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Tier 0 is really just the symmetrical conclusion of this. It is essentially an entity who is "Absolute Existence," which you, necessarily, can't really be beyond, because no matter how high of a being you are, you'll never really be escaping the basic principle of "There is something there." If we accepted that a character did do that, just for the sake of argument, that'd be a contradiction, because they would not be a character to begin with. They would, in fact, be the tierless "absolute nothingness" beneath everything that I just spoke of.
To a large degree, this ties into the aspect of simplicity, too. Since everything in 1-A and High 1-A is just qualifications and extrapolations of the same overarching thing (Existence. Being. "Somethingness") that none of them really escape from in any way. Tier 0 is just Existence unqualified, to which, by definition, nothing can be added, and which admits of no degree, just as absolute nothingness admits of no degrees due do its (I guess you could say) "negative" simplicity.
And thus comes the fact of the cosmology-independence of Tier 0: It doesn't depend on a large cosmology to be where it is, because everything is logically subordinate to it, and by nature presupposes it, just like "absolute nothingness" is logically subordinate to everything else (Because you're presupposing something of which there is a lack). So it's as I said above: Self-defined. Self-sufficient. Not contingent on lower tiers whatsoever.
Since the Tier 0 in question is based uniquely on a realism-based worldview (according to what you said), wouldn't extensions or alternate viewpoints to realism have the possibility of things exempt from this chain of reasoning or, even, the possibility of things that can defeat a monad in a logically non-contradictory manner?
After all, a realism based reasoning by nature can not account for non-realism based reasoning.
I also have the same question as DT. But there's something else I have an issue with.
I feel like you pretty much answered my question of "why are we assuming this?" by making more assumptions and further limiting fiction.
What I mean is that to draw the conclusion that Tier 0 is the absolute peak across all of fiction, you made the assumption that all of fiction has the same absolute lowest point in the form of absolute nonexistence, which is this "symmetrical conclusion" you speak of.
My question then is how can you prove that? If not by just saying that "it is"?
As I said before not all verses work the same way, so I do not believe there's grounds for saying that every verse has the same lowest or most nonexistent concept just as there isn't the other way around.
You could say that it's simply logical to draw the conclusions that you do, but then what do you say to stories whose logic is purposefully illogical or paradoxical in order to explore concepts and natures that are more complicated than "divine simplicity," without being limited by it.
After that, my next concern would be why this idea of simplicity and oneness being tied to tiering in the first place.
Why exactly is something without distinctions superior to something with them? What makes oneness superior to twoness?
If I am two with everything, then I still encompass everything that someone who is one with everything would. The same is true for separate beings that while together possess all qualities. So what is it that we're measuring here? If the only thing separating one from two is the distinction of one and two, then you aren't even tiering potency at that point.
You say that any true monad doesn't even need cosmology to jump from 3-A to 0, but those who are dyads, or those that conjoin to encompass all qualities, are somehow not even quantifiable relative to monads? It doesn't make sense to me.
Overall, though, my biggest contention here is that this limits fiction and extrapolates implications. Imagination is limitless, and this suggestion, to me, feels like you're trying to put a cap on imagination. I believe that goes against the very purpose of fiction and indexing in the first place, so while my vote doesn't matter, I strongly disagree with this proposal for Tier 0.
I don't think this really solves the contradiction. Rather, it solidifies your position more in the "A Tier 0 being is a certain set of axioms" camp, which still leaves the issue of placing a cosmology where "everything consistent with any set of axioms exists" below Tier 0, most likely at Low 1-A, but potentially at High 1-A+, despite such a thing encompassing Tier 0.
There really was just never a contradiction to begin with, since a Tier 0 isn't part of the set of objects whose existence is consistent with certain axioms. It is those axioms, and things are consistent with its existence. So it subordinates everything to itself, and not the other way around. So it wouldn't really be something "in" a possible world so much as the basis through which you can say possible worlds exist at all.
Since the Tier 0 in question is based uniquely on a realism-based worldview (according to what you said), wouldn't extensions or alternate viewpoints to realism have the possibility of things exempt from this chain of reasoning or, even, the possibility of things that can defeat a monad in a logically non-contradictory manner?
After all, a realism based reasoning by nature can not account for non-realism based reasoning.
Funnily enough this is directly adjacent to something that came up while I was discussing this with Deagon, off-site. He objected to my claim that any verse with a Tier 0 would already necessarily be taking a realist standpoint with regards to the Absolute, since it, after all, doesn't really have to be an Universal or anything. It can be a non-physical particular.
I don't find what he said terribly objectionable, after mulling over it. There's also how Realism and Idealism are at times contrasted as differing frameworks, and yet I wouldn't say a Monad is impossible in an Idealist cosmology, so, yeah, I best qualify that statement. Ultimately I'd say a Tier 0's existence really only implies the framework of "There are predicates that pick out actual realities in an object and aren't really referring to the same thing." In that case: I don't think what you just said is really coherent, no (And I doubt it'd be coherent even under the realism thing)
I feel like you pretty much answered my question of "why are we assuming this?" by making more assumptions and further limiting fiction.
What I mean is that to draw the conclusion that Tier 0 is the absolute peak across all of fiction, you made the assumption that all of fiction has the same absolute lowest point in the form of absolute nonexistence, which is this "symmetrical conclusion" you speak of.
My question then is how can you prove that? If not by just saying that "it is"?
You could say that it's simply logical to draw the conclusions that you do, but then what do you say to stories whose logic is purposefully illogical or paradoxical in order to explore concepts and natures that are more complicated than "divine simplicity," without being limited by it.
Stories that purposefully operate under illogic are, at the end day, not really something which the Tiering System ever catered (Or should cater) to. Remember what I've said: We ultimately reasoned that not even characters with Nonexistent Physiology are really absolutely nothing, since clearly they aren't, and thus concluded that they're really just "nonexistent" in a qualified form. This sort of stuff is just basic things that ground the logic of the wiki at large, before we even start thinking about tiers. Basically embedded into our very reasoning.
After that, my next concern would be why this idea of simplicity and oneness being tied to tiering in the first place.
Why exactly is something without distinctions superior to something with them? What makes oneness superior to twoness?
If I am two with everything, then I still encompass everything that someone who is one with everything would. The same is true for separate beings that while together possess all qualities. So what is it that we're measuring here? If the only thing separating one from two is the distinction of one and two, then you aren't even tiering potency at that point.
You say that any true monad doesn't even need cosmology to jump from 3-A to 0, but those who are dyads, or those that conjoin to encompass all qualities, are somehow not even quantifiable relative to monads? It doesn't make sense to me.
Depends on how this "All-in-Two"ness works. If it's A and B summing up to obtain something larger than A and B alone, then I'd say that is, indeed, inherently below perfect ontological simplicity. Something that is absolutely primal and irreducible to anything other than itself, being above something that is reducible in such a manner, is perfectly reasonable.
After all: A and B are individuated from each other by qualities which they lack, just like sets in math are disjoint when their intersection is the empty set. Meaning that A and B fail to be certain things. They are, definitionally, part of a possible world in which a certain state-of-affairs failed to pertain, in which case, they're by nature limited after a fashion, and their fusion is limited due to being the quantitative sum of two limited things. Furthermore, if the two are separable (Which they would be, in this case), then their fusion is likewise a contingent affair and could thus fail to pertain in a possible world.
So I definitely wouldn't say such a thing encompasses everything a Tier 0 character does, under these proposals.
Now, if the dyad is just irreducible in the same manner I describe a Monad to be, and isn't really like the above scenario at all, then I've no problem with it being Tier 0. I mean, one of the Tier 0 examples I gave is literally a triad.
Monads can be fictional, because we're tiering fictional characters. The response to this was that our conception of R>F isn't a 1:1 parallel to real life relationships with fiction, but that does not explain how that difference eliminates the fact that Monads can be fictional. We could have two identical Monad characters, but if one of them is underneath an "author" character they'd drop from Tier 0 to Tier Low 2-C (or whatever their cosmology is), but we'd scale the "author" below the other Monad, despite writing a character identical to that monad.
We are giving the most generous possible interpretation to a specific framework of thinking, and saying it's unfathomably greater than every other way of looking at things, and that this framework cannot be seen as fictional in an R>F framework. This is despite the fact that we have multiple characters, by your own admission, that would otherwise meet the criteria but are weaker than other beings in their verse. If we viewed them in isolation they'd be Tier 0. So, they needn't really prove their superiority, so long as it isn't disproved.
