Hello. Apparently I need permission to post on
this thread, so could I have some permission? The thread is very long and I'm not sure if something that's essentially the same as my take's been raised already, so here's mine, please tell me if it's good/I can post it.
Theoretically you could give me permission without reading my take as well, but I would appreciate feedback:
/my take begins here
In my opinion, superiority to dimensionality as Ultima puts it is illogical and contradictory. For one example of how it can easily lead to contradictions, consider a character who is aspatial as opposed to being dimensional, and is inaccessibly more powerful than all dimensional beings and is superior to dimensionality as a whole in terms of power due to their aspatiality. This is something that is explicitly brought up by Ultima and is viewed as perfectly valid. Now take a character who is
dimensional as opposed to being aspatial. This second character is treated as being inaccessibly superior to all
aspatial beings in power due to their
dimensionality. This in and of itself should not be a problem by Ultima's standards. To say otherwise is special pleading, as it is viewed to be perfectly fine for there to be "a character who has X characteristic, and is inaccessibly more powerful than all characters of Y characteristic due to having X characteristic (AKA the "mechanism attached to it that justifies its limitlessness" as Ultima called it)." Hopefully one can see the problem here. The two characters are completely contradictory, and there is no way of scaling the two if you take both descriptions as true. The first character would be stronger than the second character due to being stronger than all dimensional characters, with the second character being a dimensional character. However, the second character would also be stronger than the first character due to being stronger than all dimensional characters, with the first character being a dimensional character. This results in both characters being both inaccessibly stronger and inaccessibly weaker than the other. This is a contradiction.
From my understanding, this problem arises from allowing the arbitrarily decision of whether dimensionality or non-dimensionality is inaccessibly superior in power (or perhaps neither!) This is because one can arbitrarily decide that dimensionality is the more powerful end of the spectrum, whereas another can arbitrarily decide that non-dimensionality is more powerful. Allowing both decisions to be made inevitably allows for contradictions. These sorts of statements of "being superior to dimensionality" are essentially a category error (as mentioned by Ultima) of attributing "power" to "whether or not something is dimensional," an attribute which neither possesses power nor is it inherently connected to a certain level of power. The only solution is to either prohibit both of these arbitrary decisions (
that is, to disregard both the idea of being "superior to dimensionality" and the idea of being "superior to non-dimensionality") or to prohibit one of them. The former must be implemented due to the latter being special pleading, as both arbitrary decisions are equally plausible. There is no logical reason to believe non-dimensionality is superior to dimensionality or vice versa other than "the author said so." Unfortunately, as demonstrated here, these would be author statements that inherently lead to contradictions and thus must be discarded.
/my take on RF transcendence begins here
The argument placed forth about reality-fiction vs quantitative superiority is likewise flawed. Reality-fiction differences are considered as being greater than dimensional differences due to the fact that the "RF-superior" (for lack of a better term) side views the "RF-inferior" side as literally being zero or nothing, and thus, no mathematical operation can possibly bring the "RF-inferior" side, which is zero, up to the level of the "RF-superior" side, which is non-zero. On the other hand, dimensional differences are said to simply be solved by infinite multiplication as a cube is said to be the sum of infinite squares. Since the former is such a large difference such that no mathematical operation can bridge the gap, whereas the latter can be bridged by simple infinite summation, the former ie RF transcendence must be treated as inherently greater than the latter ie dimensional transcendence, or so the argument goes. However, this line of argumentation causes a large problem considering a statement made later by Ultima, that being that "the square has 0 volume." Unlike what Ultima later said about a cube actually being the sum of infinite squares, a cube (which inherently has non-zero volume) CANNOT be formed from infinite squares (each of which is said to have zero volume). Ultima says in his post that "the principles behind operations on the empty set do not apply to it ["it" referring to the null set of the square]", but this just isn't true. It still holds for the null set of the square that multiplication of infinite zeros (zero volume)
does not and
cannot add up to a non-zero quantity (cube with non-zero volume.
Now, this doesn't NECESSARILY have to invalidate Ultima's reasoning. We can simply view a square as having
infinitesimal volume as opposed to
zero volume. Then Ultima's point of cubes actually being the sum of infinite squares could make sense. I would actually view this as optimal considering the fact that higher dimensional beings in fiction, even when they are infinitely superior, often do NOT view lower dimensional beings as literal zero/nothingness. Additionally, it allows for compactification as an explanation for higher dimensional beings lacking infinite superiority to lower dimensional beings (that being that these higher dimensional beings practically only have infinitesimal extension in their extra dimension, or something like that, thus making them comparable in power to lower dimensional beings and vice versa).
However, there is still a problem with the approach to reality-fiction transcendence. In a verse where RF transcendence happens with RF-inferior beings are treated as zero, the RF-inferior humans for example are literally zero/nothingness. However, in verses where there is no RF transcendence, the human baseline of the verse is NOT zero. With Ultima's approach, the "zero-humans" would be viewed as equivalent to the "nonzero humans." It's arbitrary and quite ridiculous from a certain point of view to equate humans that are literally zero/nothingness to humans that are NOT zero and actually exist within the verse. We can equate them with our own arbitrary standards for the sake of having a fun matchup, but we should acknowledge that it is
just as valid to simply equate RF-superior humans that actually exist in one verse to humans from another verse that does not have any form of RF transcendence, since they are both beings that actually exist and are non-zero within the verse rather than being zero (if the RF-superior beings aren't literal zero compared to even
more RF-superior beings, that is). Ideally, this should be signified on the actual tier of the profile. For example: "0 if you use the RF-inferior beings as a baseline, 7-B if you use the RF-superior beings as a baseline" I can understand if this is too much of a hassle, but we should affirm the fact that it is just as valid to use the most RF-superior beings within a verse as the baseline as it is to use the beings that the story focuses on as the baseline.
Additionally, if this approach to RF transcendence really was to be taken, the standards for what is considered to be RF transcendence need to be MUCH stricter, along with the burden of proof being to actually prove that the allegedly RF-superior beings literally view the allegedly RF-inferior beings as zero/nothingness.
/my take on RF transcendence and my entire take in general end here
What do you think?
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