Absolutely. This series has always shone through with romantic idealism. Not an insular autonomy, but a shared one.

And so on... Let's say you had a grid of variables with a single constant, G , in the center. Now G is the only source of assigned values, and does not assign itself to any variable. When it assigns a value to something as existent, then, G creates it "from nothing."* Emanation posits the ...

An adventure that never ends, where you're never entirely certain the danger has passed, but you know it always can pass. (This is a Tranquilline-Halls kind of image (from Sanderson's Stormlight Archives series...).)

Re: permutations of wrong, there is actually a little debate out there, in academia, over the concept of "suberogation." Basically, the asymmetry between the forbidden/prohibited operator in deontic logic, and the possible obligation-and-supererogation (beyond-duty's-call) operator pairs, ...

Maybe it's automatic for me, like I have background dread regarding gamma-ray bursts too Who knows...

I think so. I want to say I know so, but that... is a lot to say... especially about something like this... On the one hand, it is true that a member of the Reconstruction movement tried to recruit me and flipped out on me variously thereafter, including in particular when I went to Chicago. It is t...

Well usually I suppose people would really think more like, if they are extremely hungry, thirsty, aroused, etc. it is likely that they will eat, drink, or be merry, so to say. They wouldn't talk about wants or desires in the abstract, and a word that might be used instead, here, would be "driv...

Let's compare free will to rolling a die, specifically one with 4 sides (for wrong, permitted, obligated, and beyond-the-call-of-duty actions*), so that relative to free will, from any set of 4 given actions that correspond to the options, there is a 25% chance that the person facing the choice will...

So sometimes some people think of science like a form of religion, whatever religious is supposed to be, or they harken back to the notion of natural philosophy and think of it like that, or as the word "science" is used the posit is often as if there are these distinct objects "relig...

So, to reform something is to make it better or something, that's how the word is used. Suffixwise and all it means to impose a form anew on something. But anyway, in Masonic terms if you will (spiritually that is), if something is to be made better from being corrupted before, it is like a building...

Let's suppose SRD is subverting, not the transcendent/non-transcendent distinction but the internal/external concept of transcendence. Basically, the essence of the divine is awe. That's the emotion that is related to "glory." God is supposed to be the most awesome possible thing. Of cours...

Here's some options: 1. A reader says things that sound contrary to SRD's offered pre-interpretation because they use the transcendent/non-transcendent distinction differently, or they at least think it means something different, or whatever. 2. A reader might think that SRD merely claims to have ap...

C'mon wf :P Z is doing this in good faith. Speaking of which, the "SRD got rid of the Creator figure in the LC for x, y, z reasons" idea is fortunately, and un fortunately, plausible. The part of me that wants to half-deify SRD thinks, "No! He wouldn't make such a mistake! Argh!"...

I'm certainly in the too-thick category :P Re: the thing about "providence would be the Creator intervening, which in this story is something he axiomatically doesn't do." And chalking it up to the necessities-of-metaphor when transcendent forces manifest in the tale... Against the second ...

I read of this theory, the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe, which besides a lot of metaphysical and transcientific jargon, also included an interesting geometrical proposal, so here goes. The basic idea is that logic/set-theory is physically embedded at a fundamental level, so that the bas...

From the POV of the universe, if you will, all objects are just patterns of geometrical motion, yet conscious beings do not have just one sense that indiscriminately represents all things, but a manifold of different senses. There seems to be some obscure distinction, then, between the quantificatio...

Hmm, maybe (3), if there was a (3) there, would be my reply... that is, it would seem as if providence exists within the characters themselves, is the power they wield itself. Let's suppose that the Land's Earth, whatever/wherever it is in one sense, in an original one existed in the mind of the old...

Although I have good-posted your post, wf, I do have one question to raise: is there a narrative problem, then, in the representation of the solution to the problem of the Worm? To be sure, the climactic showdowns in the other two sets of Covenant books, were much more acutely... psychological? It a...

I suppose I'm saying that SRD might be trying to convert transcendent religious concepts into more humanistic/existentialist/what-have-you ones, but I think that any attempt to do so is going to end up with robustly transcendent religious concepts anyway, somewhere, like at the limit, if using wild ...