Are we heading towards a Wanda's Rule moment?

[pendell]

Meanwhile, back to the OP, I don't think we're going to see a Wanda's Rule moment because Rich has a very different philosophy for OOTSverse than Rob does for Erfworld.

In OOTSverse, "fate" is what you bring on yourselves by your own actions. A better name for "fate" would be "consequences".

The resistance leader murdered a hobgoblin simply because he was a hoggoblin; and was undone by a polymorphed spy.

Azure City waged a war of extermination on goblins, and was conquered by those same goblins.

Nale murdered his father's best friend, and was himself killed as a direct result of his actions.

So in OOTSverse, everyone has totally free will, and if you do the right thing it will always turn out better than if you do something evil.

The Dwarves are suffering not because they're fighting fate, but because they unjustly sent an innocent dwarf into lifelong exile. If they had done right by Durkon, even within the bounds of prophecy, the prophecy might have been averted.

So fate in OOTSverse is not a bound law that you cannot fight against. Wanda's choice of doing evil in order to obey Fate would never work in OOTSworld, because Rich finds that line of thinking abhorrent. He will never reward it or show that line of thinking as a successful approach to life.

Fate in OOTSverse is a consequence, not a cause, and you cannot avert an evil fate by doing more evil.

That, at least, is the lesson I think Rich would want us to take away, since as I said before there really is no free will in the story save his own. But I think that's where he's going with it.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[martianmister]

I don't see it that way at all though. Prophecies and free will can merrily co-exist. All a prophecy is, ultimately, is a prediction on what a person is going to do/event is going to be. A person choosing their own path in life of their own volition and agency is not at cross purposes with that.

Let's take Oedipius as an example: His father could easily defeat the prophecy by murdering his son, his wife or himself. But then prophecy would be false. Prophecy's existence is depends on Laios to act in a certain way (trying to rid of him in a stupid way) in defiance of his free will.

[factotum]

Magic? Just because we humans cant do it doesn't mean there isn't a hypothetical being or thing that does understand all the variables and all the details.

So, "a wizard did it"? Weird how that always seems to be the answer to things that just plain don't make sense.

[Keltest]

So, "a wizard did it"? Weird how that always seems to be the answer to things that just plain don't make sense.

Well no. The system is amazingly complicated, but it isn't arbitrary, right? Theres logic behind it and a reason for everything that happens. In an isolated system with no outside interference, we could theoretically predict the weather for, well, ever. It would be difficult due to the sheer number of moving parts, but possible.

And for prophecy, that would be even more complicated, but things still happen based on logic. Gravity doesn't just decide to turn off for no reason, people don't briefly grow to 8 feed tall without cause. So the system can be predicted if you have all the data.

Sufficiently advanced science may be indistinguishable from magic, but its still science.

[goodpeople25]

I lean a bit towards the possbility of the prophecy theoretically being able to be fulfilled by Drukon going home and thus not joining the order of the stick. (With the data I have of course)

As for Oedipus, I believe that's leaving out some cultural context.

[Mad Humanist]

Let's take Oedipius as an example: His father could easily defeat the prophecy by murdering his son, his wife or himself.

Actually his father did try to kill his son to avert the prophecy. But he did not do it very effectively and that made the prophecy come true.

[goodpeople25]

Actually his father did try to kill his son to avert the prophecy. But he did not do it very effectively and that made the prophecy come true.

While I think the exact measure of stupidity is in question due to other factors I think that's pretty heavily implied by the left out/edited "trying to rid of him in a stupid way". Assuming we're all reffering to the same incident of course. (We are talking greek mythology here, multiple instances of offspring murder attempts in any particular tale wouldn't suprise me.)

[Devils_Advocate]

As I see it, there are two major possibilities, as regards "free will":

In the first case, our choices are completely unrestrained. Our will is utterly metaphysically FREE, baby! So, in the vast majority of worlds/universes/timelines/whatever, people just kind of make gibbering noises and flail spastically until they die, because that's what happens when your behavior is totally undirected, i.e. random. Nevertheless, there will be a select few cases in which the behavior of a population looks like the product of deliberation. But this is an illusion; your choices are not and cannot be caused by your desires, beliefs, and so on because they're actually entirely uncaused. "Personalities" only exist as cosmically rare generalizations over fundamentally random series of actions.

In the second case, our choices are completely determined. There are multiple choices that we could make simply in the same sense that P could or could not equal NP; ignorance on our part does not mean that there's no truth of the matter! There's no metaphorical roll of the dice involved; your choice at any given moment is purely the product of what came before it. But, if that choice is a local phenomenon, occurring entirely within you with no outside interference, then it's purely a product of who you are at that moment: Your choice come from you! Your exact state is, of course, in turn, a result of your environment... but that seems to me rather preferable to the alternative of being completely irresponsive to one's environment (and thus, being either unable to perceive anything besides oneself or unable to act on one's awareness of anything besides oneself).