I'm also concerned with how I have seen speculative discussions about Monads play out in anticipation of this proposal. Characters with statements implying Monism appear to be essentially invincible to anti-feats. Even if the evidence for their Monist qualities is exceedingly slim or vague, all contradicting information is reinterpreted through a lens that safeguards those supposedly Monist qualities. All statements to the contrary are interpreted as metaphors, or headcanon is written that justifies the statement through a Monadic lens.
The Yog-Sothoth situation is the most compelling example so far. The only evidence for Yog being a Monad is that at one point in the story Carter describes him as an "All in One, One in All" limitless being in the void.
When it is later stated (twice) that Yog is a member of a group (archetypes), both of these are reinterpreted as Monadic, the other beings alongside Yog must come from him (so he can stay a monad). But this was never stated in the story.
When it is said that a specific type of person comes from Yog (wizards, thinkers, artists), implying that different types come from other archetypes, it was reinterpreted to mean that this type of person comes directly from Yog whereas other types come from other archetypes... who come from Yog, and are thus "secondarily derived" whereas Carter is primarily derived from Yog, (so he can stay a monad). But this was never stated in the story.
When it is pointed out that he is described to be "allied to the animating essence of existence" thus distinguishing him from that essence, as you can't be 'allied to' yourself, this was asserted to be a metaphor (so he can stay a monad). But this was never stated in the story.
When it was pointed out that a different being, Azathoth, is said to be the ruler of the Ultimate Void and even described in one of Lovecraft's personal letter that Yog descended from Azathoth, it was said that the letter was a joke and Azathoth is actually part of Yog, too (so he can stay a monad). But this was never stated in the story.
All of this is being subjugated by a single statement that Yog is "all in one, one in all" which merely contrasts Yog against the multiplicity of facets that Carter experienced during his ego death. The other information should be a fatal blow to the notion that Yog is a monad, but it's useless. He was called "all in one, one in all" so that's just the end of the discussion.
But, he's never described as "beyond quality," he's never described as non-dual or transdual, he's never described as divinely simple, he's never described as lacking attributes, he's never described as being identical to the Ultimate Void he and the other archetypes reside in. He's just called "all in one" and that is the end of the story. Which is why I feel that this seemingly robust list of criteria is ultimately facile, because it isn't actually required. You simply need a statement implying unity, and all other statements will be ignored or falsely reconciled to that.
There really was just never a contradiction to begin with, since a Tier 0 isn't part of the set of objects whose existence is consistent with certain axioms. It is those axioms, and things are consistent with its existence. So it subordinates everything to itself, and not the other way around. So it wouldn't really be something "in" a possible world so much as the basis through which you can say possible worlds exist at all.
But there are other bases through which you can say possible worlds exist; other axioms. And so, the monad you're describing is only a subset of a greater collection, that of "all things made possible through any set of axioms", yet you would put this no higher than High 1-A+, creating a contradiction.
Saying that the monad is one set of these axioms does not resolve this contradiction.
EDIT: On a somewhat similar note, this part of the OP is kinda concerning
Specific Tier 0s from specific verses can do paradoxes, if the author wants
We could end up with two verses, one of which says their monad can't do paradoxes, and one of which says their monad can, yet you'd give them the same tier and the same abilities, despite one explicitly being able to do more than the other.
Hi all. Sorry for the delay – Been dealing with some technical problems for the past week (Which I'm sure some of you all were already aware of). In any case, that's solved now, so:
But there are other bases through which you can say possible worlds exist; other axioms. And so, the monad you're describing is only a subset of a greater collection, that of "all things made possible through any set of axioms", yet you would put this no higher than High 1-A+, creating a contradiction.
Saying that the monad is one set of these axioms does not resolve this contradiction.
It's not really a contradiction, because you seem to think that "The Monad exists" and "The Monad doesn't exist," themselves, form two distinct possible worlds, which isn't really the case. It's less "The entity whose existence is true at (Important to distinguish between truth-at-a-world and truth-in-a-world) all possible worlds actually doesn't exist according to some possible worlds, which is a contradiction" and more "We simply don't know the logic circumscribing all possible worlds, or if it even exists, and there are different opinions on this corresponding to different frameworks." High 1-A+ isn't really "all frameworks" in that sense.
Thinking this over, it might actually be an issue with phrasing, rather than anything else. "Creating all logically possible things" isn't very coherent, since there are things which are logically possible (Inasmuch as they are consistent with the laws of logic) and yet can't really be created, and a Monad is one such thing. So High 1-A+ is probably best qualified as "The space of all contingent things," in that vein.
EDIT: On a somewhat similar note, this part of the OP is kinda concerning
We could end up with two verses, one of which says their monad can't do paradoxes, and one of which says their monad can, yet you'd give them the same tier and the same abilities, despite one explicitly being able to do more than the other.
That's not really an issue. Being able to do more doesn't equal being stronger. At best, this would cause concerns relating to how they'd both be listed as having "Omnipotence" in their P&A, but listing the specifically showcased applications of this omnipotence (For indexing's case, if nothing else) amends this well enough.
Monads can be fictional, because we're tiering fictional characters. The response to this was that our conception of R>F isn't a 1:1 parallel to real life relationships with fiction, but that does not explain how that difference eliminates the fact that Monads can be fictional. We could have two identical Monad characters, but if one of them is underneath an "author" character they'd drop from Tier 0 to Tier Low 2-C (or whatever their cosmology is), but we'd scale the "author" below the other Monad, despite writing a character identical to that monad.
We are giving the most generous possible interpretation to a specific framework of thinking, and saying it's unfathomably greater than every other way of looking at things, and that this framework cannot be seen as fictional in an R>F framework. This is despite the fact that we have multiple characters, by your own admission, that would otherwise meet the criteria but are weaker than other beings in their verse. If we viewed them in isolation they'd be Tier 0. So, they needn't really prove their superiority, so long as it isn't disproved.
Arguments like "Other views of Omnipotence are getting neglected by the instating of this proposal" are really not very good at all. This proposal of Tier 0 is, at the end of the day, quite simply grounded on the principle of "Statements of limitlessness require some mechanism or underlying justification to be taken seriously" (Which is really just the principle of sufficient reason). This particular concept is picked not out of favouritism, but due to the fact it provides the most robust mechanism for a character being unsurpassable and also fulfills the general idea that started back at 1-A (Transcending composition and continuity between levels).
And that is, in fact, why I'd say that some of the arguments that were thrown against these revisions at first ultimately just end up agreeing with it in a roundabout way. Everyone basically already affirms that there are certain basal principles that cannot be transcended without triggering logical absurdities. I am saying that characters who, by nature, embody these very principles, are thus the strongest ones. It's really as simple (Hah) as that.
The only other "sufficient reason" for unsurpassable power that I can think of, really, is "This thing transcends all possible worlds" (In the modal sense), but ultimately such a thing would just be Tier 0 under these proposals, too. The next best thing, then, would be "The ability to actualize any possible world" (Basically the power to bring about any logically possible state-of-affairs at will. A slightly more formal version of the layman's definition of "omnipotence"), and after thinking it through while I was away, I realized I don't really have a problem with such characters receiving a High 1-A+ tier.
Initially, I was of the opinion that the only way you could be High 1-A+ was if you were, yourself, the embodiment of all possible worlds (Like in a cosmology where a Tier 0 is the dreamer and you are the dream personified), but then I realized this logic is faulty: You could also, yourself, be in a single possible world and yet have the ability to create any possible world. Similar to how you can be a character who has the ability to create any kind of universe, without being the embodiment of the multiverse, or its creator, or something like that.
Such characters would themselves inherit some of the restrictions of the 'original' definition of High 1-A+ that I proposed (E.g. Can't be surpassed by a non-Tier 0), but now there's a few more liberties, too: This level of power can be achieved (Though not sub-divided into something lower, just like 1-A), and you can have multiple characters who are like that, and yet aren't the same being, in a single verse. Overall a good amendment to these proposals, since it'd ultimately make it so 'other takes' on supreme beings aren't really getting snubbed.
