Is everything pre-determined in OOTS world?

[Squire Doodad]

I missed that. Can you direct me to that?

There's the "Worlds within worlds, yarns winding yarns", the "Odin has a high priest who delivers prophecies", and the fact that its like that in actual mythology.
I'm not going to go dig up the precise strips right now though.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

I missed that. Can you direct me to that?

Odin's prophecy. Spindle's wind the string forward but not back ("I can remember the future, but not the past").

Now you could argue that Thor, and Hurak, and indeed the exposition is all mistaken. But that is quite the claim to make, given how accurate Odin's Prophecy has been, when you do not add extra condition such as "Durkon must be personally involved in both the death and the destruction".

Grey Wolf

[Dion]

So, I’ve seen at least five different explanations in this very thread telling me how Odin’s prophecy was fulfilled, or will be fulfilled, or could be fulfilled.

If we can’t even agree on whether it’s complete or not, how are we agreeing it’s true?

[Grey_Wolf_c]

So, I’ve seen at least five different explanations in this very thread telling me how Odin’s prophecy was fulfilled, or will be fulfilled, or could be fulfilled.

If we can’t even agree on whether it’s complete or not, how are we agreeing it’s true?

Because there is a difference in the details, without a difference in the overall conclusion.

There are far more than five explanations on, say, the causes of the Fire of Rome under Nero. Few doubt it happened.

Grey Wolf

[Squire Doodad]

Because there is a difference in the details, without a difference in the overall conclusion.

There are far more than five explanations on, say, the causes of the Fire of Rome under Nero. Few doubt it happened.

Grey Wolf

This gets the point across pretty well.
There's discussion about why and how something happened, no discussion about whether it did.

[Kish]

The question is why are you separating the two? If the Oracle has on-demand knowledge of the future, for what reason do you have to claim "well, his prophecies still might not come true/be false", as you have been doing.

You're majorly splitting hairs here, and it makes no sense.

As far as I can tell, Dion has a philosophical objection to the idea of prophecies, and/or isn't making a distinction between "in the real world" and "in this fantasy story"...which leads him to make goofy claims in the name of pretending that prophecies aren't real* in OotS.

*Dion, that semantic argument you're halfway through writing: save your keystrokes.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

As far as I can tell, Dion has a philosophical objection to the idea of prophecies, and/or isn't making a distinction between "in the real world" and "in this fantasy story"...which leads him to make goofy claims in the name of pretending that prophecies aren't real* in OotS..

I suspect that Dion has already decided that Odin's prophecy cannot come true, and thus all this is serving the effort of trying to prove said point. Thus their insistence on, say, requiring the prophecy to predict precisely who will cause the destruction, and crowing that it didn't happen in that exact way.

Grey Wolf

[The Pilgrim]

This doesn't follow. If the future is pre-determined, then it was always going to be the case that Belkar would ask, that the Oracle would see that Belkar would kill him, and also see that the Mark of Justice would activate, and that the mark would activate because he would have established the town behind the tower. He had not choice in the matter, that's what was going to happen, so it did.

Alternatively, if there is free will (as we have been told there is, in-story), Belkar made the choice to ask, the Oracle then saw himself being killed by Belkar, and made the choice to tell him as little as possible. Then spent some time and money preparing both his revenge on Belkar and setting up his resurrection. He could've chosen to do neither, or one and not the other, but chose to do both.

Both scenarios are possible in-story.

Grey Wolf

All the events regarding the Oracle and his prophecy on Belkar are really interesting, if one thinks about them.

- The Oracle brought a wand to banish Roy's spirit. In doing so, he allowed him to bypass the Memory Charm. Roy assumed it was unintended, but was it? The Oracle either isn't omniscent (thus blundered by not foreseeing Roy would bypass the Charm) or he is and did it on purpose. For what purpose? Also he gave Roy the info about Belkar's death as a prophecy, so Roy would remember even if the Memory Charm triggered. And he gave it on his own votion, without Roy asking for it. The Oracle wanted Roy to know, and remember. Why?

