside the universe in question. It's not that one path was "meant" to occur, it's that only one path does occur. There is no "always", either, since again we're looking at it from the side.

Sort of like a maze? There's only one way to get to from start to finish, but there's lots of different possibilities for changing direction?

[drachefly]

The path is still a result of your free will, but it can be predicted with 100% accuracy before you do it.

Again, I feel that even this would be disappointing if it were true, because the end result is really the same as a scenario where you didn't have free will in the first place. In any universe where every event can be perfectly predicted and one path was always "meant" to occur, it means the story had no point.

Take our world and eliminate quantum uncertainty. Some classical model rules all.

Did that transformation eliminate free will? Of course it didn't.

Free will has everything to do with what passes through one's will, which is, when you get down to it, made of stuff. Your will only earns the name 'will' at all because it exists in a lawful universe. Why did you cry that time? There's a huge causal network behind that. The nearer end of that network is the machinery of your starting to cry. A bit further back is the mechanism of the cognition, recognizing a state of mind where you'd cry. A bit further back is your taking inputs that, upon reflection, will put you in such a state of mind. And so on.

If there were capacity to break that chain, your mind would be broken. That isn't free will, it's brain damage.

[Nnelg]

Sort of like a maze? There's only one way to get to from start to finish, but there's lots of different possibilities for changing direction?

Er, no, not really. It's more complex than that.

From an out-of-time perspective, there is only one path: events as they actually happen. But from in in-time perspective... It really is Schrödinger's ambush. There are an infinite number of paths, and they all lead to different places... Except, now you know where the one you DO choose will lead. Because if it didn't, you wouldn't have known that in the first place. It's not that you don't have free will, and are set on a fixed path... It's that you now know what the result of your choices will be.

Free will has everything to do with what passes through one's will, which is, when you get down to it, made of stuff.

Let's not go down that road, please. It is actually irrelevant what the driving nature of one's will is, at least for my argument. The only assumptions I made were that the out-of-time observer sees only the result of the convergence of all possibilities, and that the in-time observer exists within that same convergence. Also, I suppose, that the universe in question does in fact converge on a single timeline.

[0beron]

I think you misunderstood my response Nnelg, I got what you meant and I was simply trying to bridge the 2 perspectives to explain it in both a non-time sense and an in-time sense. Put more simply, in Nnelg's proposition, there is only one path that is ever taken, which the out-of-time observer sees clearly. The in-time participant still exerts their free will to make choices, oblivious to the fact that an out-of-time observer could already see what choice the participant makes.

Now incidentally, the above is kind of my personal/religious belief about how the universe works, but that's not what this is about :p Aaaaand I just wrote another paragraph before having another realization, so I think I have a better way to explain this, if I am understanding correctly.

In Nnelg's theory, the whole of time is like a picture. Static and fixed such that an outside observer could see it's entire path all at once. Like I said above, the characters still have free will, but by looking at this picture you know what they did/do.
In my theory, time is like a movie which you must play or rewind. The outside observer has the power to see the whole thing, but at any given moment of the movie, the observer is uncertain what will occur next.
It's a subtle (and imperfect) distinction I know, but I hope it explains the difference of how I hope "Fate" works in Erfworld.

As for Drache....yup, you officially took it to too high a level for this story :p

[Nnelg]

Hm... I don't see what the difference is here, really. I think you're just confusing the issue by adding a temporal element to your "out-of-time" perspective, though.

I'm thinking of it more in mathspace (for lack of a better term). Any set of initial "initial" conditions in for a universe (even a non-causal one) will either converge on a single point, (a stable universe; it is postulated we exist in one) diverge, (i.e. become effectively nonexistant) or somewhere in between (strange attractors I think they're called, but I'm not a mathematician... the Grandfather Paradox is one of these).

[drachefly]

Free will has everything to do with what passes through one's will, which is, when you get down to it, made of stuff.

Let's not go down that road, please.