Though this (The "Can create arbitrarily large possible worlds" thing) would be an extremely rare type of character, overall. I think the only one off the top of my head that'd come close to it would be the Star Maker, and even he is most likely disqualified, taking a gander at his profile and the blog linked in it.
The things outlined in the requirements not needing to be explicitly stated, also, is because they all just follow from the basic fact of transcendence over metaphysical composition (I.e. Monadhood is the sufficient proof of their superiority). You don't need to individually state every conclusion of a premise if the conclusions all by necessity follow from said premise. By extension, this means that I'm arguing that this interpretation of the framework isn't "the most generous possible interpretation" to begin with.
Now, of course, you can just disagree that these conclusions follow from the premises to begin with, but then that's already what you were doing since the thread started, anyway. You didn't really add anything whatsoever to your point with these two paragraphs, and they themselves are extremely strange. Of course a feat viewed in isolation is X tier until an anti-feat comes along to conclusively disprove it. I don't know why you're treating this as some controversial thing.
(Also, Monads would just drop down to 1-A if it turned out they're fake and surpassable. I really can't see any lower tier for them. And from this you can see that the insertion of Tier 0 into the system isn't really this artificial, unnatural thing. It's really just the logical extension of 1-A)
I'm also concerned with how I have seen speculative discussions about Monads play out in anticipation of this proposal. Characters with statements implying Monism appear to be essentially invincible to anti-feats. Even if the evidence for their Monist qualities is exceedingly slim or vague, all contradicting information is reinterpreted through a lens that safeguards those supposedly Monist qualities. All statements to the contrary are interpreted as metaphors, or headcanon is written that justifies the statement through a Monadic lens.
The Yog-Sothoth situation is the most compelling example so far. The only evidence for Yog being a Monad is that at one point in the story Carter describes him as an "All in One, One in All" limitless being in the void.
When it is later stated (twice) that Yog is a member of a group (archetypes), both of these are reinterpreted as Monadic, the other beings alongside Yog must come from him (so he can stay a monad). But this was never stated in the story.
When it is said that a specific type of person comes from Yog (wizards, thinkers, artists), implying that different types come from other archetypes, it was reinterpreted to mean that this type of person comes directly from Yog whereas other types come from other archetypes... who come from Yog, and are thus "secondarily derived" whereas Carter is primarily derived from Yog, (so he can stay a monad). But this was never stated in the story.
When it is pointed out that he is described to be "allied to the animating essence of existence" thus distinguishing him from that essence, as you can't be 'allied to' yourself, this was asserted to be a metaphor (so he can stay a monad). But this was never stated in the story.
When it was pointed out that a different being, Azathoth, is said to be the ruler of the Ultimate Void and even described in one of Lovecraft's personal letter that Yog descended from Azathoth, it was said that the letter was a joke and Azathoth is actually part of Yog, too (so he can stay a monad). But this was never stated in the story.
All of this is being subjugated by a single statement that Yog is "all in one, one in all" which merely contrasts Yog against the multiplicity of facets that Carter experienced during his ego death. The other information should be a fatal blow to the notion that Yog is a monad, but it's useless. He was called "all in one, one in all" so that's just the end of the discussion.
But, he's never described as "beyond quality," he's never described as non-dual or transdual, he's never described as divinely simple, he's never described as lacking attributes, he's never described as being identical to the Ultimate Void he and the other archetypes reside in. He's just called "all in one" and that is the end of the story. Which is why I feel that this seemingly robust list of criteria is ultimately facile, because it isn't actually required. You simply need a statement implying unity, and all other statements will be ignored or falsely reconciled to that.
This is a pretty flimsy point overall, since it's not actually a criticism of the proposals themselves, so much as a criticism of an example I've used of a character who I believe qualifies for them. And I don't think your arguments against this particular case are that good, either, or founded on things that clear or obvious. This summary of events is essentially your (Obviously biased) viewpoint of a rather brief discussion that took place off-site and is thus meaningless for the purposes of this thread.
I'm not really persuaded out of my claim that Yog-Sothoth is, indeed, tier 0 under these proposals, but ultimately debating his status in here doesn't really serve a point, because at the end of the day I am not looking to centralize the rights to approve of tier 0 ratings for characters in the hands of anyone, really, not even my own. So if the people end up disagreeing with me on whether a character qualifies or not, that's fine. The bulk of this is nothing that can't be resolved by writing a sufficiently robust page outlining all the qualifications (Much like we currently have a page for Reality-Fiction Transcendences) in as much detail as possible.
Of course, some things are simply just inherently case-by-case and hinge heavily on the context of the story, and so they can't really be shoved into a proverbial box in that manner. What it comes down to, though, is that your lenses of interpretation are not the standard by which something is deemed "clear" or "obvious." So this entire objection just reduces down to "This proposal might make it so some characters are upgraded for reasons that I personally disagree with," which is pretty silly because this is not an objective metric whatsoever. For instance:
From where I stand, you're already on record as giving rather strange things as "anti-feats," in this very discussion. For example, here, you tried to say that Sunyata/the Dharmakaya from Journey to the West can undergo change using this, which not only does not say anything of that sort, but ontop of that isn't even from the story proper, and is just a footnote from the 2012 translation of the novel commentating on a mention of the concept of Yin-Yang. And it's not even describing the concept itself, mind you, just giving context for it.
You also tried to use this and this to say that it can be divided (Because of the "Chaos was parted"), omitting the severalother statementsthat make this interpretation pretty incoherent (Because all phenomena are explicitly illusory, neither produced nor destroyed, neither increasing nor decreasing. The absolute state of reality has no causal relations, neither coming nor going, etc), some of which are pretty long-winded, and some of which you posted yourself. All of which you could use to reasonably conclude that "Chaos" is not, in fact, the Dharmakaya, since the two are never exactly stated to be the same. And indeed, examining the very first chapter of the book, we see they very clearly aren't.
So, yeah. I can disagree with your interpretations and you can disagree with mine in turn. This kind of clash applies to literally everything and doesn't really matter for the validity of the proposal itself.
It's not really a contradiction, because you seem to think that "The Monad exists" and "The Monad doesn't exist," themselves, form two distinct possible worlds, which isn't really the case. It's less "The entity whose existence is true at (Important to distinguish between truth-at-a-world and truth-in-a-world) all possible worlds actually doesn't exist according to some possible worlds, which is a contradiction" and more "We simply don't know the logic circumscribing all possible worlds, or if it even exists, and there are different opinions on this corresponding to different frameworks." High 1-A+ isn't really "all frameworks" in that sense.
Thinking this over, it might actually be an issue with phrasing, rather than anything else. "Creating all logically possible things" isn't very coherent, since there are things which are logically possible (Inasmuch as they are consistent with the laws of logic) and yet can't really be created, and a Monad is one such thing. So High 1-A+ is probably best qualified as "The space of all contingent things," in that vein.
Again, if you're saying that "possible worlds" is according to one set of axioms, it is plausible for a series to invoke a collection of "possible worlds" which explicitly extend over all axioms (i.e. having different such sets for different axioms), which would be broader than High 1-A+/0 under your system, causing an issue.
That sort of thing seems pretty coherent to me, so whichever weird way you decide to treat it (either ignoring such statements completely, putting them as equal to monads despite explicitly being above them, or taking a far lower interpretation of Low 1-A or something) is something I'd see as a flaw in the system.
Thinking about this, I'm going from neutral to just flat out disagreeing.
That's not really an issue. Being able to do more doesn't equal being stronger. At best, this would cause concerns relating to how they'd both be listed as having "Omnipotence" in their P&A, but listing the specifically showcased applications of this omnipotence (For indexing's case, if nothing else) amends this well enough.
Funnily enough this is directly adjacent to something that came up while I was discussing this with Deagon, off-site. He objected to my claim that any verse with a Tier 0 would already necessarily be taking a realist standpoint with regards to the Absolute, since it, after all, doesn't really have to be an Universal or anything. It can be a non-physical particular.
I don't find what he said terribly objectionable, after mulling over it. There's also how Realism and Idealism are at times contrasted as differing frameworks, and yet I wouldn't say a Monad is impossible in an Idealist cosmology, so, yeah, I best qualify that statement. Ultimately I'd say a Tier 0's existence really only implies the framework of "There are predicates that pick out actual realities in an object and aren't really referring to the same thing." In that case: I don't think what you just said is really coherent, no (And I doubt it'd be coherent even under the realism thing)
Problem is that a Monad that is declared as such under a realism based viewpoint may be defeated by a logically coherent expansion of it.