- The way the Oracle set up the triggering of the Mark of Justice, was actually beneficial for Belkar. Because it triggered inside the bounds of the Memory Charm, the triggering was forgotten by Haley, who would otherwise had abandoned Belkar. This ultimately led to Belkar having his epiphany and beggining his path to redemption, and the Curse being removed by the Priest of Loki. Had the Oracle not triggered it, Belkar would have triggered it later and the Order would have abandoned him, or, worse still, he would have fleed instead of fighting the Thieves' Gild (to avoid triggering the Mark), and Haley would have been killed and Roy's corpse lost.

Did the Oracle foresee it and acted on purpose? Did he not, proving that he is far from omniscent? Did Tiamat feed him just enough info to manipulate him into helping the Order?

Questions, questions...

[Dion]

This gets the point across pretty well.
There's discussion about why and how something happened, no discussion about whether it did.

Even Thor and Odin seem to be unclear of if it happened in the comic.

I’m choosing to read it as the nuanced type of storytelling where these things are ambiguous, and not the ham-handed sort where prophecy is unambiguously true.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

Did Tiamat feed him just enough info to manipulate him into helping the Order?

Questions, questions...

It is at least moderately plausible that Tiamat set this up to exact her revenge on the three fiends, if nothing else.

Even Thor and Odin seem to be unclear of if it happened in the comic.

I’m choosing to read it as the nuanced type of storytelling where these things are ambiguous, and not the ham-handed sort where prophecy is unambiguously true.

This story has multiple prophecies that are unambiguously true. Not that it makes the story ham-handed.

Grey Wolf

[Dion]

I suspect that Dion has already decided that Odin's prophecy cannot come true, f

But it did come true. Durkon names his new hammer Destruction.

I think you have decided that you are the only person who has read the comic correctly.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

But it did come true. Durkon names his new hammer Destruction.

At this point, you are just contradicting yourself.

I think you have decided that you are the only person who has read the comic correctly.

Wait, so according to you, there are multiple people who agree with me, but somehow that means I think they must be wrong? Interesting "logic".

No, I do not believe I am the only person reading this correctly. I do however think that you are reading this incorrectly. For the reasons I have given, and that you have not addressed.

Grey Wolf

[Dion]

Wait, so according to you, there are multiple people who agree with me,

Grey Wolf

They all seem to agree that they disagree with my interpretation. I haven’t seen anyone agree with your interpretation.

[The Pilgrim]

It is at least moderately plausible that Tiamat set this up to exact her revenge on the three fiends, if nothing else.

Three Fiends who were able to do what they did because of Tiamat. Didn't she know what would happen when, through the Oracle, she granted ABD the identity of YBD's murderer? It would be not out of character for official D&D Tiamat to don't give a dime about the well being of evil dragons, but she seemed pretty pissed on the IFCC when Darth V exterminated all those black dragons...

What's the deal with Tiamat, anyway? She is the only God who keeps fluent communications with the Dark One, after all.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

They all seem to agree that they disagree with my interpretation. I haven’t seen anyone agree with your interpretation.

Because there is a difference in the details, without a difference in the overall conclusion.

There are far more than five explanations on, say, the causes of the Fire of Rome under Nero. Few doubt it happened.

Grey Wolf

This gets the point across pretty well.
There's discussion about why and how something happened, no discussion about whether it did.

---

Which bings us to... didn't she know what would happen when, through the Oracle, she granted ABD the identity of YBD's murderer? It would be not out of character for official D&D Tiamat to don't give a dime about the well being of evil dragons, but she seemed pretty pissed on the IFCC when Darth V exterminated all those black dragons...

That's the problem with omniscience without omnipotence. They saw it coming, but couldn't stop it. I can see how that'd make them mad.

Grey Wolf

[The Pilgrim]

---

That's the problem with omniscience without omnipotence. They saw it coming, but couldn't stop it. I can see how that'd make them mad.

