Post by Chucky & JanicaPost by pataphorAs far as I know, some scientist, I think it was a woman, first
discovered the one power and later on the dark power.
You're getting it mixed up. Mierin Sedai (Lanfear) experimented with a
new form of the One Power and (accidentally?) tapped into the Bore,
freeing the Dark One and incidentally discovering this new form of
power - the True Power.
No, I just forgot about Lanfear's background, which is very shrouded by
the way.
Post by Chucky & JanicaShe didn't discover the One Power. She was "just" an Age of Legends
Aes Sedai. The One Power predates the Age of Legends by a significant
margin, at least if the Portal Stones and various other items are to
be trusted. They use the One Power.
Maybe you're trying to imply that just because the One Power tech items
predate the discovery of the True Power (if that is the Dark One's
power) Lanfear could not have discovered them both.
There are at least two different scenario's possible for Lanfear being
involved in both discoveries:
a) After discovering the One Power it didn't actually take that long to
make the tech. Remember that even now we're in ever shortening
technology cycles.
b) It did take some time to create the tech but people already lived for
a very long time, so Lanfear could have discovered the One Power,
happily lived with Lews for decades until he dumped her for Hyena
(what's with that name anyway). After that she started her career again
and discovered the True Power.
So maybe, if it wasn't for Hyena, Lanfear would still be in Lew's
kitchen making him sandwiches and the world would have lived happily
ever after!
Post by Chucky & JanicaNot angreals, certainly. Maybe they classify as ter'angreal, I don't
know.
Angreal, ter'angreal and I think there's more kinds. Maybe I should look
this stuff up in the index.
Post by Chucky & JanicaRight. So technology, running on a magical energy, is fine. You seemed
to be convinced of the purely explicable scientific origins of the One
Power itself, and I think that's a set-up for disappointment.
The problem is science is a moving target. I mean there are whole social
groups claiming to know the one truth when in fact they're only running
some local cluster of neurons in their brain in a better way than most,
while at the same time suppressing the other areas' activities.
Post by Chucky & JanicaOf course, this might set up the end of the world as they know it, and
bring about the beginning of the world as *we* know it, where magic
doesn't work at all. Wiccan nutbags and idiots who think they're
druids notwithstanding.
Or maybe the world is a static collection of 'if'-crystals and we
mistake a specific sequence through this collection for a dynamic
activity. One could just move the impuls of the whole mental cluster of
humanity and have it go in a different general direction.
I'm mentioning this because it would explain how the One Power could
work. If you've read Zelazny's amber series, in there some personages
can travel through alternative realities by changing elements of their
surroundings one by one. It's not hard to translate that kind of thing
to airflows for example. Just travel to a reality in which the air goes
more and more in the same direction. Also, disruptive 'all at once'
changes would be possible once the personages wake up to the facts about
how the world works and start skipping the boilerplate.
Post by Chucky & JanicaI don't know that the Amyrlin needs someone like Galad. He's a
Whitecloak. Siuan Sanche had a Warder named Tomas, who was to all
intents and purposes just a regular old Warder. Why would Galad be
needed?
Because he does the right thing. Lying to yourself might be tempting but
it works out for the worse in general. Let me expand on this a little.
Today I saw a Fringe episode in which a personage from another parallel
world visit's her parallel 'twin' in 'this' world (we can't really take
any world as central) because in her world her dad has just died. She is
an autist and worries if her contact with her dad would have been better
if she had been neurotypical. The girl in our world still has a living
dad and is not autistic. She decides to lie to her 'twin' claiming that
she has a bad relation with her dad too and it wouldn't have mattered if
she was autistic because it was something with her dad. In reality, as
the last scenes show, she has a wonderful dad who loves her and makes
dinner for her in the kitchen. Also, earlier in the show there is a
scene in which another person could just choose to identify someone from
a parallel world with his lost son so he could be happy again.
So what could be wrong with that? In the first case no harm is done
because the other girl will never know that her dad problem is because
of her autism, in the other case the real son is dead so what harm could
come from replacing him?
But the problem is not at this level but at a higher level of
explanation -- please bear with me, I know you dislike higher levels of
abstraction.
Some time ago I got into financial trouble because I had a different
opinion about what is appropriate job seeking behaviour than the local
thought police. Some people were involved in my case claiming it was
just a 'choice' I made and if I did not consider the current job market
to be totally corrupt (I mean in the sense of using CV's to select only
new coworkers that don't rock the boat and who won't interfere with
sitting personnel bleeding the companies and government dry for personal
profit at the detriment of society) I would have been fine.
Also, on the net I was involved in discussions with some prominent open
source contributor who had been bought by Google and who now claimed
assymmetric information was a good way of doing business and this in no
way interfered with him being an elite example for the open source
programming community.
