- 10,883
- 12,299
That's a nice construct and all, but behaving like that is no logical consequence of a basic state of oneness. They need to have explanations to behave like that just like you just gave. It's not a logical consequence of the state alone.Frankly I think people are getting too hung up on specific usage of the term "duality" without considering further nuance. Like, if you are a monad that unites everything into a single essence devoid of separation, then we are talking about an entity that is purely simple in the mereological sense, meaning that they entities with no composition (i.e have no smaller, more basic "parts" making them up). More accurately they'd be infinitely simple, not just with respect to spatial or temporal parts but to metaphysical parts as well, such as, say, predicates referring to them.
In the case of such an entity, plurality in any manner is by definition strictly forbbiden, because to introduce a multitude of features is to say that a thing can be broken down into smaller, constituent parts able to be analyzed isolatedly. So if you say that in a thing there are doubles, or triples, or quadruples, or whatever else, then that thing has composition in some level and as such is not perfectly simple anymore, and thus not really something that satisfies the above condition of lacking separation and unifying everything into a single essence.
Mind you, though, this isn't exactly the same as, for example, "Two opposing states, A and B, are true simultaneously." In such a case, you'd still be acknowledging that A and B are distinct attributes that this object somehow just holds at the same time because of some paradoxical nature of theirs (For example in the thought-experiment of Schrodinger's Cat, where the cat in the box is deemed both dead and alive until observed). The above case is more like "There is no plurality or delineation between A and B to begin with," so, for example, a perfectly simple being doesn't have a set of attributes, but is those attributes, and neither are these attributes truly distinct from one another.
So, yes, I'd say that a being like that is, for all intents and purposes, Transdual, and to reject it and similar things just because it doesn't explicitly mention the word "duality" is pretty baffling to me. I'm relatively more "Eh" on the matter of if verses happen to have more specific schemes than that, though. Like, if the cosmology was based on triads instead of dualities, or something like that, and a character then transcends that. And obviously, the above also isn't the same as simply encompassing or being one with the universe, since both can still involve a character whose nature is a plural, composite one.
I also see no practical difference between being in both state or being in one state that unifies both. Generally, duality exists in verses, so the dual states as such also exist. The difference between occupying one fused state of two or two states at once is really mostly a matter of notation. Most verses with such a setup still have a duality (not everything in the verse is in the state of oneness), meaning one can still shift them to a state of such behaviour. And even if some verse actually had no duality for anything, the entire debate just switches from the rules by which things switch between 2 or more states, to by which rules one state changes itself.
Ultimately you just don't get around having to specify the rules by which things beyond logic behave when interacted with.
Problem is that the argument you supported by that doesn't work unless you assess it's a default state. And as I explained merely standing outside features would not grant immunity to them.I never claimed that it was. I just used that as an example of how lacking or generally standing outside of certain features would mean you are unable to be interacted with by powers whose function is to interact with said features, much like Soul Manipulation is useless if the character it is being attempted against has no soul at all. You could replace "Existence" and "Nonexistence" with whatever else you find convenient.
Well, you would be wrong about that being deemed a valid example.That's not really what I meant with the example. What I was specifying is that a character is in a state where they are neither existent nor nonexistent, or speaking in the language of your argument, one where both propositions ("X exists" and "X doesn't exist") are simultaneously false, not some situation where "X exists" and "X doesn't exist" each have more possible assignable values than "True" and "False." I am very willing to bet the former would be immensely more commonly found in fiction, generally speaking, and it is something we already deem a valid example of a Transdual state if the above exchanges are anything to go by.
You mistake both states being false with a nature of nothingness. There is no logical indication for the behavior of an entity for which both truth values are false without further information.
To give an example of how one multi-valued logic might work: Say we have three truth values, 0, 1 and 2, and an entity is in truth value 2 in regards to its existence. The truth value of "X exists" is 0 (false), as the statement quite simply is false. X doesn't exist as it isn't in truth value 1. The statement "X doesn't exist" also has truth value 0, as the statement is simply false. For it to not exist it would need to be in truth value 0, but it isn't. So both values are simultanously false, but we have said nothing about the nature of 2. There is nothing preventing the logic to have the rule "if the character is killed it shifts from any current existence value to 0".
So a system in which both are false and yet the character can be killed like normal is imaginable. I mean, really, we are talking about things beyond logic. Everything is imaginable if we don't set further constraints. Of course, system in which both states are false and the character is immune to attacks is imaginable as well. But it's not necessarily the case and needs strict evidence.
So, as said, both being false can't be equated to behaving like the "nonexistent" value, meaning that the assumption that it would be unaffected is just supported by nothing. You either need evidence that they behave like nothing (and hence are unaffected by attacks as nonexistent things would be. That's what we do with NEP nature type 2) or statements regarding immunity/transcendence. Just a combination or absence of logical states alone just doesn't cut it.
KingPin's argument was in favor of Nondual characters per default being immune to stuff, with the reasoning that we assume as much for NEP. Which isn't true since NEP requires very specific evidence.Are you saying that Nature Type 2 requires no statements or showings of uninteractability because the nature of the power, on its own, already implies as much? If so, I fail to see how that actually addresses KingPin's point. Their argument, from what I gather, is that Nature Type 2 does not for instance require that a character be transcendent over both existence and nonexistence, just that they lie in some state that is not the former, but not the latter, either, "absent" with respect to both.
It doesn't simply require absence from existence and nonexistence as logical states. You could be absent from both due to being in any alien nondual state. It requires specifically an alien state which is like nonexistence. We are talking about things like beings that were nonexistence already and then got erased even from that. They aren't just absent from both states, they have a nonexistence beyond both states. That's a difference from just not being in either state.