Grey Wolf

But she could. She could have blocked the Oracle from informing ABD. Or had mislead ABD into another target.

Unless... she is not omniscent, neither the Oracle, and the prophecies are just as vage to them as are to the readers.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

But she could. She could have blocked the Oracle from informing ABD. Or had mislead ABD into another target.

Unless... she is not omniscent, neither the Oracle, and the prophecies are just as vage to them as are to the readers.

Blocking the Oracle from delivering the prophecy would fall under omnipotence, though. We know the gods limit their ability to interfere with the world. So she can grant prophecy ability, but can't stop her followers from then using it. Which sometimes means that the prophecies discovered with her gift comes around and bites her in the rear.

Grey Wolf

[Rrmcklin]

Even Thor and Odin seem to be unclear of if it happened in the comic.

I’m choosing to read it as the nuanced type of storytelling where these things are ambiguous, and not the ham-handed sort where prophecy is unambiguously true.

False dichotomy, there. Prophecies can (and has been repeatedly pointed out to you, are) true in the story, without it being ham-handed. More to the point, this particular prophecy not being true, but all of the things just "happening" to work out the way they did to match it, it wouldn't be "nuanced" it would just be contrived and add no actual benefit to the story.

But it did come true. Durkon names his new hammer Destruction.

I think you have decided that you are the only person who has read the comic correctly.

Since when did Durkon name the hammer Destruction? All he said was that he thought it was about time he brought some destruction - by using the hammer (and accessories).

You're the only one being obtuse here.

[The Pilgrim]

Blocking the Oracle from delivering the prophecy would fall under omnipotence, though. We know the gods limit their ability to interfere with the world. So she can grant prophecy ability, but can't stop her followers from then using it. Which sometimes means that the prophecies discovered with her gift comes around and bites her in the rear.

Grey Wolf

But the Oracle closed shop to avoid Xykon. So they have power to deny info if they want.

[Peelee]

But the Oracle closed shop to avoid Xykon. So they have power to deny info if they want.

That was the Oracle, not Tiamat.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

That was the Oracle, not Tiamat.

Yep. My headcanon is that Xykon's response to being given a prophecy he didn't want would involve a death too gruesome to contemplate. Or come back from.

Grey Wolf

[Dion]

Unless... she is not omniscent, neither the Oracle, and the prophecies are just as vage to them as are to the readers.

Wait... isn’t that the starting assumption for all of us?

Was there ever any serious consideration by any reader that anyone anywhere in the comic world knew everything that was going to happen before it happened?

[Devils_Advocate]

I would do that because, until we somehow invent time travel (which I believe is impossible according to the laws of physics as we understand them), causality *is* unidirectional.

Even if that's the case in our own universe, what bearing does that have on the Order of the Stick? Are you under the impression that everything that happens in the comic proceeds in accordance with the laws of physics as we understand them? I had rather assumed that magical phenomena are exempt from those rules, and that divining the future is a magical phenomenon. Do you not share both of those assumptions?

We can only move into the future one second at a time,

Haven't you heard of time dilation?

and we can't change what happened in the past.

We can't change what will happen in the future, either. Change is things being different at different times. In order for the state of the universe at a past or future instant to change, the state of the universe at one time would have to be part of the universe at a different time. Neither last Thursday nor next Thursday can change from yesterday to tomorrow unless last Thursday or next Thursday exists yesterday and tomorrow. But how can a time exist at another time? What would that even mean? Like, this is the inherent premise of a bunch of time travel fiction, but it doesn't make any damn sense. It's like positing a scenario where it's raining in London in New York but not raining in London in Paris. New York and Paris don't each contain their own different Londons, so that's just a fine lot of nonsense, now isn't it?

We can change what's likely to happen in the future according to the decisions we make.

We can change what's likely to have happened in the past through our observations.

For example: Before I flip a coin, I don't know whether it will come up heads or tails. There's a roughly 50% chance of each possibility. After I flip a coin, but before I look at it, I don't know whether it came up heads or tails. There's a roughly 50% chance of each possibility, same as before. But when I look at the coin, I can then make an inference about the past based on the present, and my probability estimates change.