Why not? A subjectively deterministic universe would be even more compatible with free will than our quantum universe - not less. The idea that determinism and free will are at odds is the very crux of this argument.

Plus, I wasn't arguing against you. Your approach is highly consistent with a block-universe approach, which again can be perfectly deterministic.

Any set of initial "initial" conditions in for a universe (even a non-causal one) will either converge on a single point, (a stable universe; it is postulated we exist in one) diverge, (i.e. become effectively nonexistant) or somewhere in between (strange attractors I think they're called, but I'm not a mathematician... the Grandfather Paradox is one of these).

Each state can be categorized into one of the following:
1) There is one stable outcome from here (one world. Single attractor with one outcome favored)
2) There are multiple independent stable outcomes (branching. On the boundary of multiple attractors. Only an infinitesimal fraction will fit here)
3) There are multiple mutually dependent outcomes each of which is independently unstable but as a set remain stable (cycles or groups of worlds each of which causes elements of the others, but they are stable against perturbation so they tend toward one canonical most stable set of outcomes. This whole complex is a single attractor of high complexity, and this state is in it)
4) This is in an infinite chain of unstable worlds each of which leads into the next in the chain, which never settles down into a stable outcome. The result of each is wildly dependent on the details of the previous, so it doesn't even converge.

Only this last is a strange attractor.

[Nnelg]

Each state can be categorized into one of the following:
1) There is one stable outcome from here (one world. Single attractor with one outcome favored)
2) There are multiple independent stable outcomes (branching. On the boundary of multiple attractors. Only an infinitesimal fraction will fit here)
3) There are multiple mutually dependent outcomes each of which is independently unstable but as a set remain stable (cycles or groups of worlds each of which causes elements of the others, but they are stable against perturbation so they tend toward one canonical most stable set of outcomes. This whole complex is a single attractor of high complexity, and this state is in it)
4) This is in an infinite chain of unstable worlds each of which leads into the next in the chain, which never settles down into a stable outcome. The result of each is wildly dependent on the details of the previous, so it doesn't even converge.

Only this last is a strange attractor.

Er... No... #2 and #3 are the strange attractors. They converge, but not to a single point.

[bladestorm]

Sorry if I am repeating you Drache, but your post honestly confused me a little. What I am arguing against is the idea that every single tiny action is predetermined and part of Fate. Instead, I support the following idea:
Certain things are fixed and sure to occur, but the path units take to get to that point, as well as details like when and where may change as a result of actions taken by free will. Predictamancy lets you see those fixed events, either devoid of the mutable details, or including some of the mutable details that are subject to change.

Also Predictamancy can see very near future events (seconds ahead) because the actions/decisions involved in bringing those events to pass have already been made (and this aspect could even make use of the oddities of Erfworld time)

This is exacty how I see things,both for the short term and long term predictamancy. Long term predictamancy sounds similar to a dm railroading a plot. Certain things are going to happen, based on the story the dm wants to tell, even if he doesn't know how it is going to get there yet. The player can fight against the 'story outline' as much as he wants but eventually the dm will find a way to get the event to occur. Whether 'fate' in erfworld is a concsious entity or not is yet to be determined, but it does seem like erfworld wants certain events to happen.

Parson may find a way to go against fate, not by directly trying to break it like erfworlders do, but analyzing it and understanding how it works.

