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[Siquo]

((I was kind of wondering where Armok was during this battle, as it is 'his kind of thing'. TNME is doing a great job, though!))

[TheNewerMartianEmperor]

(Thanks for that!)

[Dragooble]

[Tradanbattlan]

John. I realise you may not see us in flesh and blood, and may not even trust us but remember this.

They do not control you. They never will.

[Armok]

((Damn, my internet conection sudenly decided to act up, but now this's done anywyas!))((DISCLAIMER: Some of the arguing techniques used here are intellectual "dirty moves", and in addition the obviousness of the world being psychological rather than reductionist in nature changes many things. Thus, the arguments in this post are not necessarily applicable to reality. ))

This city is happy, artificially so.  The purpose of existence is happiness, and thus we are utopia!

Combat opernadii; Deconstruction:
Wikipedia defines Happiness as:

Happiness is a state of mind or feeling characterized by contentment, love, satisfaction, pleasure, or joy.^[1] A variety of philosophical, religious, psychological and biological approaches have striven to define happiness and identify its sources.
Philosophers and religious thinkers often define happiness in terms of living a good life, or flourishing, rather than simply as an emotion. Happiness in this older sense was used to translate the Greek Eudaimonia, and is still used in virtue ethics.
While direct measurement of happiness presents challenges, tools such as The Oxford Happiness Questionnaire have been developed by researchers. Positive psychology researchers use theoretical models that include describing happiness as consisting of positive emotions and positive activities, or that describe three kinds of happiness: pleasure, engagement, and meaning.
Research has identified a number of attributes that correlate with happiness: relationships and social interaction, extraversion, marital status, employment, health, democratic freedom, optimism, religious involvement, income and proximity to other happy people.
Happiness economics suggests that measures of public happiness should be used to supplement more traditional economic measures when evaluating the success of public policy.

Happiness is complex and has many facets, it's not as simple as the concentration of a certain chemical, but requires many different emotions, certain long term properties of ones actual life, and possibly spiritual components.

Combat opernadii; Refute claim "This city is happy": The drugs consumed by these citizens does not grant them happiness, only shallow enjoyment if even that. Those are not the same thing, and while certain aspects of happiness, such as causing the subject to repeat actions winch grant it or facial expressions, others such as aesthetic appeal, altruistic acts of love or a intellectually justifiable sense of meaningfulness, are absent.

Combat opernadii; Refute claim "The purpose of existence is happiness": Why would this be the case? First of all, talking about a purpose of existence in general is nonsensical, as existence is not a created thing. (even if there is a god, that god had to exist defore it could create anything, thus it could still not have created existence-as-such.) The concept tat comes closest to the common usage of "purpose of existence" is that of a Supergoal; the one and only correct by definition utility function towards winch all else is just a means.
It has been proved mathematically that all goal oriented behaviour can be described with an utility function, and thus all creatures can be said to have a supergoal of some sort. However, humanlike minds (and so far, it would seem that every mind that exists in this realm is near human) are very complex. They are never rigid constants like happiness or survival alone, nor are they empty labels like "good" or "right". They are made from complex values interacting in complex ways. Thou Art Godshatter. Thirdly, another fact of humanlike minds is that they have some measure or unknown supergoal content that even themselves do not know about, but that needs to be discovered and then followed.

If the purpose of existence is survival, then there is no need for you to fight.  Simply wait until the next recursion.  The repetition of history ensures that entropy is reversed, and that the universe never ends.  In the meantime, we can be happy.  There is no difference, chemically, between seratonin from an accomplishment, and that from a pill.

Nihilistic support!:  All accomplishment is rendered useless, all reason is false in the end.  "I am Ozymandius, King of Kings!" you say, but all I see are the remnants of a statue in the sand.

Combat opernadii; counterfactualize by premise: The purpose of existence isn't survival.

Combat opernadii; Statistical Fact: Given for each iteration a nonzero chance of breaking the pattern, no mater how small, that chance will happen before an infinite number of recursions have passed. The cyclicality is not perfect, and the universe of complex enough that no chance is ever truly infinitely unlikely, thus the probability is non-zero.

Combat opernadii; dismissal as irrelevant: There does not need to be some light of objective morality shining from above to create meaning, the very observable light created by myself in my own heart, the supergoal, suffice just fine for that. The truth value of nihilism is irrelevant; it is the truly meaningless thing here.

None of the people in the city matter, anyway.  Why is their well-being so important to you?  The fact of the matter is, is that you can't be sure that any of this is real.  They do not communicate with you.  They cannot.  I can.

That makes me a part of the Other, the part of creation that is not your concious mind.  If you think about it, we are the only things in the world that matter.  Everything else may as well be an illusion.  There is no reason to help that which is not real.

