Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Mathel]

The problem with that if it is truly a self-fuifiling prophecy, that is, a prophecy that would not come true unless it was spoken, then the act of predicting it changes the future.

Lets say events are heading for outcome A.

Now------------------------------> A


Then a self-fuifiling prophecy comes and derails them towards outcome B.

Now----------> Prophecy -\                   A
                             \
                               ------------------> B

The problem with that is, that in a deterministic universe, the future can not be changed.

So, let's say that the "Now" is Durkon's inauguration.
"A" is Durkon going home and nothing happening for 20 years.
"B" is Durkon being vampirised and bringing doom.

In a deterministic universe, no matter how you tried, you would only ever predict outcome A. That is, Durkon going home and nothing happening.

The only way to be able to predict B is that it would be that it is already going to happen.
But in order to predict that, you would have to already know that you will predict that.
But where you got that information? How did you know that you were going to predict something that would not happen unless you predicted it?

Predictions independant on themselves are fine of course, because they would be true no matter what.

[Reelya]

The issue with that is the idea that "events are heading for outcome A".

The derail because of the prophecy was an unavoidable derail, the same as any event that would have occured anyway. So if there was any "rail" that points at "outcome A" it was an illusion, since the event of receiving the prophecy was also a knowable event in the future.

Things don't change when you receive the prophecy, the prophecy itself is just another event in the pre-determined rails of fate itself.

The only thing special about the prophecy is that whatever is given to you there must be both accurate, and lead to its own conclusion.

[Felissan]

The "When the goat turns, red strikes true" prophecy from book 1 ended up being true because it was taken into account by Roy - if he had completely ignored it, it would have ended up being wrong.

[Reelya]

That's how it works in literature. The justification is that Roy taking it into account was already taken into account by the prophecy creator. If Roy wouldn't take it into account then a different prophecy would have been given ("When the goat turns, red strikes true" would have been an invalid prophecy), one which Roy would have taken into account.

[Mathel]

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.

[Reelya]

Determinism also resolves the issue of self-causing prophecies.

e.g. in a deterministic universe, given a choice of paths, it's known which one a person is going to pick.

similarly, a prophet could make any number of possible prophecies that could turn out to be true (taking themself into account), but the prophet must pick one. The prophet is constrained to pick a certain one the same as the person choosing a single path from multiple alternatives.

See? It's fundamentally no different. Given all possible prophecies, you could divide them into ones that come true and ones that don't. The prophet can only give you one prophecy from the set of "true prophecies", however their decision is constrained in the same manner as the path-taker. A path-taker also changes the future based on which path they take, however determinism means which path they take can be predicted. Equally, which prophecy the prophet gives can be predicted by the same manner, a prophecy is fundamentally no different to just choosing a path. A path-chooser and the prophet both affect the future, however their decision is locked in by determinism itself, so neither is "changing" the future.

So there is no contradiction there.

There's actually a fair bit of wisdom there. The act of trying to predict the future naturally changes the future, e.g. an oracle scrying future events affects those events, too, since the Oracle is themselves part of the system that's been scryed. You see the same thing come up in sociology, where publishing predictive polls affects the polls themselves or in quantum mechanics with the observer effects or with weird future and past stuff with particles.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/gvy394/when-the-future-helps-determine-the-past

[Mathel]

There are 2 problem with that.

In what you wrote, the oracle has to do first decide the prophecy and then check whether it comes true.
If he first checked which prophecies come true and then chose from them, there would be no chance for self-fulfiling ones.

The difference is, that the chooser has to choose path from a certain constraints.

The oracle is apparently choosing a path, which is out of the constraints given to him, act of which expands the constraints.


Also, even non-self-fulfilling prophecies take some time. If the oracle had to predict that he will predict it, he would also have to predict that he will predict that he will predict it. But he would also have to predict that. So, a prophecy reliant on itself would take infinite time to give, because the oracle would have to do infinite levels of prediction first.

