Annotated 44-9
Quian here gives us a look into the real curse of winter elfdom. It’s not just that your foreknowledge makes you so valuable to other races that your only choices are to conquer everyone else, get used by someone else, or live in complete isolation.
It’s also that after a while, knowing the end of every story means you’re bored, impatient, and irritated by nearly everything you’ve come across. It doesn’t matter that it’s actually happening for the first time: you’ve seen it all before…again, and again, and again. Their existence isn’t quite so monotonous: they can still enjoy certain simple pleasures like food and warmth and the pride of building and acquiring things. But the pleasure of “meeting new people” is not one they generally enjoy…except for the very young, who haven’t had time to get over it all yet.
FB: Winter Elf oracles are highly prominent and make their points definitively – oh, no, wait, sorry, we meant to say “auricles.”
Hmm… yes. Actually, I’m not even sure about the simple pleasures. A nice warm meal after a hard day out in the cold is probably not spoiled by the fact that you knew you were going to have it. But material wealth usually loses its appeal relatively soon after acquiring it. Even for people who are not prescient, the 15th nice warm sweater that your dear aunt crocheted for you will get somewhat less of a reaction than the first one. If you are prescient, you already know about the other 14 the first time round.
So actually, after retiring from the world, living a simple life makes the most sense for the Winter Elves, but I still must be hard. Even if they could live in similar luxury as the Sky Elves, I bet they’d just grow tired of it before it really started. Heck, even relationships between Winter Elves must be mostly uninteresting. No surprises, no disappointments, at most an “oh, so that’s what *that* feels like”. Although I guess at times it can save you a lot of anxiousness in some situations.
That is, of course, assuming that they had a choice in the matter, which they didn’t because you can’t make decisions if you already know the future. You know what you’ll decide, and what will come of it. So you’re just enacting some script, and at that point the whole causality thing starts to become difficult because the Winter Elves can’t really have decided any of what they do, can they? Which is why prescience isn’t a thing IRL, I guess, and why (backwards) time travel can only work in movies.
Which raises an interesting question: Do they even have free will? Their behaviour says they do to some extent, or else Quian might as well be the one guiding the visitors, with zero enthusiasm, but that’s what he stupid timeline says, so whatever, here’s your stupid glimpse at your stupid future, idiots.
Hmm, I approach it differently. According to T here, winter elves still experience childhood and learn over time the meaningfulness of their visions. So, at some point, they must make a choice (and perhaps repeatedly make it) to continue their life, knowing what it will contain. They must have some sense of the importance or meaningfulness of their future, and choose to remain alive because it’s valuable or desirable enough to do so. Which kinda implies to me that there should be some degree of joyful anticipation and quiet, delightful knowing.
They’re clearly able to discern the future in a meaningful way; after all, even the Sky Elves can’t find them. Is the knowledge of the future more complete or accurate the more they concentrate on it? The closer it is? The more personally important? The more “cosmically” important? I remember the larger details of this story, but the finer ones I forget. So forgive me if the story, itself, answers those.
The only way to restrict the amount of information available is to remove any kind of free will. I could make arguments regarding that but lack of free will doesn’t change the lives of those living.
“lack of free will doesn’t change the lives of those living.”
Not unless those living can also see the future. If you don’t know the future, than the results of enacting your free will is indistinguishable from the results of enacting some unconscious pre-determined (but unknown to anybody) pattern — in fact if I’m not mistaken, then the two may be considered one and the same thing in many circumstances, in the same way that a dice throw is absolutely deterministic but (usually) impossible to predict.
The “do they have free will” is actually a complex situation I have to deal with with a character of mine because (thanks to time powers) they see every time line including their involvement yet can manipulate timelines or just delete them. I’ve concluded that more or less he simultaneously has the most and least free will in my multiverse because he is the only one who can Truely choose what timeline he goes down but he also has already chosen what timeline he goes down before he makes the choice
Warning: Slightly abstract metaphorical high-flying concept stuff.
I’m just reminded of the wave function for electrons around atoms.
And electron has a certain wavelength. So for it to orbit a nucleus, the length of that orbit must be a multiple of the wavelength, otherwise it would interfere with itself. That is why electrons always are only stable within certain “shells” around an atomic nucleus, where they can be in resonance with themselves.