Railroading sucks, though. I've had players who were petrified of doing certain things because they thought I would get upset if they changed anything about the world I had set up for them. Quite the opposite, it was fun for me to see how the PC's actions were affecting the world. While there were some actions that were going to take place regardless of what the PC's did, that happened in places where the PC's actions could not affect the outcome. If the PC's are spending all of their time on the west coast, they aren't going to affect the war that has been building up over on the east coast. On at least four occasions, the PC's incited a war, and on at least two, their actions kept a war from breaking out. From my DM perspective, all I had to do was create a world that kept moving. I had the original plot laid out on paper, and after the campaign fell apart from players coming and going, we looked over the notes. I originally had King A holding the item they wanted, but they killed King A (breaking and entering gone wrong, and they assumed the king had plot armour and more hp than he did). Following basic logic, the item that was a key part of the campaign got passed around in the power vacuum, and eventually ended up in 'the wrong hands'. Instead of receiving the item as reward for some asinine quest to the bowels of the planet, they ended up prying it from the still warm fingers of what became a main villain (which the party basically brought to power) after a very cathartic combat. The asinine quest never got accomplished, and the party realized that the item that they were questing for had slipped through their hands early in the campaign, and they were set upon fixing what they had done wrong. The whole part of being fugitives because they had committed regicide complicated matters. It was a thing of beauty. I didn't have to run a plot, I just had to run a world that responded to the party's actions in a consistent and believable action. The only consistencies between the written plot and how the story turned out was that each of the four quest items were eventually recovered, and a huge war did break out. Constituents of the war were completely different, and none of the details of how the items were retrieved were the same. If I were to attempt predictamancy based upon that, so long as I was at least vague with the details, I would have been correct. The first item was retrieved from a king from a certain region. It was actually retrieved from a lesser duke who had used the item to usurp power and make himself a king, but the prediction held. Wanda was Predicted to attune to an Arkentool. No mention of which one, or where it would come from.

[Nnelg]

This isn't railroading, though. That isn't a good metaphor, because it 1. precludes free will and/or 2. implies that some external force is affecting events.

There doesn't have to be an external force effecting events for Prediction to work. All that is required is for an iterating series of causes and effects (even non-causal ones) to eventually settle down to a single series of events; one in which all Predictions happen to be true. That can be done with purely internal forces.

[bladestorm]

So bringing this metaphysical metaphorical conversation back around to the earlier posts, what powers, spells, or abilities would fall within Predictamancy?

[0beron]

Well, to address Blade's comment, we have seen the following confirmed:

• Predictamancers see certain events in the "distant" future. It is implied that certain details such as time and participants are foggy.
• They also see or know certain events during the current day. An ambush will occur, a unit will pass nearby, ect. Again, it seems they may not know details, just the general nature of the event about to occur.
• Lastly, they can see very near future events, like a spit second in advance. They can see where a unit they're looking at is about to be, and in combat they can use this to know which shots they make will be most effective.

[Nnelg]

One thing they probably won't be able to tell you is how likely something is going to be. Including things like "If I do X, will Y happen?".

For stuff like that you'd want a Mathamancer, Signamancer or maybe even a Date-a-mancer (depending on the situation).

[drachefly]

Each state can be categorized into one of the following:
1) There is one stable outcome from here (one world. Single attractor with one outcome favored)
2) There are multiple independent stable outcomes (branching. On the boundary of multiple attractors. Only an infinitesimal fraction will fit here)
3) There are multiple mutually dependent outcomes each of which is independently unstable but as a set remain stable (cycles or groups of worlds each of which causes elements of the others, but they are stable against perturbation so they tend toward one canonical most stable set of outcomes. This whole complex is a single attractor of high complexity, and this state is in it)
4) This is in an infinite chain of unstable worlds each of which leads into the next in the chain, which never settles down into a stable outcome. The result of each is wildly dependent on the details of the previous, so it doesn't even converge.

Only this last is a strange attractor.

Er... No... #2 and #3 are the strange attractors. They converge, but not to a single point.

Absolutely not. #2 is a Limit Cycle. It is definitely not a strange attractor.

If you'll take wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_At ... _attractor "An attractor is called strange if it has non-integer dimension." #2 is decidedly pointlike (in the technical sense of having dimension zero).

[Lamech]

From an out-of-time perspective, there is only one path: events as they actually happen. But from in in-time perspective... It really is Schrödinger's ambush. There are an infinite number of paths, and they all lead to different places... Except, now you know where the one you DO choose will lead. Because if it didn't, you wouldn't have known that in the first place. It's not that you don't have free will, and are set on a fixed path... It's that you now know what the result of your choices will be.