In between the above extremes, we have multiple (not just epistemically) possible choices that have different probabilities. I think that this is pretty much how we perceive the world by default: There are lots of possibilities, but they're not all equally possible. And that's the case for phenomena in general, not just for our choices.

So, do you see "free will" as meaning complete metaphysical freedom and thus no self-determination, complete self-determination and thus no metaphysical freedom, or specifically somewhere in the middle rather than either of the above? I gotta admit, "free" does seem to refer to metaphysical freedom in this context, and "will" likewise seems to refer to self-determination, so it kind of seems like it has to be the third option, semantically speaking. I just don't see why you'd want to quasi-randomize your choices as an end in itself.

That's one place where stories and reality conflict. We try to paper over it, but the truth is that, whether free will exists or not in the real world, in the fictional world of a story there is only one: The authors. Everything that happens in the story -- the actions of the characters, the actions of the universe, the smallest pebble falling, or a single raindrop on a stone -- it all happens because the author spared the time and attention to write it in.

That's like saying "We can't have free will if everything that happens proceeds according to the laws of physics". In order to make a case for that, you need to provide some sort of argument that free will is inherently non-physical.

Similarly, you haven't made a case that it's not possible to write characters as if they have free will. Obviously in the sense that they're fictional, characters don't "really" have anything, but so far as I can see you haven't given any reason to think that their free will is less real than their thoughts, feelings, goals, personalities, and so on.

So, since it's effectively impossible to predict what the weather will be doing in a month's time, how can you possibly predict what a person will be doing then, especially when you have to take into account their interactions with hundreds of other people? This is why I believe prophecy denies free will--the only way to know the future is to define what that future is for everything, from the smallest zephyr of wind to the great war between two nations.

You seem to be making the hidden assumption that the future cannot exert causal influence on the past, only vice versa. In that case indeed the only way to ensure a prophesy will be correct is to "rig" it to be correct.

Or, to put it another way, a non-rigged future and infallible prophesies together require backwards causality. ;)

[alwaysbebatman]

Hey! It's compatibilist determinism! I've been thinking about that a lot lately, both in the context of this prophecy, and the relationship between predictions and outcomes in the real world.

I'm a statistics guy and I think it's our fault people misunderstand the world so badly. We say "there's a 20% chance that the Twins will beat the Yankees" and people think that represents reality. But it's just a statement of our "confidence"-- our incomplete knowledge of the future.

People wouldn't make the same mistake regarding a probabilistic statement about the past. If I say "there is a 20% chance this painting is a forgery," you wouldn't think that in 8 pasts Picasso painted it, but in the other two a forger did!

There is a 100% chance of everything that did or will happen, and a 0% chance of everything else.

[PontificatusRex]

I don't quite see it that way. I'm not actually a fan of prophecy in stories, simply because, to my mind, it *does* essentially mean the world runs on rails and nobody has any free will. Oh, you could have some sort of general prediction of the future that relies on what people are likely to do in a world with free will, but here we have predictions where the Oracle is able to tell you exactly how many words you will utter during the resolution of the prophecy, or where he can pinpoint his own future death so precisely that his lizardfolk assistants teleport in literally within a minute or two of the perpetrators leaving. I just don't believe being able to forecast the future to that level of accuracy is possible in a world with free will.

Hey there, ceasing lurking because I'm a Tolkien geek and have something re:LOTR to say about this.

One of the little details that I love about Lord of the Rings that you can only find if you totally delve into the appendixes is the ambiguous prophecies. There was a prophecy at Aragorn's birth - he would become the king of the renewed kingdom of the Dunedain OR it would all go to hell. So he was the man in the crucial time and place, but it wasn't foreordained like Harry Potter that he would win. And the cliche of "If you're in a prophecy, you win" was subtley subverted in a story about his ancestor the last king of Arthedain - he might have become the king of the reunited Gondor and Arnor or things would go to very badly, but he didn't so things went very badly.

Lloyd Alexander did something similar in his Chronicles of Prydain, and though the protagonist Taran was a figure in a prophecy it didn't mean it was fated to all work out well:

“How then?” Taran asked. “Could The Book of Three deceive you?”

“No, it could not.” Dallben said. “The book is thus called because it tells all three parts of our lives: the past, the present, and the future. But it could as well be called a book of ‘if.’ If you had failed at your tasks; if you had followed an evil path; if you had been slain; if you had not chosen as you did — a thousand ‘ifs,’ my boy, and many times a thousand. The Book of Three can say no more than ‘if’ until at the end, of all things that might have been, one alone becomes what really is. For the deeds of a man, not the words of a prophecy, are what shape his destiny.”

