Not Everything Is A Clue – Ch 246-247

Chapters 246-247 – Some Things Were Clues

Justified True Belief That Isn’t Knowledge Meme

Torture vs. Dust Specks

For next week — 248-251

248. Princess!
249. There’s No Knowing Where We’re Going
250. The Ongoing Adventures of Valencia the Red
251. It All Depends On What You Mean By Home

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2 Comments

  1. As soon as Steven said “Do you want to do the end of the world on Thursday?”, did anyone else immediately think of the HPMOR thing: “Why did this sort of thing always happen on Thursdays?”
    I guess we’ll find out if everything goes well this Thursday….

  2. Interesting to hear it took you out of the story! I saw the DM going “You’re a character in a story, Joon.” and went “Huh, that actually is true, isn’t it.” But I still kept imagining Joon as a real person. I think I treat mental characters somewhat close to real people anyways.

    No discussion of the reality of fictional characters can be complete without mentioning Vivec from Morrowind. In the lore as Michael Kirkbride wrote it, Vivec possesses a power called CHIM. It seems to be the case that the entire setting of The Elder Scrolls is actually the dream of a sleeping god, and CHIM involves somehow manifesting yourself as a self-aware dream of that god. But personally, the way I choose to interpret it is that Kirkbride simulated Vivec sufficiently deeply that Vivec became able, in the lore, to act on his universe “from the outside” by exploiting his position as a figment of Kirkbride’s imagination. So context-crossing may in fact be possible. Presumably Alexander Wales is more confident in his mental insulation. :)

    I believe the amnestics are a reference to the SCP setting. At least that’s where I know them from. They’re their equivalent, narratively, of the Neuralyzer from MIB; a simple way to preserve the status quo after the end of a story.

    It still isn’t time travel. Time travel requires the detailed simulation of the original timeline in order to generate the object of the timetraveller. Without that simulation, the timetraveller could not arrive in the past. I believe Alexander presimulated “Joon-at-the-end” coarsely, enough that he could know that Joon would want to abolish the hells, and so acted on this preknowledge from the beginning. In other words, the “hell is real” timeline exists, but it was simulated at a sufficiently approximate simulation that it was never real *even inside* Joon’s context, even beyond Alexander simulating Joon being inherently coarse. Personally I prefer to think that when Alexander was writing people suffering in hell, he mentally imagined them as being thespians pretending to be suffering from the start.

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