#he's hypothetically omniscient and maybe even omnipotent

[asgardian--angels]

yknow on that note, there's been so many theories about 'in all timelines, in all possibilities' with regards to how many Jayces have visited mage Viktor, whether his words imply all but our Jayce have failed or whether it's Jayce in all timelines that succeed.

And I just want to put this tidbit out there - if many Jayces have met mage Viktor atop the hexgates and received his instructions, and tried & failed to kill Viktor in the commune, you'd need a lot of hammers.

Now, true, we don't know if our Jayce is the only one who fell into the ravine and dismantled his own hammer, hence why he had to take husk Jayce's. As many have speculated, that could have been why he ultimately succeeded - he was hardened and enlightened by the experience of having to walk a literal mile in Viktor's footsteps, retracing his hardships through life. Maybe it was a test, mage Viktor closely monitoring him to make sure he didn't die but understanding this was necessary to prepare Jayce for what lay ahead. But there's only one corrupted mercury hammer, and given that we see husk Jayce's fingers literally break off and get stuck to the hammer when he releases it, it's clear this hammer has never left his grip since he knelt down there ages ago.

I've recently seen this screencap going around:

One of many of Jayce's potential 'divergence point' moments - but is it really? I love the idea, especially given the following moment of his face splitting into many screaming thrashing versions of himself. It's certainly set up visually to invoke divergence points. But idk it just doesn't add up to me!! We can't see the hammer design on these Jayces, and also, why would they all look exactly like our Jayce who was stuck in the ravine for weeks/months? If many Jayces spent time in the cavern there'd be evidence, and they'd have an equal chance of succeeding. Would mage Viktor let so many Jayces die, after the grief and pain of losing just one - his own, after going through the trouble of saving young Jayce when he could easily avoid all of this by just, not rescuing him?

It comes back to 'in all timelines, in all possibilities, only you can show me this.' Many have pointed out the wording is very specific here, vs something like 'out of all timelines and possibilities' which would imply our Jayce is the only version of Jayce that can succeed. This is such a big sticking point for me because the fandom really cannot seem to agree on or even figure out what the hell's going on. The wording we got implies that in all timelines it's always Jayce who brings him back from the brink, and Viktor sets it up that way because he always saves young Jayce and gives him a rune to start his journey. And yet, we get radically different interpretations of this scene that are basically opposites - either Jayce always fails or he always succeeds. You'd think that if Jayce can't do it by attempt number five hundred Viktor would start rethinking his strategy. The romanticism of it stems from Jayce succeeding in other timelines - so why is the more common interpretation that he usually fails? And I'm not pinning this on the fandom - I think the show could have given us something just a tad more explicit (about literally all of this) to let viewers know what was really going on here.

It also feeds into the separate but connected ongoing speculation about Mage Viktor's existence in general. I've seen it postulated that our Jayce succeeding broke a cycle and somehow erased the ruined timeline from existence (and I've heard this one often enough that a fair amount of people must believe it). I just don't see why that would happen. From what I've heard, it comes from the fan idea that all anomalies are connected or are the same anomaly, thus destroying one destroys them all, which, we have no evidence that's the case in any way. Even if so, destroying the anomaly wouldn't destroy the timeline. Mage Viktor now exists in the arcane, he is outside of time and space. Even, even, if his timeline ceased to exist, he's basically immortal. I think this all stemmed from the shot where the corrupted hammer crumbles into dust atop the hexgates, having served its purpose. And yes, I do think it's symbolic of breaking the cycle, but I don't think we can take that and say that timeline doesn't exist anymore (esp when Swain's raven takes the hexgem from it whoops).

these are just some disorganized thoughts. I really like analyzing these things but most of the fandom's on twitter and not only do I have zero footprint on there to help my posts get any traction, but it's not exactly the best platform for long-form meta. anyway.

[fathersappointed]

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

When you hold the truth in your hands, and don't know it! Or maybe; When you hear the truth and you think it's just too funny!

This Atheist Activist (a rather captivating fellow.) spoke the truth! And then they all had a good laugh! Along with the Devil!

A little into Peter Millicans speech, he says; One point that John Lennox made, appealing to the Resurrection was to say if The Resurrection is true there's a God, that doesn't follow at all. All that follows at most is that there is some supernatural being capable of performing a Physical Resurrection on a human being! Why should that be Omnipotent! Why should that be Omniscient! Why should that be Perfectly Good! (here it comes!) It could be a being that's doing it in order to dupe loads of us into having beliefs in a false religion! And then, Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha (We move on!)

