Despiser's Continuing Guidance

[burgs]

Fantasies are usually about quests of some kind. One of the reasons I like Martin so much is that there isn't much traditional fantasy questing. Any movement from place to place is entirely human. Magic is almost incidental, and without certain pressures he never would have included dragons. (I wish hadn't. Dragons are so cliche.)

[finn]

[quote="Nerdanel"]

Since caesures do not normally chase people, it must have been guided to make Anele be in the right place at the right time. The only person known to be able to guide caesures (in addition to the Demondim) is Esmer. (There is a good chance Lord Foul could have done it too, but he was otherwise occupied, and the thing looks like something he'd delegate anyway.) [/quote]

But Linden has guided a Caesure as has Stave and the Ranyhyn and the power that drove the caesure to steer Anele to the desired point (if such a this did happen and was not merely chance or an aspect of the Land's version of Chaos theory) could have come from a variety of times as well as places (or persons in times and places).

[Nerdanel]

Let's go through all the possibilities:

Lord Foul: Probably too busy and would prefer to delegate.

Herem: Busy possessing Joan. If Herem could make Joan do anything this controlled, it would have made for very short Last Chronicles.

Jehannum: Almost certainly busy possessing Roger.

Haruchai: This kind of stuff violates their principles in more than one way. Besides, Anele said the Haruchai were after him but that they were possible to evade, unlike the caesure.

Ranyhyn: Would be massively out-of-character, if they even could control caesures while outside of them, which I seriously doubt. The Ranyhyn top my list of Least Likely to be a Bad Guy in Disguise.

People of the Land: No ability and no conceivable motivation.

Ramen: See above.

Giants: No ability, no motivation, not even near the right geographical area as far as we can tell.

Sur-jheherrin: See above.

Lurker of the Sarangrave Flat: The absence of Saragrave Flat is only one of the factors preventing this.

Kastenessen: Appears pretty irrational to me, if that fiery thing possessing Anele was indeed Kastenessen. We need someone at the very least able to follow directions.

Someone dead, like Kevin: This could be possible, but we haven't seen any evidence that any of the dead are being controlled by Lord Foul or even active in the story at all. The dead wouldn't do this kind of thing on their own.

Someone from the future: How could they do anything that big without shattering the Arch of Time into a million pieces?

Someone from the past: The ur-viles are a credible suggestion, but I still prefer Esmer. He is better at not being seen and Anele did not talk about things when talking about it. If not the ur-viles, is the place crawling with time-travellers? What motivation could they have? The Demondim are not in the play yet.

The Mahdoubt: It doesn't feel like her in the least, but what do we really know about her anyway?

Thomas Covenant: Doesn't make sense, unless you believe in fragmented Covenants, some of which are controlled by Lord Foul, or if Covenant is suddenly evil and plotting as elaborately as Foul. Either case, the level of elaborateness required would be impressive.

Elohim: From what I have picked up, the Elohim are not into elaborate plots like this one. They would be more likely to just use their power and do what they want.

Croyel: The last we saw them, the Croyel did not serve Lord Foul directly and they would have no motivation for this particular plot. We haven't seen a single person carrying a baby around.

Merewives: Within the realm of possibility if they can live on the land and are allied with Lord Foul. Esmer is still far more plausible.

Arghuleh: Too dumb. Too low melting point.

Sandgorgons: The low level of Hulk Smash involved suggest otherwise. Nom might be capable, but unless the remnants of Sheol have taken over him, he would have no motivation.

Someone we haven't met: The trouble with things we haven't met is that we don't know anything about them.

[Nerdanel]

Re: time rubble, the shattered cliff, multiple Covenants

Gradual Interview to the rescue!

So: the crucial information is in the chapter where Linden passes through one of Joan's "caesures". There Joan stands amid the rubble of a shattered cliff. Each of those broken pieces of stone represents a moment or moments of the Land's past. (How was the cliff shattered in the first place? Presumably by the breaking of the Laws of Death and Life.) They do NOT represent moments in Joan's present. So when she destroys one of those pieces of rubble, she is creating a "ceasure" in that specific moment of the Land's past. Could be a hundred years before her present. Could be 3500 years before her present. But--since I insist on thinking of time as linear--all of them *must* represent moments prior to her present rather than after her present: she hasn't destroyed *herself* with wild magic; hasn't sent *herself* gyring chaotically into her own future.

When Joan feels compelled to let out a blast of power, she has, in essence, all of the past 3500 or so Land-years to pick from as a starting point for her "caesure".

Clear, no? No, of course not. We're talking about time paradoxes here: they *can't* be clear. <grin> But I'm doing the best I can with what I have.