Combat opernadii; obsolatize concept: Real? Could you care to define this concept, preferable algebraically?
"Real" is an artefact, a word from universes that have insurmountable constraints posed on location and causality by the laws of physics, it is used to refer to the universe the speaker happen to be in, and is granted special status because the speaker can never leave it or communicate with those outside it. In a place like this, governed by mental laws rather than physical ones, where time is not linear, and where a change in perspective can mean change from one world to another, the concept is simply obsolete.

Combat opernadii; motivate: I have all reason to believe that once your chemical curse is lifted, they will be able to communicate just fine. There is no reason to believe they are not sentient, and my sense of what is right tells me that I should set them free. Besides, if they were so unimportant, you wouldn't care to oppress them.

Combat opernadii; Refute claim "That makes me a part of the Other, the part of creation that is not your concious mind.  If you think about it, we are the only things in the world that matter. Everything else may as well be an illusion.  There is no reason to help that which is not real.": My conscience makes no discrimination between real or not real, solid or illusory. In fact, if those qualities exist at all they are just another form of weakness and oppression, just one more reason to protect them and try to set them free.
Being made of matter, concious mind, or unconscious mind dosn't matter, it's merely a question of substance and origin. Entities that have individual actions, thoughts, feelings, motivations, and a complex behaviour, they are all quite clearly their own individuals, and questions of media is secondary.

INITIATIVE:

Combat opernadii; assert status: My hat is cooler than yours.

Combat opernadii; Assert opponent self defeat: You are stumbling over your own toes. Your goals are inconsistent; you concern yourself mainly with the doings and state of the city  people, yet you disregard them as  unimportant. Your arguments are inane, fumbling around a general concept with no sense of direction.
You claim to want one thing, but by being an anthropomorphic personification you give your enemies a face to fight, something that has been shown in many many experiments so be one of the strongest factors in what will let people fight something. Hoist by your own petard, you contradict your own existence. You shouldn't exist.

[The Mad Engineer]

((Um.  Give me a minute to formulate a response.  Or a day.  I'm glad this is only the first boss.))

Id:  100 <-2,986,567,321?>  The Dream is in hypothetical danger!

[Armok]

((See? I told you I were good at this! You've got untill whenever I get to the computer tomorrow.))

[The Mad Engineer]

Emergency Retort!
“I do not believe you understand what I am referring to, John.  When I say that they do not matter, I’m not describing their station as peons or peasant folk.  I literally mean that their minds are not factually proven to exist.  As to your claims about the motive behind my actions, I am not a physical entity.  I am but a thought.  I exist only to plague you, and to remind you of the futility of morality and ethics.

Let’s review the facts about this place.
When I say that you are “real”, I mean to say that your mind exists.  You are a unit entity.  “You think, therefore you are”, and all that jazz.  Now, one could make the claim that nothing else exists, and that everything is but in your mind.  That cannot be true, not in the definitions we have established.
You are a unit entity, meaning that you are able to observe yourself.  If we are to encompass the unknown world and the memories forgotten within that definition, then you are no longer a unit entity.  If there is some part of you that you do not know about, or cannot access, then it is not a part of what makes you YOU, the unit consciousness.
There are parts of existence then, that seem to follow some order, are not entirely random, and are not part of you.  That can all be defined as “Other”.  This includes everything that you do not observe, including the future, your forgotten memories, and the other beings that you interact with.  There is a chance that it does not exist, and this is but a moment frozen in time without future or present; but let’s discard that – for now.
This “other” could be a God, perhaps, creating a world with two conscious beings – the observed, and the observer - you.  Or it could be an ordered universe that obeys empirical laws, and you are but a biological neural net without purpose, and without importance, since both words would then be meaningless.  It could be a computer program or something similar, which entails a world above this one, which leads to further problems.  The past itself isn’t concrete.  This whole reality may have been created five billion years ago, five seconds, or never at all.  The future isn’t even guaranteed; the world may end at the completion of this sentence.

Or not.  What we then reach is the conclusion of absolute uncertainty, the wonderful word of Tock.  You have heard this phrase before, and you will again, or at least that is what your memories tell you (Which may also be engineered).

Of course, this begs the question, “What is the point?”  Of course, one could argue that this question itself is meaningless, but that is relying upon the assumption that the world is empirical, which is actually preferable to uncertainty, since it implies less belief in other entities besides yourself.  In the other cases, however, wherein the world you see is designed, it requires the question of a purpose.  What is the reason of the Other?  To teach you?  Or to torture you?

Now, you might wonder why I state the obvious, and what it has to do with our current discussion.  No matter what happens, uncertainty will exist.  The facts inherent in that there exists you, and that there exists the Other, are the only axioms of reality.  It means that, unless you can construct it using these axioms, there is no concrete philosophical reason for morality.  And even if you die one day, and discover, lo and behold!  That there is an afterlife, you will never be certain that it is truly there.  You could be in a coma.  You could be in Hell.  If you become a God, and take over all that is creation, you will never be certain that it is truly all of creation.  You could be a toy in a larger game of gods.