If you can know what will happen, that includes knowing what you yourself will do, which removes your ability to act spontaneously. But if can see the future, that means you can see how the laws of nature will play out, applied to the current state of the universe, including yourself. That includes all the things and people behaving and reacting in the way in which they do, including applying their free will — and that includes yourself! If anything you did contradicted your own will, then your vision of the future would be wrong.
If you foresee any other person making any decision, then it’s because that person will make that decision. And that would have to apply to yourself, too. The decisions you make are the decisions you will make based on your then-current mental and emotional state, and all available information (which includes the future!).
So, if some prescient person at any point in time did something entirely nonsensical for no other apparent reason than that they foresaw themselves doing it, although they did not want to, and it made no sense to themselves … their prescience would be broken because it predicts stuff that makes no sense. That scenario makes as little sense as anyone else behaving completely out of character against their own will, simply because some prediction said they would. Which in turn means: A prescient person has the same amount of free will as anyone else. They are still in resonance with themselves, the world, and in their particular case: the future.
Now, someone who can switch between timelines? I guess that would be like an electron switching between different orbits? This line makes complete sense, and maybe so does another… so actually that person would have a degree of free will and autonomy that nobody else has. Knowing their own future and changing it to a different version. I kind of feel that for the analogy to work, they would need a lot of energy (willpower, conviction, personal effort or otherwise) to make that kind of change, though :)
…and I realize that this means that Winter Elves might still have all of their free will intact … I might have just proven myself wrong. Funny world, this :)
“you knew you were going to have it”
Well, that raises lots of questions. Are they aware of everything all the time? That’s basically omniscience, and seems a high bar for a basically human ‘brain’. If not, then how does it work? Can they choose to ‘see’ the future, then forget about it by not thinking about it? Can they choose not to ‘see’ at all and let themselves be surprised? It seems not, given the comic pages, but then we’re back to all-the-time omniscience… yet they grow, and change in attitudes with age.
And what happens if they try to change the future? Or do they just… not try, by virtue of Winter Elf nature?
The proof that there’s no general way to predict the behavior of an algorithm (computer program) is essentially that if there were, you could write a program that used that way to predict its own behavior, then do the opposite. Paradox! I feel it extends to prescience in general. You could see the future that would happen if you don’t act, you could see related parallel timelines but not your own (Jo Walton’s _The King’s Peace_ uses that), you can see the future of systems you’re not part of, but seeing The Future of a world you’re part of and act on is… weird, at best. Even more when there’s more than one such person, with conflicting desires.
In Dune I think prescience was more seeing possible futures, and being able to choose among them, and also having such vision clouded by other prescients.
Dune’s a good one (and also, I read all the books, some time ago…). One thing there is that I don’t think Frank Herbert was big on factual and technical consistence. It’s a lot more about humans being put in situations, and the behaviour of societies, politics, groups, relations between humans, and so on.
The way I understood prescience to work in those books is that nobody has a clear view of the entire future, they more or less catch glimpses of (if you do this, that will happen), in various abstractions. So the Bene Gesserit knew they were breeding the Kwisatz Haderach, and that they were close to getting there, but they did not anticipate him/her to turn up one generation earlier. They had long ago planted the myths on Arrakis needed to allow the Lady Jessica and her children to be welcome but they wouldn’t have known which individual would be served by them, and in what exact circumstances. Nor did Lady Jessica. But she had been trained, like her fellow Bene Gesserit, to behave in the appropriate way so the Fremen would “recognize” her.
Only Paul can completely see his own future, and only from the point on where he is blinded. And from that moment, he simply executes the prophecy and pretty forsakes his own will. And so does his son (dammit, forgot his name). He becomes the God Emperor and ruler of the galaxy, next to omnipotent, but also deeply unhappy because he cannot leave the role once he picks it up. He must act the part that he has chosen. Which pretty much turns him into a prisoner, too. In the end, he seems to welcome his death.
Also, if you read the books a little too critically, the logic does not hold up all the way … I chose not to do that, though, and simply see all these stories as examples of the dilemma of any ruler who accumulates more power than is healthy: At some point none of their ideals matter, and they become a servant of the path they have chosen. They either do what it takes to stay in power, or they are deposed and not judged kindly. I’m not sure if that’s what Herbert had in mind, but I find that the intended “moral of the story” is sufficiently vague that it’s fairly easy to see (or overlook) a lot of different things in it.
Back to the topic, though: yeah. The more prescience, the less free will.
Maybe not the intended subtext, but I also feel like these two are brothers.
I’m not sure why they even bother with xenophobia. It looks like they find each other tedious, too.