[Reelya]

It doesn't matter whether there are e.g. 4 paths or a million, determinism still applies. Assuming the prophecy is in language, it can be broken down into a finite set of information, therefore there are only finite possible things that could be said. So it's like paths except there are many paths at the junction. Determinism doesn't care whether you have 2 choice or millions of choices. e.g. when you utter any sentence you have millions of choices. The same as the prophet. So it's not different in a quantifiable level to choosing ... any normally trivial thing.

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.

Some who babbles a purely random sentence affects the future, but they are definitely not outside determinism. The "set of possible sentences spoken by a prophet" is a subset of the "set of all possible sentences". So if the random babbler is constrained by determinism, then so must the prophet be, since what the prophet can say is merely a subset of that.

[Mathel]

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.

[Reelya]

His choice of setence was already predictable by the same means by which prophecy is possible however. There is no such thing as what was going to be true "before" uttering the prophecy.

What was already true was that the prophet would deliver that specific prophecy setting those specific events in motion, no different to anyone else choosing anything in a deterministic universe. There was no "before".

e.g. if an oracle scrys future visions then those visions are already taking the act of scrying into account. It's already a done deal at the time that the prophecy is made. The prophet might make a "decision" to present the information one way or another, but that decision is already taken into account by what the prophet is capable of scrying. The same as any other choice made by any human. The act of scrying doesn't discriminate between the prophet's choices and anyone else's.

[Mathel]

If it was already true, then what caused it? Since this is supposed to be a deterministic universe, it had to have at least 1 cause.

And please stop editing your posts while I am responding to them.

[Reelya]

If you have a deterministic prophecy then the only logically consistent ones are ones that are self-causing, because any prophecy which causes the future to be at all different from the prophecy is invalid. So if someone is capable of prophesizing the future then the only world they could possible see is one in which the act of prophesizing itself is consistent with the future world (since the act of making the prophecy is already accounted for in the viewed future). All other worlds are ruled out.

[Mathel]

There are also those prophecies, that are true no matter whether they are spoken or not.

If we go with OOTS, the Oracle telling Durkon he would be returning home posthumosly was such prophecy.

But I just realised that we may be using different meanings of determinism.

Look at the Wiki

What I mean is causal determinism, nomological specifically, which basicaly means that every event was exactly caused by previous events.
You probably mean predeterminism, which is the idea that all events are determined in advance.

[hops]

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.

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.

In such a situation as B, you should probably try to game the system by moving everyone into another city and having Durkon intentionally collapse the old cavern afterwards. It might not work but it's all you've got, really.

Fate, my man.

The way I understand how free will works in DnD is that there is a certain flow of time, otherwise oracles would be out of a job. It's like trying to kill Skynet in Terminator, you can keep altering the variables and delay or even alter the prophecy, but the fates will twist events so that the prophecy will come true in some way, sooner or later, and it requires an even greater force still, one possibly beyond divine power or just being really damn lucky, to destroy a prophecy entirely.

For example, it may be foretold to you that your loved one will die in the next year. That could mean that your wife will bite the dust, or maybe you're a crafy sonuvabitch and trick a succubus into charming you on New Year's Eve and then she promptly dies. BOth way still fulfills the prophecy.

[Madman198237]

The function of the two is identical, though.

To butt in on your discussion, whether it's predetermined or "casually" determined, everything is going to happen in a set way, because the previous events that lead up to this event all happened the same way, etc.

Basically, if you take Event A, and say it affects events B and C, which both affect Event D, event D will ALWAYS happen the same unless you change event A, because B and C must remain the same.

But the only way to change A is to change the events that preceded A, but you can't, because to do that you'd have to change the events that lead to those, and so on and so on until you realize that in any universe that is close enough to the same as ours you MUST have the same trains of events, because in order to change ANYTHING you'd have to change the FIRST event, which would fundamentally change the entire universe.