Being able to make similarly reliable inferences about the future not only doesn't break anything but is entirely normal. If I mix two mixtures together, I can predict with high confidence that they'll form a pretty homogeneous mixture after enough time has passed. But I couldn't determine the compositions of the original mixtures from the final one. What seems "off" about prophesy, probably, is that the usual direction of inference is reversed, with future behavior being inferred with an accuracy normally reserved for past behavior. That probably corresponds to a decrease in entropy, which in our universe means an even bigger increase in entropy somewhere else. But if magic is allowed to break the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics anyway, then that isn't an issue for magical prophesy.

In any case, my argument is not that the universe is not somehow entirely deterministic, it's that, chaos theory being what it is, it isn't actually possible to make accurate future predictions even if it *is*. No matter how accurate and precise your model of the current state of the universe is, your future prediction will rapidly diverge from reality.

And my argument is that reliable future predictions don't even require that the future be fully determined by the present. The present being partially determined by the future is sufficient.

The only difference between "fantasy fiction" and "science fiction" is that the former calls magic "Magic", while the later calls magic "Technology".

I suppose that my implied definition is pretty terrible by descriptivist standards. How about "science fantasy rather than hard science fiction", or even just "soft science fiction instead of hard science fiction"?

That the magic tricks makes logic sense or not doesn't factors in the equation.

There's a distinction to be drawn between at least attempting internal consistency in a story and not even trying, but I suppose that I have to concede that it's pretty much independent of genre.

Here’s my thinking. There are at least two kinds of prophecy (in the same way there are at least two kinds of birds):

Falsifiable Prophecy: a falsifiable prophecy is one where an observer can create an experiment to say “is this prophecy false”, and that experiment is guaranteed to produce a result.

Unfalsifiable Prophecy: a prophecy that is not falsifiable. No matter what anyone does, all that can be said is “well, maybe it’s still true because of something that might happens later.”

“When the goat turns red strikes true” is unfalsifiable. If Haley had rolled a 19 instead of a 20, it wouldn’t have proven the prophecy false. Instead, it would have just shown that the prophecy might still be true, but probably meant something else.

I'd leave out the "can create an experiment" part. Not knowing how to bring about criteria that would falsify a prediction doesn't meant that no such criteria exist. Take the Oracle's prophesy to Haley. If she had restored her speech without looking any metaphorical gift horse in its proverbial mouth, then the prophesy would have been falsified. But of course she didn't know how to fix her aphasia; that's why she asked about it! Sometimes you have to wait for an opportunity to test a theory through observation, because creating such an opportunity is beyond your power.

Other than that, though, I agree that falsifiability is a valid and significant distinction. And Eugene's prophesy to Roy indeed is pretty well unfalsifiable, as it's a "When X, Y" type prophesy where both X and Y are sufficiently unclear to ever be able to conclude with justified confidence "Well, that already happened". If X is sufficiently specific that one might say that it already occurred without any form of Y, or vice versa, then we can imagine observations that would show such a prediction to be incorrect. Contrast Eugene's prophesy to Roy (where both X and Y are too vague) with the Oracle's prophesy to Haley (where X is still vague and metaphorical and refers to Nale as a form of livestock, but Y is clear enough given the question she asked).

Not all of the prophesies in the comic are unfalsifiable -- I think that you'd look pretty silly trying to spin "Xykon will be within a 1000-foor radius of Girard's Gate before Xykon is witin a 1000-foot radius of Kraagor's Gate" as unfalsifiable -- but some are.

For the sake of this discussion, which is about deterministic viewpoints, they are effectively the same as they play the same role.

If reliable prophesy requires foreknowledge of the future and foreknowledge of the future requires determinism, then reliable prophesy implies determinism. But Dion has disputed the first premise by arguing to the effect that sufficiently vague prophesies can be virtually guaranteed to be accurate without foreknowledge. And I dispute the second premise, to the extent that "determinism" means that the future is fully determined by the present!