E.g. say a Monad is declared as such in a view where qualities are granted by concepts (i.e. concepts = qualities for this). Then the Monad is an entity lacking and superior to all concepts with the exception of the concept of itself (if even that).
To give a practical example, Owari no Chronicle has a realism based worldview with concepts (which are universals). However, it also introduces a power called "Will" linked to the idea of the will of the Christian god creating the world from the sea of chaos before creation (better described later on as 'void' lacking all concepts). It is reasoned from there that this 'Will' as such is a power independent from all concepts as it "predates" them. (Quotation marks due to time and similar not existing at that point) Notably, it is not a power without properties, though, and in particular not a monad. This is logically consistent, as by no logical rule there has to be a single thing granting properties. I.e. properties that are neither qualities nor lack of the property represented by the quality can be logically consistent, as they are in this case.
Now 'Will' is superior and independent of qualities (concepts) and has the ability to manipulate those. There is no logical contradiction in it being able to add qualities (concepts) to some a Monad, just as it can to other things that lack certain concepts. So it making a Monad into a non-Monad by adding some quality is plausible.
Likewise, it can erase qualities/concepts so it is logically plausible for it to turn a Monad to nothing by removing the quality that separates those things.
(Will in particular would not be restricted by the Monad's superiority to qualities, as it is not included in that category unless you apply a false equivalence)
To add on to this and the considerations in my prior post (which were not answered yet): That there can only be one Monad is only a valid viewpoint from certain metaphysical theories.
In trope theory a quality as such may be considered to be an equivalence class of tropes (or a set of equivalence relations between tropes, given by an arbitrary representative of the class). In principle, it is allowed for there to exist an arbitrary amount of objects which have only tropes whose equivalence class exclusively contains themself. I.e. we have a large amount of non-identical objects which are divine simple, by the definition of lacking all qualities except their own.
In fact, now that I think about it, if we allow a Monad a quality that is itself, then what prevents the same from applying to realism? You can have an arbitrary amount of universals instantiated by only a single being which instantiates no other universal.
To add one question to this: Why would we assume statements of a Monad lacking qualities also apply to meta-qualities? Meta-qualities rank lower in your proposed system and the meta-quality of being a quality applies to a Monad, if it has the quality of 'itself' (Which you said it has).
In particular, are meta-qualities not generally included in most philosophical views as I see it.
It seems like a stretch to say that fictions generally make Monad statements in /(meta-)*realism/.
Finally, to add one point of non-Monad related criticism, why are your 1-A levels defined by qualities in general? I thought you had no intention of equalizing differing qualities according to the last thread.
As in, shouldn't High 1-A be strictly qualitative superiority above R>F, rather than being just above any one kind of qualitative superiority hierarchy? Generally, other qualitative hierarchies are not comparable to R>F hierarchies in fiction, just as their different qualities in general are not equal or superior to R>F, so without that specifier there would be no guarantee that High 1-A is generally above 1-A.
Accordingly, I suppose that means 1-A may theoretically allow for characters with qualitative superiorities lesser than R>F, i.e. R>F is not necessarily the baseline. (which your text doesn't contradict, but should probably be clarified)
Monads can be fictional, because we're tiering fictional characters. The response to this was that our conception of R>F isn't a 1:1 parallel to real life relationships with fiction, but that does not explain how that difference eliminates the fact that Monads can be fictional. We could have two identical Monad characters, but if one of them is underneath an "author" character they'd drop from Tier 0 to Tier Low 2-C (or whatever their cosmology is), but we'd scale the "author" below the other Monad, despite writing a character identical to that monad.
We are giving the most generous possible interpretation to a specific framework of thinking, and saying it's unfathomably greater than every other way of looking at things, and that this framework cannot be seen as fictional in an R>F framework. This is despite the fact that we have multiple characters, by your own admission, that would otherwise meet the criteria but are weaker than other beings in their verse. If we viewed them in isolation they'd be Tier 0. So, they needn't really prove their superiority, so long as it isn't disproved.
We tier things by the lowest reasonably possible interpretation and I think there is no denying that Monad statements can be made on lower R>F levels.
Additionally, we practice that if fiction frequently does things wrong we take an approach of requiring evidence of doing it right. We have less than 10 candidates for the spot (according to OP), several of which seem questionable and of which I generally don't think they even have affirmative proof of including R>F. Meanwhile we apparently already have several examples of characters doing this wrong. That means a substantial amount (more than 20%... I don't know the actual numbers. Probably quite a bit more) evidently do not include meta-hierachies, or R>F in particular, in their reasoning. And the comparison between the amount that does it wrong and the amount of which we actually have direct evidence that they do it right is even greater. I would guess more than 50% easily, but maybe we should actually count.
Basically, I'm fairly sure Monads including meta-hierarchies has a worse relative percentage of being done wrong, than something like lightning being lightning speed has. So by existing precedence, it only makes sense for us to require confirmation as a rule.
The things outlined in the requirements not needing to be explicitly stated, also, is because they all just follow from the basic fact of transcendence over metaphysical composition (I.e. Monadhood is the sufficient proof of their superiority).
This is inaccurate. Or rather, it is not a universally held opinion even amongst the proponents of these philosophies. None of these characteristics are universally held by religions or schools of thought. For instance, I'd say Adi Shankara's conception of Brahman is largely reflective of what you are proposing:
Shankara argues that Brahman, the Ultimate Reality, is absolutely One (advaita or nondual). Attributes would destroy the absolute unity of the One and also impose limitations on it. The nondual One is infinite, beyond subject-object and all other relations, for these would make it finite being. Brahman is the absolute knower, pure consciousness itself, not consciousness dependent on objects, attributes, or relations.
However, this is not the only interpretation. Far from it. Every single one of these characteristics is rejected in some school of thought or another.
Lack of Qualities/Distinctions:
Ramanuja disagreed with Shankara’s view of the nature of the Ultimate Reality. He argued that Brahman without qualities (nirguna) is nothing; to be real, Brahman must have content (qualities); Brahman is Saguna Brahman (saguna means literally “with qualities”).
Now the first alternative is not possible, because one who is devoid of all distinctions cannot possibly think and resolve to be many, as the creator of the world does in the beginning according to Scripture.
The essential quality of a substance is inseparably related to it. The mere substrate ( visesya ) without quality is inconceivable. Brahman as a qualified spiritual substance ( ajada dravya) is one but the qualities and the substrate in which they inhere are different. A pure substance devoid of any qualities is non-existent, like the sky flower according to Vedanta Desika.
Unknowability/Ineffability/Negative Theology:
If Brahman be devoid of all attributes and specifications, He will be outside all sources of knowledge, and as such be unreal like the sky-flower, which also is outside all sources of knowledge. Thus, the attributeless Brahman is not, evidently, an object of perception, since He is beyond the sense- organs ; nor is He an object of inference, since He is without any mark; nor is He an object of Scripture even, for what is devoid of attributes cannot be expressed by words. Thus, the attributeless and non-specific Brahman cannot be an object of rfidhavrtti, as He is devoid of class, attribute and action, nor an object of yogavrtti, as He can have no root-meaning, nor an object of lakeana, as He is devoid of any connection with anything else, nor lastly, an object of gauna- vrtti, as He is devoid of qualities. Such a Brahman, therefore, incapable of being established by any proof, is but a myth, and not a reality. The real Brahman is essentially possessed of attributes, as shown above.
Partlessness/Indivisibility:
The Vedanta-sutra uses the term amsa or part, to describe the relationship between [Brahman and an individual human soul]. What is meant by amsa and how does this concept support both the views? Amsa or part does not mean a spatial part of the whole, because the soul as a spiritual entity does not admit of any spatial division. Nor is Brahman a quantitative infinite of which soul is a part. The term amsa is, therefore, defined by Ramanuja as that which constitutes an integral part of an entity (eka-vastu eka-desatvam hy-amsatvam). What is meant by part of a whole is that it is an essential attribute of a complex whole. Thus, for instance, the luminosity radiating from a luminous body such as fire or sun is part of that body; the generic characteristic of a cow (gotva) as its essential attribute is part of the cow in which it inheres. In the same way Jiva is regarded as an integral part of Brahman.
