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[Mathel]

The prophercy did not say: "Durkon will genocide all of Dwarfkind" though.

It said: "

When next he [Durkon] returns home, he will bring death and destruction to all of us.

"

The thing is, if the prophercy would be right anyway, that they were lucky it did not come true alredy.
Note the "returns home", not "returns here".
If Durkon created a home somewhere else and then returned to there, he would have somehow brought death and destruction to all of them.
Also bringing death and destruction does not nescessarily mean killing them personaly. It may mean that he will be running from the destruction and seeking shelter.

[Reelya]

If prophecies are bound to happen, the telling Durkon about it would be worse because the whole time he'd know that he was going to "bring death and destruction to all of us" at some point in the future.

If he's going to be the cause of that death and destruction at an unspecified future point, and you can't do anything about that, would it be kinder to let him live with, or without, that knowledge.

[Mathel]

Except that if he knows, he can postpone the fate on his own, making it possible that it happens later than if they just banish him.

Durkon could have just gone to the nearest human city and become a healer there. Then he would be considered at home there and upon his first return to whaterver house he lived in, would bring death and destruction to all of Dwarkind (somehow).

If they told him, he could have kept a nomadic lifestyle, not being home anywhere. Without home to return to, the prophecy could not work.

[Reelya]

Not possible, if prophecies must work, by their nature. e.g. they could only postpone the event, not prevent it. And they were banking on Durkon never voluntarily breaking his oath. So if he did return home it would be involuntarily by definition, meaning it would probably be better for Durkon to be sent out on a unexplained mission rather than worrying about the death and destruction constantly for his entire life.

[Mathel]

But it said home, not that particular mountainhome.

He could have settled somewhere else, moving his home. Then he would go for a walk, and upon returning to his new home, bring death and destruction to all of Dwarfkind.

[Reelya]

idk what's the dwarven term for home? We can't say for sure that the semantics would be exactly the same there as in modern English. Perhaps the term translates as ancestral home / homeland.

Perhaps any Dwarf in that setting (or Dwarfs of Durkon's mentality) would find it inconceivable to consider some house they live in, in Human lands, to be "home". If so, then they could bank on the idea that Durkon would never consider a place he resides in human-controlled lands as home.

[Felissan]

What are the odds they justify not telling Durkon next page?

[Mathel]

That they have an excuse? About 90%.
That they have an excuse that is a valid reason? About 30%.

[Reelya]

Telling him had the very real possibility of making him extra-miserable for not much gain. That's more than 30%.

Alignment plays a definite role here. Telling him might have been more pragmatically sensible, but at the expense of his mental wellbeing. That attitude might have been more aligned with Lawful Evil rather than Lawful Good.

[Mathel]

idk what's the dwarven term for home? We can't say for sure that the semantics would be exactly the same there as in modern English. Perhaps the term translates as ancestral home / homeland.

Perhaps any Dwarf in that setting (or Dwarfs of Durkon's mentality) would find it inconceivable to consider some house they live in, in Human lands, to be "home". If so, then they could bank on the idea that Durkon would never consider a place he resides in human-controlled lands as home.

That is entirely possible. But without warning Durkon, he could return to warn them of some great danger, unwittingly showing the danger the path to them. The danger could be great enough to ignore the banishment.

[scriver]

[

There's really only two reasonable approaches when one has reason to believe there is a genuine prophecy in play.

A. The prophecy will come to pass in the absolute manner in which it was intended, no matter what you do. This is immensely distressing since it suggests prophecies just tell the future and there's no free will. Anyway, there's nothing you can do about it, so just go back to your automaton life and wait for the axe to fall.

I don't see why being able to tell the future true would mean nobody has free will. No matter how many choices you have you can still only pick one. That means that if one can see into the future one can tell which action you will free-willedly choose.

Because a prophecy brings back data with certainty. It's the inherent paradox in seeing your own future in a non-multiverse setting: Once you see it, it changes because you've gained knowledge that you wouldn't have had otherwise, and not just once but continuously. So you can never really see your future because if anything happens that you'd want to change (and you will) then you'll never see anything as it forever shifts through your observation-reaction. It stretches out to infinity.

Not if the vision/prophecy foretold shows the future in which you try to do something about what the prophecy tells you, which is what you try to do after you're aware of the prophecy. To me, that is what happens in Oedipus and other such stories - not that the future is unavoidable, but that the things we do brings about the future. A prophecy that foretells that Oedi will kill his father already takes into account that when Oedifather hears the prophecy he will choose to have Oedipus killed, thereby estranging him from his parents.

If  can see something, then you're either seeing a multiversal copy or you can't truly change your mind. Even if you observe something and change it, it means your "original" plan was a fiction, this outcome was established at the conception of the universe and existed ever since. It was waiting for you to flow down the river of time and reach it.

And if you can't change even once you know, you aren't deciding anything. It just happens. Deterministic universe.

All plans are always fiction, only what happens happens regardless of free will or determinism. Free will is not the same as allpowerful will, or random will. You are constantly barraged by a set of choices and your Everything You decides how you deal with them. But in every choice, you can only choose one action. There doesn't need to be a multiverse for there to be free will, it's just that when one looks forward in a monoverse you will see the exact action people will choose to take in the future, just like when you look back you will only see the actions people chose to take in the past. It does not mean that there is no choice when you take the action, it just means you only make one choice. One can look back and say "what if I did..." but you didn't when provided with the choice to do so. You chose what you chose, and you are going to choose what you are going to choose. The only determining factor is you, but you can only make one choice, can only take one action.

[Mathel]

Even if a prophecy will come to pass, sometimes you can chose how it does. (e.g. Croesus)

The prophecy of priest of Odin said when he next comes home. They bet on the when being never.

As for whether a universe is deterministic, I think it depends on if there is a chance that with all variables the same, events would unfold differently.

The problem I have with self-fuifiling prophercies in deterministic universes is, that they can not happen in a deterministic universe.
You can know what will happen based on current status. The current status says that the prophercy will not come fuifilled.

If the only reason it comes fuifiled is that it was spoken, where did it come from? Was it spoken because it would always happen? That can not be, because it was not going to happen, until it was spoken.

That is, unless the universe really is not deterministic, and the act of speaking the prophecy actually changed the future.
In which case, these self-fuifilling prophecies have to have some magic within them to make them come true.

[Reelya]

The choice you make after hearing the prophecy is already factored into the prophecy itself, as it everyone else's actions.

e.g. Oedipus' father chose how to deal with the prophecy, which is what caused the prophecy to become possible.

Choice and determinism aren't necessarily incompatible. The Self is the thing making the decision. The fact that The Self would always makes the same decision given the exact same inputs doesn't mean we lack free will. Lacking free will implies some "external force" forced you to act the way you did. But there's no external force needed. Atoms move the way atoms want to move, the action comes from inside the atoms themselves.

[Mathel]

That may be so, but where did the prophecy come from in the first place?

[Reelya]

That may be so, but where did the prophecy come from in the first place?

A prediction of the future necessarily also predicts itself. And there is no contradiction there any more than the prediction predicting other things. The prediction being related to the asker is just another event that happened in the chain of future events, and the prediction itself doesn't make a distinction.

Also consider that if it was possible to predict e.g. 1 minute into the future, then each minute also predicts what's going to happen 1 minute after itself. So "before" and "after" become meaningless in that scenario. The entire path was already laid out before you even asked.