(emphasis mine)

So it appears that the multiple Covenants theory in its standard form has been blown out of the water, since Covenant died and became a part of the Arch after the Laws of Life and Death were already broken. However the shattered cliff being indeed shattered complicates things. I'm inclined to think that the shatteredness may not mean anything more than the Laws are not as whole as they used to be.

[Nerdanel]

More from the gradual interview, re: possession:

First we need to define "enter." I see "possession" ("entering") as operating along a continuum which ranges from "merely whispering nearly-inaudible suggestions" to "complete control." And on that continuum, the degree to which Lord Foul can enter a mind in the "real world" is severely limited to the low end. He couldn't do it all until the structures of Law which sustain the Land began to break down. And he still can't assume control: he can only whisper persuasively. (The Ravers can't do this at all to a mind in the "real world": only LF is that powerful. When Linden feels turiya in Joan's mind, Joan is already dead; already in the Land.)

It looks like I missed some hints I really should have seen. It looks so obvious after the fact.

[wayfriend]

So it appears that the multiple Covenants theory in its standard form has been blown out of the water, since Covenant died and became a part of the Arch after the Laws of Life and Death were already broken.

Really? Don't you think that the cliff is a metaphor for the Arch? (Or, rather, they are both metaphors of the same thing.) And don't you think that Covenant would become the Arch as it is at the time? (That is, if Covenent becomes the Arch, and the Arch is broken, then Covenent would become a broken Arch, would he not?)

[Nerdanel]

And don't you think that Covenant would become the Arch as it is at the time? (That is, if Covenent becomes the Arch, and the Arch is broken, then Covenent would become a broken Arch, would he not?)

Ummm. I didn't really think it that way...

So what you are thinking is that when Thomas Covenant became the Arch of Time, he was bijected (if you excuse my use of math terminology; this discussion reminds me of a current computer science course of mine) from his corporeal body C to the Arch of Time A. There is a one-to-one mapping between C and A (the definition of bijection), and A is a non-continuous group. Therefore C, when projected to A, becomes non-continous also.

So was the Thomas Covenant that came back to fight Lord Foul only one of numerous sub-Covenants (who possibly fought somewhere else in time or did not fight at all)? Could Covenant be really said to told Linden to pick up the ring it it was only a shard of him? Does a request to pick something up really count as giving the ring truly away? Has Lord Foul still as much of a right to use the ring Linden? But I digress.

I think my view is based on that bijection is reversible. Even though A is non-continous, C isn't. We can map A back into C and the the points will be continous again. So Covenant-as-the-Arch could exist in lots of discrete pieces but Covenant-as-a-person could still be whole. At least he was never shattered by the collapse of an important Law. I really liked about Mordant's Need the in-depth thinking that had gone into the mirrors. I hope we are getting the same thing here even if SRD isn't particularly fond of scientific accuracy.

(I hope I wasn't too confusing.)

[Nerdanel]

Thinking more about the ideas in the previous post... WARNING: Math/physics/astronomy/signal processing geekery ahead!

An unsolved question in the real world is whether the reality is analog or digital, or if a given volume of space has a finite number of discrete states in which it can be. This problem is complicated further by the unknown physics of the Land. We cannot even be sure if the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle operates in the Land and if there is the accompanying Planck distance that limits the smallest scale on which observations can be made.

Further, we do not know if the universe in which the Earth resides is finite or infinite in size. The current research suggests that the geometry of the "real universe" is not curved upon itself, which would mean that it would not be possible to return to one's starting place of origin by travelling straight in one direction in the space, but no such measurements have been made in the Earth's universe. The Earth's universe could potentially even have definite borders at its edges.

This brings us back to the problem of mapping Thomas Covenant (C) to the Arch of Time (A). C has a finite physical size and a finite size in the time dimension. Possibly C could be seen as a moving 3-D solid in the four-dimensional spacetime or perhaps he would be best perceived as a stationary 4-D object, although this latter view is questionable on the part of the free will. This is an intriguing question, but happily the distinction is not material to our point.

A is a different matter entirely. Its physical size may be either finite or infinite and we have no way of knowing unless SRD decides to tell us later in the Last Chronicles. A's size in the time dimension would be finite - unlike our own universe which according to the latest reserach will expand forever - since A was created once and will be destroyed once the Laws governing it are broken down. This means A's physical size alone will be the determining factor for our purposes.

Finally, for both A and C we must consider the deep nature of reality. This should be the same for both in the Land. If A and the "real world" are different in the analog/digital respect, this means only that C must have passed through either an analog/digital or digital/analog converter on his way to the Land. Since we are talking about sub-atomic differences, the process would have been unnoticed by everyone.

The deep nature of reality is a fundamentally important concept in considerering the mapping of C to A. Bijection, one-to-one mapping, is only possible with entities of the same size, but since there are potential infinities involved, A and C may indeed be the same size.