The crucial issue having an ontological implication is whether Goddess Sri, who is inseparable from Visnu, and who also enjoys equality with Him in all respects, is an integral part of the ultimate Reality. There are two views on this question. According to one view held by Vedanta Desika and his followers, Sri is an integral part of Reality and the divine couple together constitute the para-tattva. The basis for this claim is that the scriptural texts, the Pancaratra Samhitas and the Visnupurana declare that Sri is vibhu or infinite in character in the same way as Visnu is and She plays an important role in all the functions of the Lord including that of intercession. The other view, maintained by the followers of Manavalamamuni contends that Sri is not vibhu in character but monadic (anu) like the individual selves and cannot, therefore, become an integral part of Reality. In their opinion if Sri were on par with Visnu, it would militate against the unitary character of the ultimate Reality.
Unchangeability/Immutability
The fact is that it is the power (lakti) inherent in a thing which determines whether a particular thing can be transformed into something else or not, and not the fact of its having parts or not. Hence, water though possessed of parts (savayava) is never transformed into curd, because it lacks the power of being so transformed, while the milk-atoms, though devoid of parts (niravayava), are transformed into curd, because they possess the power of being so transformed.
Hence, the above argument that Brahman can have no transformation, because He is all-pervading and without parts, is not a valid one. On the contrary, we may argue as follows: — Brahman is capable of having transformation, because He is all-pervading, like the ether.
Impassibility/Emotionlessness
1. In the beginning this world was Soul (Atman) alone in the form of a Person. Looking around, he saw nothing else than himself. He said first : "I am." Thence arose the name "I." ...
2. He was afraid. Therefore one who is alone is afraid. This one then thought to himself: "Since there is nothing else than myself, of what am I afraid ?" Thereupon, verily, his fear departed, for of what should he have been afraid ? Assuredly it is from a second that fear arises.
3. Verily, he had no delight. Therefore one alone has no delight. He desired a second.
Spatial Extension:
She is eternal and blessed (Mukta) like the Supreme Soul and is his consort. She has various forms, but no material body, and is thus like the Supreme Soul, and like him is expressible by all words. She possesses the same extension in space and time as the Supreme Soul, i. e. is concomitant with him.
Hierarchical:
Higher than the sense-organs are the objects of senses, higher than the objects is the mind, higher than the mind is intellect, higher than intellect is the great soul. Higher than the great (mahat) is the unmanifest (avyakta), higher than the unmanifest is the Person (purusa), nothing is higher than the Person, He is the goal, the highest course.
Upon request, I can provide further explanations as to the source of each statement in terms of which Hindu theologian or scripture it comes from or where -- elsewise -- these same individuals or schools of thought can be found asserting that Brahman is the One, Ultimate Reality, substratum of existence, et cetera.
The point being: It is absolutely not the case that the collection of requirements you set forth for Tier 0 can be naturally extrapolated from Monadhood itself. You can find numerous extremely prominent Hindu philosophers arguing that some of these requirements are -- in fact -- logically incompatible. Some argue that lacking qualities makes something non-existent, thus, the Ultimate Reality must have qualities. Some argue that an unknowable/unspeakable thing is also unreal, or inconceivable entirely, and that such a viewpoint renders scripture invalid. Some argue that individual souls are integral parts of Brahman which form a complex whole. Some argue that two distinct divinities combine to form the Ultimate Reality, which others argue would violate its unitary character (which is reflective of your view, hence, there is disagreement). Some argue that changeability is merely a function of something's power, not its supposed partless nature or anything else, that Brahman's creation of the world was, and is, a transformation of Himself. That he divided himself into the world. Then you have multiple scriptures defining him as having emotions, as being afraid of being alone for a time, as desiring a partner due to his lack of delight. Describing human souls as comprising 1/4th of him, and the other 3/4ths being the immortal beings in Heaven.
So the question becomes, how or why are we excluding these viewpoints from Tier 0, and further, how or why are we reaching the conclusion that fictional depictions of Monads must fit your viewpoint and not these others, when so many of them fail to address these elements to the extent that we could determine whether or not they consider their monad as immutable, ineffable, impassible, indivisible, or lacking qualities?
This is a pretty flimsy point overall, since it's not actually a criticism of the proposals themselves, so much as a criticism of an example I've used of a character who I believe qualifies for them
It is meant to serve as a demonstration of my above point and the further peril that lies with this approach, such that we are essentially going to extrapolate a specific conception of Monadhood out of extremely limited evidence, such as a single reference to being "all in one" and assume that not only does it encompass a myriad of other characteristics that were never established in the verse and are not logically required by monadhood, but that all contradicting information is subjugated to the metaphorical, even when it is incredibly direct, like outright stating that the "Monad" is the chief among a race of beings that live in the void.
I do not think that we should use the views of mere regular philosophers regarding the nature of the Parabrahman/Parashiva, but rather stick to Enlightened Masters only, as they are able to explore the nature of higher reality on a personal level.
I do not think that we should use the views of mere regular philosophers regarding the nature of the Parabrahman/Parashiva, but rather stick to Enlightened Masters only, as they are able to explore the nature of higher reality on a personal level.
What do you mean by "mere" philosophers? It's a philosophy and theology, no one has ownership or greater authority over it compared to anyone else. Even then who are we to decide who counts and who doesn't? I can't agree with this take, it would be like dismissing an Eastern Orthadox viewpoint because they aren't as dedicated as American Amish in worship.
I do not think that we should use the views of mere regular philosophers regarding the nature of the Parabrahman/Parashiva, but rather stick to Enlightened Masters only
In case there is a misunderstanding, I am not just citing random philosophers or contemporary Hindu gurus, I am citing the beliefs of highly highly influential figures, who are considered the founders of large branches of Hinduism. These are the main individuals I am drawing from:
My point in providing the quotes that I did was not to merely establish that people exist who have these views, but that these views represent large sects of Hinduism with millions of followers, and these quotes are from the foundational gurus who established those sects.
They certainly were not Buddhas, because they were Hindu and not Buddhist. As to the term "Siddha" it seems to be prominent in Jainism but its usage in Hinduism is inconsistent.
I don't know of a direct equivalent for Hinduism, as there are several Hindu titles and I don't see any concrete hierarchy that is established. It does not appear they have a specific title that is commonly attributed to teachers who were thought to have obtained "enlightment" in the manner you'd be familiar with in Buddhism. However, Ramanuja held the title of "Jagadguru" meaning "Guru of the Universe" and is considered one of the "three great acharyas" which refers to the pillars of Vedantic thought in Hinduism. An acharya is a formal title for a teacher. Nimbarka is an acharya and jagadguru as well. Vedanta Desika literally means "teacher of Vedanta" which is the moniker he attained due to his expertise, and is revered as an incarnation of a deity in the school of thought that he was a proponent of.
Point being, these weren't just random philosophers or footnotes. They are extremely prominent historical figures who shaped Hindu thought and beliefs and are considered authoritative within their respective sects. Although, some of my quotes come directly from Hindu scripture, rather than a famous teacher.
Apologies for the delay, for the matter, all. Been really busy tor the past week, so, didn't get to look at much stuff on the wiki whatsoever for that time. I'll try to get to this in the weekend.
I was assaulted and waylaid by moonlight and subsequently kidnapped in order to be brought to this thread to say that I'm against the changes proposed here. I have a very particular (and admittedly perhaps more than a bit jaded) view of the tiering system and feel there are substantially more preferable routes to take it than relying on yet more esoterica and creatively interpretable statements.
I have been encouraged here on the basis that most staff members do not seem to be expected to return, to let the giants run about in their playground, so I will take this small mercy even though I usually strive to not do that. G'day.
I've been away for a while, so, this post will be a bit long. All-in-all, will pretty much act as a recap of sorts. Especially since I fear I probably expressed myself badly earlier here, so:
Again, if you're saying that "possible worlds" is according to one set of axioms, it is plausible for a series to invoke a collection of "possible worlds" which explicitly extend over all axioms (i.e. having different such sets for different axioms), which would be broader than High 1-A+/0 under your system, causing an issue.