Actually, I had an interesting idea about how to make the schrodinger's ambush happen: Time in Erfworld is already a little screwy. How do we know Erfworld always resolves things in a specific order at all? Suppose time is a lot more screwy than we thought? Suppose Bob is going to ambush Jane as decreed by fate. Bob however is also trying to avoid any fights, and Bob's turn happens before Janes.

1) He sends out his scouts and looks for a good hiding place.
2) Now pause Bob's move.
3) Start Jane's move, she hears that she'll be ambushed, so she decides to change her previous path. And starts her move. Mid-move pause that.
4) Back to terrain generation a at the start of this turn. Fate makes a "ambush tree", the best hiding spot, possible pop in the hex Jane is about to enter. No one has checked that hex so, it didn't need any defined characteristics yet.
5) Restart Bob's turn. The scout he sent out gets reeaaally lucky and spots the ambush tree. So Bob goes to hide there.
6) Restart Jane's turn. She gets ambushed by Bob.


Now where is free will? Bob could have chosen not to use the "ambush tree". It would have been an idiotic choice, but he might have done it. Jane could have doubled back right before entering a random hex. Pointless, but free will. Now what if these things had happened? Fate could try and draft Jim, another warlord. Or if there is no one else around it can just pop some barbarians and dwagons to do its work. Worst case scenario Fate unwinds that whole timeline and never hands out a prediction.

[TazTheTerrible]

I would like to apologize for being partially responsible for starting the free will discussion here. I used the term as a sort of short cut. My issue wasn't actually with the existence or definition of free will, but rather with the matter of predictability.

My key issue was that of a universe with multiple possible "time lines" so to speak and how that relates to predictability and prophecies.

Regardless of whether the universe is completely deterministic or not, my issue is more with the possibility of predictions. Namely: if you can't predict all small scale, short term futures, how can you consistently predict large scale, long term events?

Or to put the question differently: Where do predictions and prophecies come from?

Do they come from some sort of cosmic, non-sentient force that only allows self-consistent prophecies to be revealed? (i.e. prophecies that will come true even if the subjects involved are made aware of them) This seems possible, but it feels a bit off to me. Seems like you'd get a lot more nonsensical or useless prophecies out of that than seems to be the case. Things like: "today three of your enemies will be wearing a hat" and the like, things that are true but don't matter much to people. This also doesn't quite seem to jive with the theme of the story.

What I'm getting much more of a feel for is option two: Prophecies coming from a conscious force, actively shaping the world into events that are narratively meaningful, and the reason why certain fates are fixed and others aren't is that this force isn't quite omnipotent. It can mess with the stats, the numbers and the rolls, but it operates within the constrictions of the world. That's the sort of feeling I'm getting from all of it.

[drachefly]

Well, if we go with the 'block universe' notion, then big events could reach out backward and leave tendrils in the past that only a predictamancer can pick up on. These predictions are a part of the event as surely as its more normal causes.

[TazTheTerrible]

That would still leave open the question of the purpose of prophecy and its effects on the world.

Events that reach back would cause some sort of recursive effect, surely. So if we go on the assumption that this is a non-conscious force, simply re-iterating itself until it finds a stable pattern where all prophecies are true, then that means that the world is largely shaped by the force of prophecy. Which leaves the question of "to what end?". Is prophetic structure in itself a purpose?

A perhaps slightly different interpretation of the block universe would be to think of the predicted events as fixed points and everything that happens around them as mutable. Possibly predictamancy exists as an attractor mechanism for these points. Again though, this raises questions of why. All the big predictions seem to have narrative meaning, things that matter to and are interpretable by conscious minds.

Of course, this could be a matter of simple contamination by the author(s) because of a sense of "that's just how prophecy works". If we had to look for an explanation though, I'd say a conscious force seems like the more likely possibility.

[Housellama]

That would still leave open the question of the purpose of prophecy and its effects on the world.