[Kish]

It wasn't foreordained that Harry Potter would win either. The prophecy in Harry Potter says only that either he'll kill Voldemort or Voldemort will kill him, that they can't coexist, and when he's feeling like the prophecy says he has no choice, Dumbledore points out to him that it says only* what he's known ever since he learned what kind of monster Voldemort is and what he's done.

*Which isn't quite accurate--it does spell out that no one else is going to kill Harry or Voldemort until the other one's dead.

[137beth]

It wasn't foreordained that Harry Potter would win either. The prophecy in Harry Potter says only that either he'll kill Voldemort or Voldemort will kill him, that they can't coexist, and when he's feeling like the prophecy says he has no choice, Dumbledore points out to him that it says only* what he's known ever since he learned what kind of monster Voldemort is and what he's done.

*Which isn't quite accurate--it does spell out that no one else is going to kill Harry or Voldemort until the other one's dead.

Which still makes it a (partially) self-fulfilling prophecy, since

Spoiler

Show

Bellatrix has at least two chances to kill Harry, but doesn't due to the prophecy. First at the end of HBP, she almost kills him, but Snape stops her on the grounds that Voldemort wants to kill him because he heard the prophecy. She again refrains from killing Harry in Malfoy Manor during DH, instead calling Voldemort to kill him, which gives Harry and the trio just enough time to escape.

Of course, it is not entirely self-fulfilling, since there are others who attempt to kill Harry, prophecy or not (Aragog's children, the Hungarian horntail, Umbridge via dementors, Crouch Jr, and probably others that I'm forgetting.

[Keltest]

Which still makes it a (partially) self-fulfilling prophecy, since

Spoiler

Show

Bellatrix has at least two chances to kill Harry, but doesn't due to the prophecy. First at the end of HBP, she almost kills him, but Snape stops her on the grounds that Voldemort wants to kill him because he heard the prophecy. She again refrains from killing Harry in Malfoy Manor during DH, instead calling Voldemort to kill him, which gives Harry and the trio just enough time to escape.

Of course, it is not entirely self-fulfilling, since there are others who attempt to kill Harry, prophecy or not (Aragog's children, the Hungarian horntail, Umbridge via dementors, Crouch Jr, and probably others that I'm forgetting.

As Dumbledore points out, it only has that meaning because Voldemort gives it that meaning. Harry lives because Voldemort says he lives, and while Voldy is basing that on the prophecy, ultimately he is deliberately trying to make it occur that way.

[archon_huskie]

See, I don't even look at it like that. IMO, 'fate' knew ahead of time how the dwarves would react when given the prophecy. Thus there was no 'easy' option ever on the table.

Why?

Because if the dwarves were going to take the easy option, it would have invalidated the prophecy, causing it to never occur. And if a prophecy can't occur, it'll never be given in the first place.

To put it another way, this was a prediction, not a curse. Under a curse, no matter what the dwarves did, it would happen. But a prediction is just saying "I know what you're going to do and what the consequences will be".

Couched in flowery language, sure. But ultimately no more than that.

Where it gets interesting is when we get into the bake your noodle speech from The Matrix part of this prophecy. But that's half the fun of prophecies.

Durkon could have returned home with two goldfish named Death and Destruction.

[Devils_Advocate]

Incidentally, does anyone else think that the whole concept of "what would have happened" if something had gone differently is a bit contradictory? It implies that the alternate outcome of some event (e.g. a decision) only has one possible set of results, which implies full determinism, which in turn implies that the event couldn't have had a different outcome than it did!

So we can conceive of multiple different ways how things could have gone if Durkon hadn't been sent away, but the idea that one of those scenarios is how things would have gone just doesn't seem to make sense.

You can calculate expected values based on probability estimates... but in that case, it's important to consider the other possible results of what actually happened as well as the possible results of other things that could have happened! For example, if you won a million dollars in the lottery, that doesn't mean that buying a lottery ticket was a really good decision because that now has a 100% chance of very good results. Because if you're contrasting that choice against the alternate choice of not buying a lottery ticket, you're considering the possibility that things could have gone differently, in which case you should also consider how things other than that one decision might have gone differently.

You have to be careful with these things.

[alwaysbebatman]

You make a good point, but I don't think it's necessarily inconsistent for someone with a determinist viewpoint to to entertain a hypothetical. As long as it is understood that that hypothetical is completely contrafactual.

But you're right: most people aren't really determinist, so it makes no sense for them to say "what would be the present state if one event in the past had been different." If you have a probabilistic viewpoint, naturally that hypothetical different present would be a probability curve, not a single answer.