That sort of thing seems pretty coherent to me, so whichever weird way you decide to treat it (either ignoring such statements completely, putting them as equal to monads despite explicitly being above them, or taking a far lower interpretation of Low 1-A or something) is something I'd see as a flaw in the system
A verse could try to do this, yeah, but as soon as it tries to, it ultimately just disqualifies any of the things within those possible worlds from being Monads at all, by placing them inside an actual system of distinctions that exists outside their purview. Honestly a very incoherent thing to posit overall. That the thing above ontological differentiation is, in fact, embedded within a system of ontological differentiation, just because our discourse about it leads to us thinking of scenarios where it exists and scenarios where it doesn't. It's why I said that "All logically possible things" is self-defeating as a definition for High 1-A+, earlier, and amended it to "All logically possible contingent things."
Something occuring within our thought doesn't really mean that it finds, or can find, correspondence in reality, especially when our thinking itself more or less starts to run into walls when considering this sort of stuff. Independent of our intuitions, I would say that trying to embed Being itself (What the Monad is) within a deeper framework is inherently a pretty futile endeavor. It's a primitive notion par excellence, so if you were to find something which you previously identified as "Being" to be inside a broader category or genus (Which you could then use to explain and define it), that would just mean the previous thing was just never really "Being Itself" after all.
Not really, in this case. It's not like Monads who can't enact contradictions are unable to do so because contradictory states-of-affairs are "too much" for them, or somesuch. The very idea is pretty weird, since you can obviously have Tier 2 characters who can actualize paradoxes and also 1-A characters who can't do such a thing, and yet you wouldn't say that this somehow causes problems. This way of viewing things largely breaks down when you try to insert something as non-linear as "Can actualize a paradox" into the equation.
This also ties into the point above in an interesting way, actually. You seem to view the Monad as being grounded by logic, when it's the other way around: Logic is grounded by it. So it's not as if, in such a case, contradictions are impossible because there are things that the Monad is too weak to do. It's moreso that the nature of the Monad itself eternally makes it so these things are impossibilities.
To add on to this and the considerations in my prior post (which were not answered yet): That there can only be one Monad is only a valid viewpoint from certain metaphysical theories.
In trope theory a quality as such may be considered to be an equivalence class of tropes (or a set of equivalence relations between tropes, given by an arbitrary representative of the class). In principle, it is allowed for there to exist an arbitrary amount of objects which have only tropes whose equivalence class exclusively contains themself. I.e. we have a large amount of non-identical objects which are divine simple, by the definition of lacking all qualities except their own.
In fact, now that I think about it, if we allow a Monad a quality that is itself, then what prevents the same from applying to realism? You can have an arbitrary amount of universals instantiated by only a single being which instantiates no other universal.
To add one question to this: Why would we assume statements of a Monad lacking qualities also apply to meta-qualities? Meta-qualities rank lower in your proposed system and the meta-quality of being a quality applies to a Monad, if it has the quality of 'itself' (Which you said it has).
In particular, are meta-qualities not generally included in most philosophical views as I see it.
It seems like a stretch to say that fictions generally make Monad statements in /(meta-)*realism/.
Not quite, no. As you know, Trope Theory is basically a philosophical stance which says that, instead of properties being singular, universal things that individuals exemplify (Or "participate" in), they're actually individuals themselves. So, instead of there being one overarching universal of "Redness" which all red things partake in, there are several "Redness" tropes attached to each red thing. And these Tropes can then be exactly similar, yet be numerically distinct (i.e. The exact same shade of red may be present both in a ball and in a book, yet the red of the ball and the red of the book are still different tropes, not manifestations of a single "redness")
So, since Tropes aren't Universals, and can be "duplicated," I assume the point you're making is basically that a Monad can be just an entity that's identical to its tropes, and its tropes alone. So you could have multiple entities that technically are "Monads" by being identical to all their qualities, and yet are distinct because they're only identical to their qualities, and not the qualities of other objects, which may also be duplications of their own properties.
By extension, this means the argument is also that Monadhood isn't necessarily being "Existence-Itself" and can be satisfied by being a lone, self-isolated 'blob' of existence, if you will. And then, of course, by that logic, you could have "greater" blobs of existence than the one which the Monad is one with, and whatever. And, of course, the "simplicity" that is demanded of the character is also something you're arguing is fulfilled in your scenario: A Trope, after all, isn't comprised of anything else. The pure, self-identical property of "Redness" doesn't seem to have... anything other than redness.
Yeah, so, overall this is a pretty big misunderstanding of the concept being pitched here, more or less. Firstly: The line of thinking outlined above is confusing a necessary condition with a sufficient condition. A Monad, here, is largely characterized by its lack of internal distinctions and composition, but that's not to say that anything that lacks such composition inherently is a Monad. The Monad doesn't just "lack" differentiation, it transcends it.
Now, what's the difference between those two things, you might ask? Think of the difference between a 0-dimensional point and something with Type 2 Beyond-Dimensional Existence. Clearly, a 0-D point is wholly devoid of spatial parts and composition, just in virtue of the fact it's the smallest thing there is. Mathematically, you conceive of these points as being the building blocks of space, and not as things that are extended across space, so points are completely indivisible and nothing comes before them. Clearly, they're "simple" (As in, they lack parts) when it comes to space.
You can obviously find an analogy to that in the Type 2 BDE case. A beyond-dimensional entity completely lacks spatial parts and composition. But this simplicity is completely different from the simplicity which the point has. The point is spatially simple and irreducible due to being the smallest thing there is, but it's still contained inside the framework of space. Meanwhile, the beyond-dimensional being is "spatially simple" because it's above the framework of space entirely, and isn't contained in it to begin with.
The error being made here is basically thinking of the Monad as being the metaphysical equivalent of a point. That's not what it is, at all. As seen above, there's a difference between an "inward" simplicity, which is simply a lack of internal distinctions with respect to some given framework, while still existing inside said framework (E.g. Points have no internal spatial distinction but are still in space. They don't have spatial parts, but instead are the parts making up everything else, at least math-wise), and simplicity that comes from transcendence over a given framework (E.g. Beings with BDE have no internal spatial distinctions because they're not in space whatsoever. They don't have spatial parts, and nor can they act as such parts). With regards to the framework of ontological differentiation, Tropes are the former, and the Monad is the latter.
In fact, it's a great thing that you mentioned Tropes at all, because they... really are the metaphysical equivalent of 0-D points. They're the most basic parts of any aggregate of properties, because they are properties. They have no metaphysical parts, because they are those parts. So they're basically building blocks for whatever metaphysical framework you're working with, just as points are building blocks for space. If it helps, here are some graphs, to compare and contrast ("Unspace" is a placeholder name for a generic 1-A realm, for the matter):
Now, it's important to explain what exactly I mean by "framework of differentiation," and some facts about Tropes can actually help with that. In particular, the topic of Primitive Individuation.
The name is a bit scary, but it basically cuts down to the matter of "What makes things different from each other?". For objects, the question is easy enough: "Two objects are distinct if their properties are distinct." And you can also appeal to other things to individuate objects, too, like spatiotemporal separation. For instance, if I have two basketballs that are identical in literally every single way, then it seems the only thing keeping them distinct would be the fact that they occupy different spots in space, and matter is impenetrable. So, spacetime itself prevents them from being the same ball.
The question becomes a bit harder, though, when we move away from concrete objects and ask "What makes properties different from each other?". The issue gets clearer when you see properties as being able to exist detached from space and time – The pure, self-identical property of "Redness" has no internal structure to it other than Redness. And in this scenario it obviously isn't distinguished from other properties like, say, Greenness, by spacetime, since neither of them are in spacetime to begin with. What exactly, then, lets us say Redness and Greenness are different properties?
In comes the answer of Primitive Individuation: They just are. Redness and Greenness are different because they're different. End of story. Their difference is just a brute fact rooted in their respective intrinsic natures. In philosophy terms, we would say that each property has a different "Haecceity," which is basically a term for the idea of a primal, essential thing that makes you, you, independent of all the other properties you might have or not have. Literally, your primal individuality.
Think of it as if you took something like, say, "Being Napoleon," and conceived it as a particular property different from all other qualities Napoleon had. Under this view, Napoleon was Napoleon because he had the specific property of being Napoleon. Not because of anything else, really. (Of course, whether this necessarily holds for people is a matter of philosophical debate, but for basic properties/concepts/universals that are detached from objects, it's the only way they can be different from each other)
So, in that same way, pure properties are simply different per their own nature. "Redness is different from Greenness because Redness is Redness and Greenness is Greenness."
