On 01/31/2012 08:12 AM, Chucky & Janica wrote:

No, I just forgot about Lanfear's background, which is very shrouded by
the way.

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!

Angreal, ter'angreal and I think there's more kinds. Maybe I should look
this stuff up in the index.

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.

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.

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.

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.

OK let's arrange them in order of increasingly more made up guys. Now
take the last one.

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.

Yeah, very ...

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On Sun, 05 Feb 2012 13:45:04 +0100, pataphor <patap...@gmail.com>
wrote:

Wow. Pretty sure Mierin Sedai didn't discover the One Power. There
were Ages predating the Age of Legends where the One Power was in use,
and Mierin was active in the Age of Legends. There's no suggestion
that she was old enough to have been alive in any of the Ages before
that.

Although I suppose it's always possible.

*scenarios.

Okay, but I'm not seeing any evidence for the Age of Legends being the
Age in which the One Power was invented / discovered, the Aes Sedai
established, etc. I feel sure one or another of the Forsaken would
have snooted about it by now if it had.

I can't quite express how dubious this is, but certainly possible.

Damn Hyena.

Sa'angreal are the big ones, like super-angreal. Angreal and
sa'angreal increase the amount of the One Power you can use, while
ter'angreal do different stuff *with* the Power, either when channeled
into or just when used by anyone.

None of which is anything to do with magic in a fantasy series. I
don't think you're going to get any evidence for the One Power having
a "scientific" basis in the final book, and there hasn't been any so
far.

Of course, all these things can be argued the opposite way too.
There's no conclusive proof *against*.

Uh huh, what is an 'if'-crystal?

*nod* I recall.

Waiting for you to connect this to the One Power for me.

...and you missed. Obviously too clever for me.

You've lost me. I follow the anecdote, just not seeing the connection
to the Wheel of Time situation.

Uh huh.

I don't dislike them, but this is starting to sound like an awful
load. If you'll pardon my saying so. Could you dumb it down a shade
for me? "Higher level of abstraction" is not the same as "phoney
over-complicated intellectual-speak without visible point."

Uh huh.

So your CV was a problem.

I don't know what assymmetric information is, but okay, I'm on board.

Of *what*? Perception being reality?

Did I just sum it all up in three words there? Or am I completely
lost?

Whoa.

So Galad is representative of a personality type that is so solid in
its perception of reality, namely right and wrong, that he will not be
swayed by prevailing public opinion or political expediency, and thus
would make a good partner for Egwene?

Could be.

But he could just as well be an advisor to her without being a lover
or husband. Gawyn also needs to go off and be Elayne's First Prince of
the Sword or whatever it was his duty to be, I imagine his role as
Egwene's Warder and husband will interfere with that as well. But then
Elayne's whole identity as Aes Sedai *and* Queen of Andor is
complicated, she's going to need to be in Andor. With Gawyn? Maybe.

It seems a moot point, unless after the Last Battle Galad sees that
the "right" thing to do now is dismiss the whole idea of Aes Sedai
being evil that the Whitecloaks hold so dear, and become Egwene's
advisor. Maybe Amadician Ambassador or something.

Right, so there we go. But that did seem to be the dream you were
talking about. So you can imagine my confusion. Were you originally
talking about some other dream Egwene had with towers in?

Thought I did that. Although then it should be "Sanderson, Jordan, or
Jackson", since Jordan is a pseudonym and Sanderson is, to the best of
my knowledge, not.

You don't dig on giving straight answers, do you.

...

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