"All that follows at most is that there is some supernatural being! (wham, bam, slam! Trusted into the mystical) his thinking is hypothetical it's understandable that he doesn't know. One thing you can be sure of when it comes to an atheist, they've never knowingly encountered the Devil!. You really need experience with this cold indifferent group of betrayers led by a being of hate and jealousy! (who isn't a supernatural being) and even that'll probably lead you to wrong thinking! We're not dealing with the supernatural we're dealing with science! That's what this group is using against us! Not only are they using science against us but they're using our science against us! That is to say we're being attacked with our Fathers technology!"

The Religiously Active, The Atheist Activist, and The Atheist Scientist, all make the same mistake of micro analyzing! When they need to grasp the bigger picture. Unfortunately this comprehension blender is incomprehensible to them!

[observenature]

Where magic and science meet.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. -- Arthur C. Clarke

In the context of my professional scientific training and the personal value I place in the Scientific Method this is a heretical post. While I am a strict physicalist, there are limits to what Science can tell us, at least in part because there are things that are, as far as we can tell, unknowable. In fact (so to speak), there are different classes of unknowable things. At the top of the ignorance food-chain one might reference Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, colloquially put: Godel proved that there exist true statements which are impossible for us to know are true using any normal mathematical/logical system; he effectively proved the inherent ignorance of deductive reasoning . In his book The Moral Landscape, Sam Harris describes the concept of factual realities that can, for all practical purposes, never be known.  For instance, you can ask: between exactly 12:01 am and 11:59 pm today, how many people on Earth were bitten by mosquitoes (assuming some reasonable definition of “bitten”)?  There is a single number that is the right answer -- let’s say 3,223,541 people were bitten. We can estimate this value (we won’t here), but humanity could devote virtually limitless time and effort and never truly know exactly how many people were bitten -- there are just too many variables and much of the data required to actually know this value simply does not exist, it was never recorded. Then there’s uncomputable numbers, that is, numbers whose exact enumeration would take an infinite number of operations on a perfect Turing Machine. There are proofs that show that certain physical systems cannot be described analytically by a closed mathematical form (e.g. the states of 3D Ising Model) and the related larger space of problems in computational complexity (i.e. P vs. NP).  And then there’s chaotic systems, the simplest of which is the double pendulum. The dynamic trajectory of such systems is, frustratingly, deterministic, but depends so sensitively on initial conditions that predicting the motion over long time periods is impossible.  These are all concrete physical and/or mathematical examples of unknowable and/or unprovable, but true things; or said differently, physical systems for which precise information about the system exists but is unknowable.

To be clear, this does not mean that we are completely ignorant about these systems. Indeed, we can compute / simulate many measurables about them, but the amount of work (read: actual energy or number of computational operations) to reach those answers depends on the desired level of precision. Whatever the limitations, we can conceptualize ‘the space of all knowable things’, that is, the contiguous information space of all knowledge accessible with our current methods, limited energy for computation, and understanding of what is possible. The point is that from the logocentric perspective of our human-sized, neurologically wired brains, it appears that that knowledge space has limits.  Accordingly, from our point of view that space is all that can be known, even though we know that there is hypothetical knowledge beyond those limits. Many people would assert that this post should stop there, with a kind of ontological circular argument that all that can be known is all that can be known, and thus considering anything past that is folly.  Let the heresy begin -- let’s now consider, against the proofs and assertions of people much smarter than me, that there is a body of information (call them ‘facts’, ‘algorithms’, ‘technologies’ etc) that in a grander sense could be known if we had better tools, bigger brains, massively expanded intuition, or a fundamentally different understanding of reality (ignoring the very real possibility that we are simply wrong about what we think can and cannot be known). 

As an attempt to illustrate this concept let’s consider two examples.  I have three wonderful cats:  Zorro, Purry, and Handsome.  Sometimes I imagine that if I could speak ‘Meowish’ I might try to explain new concepts to them and see what they think about them.  “Hey Zorro, did you know that we live on a rocky spherical planet orbiting an average-sized star that we call the Sun in a galaxy about 100,000 light years across?”  I have serious doubts that no matter how fluent I am in Meowish, no matter how masterfully I explained these concepts, no matter how small I broke down the ideas, their brains are incapable of understanding nearly every abstract concept in that question.  Second example:  very soon we might create artificial intelligence whose ability to integrate the sum of human knowledge and rapidly test hypotheses through simulation endows it with an intuitive understanding of reality that dwarfs that of any single human, maybe even humankind.  From the point of view of my cats, the average human is god-like in their understanding of the world and is capable of knowing, understanding, and controlling reality in a way that no cat can.  From the point of view of my (reasonably) speculated AI, we are cat-like in our understanding of reality -- its cognitive capabilities place it on another plane of existence, god-like you might say.  