And this basic distinction between even different properties, is what the Monad transcends. It transcends the distinction between attributes just like 1-As transcend the distinction between points in a space. And the reason this naturally allows it to bypass 1-A and High 1-A is the fact that those tiers are entirely based on that exact principle.
Say: You have a verse whose cosmology has two layers: Layer 1, the baseline setting, and Layer 2, a 1-A realm. Is Layer 2 "beyond the distinction between attributes" compared to Layer 1? Of course not, because it is itself distinguished from Layer 1 by... exactly that. The difference between layers of 1-A is really just based on a difference between the attributes corresponding to each layer (In the case of R>F levels, the form of "realness" that each level operates on). So the distinction between them is exactly the distinction between "pure properties" that I explained above. A distinction between Haecceities.
Which makes sense: After all, your "realness," under the Tiering System's mechanics, is basically something that permeates all of you, and encompasses all your other, secondary features (Which is why dimensions "reset" when entering higher R>F layers, so that even a 0-D thing in a higher level is above whatever dimensional stuff in the lower one). So two levels of existence, one "more real" and another "less real," can't be distinguished by those 'secondary qualities.' They can only be distinguished by... The fact one is more real and the other is less real.
And High 1-A is really just a broader generalization of that. Basically treating the whole 1-A hierarchy (Or would-be hierarchy) as a single unit with its own Haecceity, which you transcend ("Transcending the quality defining 1-A states of existence," to use previous words of mine).
This has the obvious result of you being only able to have one Monad (Since you can't differentiate it at all), but it also means that, since the Monad transcends the difference between properties/substances altogether (I hope I don't have to clarify that, by these terms, I don't mean adjectives), it also transcends the distinction between a non-1-A realm and a 1-A realm (Or, in other words: It transcends the distinction between reality and fiction). Likewise, it transcends the distinction between quality and meta-quality, and also the distinction between meta-quality and meta-meta-quality, and so on and so forth.
This probably sounds similar to Transduality, and it is. Because it's nondualism in the proper sense of the term, instead of the weird made-up version of it that we maintain here on the wiki. To explain the difference between the two, I'll refer to something written in our Nonduality page:
For this ability, dualities refer to logical dualities where the duality is between "A" and "not A" where A is some object or attribute. For example, fire and water are not a duality; the duality of fire would be fire and not fire. The duality of existence would be existence and not existence, or, alternately, existence and nonexistence or existence and void. However, not all verses follow this logic, and many may treat things not logically considered dualities - such as water and fire or time and space - as dualities, meaning what is and isn't a duality can change between verses
So, the page talks about two types of distinction. Two types of duality, if you will: There's distinctions like the distinction between fire and water, or between a lesser and greater amount of an attribute. And then there's logical distinctions, of the kind "A ≠ ¬A" (Where ¬A means the logical negation of A. "Not-A"). As said above, per the latter kind of distinction, dichotomies like "Higher-dimensional and Lower-dimensional" are not in a duality. Per the former kind, though, they are.
The Monad transcends the former kind of distinction, for the record: Yes, it does transcend the distinction between non-1-A and 1-A, and between 1-A and High 1-A, and between levels of High 1-A. But it's not like a 1-A realm is A and a non-1-A realm is ¬A, or like a High 1-A realm is A, and a 1-A realm is ¬A. Not any more than Water is ¬Fire and Fire is ¬Water. It's really just that a non-1-A realm corresponds to property X, a 1-A realm corresponds to property Y, and a High 1-A corresponds to property Z, and the Monad in turn transcends all of those by virtue of transcending the notion of distinct properties to begin with. In the terms used above, it's really no different from transcending the distinction between two substantial things, like, say, fire and water, or higher dimensions and lower dimensions.
So, that's why Monadhood is Tier 0. Levels of Tier 1 below 1-A are distinguished by spatial terms. 1-As are above spatial differentiation/composition, and therefore are above any number of dimensions, regardless of whether the verse talks about cardinal numbers and whatever else. 1-A and up are distinguished by primitive ontological distinctions. A Monad transcends ontological distinction, and therefore it's above all these tiers. Doesn't matter if its verse has 9161016 R>F layers or just 2, or none. Or if it has 10 High 1-A layers, or just 1, or none.
The argument against this would basically be trying to say that the difference between non-1-A and 1-A, and between 1-A and High 1-A, is absolute enough as to already account for this type of transcendence without resulting in the consequences described above. It's a clever argument, for sure, since in the previous thread I took pains to emphasize how 1-A is "discontinuous" from lesser planes of existence.
But ultimately it doesn't really follow – There is, indeed, a common process through which 1-A is differentiated from non-1-A, and 1-A is differentiated from High 1-A, and so those tiers, at their most fundamental, are indeed "continuous" with regards to that, even though they aren't bridged by dimensions and physical composition, and such, and thus obviously lack continuity with each other as regards those things. And since Monads transcend that common process, they transcend those tiers. It's, as said, no different from how, since 1-As transcend spatiotemporal differentiation/composition, they transcend any amount of dimensions.
But a potential rejoinder to the opposition, as it were, is available (The only objection I find even remotely concerning, actually), which is basically a charge of incoherence: How can the Monad transcend ontological distinctions entirely, when it is itself distinct from things below it? Shouldn't it also be devoid of the distinction between Monad and non-Monad? Ultimately, this logic doesn't work, and the answer to why may come in two forms:
1. Doubling Down: The verse simply wholeheartedly accepts the apparent consequence above and says that the Monad is, indeed, not distinct from things below it. More specifically, these cosmologies go full Hindu and say that distinction and multiplicity is illusory, and that in truth the Monad is all that actually exists. Journey to the West and Seekers into the Mystery are both examples of this kind of cosmology.
A bit of a variation of this trend are also cosmologies where you effectively reach the Monad by "dissolving" yourself into it. Basically saying that the Monad is the essence of everything, and all the rest is stuff "piled ontop," so to speak, so that, when you shed it all off, it's all just the Absolute at the end of the day. Basically like cleaning a whiteboard.
(The above, also, makes it so the attempt at trivializing the Monad through Trope Theory falls flat even if you want to talk purely about practical application. It's honestly wild to interpret "Ontological distinctions are illusory and everything is ultimately just one unseparated thing" as "Ah, so that thing is just a self-identical property that you can have infinite of, then.")
Verses that walk towards this direction (Pantheism) are totally safe from the above objection. In fact, most verses that get to Tier 0 here (Which are already few), will inevitably work with that kind of cosmology, so, from a purely practical perspective, it isn't really something that actually harms the proposal. But I don't content myself with practice and like to get into the nitty gritty of it, and indeed it is my opinion that a verse doesn't need an "All-is-One" cosmology to get to Tier 0 here. Thus, the other option:
2. Primordial Binary: This one's a lot simpler. This rendition basically forgoes Pantheism entirely and makes the Monad and its creation be two separate things. Cosmologies of this kind will, in effect, be portraying it as a Creator God in the traditional sense. Creatio Ex Nihilo and all that.
So there is, indeed, a differentiation between the Monad and the rest of the cosmology here. The catch, though, is that this very distinction is something that "emanates" from the nature of the Absolute itself. Like I said before: The Monad is totally self-sufficient, and there isn't any fact about its intrinsic nature that comes from a relation with anything other than itself. Meaning that its own nature delineates the distinction between itself and anything else.
If the above sounded confusing, you can probably refer back to the matter of distinction between concepts/properties up there: What makes two "pure" properties, say, Greenness and Redness, different from each other? Nothing but the primitive nature intrisic to each of them. In other words: They're different because they're different, and that's that. It provides a good analogy (Emphasis on "analogy," mind you) here, but it's also different in one aspect.
Namely that, obviously, there is no single property/concept that accounts for the distinction between all properties/concepts. Greenness is different from every other property on account of its own primitive individuality, certainly, but it's not like properties in general are different solely because of said individuality (Blueness and Greyness are not different because Greenness is Greenness. That's obviously a non-sequitur), unlike with the Monad, whose individuality and self-definition does, indeed, generate differentiation as a whole. So there's similarity between both kinds of distinction, but they're not really the same.