I could give more examples but the thing is once one gives up the things
one 'knows' to be true, in order to please someone else, and curiously,
even if that someone else is another incarnation of yourself in the
future or -- speculatively -- in a parallel world, one starts to move on
a slippery slope. I mean, we could all be happy if we truly believed our
dictator would be benevolent.
So we need more Galads.
But you're right, it wouldn't necessary be in the from of a lapdog for
Egwene.
Post by Chucky & JanicaLet me know when you've read all the currently available books (there
was some uncertainty about that too), and we'll see if Gawyn fits the
It seems the dream Egwene had about the crumbling and rising towers was
in a book I had not read, the last book currently available in fact,
number 13, which I am now reading. I did mention I was in book 11 in my
first reply.
Post by Chucky & JanicaPost by pataphorNot really. I just want to defend his right to leave alternative
explanations on the table, even though his story sucks big time. Can't
stand the guy, by the way.
Jordan, Sanderson, or Jackson?
OK let's arrange them in order of increasingly more made up guys. Now
take the last one.
Post by Chucky & JanicaLost me again. If you're asking "why the heck aren't we going into
space?", I am right there with you. And the general commercialisation
and toy-centric mood of science in recent decades is a big guilty
party, I agree with you there too.
We need a kicking. I just doubt it's going to happen. So we'll die
out. We're not that great a species.
One of the problems is our heros, the people we look up to, turn out to
be not all that great, even if they were very accomplished in some area.
Take for example Tesla, I'm reading an autobiographic piece of him now.
Even though I am eternally thankful for the bits of insight in there,
I'd even say life-changing, still the guy comes across as rather
immature in certain other areas. I've had the same kind of experience --
except not as enlightening as with Tesla -- with other pieces by very
smart people, like Kaczynski or Langan or Sidis, at least for as far as
I could stand their material. Yes, in fact sometimes their weirdness
makes it impossible for me to read further even if they start out with
very valuable ideas.
The thing is, being smart does not preclude one from being wrong. So
Kaczynski's idea may be a prelude to later singularitarian ideas of a
super intelligent entity tasking over the world. However he is limited
by a sequential world view, the same thing that makes current
singularitarianism turn into a sect like 'save the world' cult. Because
a parallel computer can not so easily simulate or predict another
parallel computer, because we don't have efficient code for parallel
computing yet, and maybe it is a hard problem, a thing that makes all
the difference. So we end up in the labyrinth scenario I wrote about before.
For Langan, his accomplishment is that he defines reality theory even
though the term is sadly enough hijacked by now by some obscure
psychologists. Then he goes on to turn it all into math and language
which is just the standard mistake of using too few brain areas and
mistaking that for the whole.
I am not claiming to be better than those giants, just that I see many
talents in many people, say for instance the talent to recognise faces
or a talent to guess what other people are feeling or thinking or the
talent to have lucid dreaming cross over with reality like Tesla. Or the
standard scientific varieties of math talents, which are very diverse by
themselves by the way.
Post by Chucky & JanicaPost by pataphorPost by Chucky & JanicaPost by pataphorHave I read that?
You tell me! I assumed, since you were talking about the towers rising
and falling, you'd read that scene, which was in the second-most
recent book, pretty sure that was Towers of Midnight.
Yeah, very Aes Sedai like formulation you have here! It's just book 13,
the book that is currently the most recent and which I had not read at
the time.
Post by Chucky & JanicaAbout the closest we get to time travel (aside from the various
visions of alternate futures shown by testing ter'angreal and the
Portal Stones) is Aviendha's views through the glass pillars, which
seem to take her into future lives of her family rather than past
lives as shown in the Aiel Clan Chief test. Those seemed fairly
definite and fixed, but they might still have been only a possible
outcome.
Haven't seen that yet.
Post by Chucky & JanicaIndeed, the Portal Stones seem to answer the question of alternate
histories in Jordan's universe. They open on the Worlds of If, which
is a pretty close approximation of the theory that there is a
branched-off parallel universe for every variable, so every
possibility is played out. Make a choice, and an infinite number of
possible futures collapse into one, which then branches out again. The
Worlds of If show this. And when Rand messes with the Portal Stones
and sees himself die in a thousand different ways in a thousand
different futures, those are Worlds of If that he could end up in.
Thanks very much for mentioning that story! A great read. My current
theory is that the worlds of if are timeless and what we experience as
our consciousnesses are just trajectories we must follow because of our
initial impulse in some direction. Also, Tesla's automaton idea.
Post by Chucky & JanicaThe question of which is the real world becomes a bit baffling at that
point, of course. I prefer to just point at the ground and say "this
one".
How rude! Of course if I move in a direction that has some angle with
yours we may only meet once in every world we happen to share.
P.