Cats and humans are biologically essentially identical and in terms of our definition of sentience and agency, humans are just barely past the dividing line between Life that can understand its place and move with agency in the Universe and Life that is blissfully unaware of all but the most salient features of its environment and the corresponding influences on its survival. That fact should humbly remind us that we, and our offspring (liberally defined), have a lot to learn.  I wonder if even that understanding, that I / we perceive to be so important -- between what we conceive of as sentient living systems and unconscious self-reproducing goo -- is actually its own opaque barrier between our current state and a far deeper, more holistic, and penetrating view of physical reality -- i.e. to potential god-like lifeforms, we are the unconscious, self-replicating goo.  

In the search for the existence of that deeper truth, understanding, or a chance to touch the unknowable, people turn to all kinds of systems of belief.  Broadly, my personal classification is that those systems are either falsifiable or unjustifiable.  Reasonable examples of the former include believing that the alignment of planets or division of the heavens (the Zodiac) have, through their gravitational effects or other mechanisms-at-a-distance, anything to do with who you are as a person.  Put that in contrast to a back-of-the-envelope calculation showing that who was standing around you at birth is far more gravitationally important than planetary alignments, or simply skipping over the obvious fact that the time of year you were born has many other salient correlates like light levels, temperature, or available foods, all of which affect your development and propensities. Another example is the erroneous notion that water has any kind of molecular memory for, or health relevant qualities from, a now absent molecular species. For the latter classification, I gloss over the largest can of worms and roundly put theistic religions in the ‘unjustifiable’ category without further discussion -- you can keep your faith, I’ll employ my evidence and mechanism.  (I like this possibly apocryphal quote from Laplace)  All that said, anything -- be it religion or psychedelic drugs -- that alters how your neurons fire might well bring with it a noticeable expansion of one’s personal knowledge space. I wager practitioners of either school would attest to such -- I certainly do.

The point in all this posturing and discussion is that our knowledge space has bounds, likely imposed by the very structure and capabilities of our brains, yet maybe there is far more that can be known by entities with greater capacities. Consider then that in terms of biological structure and mechanisms, the cat brain and the human brain are essentially the same, and thus if the relatively minor differences in brain size and connectivity produce god-like differences in organismal consciousness, how easy would it be to imagine a life form with god-like capabilities above ours and how much larger and qualitatively distinct might the differences in comprehension and control of physical reality be?  And if sentient Life emerged elsewhere in the cosmos, a billion years ahead of us, it could be incomprehensibly more advanced in its technology and understanding of reality, so much so, that it would not be possible for us to understand, replicate, or even use its technologies, anymore than a cat can consciously surf the internet or a chimpanzee can comprehend regular perturbations of non-linear partial differential equations.  In that context, now consider Arthur C. Clarke’s quote ... “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”  These beings, their methods and capabilities, and their influence on our reality would be magical, and because it might employ knowledge that we could never attain or comprehend (i.e. on the time scale of human civilizations), it would remain magical and mysterious no matter how much effort we put into understanding it.  The real mind fuck is that it would (or could) still be rooted in physical reality, meaning: a true source of magic, as far as we can ascertain, whose fundamental workings are still and will always remain real and physical.

With all this in mind I begrudgingly admit that these concepts force me to consider the possibility of (physical) beings so advanced that they are effectively gods -- relative to us their knowledge gives them omniscience and their technology gives them omnipotence. If we haven’t met them yet, let’s hope they are also omnibenevolent. Though, mostly likely (imo) they simply will not give us much consideration -- benevolent or malevolent -- in much the same way that we rarely try to have meaningful conversations with an ant colony. We may not even comprehend their presence, in much the same way that I doubt ants are aware of our presence beyond basic notions of threat and large scale environmental influences. To my mind, the other interesting possibility is that, like the plants we tend in our gardens, we are, right now, being tended without awareness of our conscious minds, in the same way that a plant can have so much care put into its cultivation and never have any ‘idea’ that there is a gardener -- it just ‘sees’ its version of physical reality:  it’s hot or cold, dry or wet, nourishing or starving, competing or cooperating -- the plant lives in the only physical realities it has ever known.  My personal hope is that if such beings exist, they are capable of communicating their presence in a way that we can understand ... oh, fuck, may that’s what supernatural is?! :\ 

The ability to test a hypothesis, to measure a difference between an idea and reality is, for the physicalist or anyone else that values objective reality, the definition of knowledge and the defining line between mechanistic and predictive understanding and the realm of the unknowable and the uncontrollable that we call magic. Therefore, I assert that when our ability to perform measurements and gain the knowledge that empowers distinction between science and magic disappears, science and magic cease to be separate -- physical reality and magic are one and the same at the edge of what can be known.  

And as for possible implications for an afterlife, in some form, let me get back to you ... 

(photo credits: Mr. Wuffles)

Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination. – Edward Abbey