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[hops]

Well, what I'm essentially saying is that prophecies don't necessary erode the free will of people in the world. All they do is provide a trend of how things would go. It's like statistics, but more magical.

[Madman198237]

xD

This discussion, if you broaden it like that, becomes meaningless, because ultimately the kind of prophecy we're dealing with is entirely dependent on the AUTHOR, whose world this is.

It could be like Harry Potter, where the Department of Mysteries has row upon row of dusty spheres, fully of prophecies that never came true. Or it could be like Greek mythology, where the prophecy is ALWAYS true, but you may not understand it.

Or it could be "You're screwed, everybody, no matter how many times you break the fourth wall. Prophecy rules your life, and you are going to follow the prophecies."

[Mathel]

Well the difference is that in causal determinism, everything has to have at least 1 cause that happened earlier. Not so in predeterminism.

As for whether the world of OOTS is or is not deterministic in any sense, well it is theologicaly deterministic by the author.

Any other world with prophecies? Depends on the world. But if you are within it, you can not know if it is deterministic or not, so it is safer to bet it is not and try to change the future, or at least make the prophecies come out in the least bad way possible.

If the prophecy will come true anyway, you may at least try to make it as not bad as possble.

Basicaly, I belive that if prophecies always came true, they would be more like Mister Metal Slime Hunter's option B

B. The prophecy is some sort of magical heuristic set that pushes on reality in order to reach any eligible end-state. Durkon goes outside for a second and triggers a landslide, Durkon spiritually "leaves home" and invokes Thor's wrath upon the whole city when he tries to repent, Durkon's vengeful soul breaks free from the phylactery you imprisoned it in a thousand years ago and exterminates the dwarfs. Something that fulfills the sense implied by the words of the prophecy.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

But then what was the cause of the prophecy? Since no event can cause itself and event B was the direct result of the prophecy, it would have to have a cause in the past.

But that is not what a prophecy is. Prophecy is a prediction of a future event.

There are only 2 possibilities for a self fulfilling prophecy.

1) The prophecy spell chooses a future at random and then enforces it by magic.

2) The prophecy spell searches the possible futures for one that will stay true even if it is said.

Both versions actually change the future, making them impossible.

In a deterministic universe, the current status has all future statii coded within it. But in order for a prophecy to be self-fulfilling, the event B has to be coded in at the point when the prophecy is made.
That means that the universe was not truly deterministic before the prophecy was made, because a future status of the universe was not coded within it.

The thing I keep saying is that self-fulfilling prophecies can not exist in deterministic universes. In a universe, whose future can be changed, it is no problem.

...not really? You could say that contradictory universes are not valid, and then out of all the possible universes, only a valid one is chosen. Closed time loops will be present within some of these universes if you choose your physics right. You have to imply the existence (or at least hypothetical/counterfactual existence) of other universes (or possible universes), but you can salvage a deterministic prophetic universe out of the mess.

Exactly!

In fact, the prophet is more constrained than the person making up a random sentence, since the prophet must also produce a sentence which "becomes true" in the future. so they have very narrow constraints, in fact. If someone babbling a random sentence (without the constraints of being true) is constrained by determinism, then so is the prophet.

Someone speaking at random can and does affect the future. That doesn't mean they're outside the constraints of determinism. Neither is a prophet who also speaks a sentence.

The problem is, that in order to create a self-fulfilling prophecy, the prophet chooses a sentence which is not going to "become true" in the future. That is, before uttering the prophecy. After he says it, it is now going to become true.

Seems relevant.

"Change" is a word that makes sense within time, and only within time.  One observes a macroscopically persistent object, like, say, a lamp, and compares its state at 7:00am to its state at 7:02am.  If the two states are different, then we say that "the lamp" changed over time.

In Timeless Physics, I observed that, while things can change from one time to another, a single moment of time is never observed to change:

    At 7:00am, the lamp is off.  At 7:01am, I flip the switch...  At 7:02am, the lamp is fully bright.  Between 7:00am and 7:02am, the lamp changed from OFF to ON.

    But have you ever seen the future change from one time to another?  Have you wandered by a lamp at exactly 7:02am, and seen that it is OFF; then, a bit later, looked in again on the "the lamp at exactly 7:02am", and discovered that it is now ON?

[Mathel]

Ok, Fruitclutter Woodward, after reading the article from mr. Yudkowsky, I realised that I was making the mistake of trying to calculate
the future while skipping the past.

So I have been wrong.

[scriver]

Fruitclutter Woodward

Is that what it means?

[Mathel]

Well, at least according to the language page on df-wiki, it is the translation of his name from dwarven.

[Reelya]

There's also quantum mechanics and relativity to take into account.

With quantum mechanics there is time symmetry. e.g. at the molecular level there are experiments where doing something 5 minutes from now changes what readings you get 5 minutes before now, not the other way around.

Also, with relativistic time dilation, anything traveling at the speed of light experiences zero subjective time. e.g. a photon emitted at one point and absorbed at another point considers that to be the same exact time, not past and future. A classic experiment that expresses this is the photon double-slit experiment where whether there are one or two slits later, then the photon knows what path to take before. In these types of experiment, the photon seems to paradoxically "know" it's future at the moment it was emitted. That's resolved by understanding that time is relative. What is "past and future" in one point of reference is the same point in time according to another point of reference.

So the thing with prophecies, if they were at all possible, is that they don't follow classical newtonian physics common sense of cause and effect, they'd follow the weird "there is no such thing as the present" logic of quantum mechanics and relativity.

In a setting where information can flow backwards in time it makes no sense to adhere to a classical physics idea that only past causes are allowed. The prophet is only tapping into that backwards information flow, the information flow was already there, meaning the future in that setting already affects the past, so there is no contradiction. Causes can be in the future.

[smjjames]

Quantum mechanics in DnD? Wut?

Also, new page up

[Mathel]

Yeah. And Belkar is right. AGAIN If the prophecy was not told, this particular path of events would not have happened.

But who is to say that a worse one would not have happened as well?

[Trekkin]

Yeah. And Belkar is right. AGAIN If the prophecy was not told, this particular path of events would not have happened.

But who is to say that a worse one would not have happened as well?

Odin apologists, presumably; vague, hypothetical even worse futures are kind of one of the stock defenses of divine stupidity, and OOTS' gods are as strong an argument for ur-priests as you could want, so expect a lot of "mysterious ways" rhetoric in the epilogue.

[Imic]

It's entirely possible that the gods are setting this up secretly, unbeknownst to the other pantheons, so that something can happen.

[Reelya]

Yeah. And Belkar is right. AGAIN If the prophecy was not told, this particular path of events would not have happened.

But who is to say that a worse one would not have happened as well?

That begs the question of whether gods are outside causality however. e.g. if the future is deterministic and you know the future, you also know what actions you are going to take. This includes gods.

[Mathel]

They probably are not, but I still can wonder what the path that was not chosen would lead to.

[Blade Master Model 42]

Considering the gods wound up surprised by Hel's ploy, I kind of doubt that the gods of the setting are omniscient. This being the case, they probably have a limited capacity to see into the future to hand out these prophecies.