You will never know the truth.  “The truth is, that the truth is terrible!  There exists no future, no tower, no goal!  You burnt the world, and you killed it.  We will forever feast upon your guilt, your failure.””

The Dream has become enraged!

“And what about your purpose, eh?  You fight for the broken one, the Runaway.  She is an interesting mind, to be sure.  Both parts pessimistic and optimistic.  Our scientists must study her, sometime.  You will never be sure if she truly loves you.  Or if she even exists.  You will hurt her again.  And she will hurt you.  One day you will find yourself facing off another theory, only to find that it is your first creation.”

[TheNewerMartianEmperor]

This is Sphinx, Initiating Exististential Counter-Strike.

"That is not a reviewing of facts, but a meaningles diatribe by a fading phantasm. Nevertheless, I shall humour you. The past and future may not be concrete, but not treating them as liable to happen is quite frankly, a futile endeavour. You must accept that time moves, otherwise nothing would ever get done, and since there is as I speak a city around me, it would seem that someone or something built it. That would require time. We can point to the things all around us and say this requires time to build, thus quantifying that the time to build them must have existed.

As for this other, it's a name assigned to disparate autonomous systems and the subconcious. It's a name given to a variety of individual things that have existence seperate from each other. It is just a part of this world, being the worlds impact on me, the subconcious, and the things locked away. Not deserving of attribution to some mal- or bene-volent entity. It has no purpose, it just is.

Now for the point:  In empiricism, the point is what I make, being as there is nothing else, any goal that I were to choose, any padagrim that I were to take upon as my own would be by definition better then the one that does not exist, and I choose to fight, to learn, to know. In the world that is designed, I choose to find the path to whatever meaning or purpose this world has, even if it may be just that not doing so would be... rather boring, in fact.

As for your axioms, one does not exist. There is ever only me. The facts of the matter is that I must treat my perceptions as being, by and large, real, otherwise nothing would get done. I don't see just why you fear uncertainanty so, without it we'd have nought reason to do anything, instead acting out out lives like puppets that can see the strings. if I die tomorrow, and there is an afterlife, then there is an afterlife. If I am but in a coma, then that's that. If there is no way to know, then there's no reason to care.

Now, you want the truth? You can't handle the truth, and you never could! I may have burnt the world, but now my will is to see it alive. As for the theory, I'd say that it is undeserving of the title, just being a hypothesis that ran away. It does not fit the facts, so it muct be torn down, so that another that fits more closely to the facts as they are can be constructed; and if you and the rest of your bonepicking kin dare to oppose me... we may just have a murder of crows.

-By the way, I may never be sure, but I still trust her, and if that trust is broken, then so be it. I do not fight for her alone, but I still fight for her."

-Where there is life, there is hope.

[Armok]

((ok, finaly here now, working on a response... this is fun.))

[Armok]

I do not believe you understand what I am referring to, John.  When I say that they do not matter, I’m not describing their station as peons or peasant folk.  I literally mean that their minds are not factually proven to exist.  As to your claims about the motive behind my actions, I am not a physical entity.  I am but a thought.  I exist only to plague you, and to remind you of the futility of morality and ethics.

I understand quite well what you are referring to.
Lets, for the sake of argument, assume that everything except myself is indeed simply controlled as a roleplay of some single malevolent entity, some mad thing engineering all experience. All the persons I appear to see around me would simply be puppets role-played by this entity. In order to do this believably, with all the different personalities I see around me, this entity have to consider what the entity played would experience if they existed, and how they might react to that stimuli. This include imagining their thoughts, emotions, anguish, joys, actions, and reasoning about their subjective experience so they can appear to speak about it to me. In fact, in doing all this, and as an absolute requirement to making it believable at all, the entity would have to make an entire simulation in their mind, and each messing round with the results of tis simulation would reduce its believability. Thus, if there appears to be a person that show all the signs characteristic as such or even something whose non-personhood could be reasonably doubted, there must somewhere be a simulation of it, and one that is only manipulated rarely and subtly if at all. If the person appear to be in a certain state, and can be reasoned with about it and all the other subtle things I that can be observed and interacted with, that means the simulation in actuality IS in that state. If the person seems intelligent, the simulation needs to be intelligent. If the person seems to reason about "I think therefore I am", then the simulation would have had to reason about that. Such a simulation easily fit all my criteria for being a person, and as it is the thing I actually communicate when I consider myself to be communicating with the person, the simulation IS that person.
Not only cant you create something that appears to be a person under close inspection, but isn't, but the very notion of such a thing is nonsense, because the person IS the complicated behaviours I observe.