- Digilal reality, bounded universe: A and C are both finite. A is bigger than C.

- Digital reality, unbounded universe: C is finite but A is numerably infinite.

- Analog reality: Both A and C are innumerably infinite and therefore effectively have the same size. Bijection is possible.

So if the nature of the Land is analog we can project C into A so that one point in C corresponds to one point in A, and the other way around. However this is not possible in the case of digital reality. Trying to map a finite C to a larger A results either some parts of A in being uncovered by C (sounds very unlikely on the basis of the book, unless Covenant protected the Arch from Lord Foul in the manner of table tennis) or duplication of C points to fill up A, which could simply mean interpolating and oversampling C in the case of a finite-to-finite transformation, but a finite-to-infinite transformation cannot be done this way and would basically cause an infinite series of copies of C or at least parts of C, or in the case of a finite-to-finite transformation, a fixed number of copies of C. However, if we really wanted, we could also map the infinite into the infinite multiple (or even an infinite number of) times, since the nature of infinity allows this. One should still note that none of this potential multiplication has anything to do with the discontinous status of A. (This little datum is probably the closest to an actual point I get in this essay, scribble, thing.)

However, there is a possibility that C and A do not share the fundamental nature of their reality. We know there is something about things not of the Land. Perhaps it is something to do with the quantum structure. If C is digital and A analog, the situation is essentially the same as in the digital reality/bounded universe situation above, except more so, since A would be innumerable instead of numerable. On the other hand, if C is analog and A digital, C would be infinitely larger than A. In this case C would need to be digitized, but the loss of information would have been much less than if C had been A/D converted upon arrival to the Land, infinitely so in the case of an unbounded universe.

(I think I must have been really confusing. I think I would have needed diagrams or something.)

[Warmark]

No offence, but my brain just died.

[High Lord Tolkien]

Yeah, you lost me at "(C)".

[Variol Farseer]

The trouble, Nerdanel — forgive me for shooting back at you with some really obscure metaphysical terminology — is that you are trying to map a diathetic construct onto a physical construct, and assuming that the bounds and parameters of the physical construct are an obstacle to the mapping.

It is not Covenant's physical body that is being mapped onto anything; that is back in the 'real' world, feeding the worms. (So is his secondary physical body in the Earth.) His mind, to borrow a trope from cyberpunk, has been 'uploaded' to the Arch of Time. Therefore the question of whether the Arch is physically finite or infinite, and whether the Earth's space-time continuum is a discrete-state or continuous-state information system (I dislike the terms 'digital' and 'analog' in this context, as they imply more than they actually mean), is entirely irrelevant.

SRD has often explained the ground rules as he sees them. Fantasy, as I have sometimes said, is the literature of everted symbolism: the One Ring does not represent power in some merely analogical sense, it is power. Likewise, the white gold is the power that binds the Arch of Time, and can unbind it; it also is Covenant. The mapping, or identity, is not dependent on physical constraints. ('Judge me by my size, do you?')

The specific matrix of symbolisms embodied in the Land is intended as a map of Covenant's own psychodrama, but (SRD has suggested) on a higher level of Platonic 'reality'. It might be more accurate to say that Covenant in the 'real' world is the Land's dream, than the other way round. (This would be something like the apparent relationship between the Elohim and the Earthpower.) This would explain why the Land can go on existing after Covenant's death, and why Lord Foul, as he gleefully informed the 'groveller', could carry on his machinations against the Earth in Covenant's absence. Both Covenant and the white gold are aspects or reifications of the essential paradox on which the Arch of Time is founded.

Remember the old man's essay in LFB?

There he is informed by a disembodied voice that he has been brought to that place as a champion for his world. He must fight to the death in single combat against a champion from another world. If he is defeated, he will die, and his world—the real world—will be destroyed because it lacks the inner strength to survive.

We may provisionally assume that this is literally true. It would fit in with SRD's hints about the comparative Platonic levels of the two worlds. In that case, nearly everything we have assumed about the relationship between Covenant and the Land is, not exactly wrong, but upside-down. But in any case we need not postulate the possibility of a fundamental physical incompatibility between the natures of the two worlds at either the cosmological or the subatomic level. The terms of reference exclude such questions implicitly.

[burgs]

To my (relatively) simple mind, Covenant is wild magic, so he must be a part of the Arch in a fashion, but he is also one of the Dead. Findail sent him away with a simple command. You can't be the Arch and Dead at once.

Or so it seems to me.

[burgs]

I should add to that contradictory post.

When Covenant spoke to Linden after diminishing Foul in WGW, he spoke to her as a "revenant" (that's the word used).