[Fyraltari]

Edit: also, the death and destruction prophecy doesn’t come from the oracle, so whether or not it comes true isn’t a comment on the oracles abilities.

Yeah, I still don’t understand why you brought it up anyway.

[HorizonWalker]

Durkon Thundershield returned to the Dwarven Lands. As a direct and obvious result of that, people died and a bridge got wrecked. That's... very obviously the prophecy coming true. Durkon's return home brought death and destruction.

[Dion]

Yeah, I still don’t understand why you brought it up anyway.

Because it’s a prophecy, just like “when the goat turns red strikes true”.

[Wizard_Lizard]

If free will is an illusion, I am happy to be fooled.

[Dion]

If free will is an illusion, I am happy to be fooled.

I believe causal determinism is a requirement for free will to exist in our universe.

Without determinism, what happens next doesn’t depend on what occurred in the past.

In other words, without determinism, things just happen because they’re going to happen.

It’s impossible to make meaningful choices without determinism, because your choices can’t have any impact on what happens. What happens is just whatever was going to happen, regardless of your choice.

EDIT: obviously, this doesn’t apply to OotS-verse, where free will and determinism is free to work in other ways.

Also, I haven’t seen evidence that anyone or anything in OotS-verse has complete foreknowledge of what will happen (which is separate from both prophecy or determinism in my mind). A few characters have a very small measure of pre-knowledge, but it seems muddled, unclear, and often not very helpful to them.

[Emanick]

At the end of Back to the Future, there are two pasts, the one we are presented to at the beginning that Marty and Doc remember, that is the ‘‘original’’ past where Marty and Doc never went back in time. And then there is the ‘‘new’’ past they created where Marty’s dad punched Biff in the face, etc. This is a sample of two.
The only differences between the two timelines are due to the actions of Doc & Marty. Meaning that Back to the Future presents a deterministic universe where people reacts to external circumstances (i.e. the world) according to internal circumstances (i.e. the self) and given the exact same set of circumstances, the exact same reactions will occur. However it is one who allows for grandfather paradoxes somehow.

What Existential Comics asserts is not that Marty and Doc had the power to create a new timeline - it is that, merely by being able to observe the original timeline, they should have seen an entirely different series of events play out if free will actually exists. That seems absurd to me, because there is no reason to believe that Marty would have created a new past for his parents merely by being there in 1955 to watch events unfold. If he watched his parents live through the entire week without doing anything to interfere, their timelines would not be split. They would behave exactly the same way, not because they lacked free will, but because A = A. Regardless of whether behavior is predetermined or not, you cannot learn anything by observing that a group of people made the same series of choices in Scenario A as they did in... Scenario A. That's not a novel observation, it's a tautology.

What Back to the Future does show is that people will behave differently when their circumstances change, but since more or less every theory about determinism and free will accounts for this fact, I don't find it particularly significant.

The notion of ‘‘libertarian free will’’, meanwhile claims that humans have the ability to make decisions regardless of the circumsrances. This seems absurd to me, as it not only posits that physical reality is at a mesoscopic scale is affected by something outside of it, but also that our decisions are not truly our own but random and that should I be presented with a train that goes where I want to go I would be as likely to go onboard as to jump under it or to strip naked and dance the carioca.

I don't find the idea of an extramaterial soul with causal power absurd (indeed, I find it the only satisfying explanation for the existence of consciousness), so I don't personally find libertarian free will silly at all. Nor does that conception of the world imply that our decision-making process is random. But since I'm fairly certain that we're not allowed to discuss that sort of thing on these forums, we'd better stick to Back to the Future and Existential Comics.

[woweedd]

The way I understand it is that The Oracle has omniscience...Provided he remembers to "call ahead", as it were. His future sight isn't a passive thing, he has to consciously activate it, not necessarily in the form of a prophecy, but at least having to concentrate on it to look ahead. This is why he didn't see Roy keeping his memory: He didn't bother to check.