As for plaguing me, you are failing that to; this is both fun and rewarding, and I have no real worry of failure.
Morality is not futile, for it is  directions and not a binary goal, so it can be followed no matter how far the distance travelled is. And it is internal to myself, not a light shining from above, and as such it is by definition, it as an axiom, not an answer.

---

I will accept that I exist, and that something that is not me exist, although we seem to need a better definition of "me". For example, I would not count the past scavenger, whose memories I do not posses and who were evil and unlike me in many personality traits to be the same person in any meaning as the one speaking with you now. But considering an entity consisting of a blend of memories and traits from each, wich may well have existed or will come to exist at some time, I am not sure if to classify that as "me" or not, although upon observing the consequences of such a blend the classification would probably be obvious.

I will also accepts that no probability ever has a certainty of 1, for that is an infinite certainty, and thus would require an infinite amount of observations to ever reach.
There is always the possibility one might be a Boltzman brain, but in that case the reasoning process used to reach all these conclusions is most likely invalid, and thus it is unhelpfull to consider it for most practical purposes.

What I do NOT agree on however is that this would entitle one to throw up ones hands and declare that existence is completely unpredictable. No probabilities are 0, but they may be arbitrarily small, and not all probabilities are the same. One can still say that MOST LIKELY I will not cease to exist the next second, MOST LIKELY my experiences are not the result of random noise because then they wouldn't be so orderly. MOST LIKELY the majority of my memories actually happened. And for each statement, the probability that one is wrong increases, but the probability that they all are wrong shrinks into irrelevance. No probability is 0, but it may well be one in a gogolplex, and in practice there is no difference.

Also you forgot a few axioms: in addition to me existing, and the other existing, what also exists is maths/logic, as it is a requirement for the complex process needed for there to be a me. There is also knowledge of certain PROPERTIES of the me; that I experience certain things, that I contain certain memories, and that I uphold certain beliefs and principles, and that I can reason according to certain laws of logic.

As per my previous argument, with a few irrelevant exception scenarios like being a Boltzman brain, having memories of something that clearly seems like people and the existence of the other together implies that people like that actually exist.

Giving this conclusion, as well as the axiom of me existing, as well as the contents of me, one can indeed conclude morality:
The contents of my mind, morality is defined as certain types of actions in interaction with other people, most importantly treating them like they would want to be treated if they knew everything I know at the moment and had their full mental capabilities. This morality is not some outside influence that "should" be followed; it is a simple property of my minds, I act acording to what I consider to be moral because I WANT to, not because it serves some higher purpose. Given this, I can and will indeed follow these principles as far as I can, "good" is only an empty label, I'm after Utilons, and as long as I exist, some other sentient mind exist, and I have some way to influence that mind in any way, I can get at least some.

The thing that burned the world shared few properties with me save name and looks, in no way was that me. No guilt is necessary.

Love is strange, but not mysterious, for mystery exist only in the mind, and not one unusual thing has ever happened. If she will hurt me, only time will tell, if time exist. But I will never hurt her, for the moment I do I no longer qualify as me.

((OOC: The mad Engineer, I want to thank you deeply, for the first time since long, long ago I am in my own right element again. Also, you might want to read this as something more than a response to a game as well, and you will discover that you might have gotten much higher stakes than you bargained for...))

[The Mad Engineer]

And all the children said that we could once be free.  The darkness.  It spread then.
And all the children said that all the wounds could heal.  The happiness.  Replaced it all.
The end of an era, the beginning of a failed age,
No more darkness, no more light, nothing left to see.


The Theory has been struck down!

((OOC:  You do not need to remind me that this could have some significance outside of a simple forum game.  When I created this, I  decided that questions I once had needed answering, and personal demons hidden away needed to be destroyed.  Thank you all for defeating Tock, the Null Hypothesis, the Dreams of Industry.  There are things that are still not quite finished here, but I am quite certain that he will be making another appearance; the seeds of discontent and conflict have been planted.  The next boss fight will not be as single-sided as this one:  I will be adding some improved mechanics to make it more difficult.))

The city is unprotected!  The influence of the dream has left the Tower without a Name, and his birds are preparing to retaliate.  What shall John do?

If only we had some sort of army...

[Tradanbattlan]

We do the only thing we can, John. We sharpen our scissors.

[TheNewerMartianEmperor]

Incoming Transmission:

Now, you must first give the tower a new name. Names have power, and the meaning of the name decides just what power is granted. Just as the name Tock represented inevitability, now the name that replaces it must represent the breaking away from what is decided and done. Rename the Tower Enigma, for Enigma can take you where Dogma cannot.

[Dragooble]

(So this whole thing is a personal experiment to trick ask us to help you fight these personal demons of yours? that's pretty cool actually. It's also cool that we weren't supposed to just defeat the idea and that's it, we've won. I'm looking forward to more tock/whatever cryptic sketchy worlds you might have in store for us.)