[wayfriend]

It would fit in with SRD's hints about the comparative Platonic levels of the two worlds.

I wish I knew more Plato. But until now I assumed that the Land being 'more real' meant that it was closer to being Ideal (Perfect), and therefore farther from being the actual, mundane world (that we unperceptive humans see).

Anyway, when we say that Covenant is wild magic or is the Arch of Time, there's a lot of wiggle room in just what that word "is" implies. I am fairly sure it doesn't mean a mapping of subatomic particles. And I'm fairly sure it doesn't mean any sort of physical continuity, shared identity, or Hulk-like metamorphosis. It's about Spiritual Unity. And there's a lot of wiggle room in just what those words "Spiritual Unity" mean ...

[Nerdanel]

Diathetic - Doesn't that mean having a genetic predisposition to a disease or is having a passive sentence with a subject the thing you are talking about? (I had to check that up. My English isn't THAT good.)

I think I got a little (yeah, righ) self-indulgent in the previous two posts. The trouble with the situation is that there isn't nearly enough information available, but I'm nevertheless a highly analytical person who likes to speculate, as you may have noticed. Speculating is fun. Making a thorough analysis of the whole situation would take a great many words indeed and would still be likely to miss some of the weirder possibilities, so I had to concentrate on a specific subset of what it could mean for Thomas Covenant to become the Arch of Time.

If the "real world" is indeed deep down like our world (uncertain) and specifically is deep down like our world as seen by and the modern science and the little atheist me save for intrusions by extradimensional supernatural elements (even more questionable), then a "soul" would really be an emergent property of the electromagnetic functioning of the brain. Transferring a soul somewhere would necessarily mean copying of the brain's neural pathways, which would need to be done with as much accuracy as possible so that the person copied would actually remain the same person. I assumed that a magical universe could allow an unlimited precision for this, but it could be interesting if it didn't and people would become different when they died because of that. I don't expect that last thing to actually be true in the Land though, since it would be a bit too close to saying that souls are not actually immortal. I think it would be more likely that upon entering the Land Covenant is granted an immortal soul if he didn't possess it earlier, but well, we lack the information.

[Variol Farseer]

Diathetic - Doesn't that mean having a genetic predisposition to a disease or is having a passive sentence with a subject the thing you are talking about? (I had to check that up. My English isn't THAT good.)

That's the medical (and usual) meaning of the term. R.O. Kapp employed it in its etymological sense (from Greek diatithenai, 'to arrange or dispose') as a technical term in philosophy. He used it to mean 'capable of disposing to a specification', and proposed it (rather than the vague 'spiritual' or the merely negative 'immaterial') as a designation for the category of phenomena not describable in terms of their physical constituents. Anything concerned with intentions, purposes, and the arrangement or interpretation of symbols, is 'diathetic' in Kapp's sense of the word.

The mind may indeed be an emergent property of the electromagnetic functioning of the brain, but this is only possible because the structure of the universe as a whole permits that kind of property to emerge. In effect, the universe is an information system, and what we call 'mind' or 'soul' is a process that arises from, because on a local scale it resembles, the structure and operation of the whole. (If you think of intelligence as a 'disease', the universe may be 'predisposed' to it by the 'genetics' of its physical laws; and in that sense, intelligence is a diathetic phenomenon in something like the medical sense. But this is irrelevant to Kapp's reasons for choosing the word.)

My point, in any case, is that the correspondence between the 'real world' Covenant and his equivalent in the Land was mental and structural, not material. Just as the same data may be represented in printed text, as bits on a disk, or as a graphic image, Covenant's real body and his (occasional) avatar in the Land both contained representations of the same process, which we refer to loosely as his mind. Both were fully functioning representations, but the physical details of how they functioned are not important to the story. It doesn't matter whether a Turing machine is built out of silicon chips or peanut butter, as long as it does its job; and similarly, the physics underlying Covenant's 'real world' brain need not be identical or even related to the Law of the Earthpower. But in fact, this being a fantasy, I suspect you would find that the 'real' world is a construct, sc. an information system, of much the same sort as the Earth: diathetic, not physical, in Kapp's sense of the term.

In other words, while it may be true in this world that Mind is an emergent property of Matter, it is definitely more nearly true in both fantasy worlds that Matter is an emergent property of Mind. (Actually, I have long suspected that the situation is not nearly so simple even in this world, but that touches upon points of information theory that I don't grasp well enough to discuss intelligently.) SRD actually makes himself quite clear on that point, in the GI and elsewhere. So analogies predicated on our own laws of physics are inherently liable to fall down when projected into that context.

[Borillar]

Reading this thread makes me want to write to SRD and tell him he'd better hurry the hell up on "Revenant" before some of these ambiguities and unknowns become someone's graduate thesis.