Events that reach back would cause some sort of recursive effect, surely. So if we go on the assumption that this is a non-conscious force, simply re-iterating itself until it finds a stable pattern where all prophecies are true, then that means that the world is largely shaped by the force of prophecy. Which leaves the question of "to what end?". Is prophetic structure in itself a purpose?

A perhaps slightly different interpretation of the block universe would be to think of the predicted events as fixed points and everything that happens around them as mutable. Possibly predictamancy exists as an attractor mechanism for these points. Again though, this raises questions of why. All the big predictions seem to have narrative meaning, things that matter to and are interpretable by conscious minds.

Of course, this could be a matter of simple contamination by the author(s) because of a sense of "that's just how prophecy works". If we had to look for an explanation though, I'd say a conscious force seems like the more likely possibility.

I'm going to go with the Doctor here. "It's more like a big bowl of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff".

Taz's fixed points theory is the most consistent with what we've seen thus far. The endpoint could be considered an attractor in that no matter how you get there, you're going to get there no matter what. Erfworld is definitely deterministic, in that Causality is strictly enforced. What isn't determined is how the characters choose to view those events. Cause and effect follows from that, meaning View X will lead to Action A, View Y will lead to Action B, etc. There's your Block Universe with free will, right there.

What Predictamancers see is a single fixed point. It's an extremely limited event. What they see involves a very limited number of actors, relatively speaking. Maybe they see a lot of possibilities and maybe they just see the event itself, but we know they don't see the path to it. To go back to the Doctor's metaphor, what you have is two ends of a string. You know where the event is starting, because you're there right now, and you know where the event is ending, because it's been Predicted.

Here's the thing. The reason that free will is important isn't just because of the primary actors involved. The reason it's important is because that string gets tangled up in a lot of other strings in that big bowl of time-y wimey stuff going from one end to the other. That's where choices matter. There are only a limited number of fixed points, and a whole lot of stuff. This means that the possible permutations of that stuff around those fixed points is, while not infinite, very large. Compare that to the number of fixed points, and that's why free will matters.

As far as what all this means, the theme of the story thus far has been about choices. Fate has written certain points in the story, for some unknowable reason, like the Titans willed it to be so. The world that the characters live in is extremely mechanistic. Their choices are greatly limited as compared to our own. Within this framework, you also have the play of emotions, most prominently Love. Predictions are very limited. They aren't what defines a character as a person. It's everything else that leads to those moments that makes them who they are. Fate can only force what a person does. It cannot force who a person is. That's the purpose of Predictamancy. To help frame those choices and give them context.

[Housellama]

I just realized I forgot to address a point.

What I'm getting much more of a feel for is option two: Prophecies coming from a conscious force, actively shaping the world into events that are narratively meaningful, and the reason why certain fates are fixed and others aren't is that this force isn't quite omnipotent. It can mess with the stats, the numbers and the rolls, but it operates within the constrictions of the world. That's the sort of feeling I'm getting from all of it.

This reminds me of the Battlespace discussion. To recap, Battlespaces only appear when units from two or more different Sides are going to encounter one another. They are formed by Natural Predictamancy. That's a fact confirmed by canon. It was proposed, essentially, Erfworld knows the choices that are going to be made and thus creates a Battlespace based on that. That doesn't deny the existence of free will, just implies that there is a non-linear time mechanic in play (which we already knew).

Actual Predictamancy could be the same way. It's not Fate forcing something to happen, but a non-linear process showing the results of the decisions that a free willed actor chose to make. You find the same kind of thinking in theology, justifying the seeming paradox of God's omniscience and the idea of the elected with man's freedom of choice. Currently I don't see a way to distinguish between forced fate and non-linear choice reveal.

[Shai_hulud]

This discussion seems to ignore Delphies claim that non fated units don't have any "fate" at all. Wanda and Jillian have a fate, not other people. Everyone else can do pretty much whatever they want as long as it doesn't change those two peoples fates.