In a nutshell, you can say that, here, the difference between two non-Monads and the difference between a non-Monad and a Monad is basically "The difference between this being and that being" vs "The difference between an individual being and the concept of 'Being' itself." In that sense, the Absolute would be the "capstone" and source of the idea of distinctions as a whole, and not just another thing included in the framework of distinctions. I guess you can also analogize this to like, "Point A and Point B in a coordinate space" vs "A point in space and the thing that acts as the foundation of space."
(This, by the by, also illustrates yet another reason for why you can't really have something above the Monad without contradiction. It's completely self-defined to the point where even the distinction between anything whatsoever is something that emanates entirely from its own nature, so if you have something "above" it, it'd just be subject to that thing's intrinsic nature and as such not be self-defining at all)
Overall, a more practically-inclined mind will probably find the above diatribe unnecessary, given the rarity of this type of Monad in fiction, but, nice to address it here already, regardless.
Problem is that a Monad that is declared as such under a realism based viewpoint may be defeated by a logically coherent expansion of it.
E.g. say a Monad is declared as such in a view where qualities are granted by concepts (i.e. concepts = qualities for this). Then the Monad is an entity lacking and superior to all concepts with the exception of the concept of itself (if even that).
To give a practical example, Owari no Chronicle has a realism based worldview with concepts (which are universals). However, it also introduces a power called "Will" linked to the idea of the will of the Christian god creating the world from the sea of chaos before creation (better described later on as 'void' lacking all concepts). It is reasoned from there that this 'Will' as such is a power independent from all concepts as it "predates" them. (Quotation marks due to time and similar not existing at that point) Notably, it is not a power without properties, though, and in particular not a monad. This is logically consistent, as by no logical rule there has to be a single thing granting properties. I.e. properties that are neither qualities nor lack of the property represented by the quality can be logically consistent, as they are in this case.
Now 'Will' is superior and independent of qualities (concepts) and has the ability to manipulate those. There is no logical contradiction in it being able to add qualities (concepts) to some a Monad, just as it can to other things that lack certain concepts. So it making a Monad into a non-Monad by adding some quality is plausible.
Likewise, it can erase qualities/concepts so it is logically plausible for it to turn a Monad to nothing by removing the quality that separates those things.
(Will in particular would not be restricted by the Monad's superiority to qualities, as it is not included in that category unless you apply a false equivalence)
This argument seems to be based on the aforementioned flawed understanding of the concept being proposed here, so, it's likewise erroneous. The Monad, if anything, would be the basis for any other concepts and properties, since it'd be embody pure "Being," which everything else presupposes by nature. Properties are inherently assigned to objects, which means that when you say "X is red," you presuppose that there is such a X, to begin with – Notice how the notion of "existence" is already conceptually prior to the predication of "redness" itself, there. And so likewise the Monad is prior to any properties save itself (And defines what "property"hood means, to begin with)
If you know a little bit of analytic philosophy, you'll recognize this. It's the prevailing view on the concept of "Existence." That it isn't really a quality that you predicate of concrete things (At least, not in the same way "red" or "cubic" is), as if there was first an object which then could have either "existence" or "nonexistence" predicated of it. The moment you say there is such an object at all, you're already presupposing existence. So under those lenses, "existence" is more fundamental than any such properties. It's the basis of predication.
So even granting that the ability is effectively boundless in its functionality, it still seems to work by pretty much adding properties to an object (Basically predication as an actual power), which is null and void when faced against something that's the foundation which allows you to say properties and predicates are a thing to begin with. The coming-into-being of any new concepts whatsoever would by necessity happen through the Monad.
Trying to mess with it by creating concepts is like if you had the Platonic Form of 'Dimension' and then tried to affect it by adding more dimensions to physical space. You'd fail pretty miserably because the Form of Dimension defines dimensionality to begin with, and would dictate the very terms of your interference with dimensional space. Same here, except in a much, much broader scale.
(In general you can analogize this to trying to affect something beyond space altogether by adding points to space, which would indeed be equally fruitless)
And to that comes the fact that Will would, indeed, be included in that category, since the Monad is really just the embodiment of primitive identity, as it were. To fall under it, all you have to do is... be a thing, really.
Finally, to add one point of non-Monad related criticism, why are your 1-A levels defined by qualities in general? I thought you had no intention of equalizing differing qualities according to the last thread.
As in, shouldn't High 1-A be strictly qualitative superiority above R>F, rather than being just above any one kind of qualitative superiority hierarchy? Generally, other qualitative hierarchies are not comparable to R>F hierarchies in fiction, just as their different qualities in general are not equal or superior to R>F, so without that specifier there would be no guarantee that High 1-A is generally above 1-A.
Accordingly, I suppose that means 1-A may theoretically allow for characters with qualitative superiorities lesser than R>F, i.e. R>F is not necessarily the baseline. (which your text doesn't contradict, but should probably be clarified)
It's fairly strange to speak about "qualities" as being meaningfully different, once you hit 1-A (To the degree they're incomparable, that is). The tier, as it were, is effectively based around the idea of surpassing physical differentiation and composition, to the extent where you can't be obtained by the sum of anything lesser than yourself (Contrast that with, say, something like an Inaccessible Cardinal, which can't be reached by unions of sets smaller than itself, in lesser quantities than itself, but otherwise is still the union of singletons that are individually lesser than itself)
So, overall, It's really the stage at which your sheer superiority over lesser things isn't really related to any "physical" factors at all, and so by necessity becomes purely based on your ontology (Because it can't hinge on anything else, at that point). Comparison really just becomes a matter of picking out the first thing that's beyond physical composition in the verse, and scaling from there as the baseline, because at that point it all is indeed the same thing. Though not always: Sufficiently robust forms of transcendence just bypass the whole process anyway.
I also wanna say that I really agree with this point:
We tier things by the lowest reasonably possible interpretation and I think there is no denying that Monad statements can be made on lower R>F levels.
Additionally, we practice that if fiction frequently does things wrong we take an approach of requiring evidence of doing it right. We have less than 10 candidates for the spot (according to OP), several of which seem questionable and of which I generally don't think they even have affirmative proof of including R>F. Meanwhile we apparently already have several examples of characters doing this wrong. That means a substantial amount (more than 20%... I don't know the actual numbers. Probably quite a bit more) evidently do not include meta-hierachies, or R>F in particular, in their reasoning. And the comparison between the amount that does it wrong and the amount of which we actually have direct evidence that they do it right is even greater. I would guess more than 50% easily, but maybe we should actually count.
Basically, I'm fairly sure Monads including meta-hierarchies has a worse relative percentage of being done wrong, than something like lightning being lightning speed has. So by existing precedence, it only makes sense for us to require confirmation as a rule.
I maintain that 1-A (Or anything below 0) is not, in fact, the lowest reasonable interpretation for Monadhood at all, so that first assertion is frankly a moot point. Really just reaffirming your stance, so, counts for nothing, really.
Trying to bring probabilistic arguments into this is honestly pretty weird, also. Because "This thing is above ontological distinctions entirely," by nature, does indeed include all the others tiers in the system. Assuming that it doesn't isn't "Taking the lowest reasonable interpretation." It's just assuming the statement is false. Really the equivalent of seeing a character say "I can move at the speed of light!", with clarifications that it is indeed literal, but nevertheless rejecting it because, technically, it doesn't explicitly say they can cross 300,000,000 meters in a second.
This is inaccurate. Or rather, it is not a universally held opinion even amongst the proponents of these philosophies. None of these characteristics are universally held by religions or schools of thought. For instance, I'd say Adi Shankara's conception of Brahman is largely reflective of what you are proposing:
However, this is not the only interpretation. Far from it. Every single one of these characteristics is rejected in some school of thought or another.
Lack of Qualities/Distinctions:
Ramanuja disagreed with Shankara’s view of the nature of the Ultimate Reality. He argued that Brahman without qualities (nirguna) is nothing; to be real, Brahman must have content (qualities); Brahman is Saguna Brahman (saguna means literally “with qualities”).
Now the first alternative is not possible, because one who is devoid of all distinctions cannot possibly think and resolve to be many, as the creator of the world does in the beginning according to Scripture.
The essential quality of a substance is inseparably related to it. The mere substrate ( visesya ) without quality is inconceivable. Brahman as a qualified spiritual substance ( ajada dravya) is one but the qualities and the substrate in which they inhere are different. A pure substance devoid of any qualities is non-existent, like the sky flower according to Vedanta Desika.
Unknowability/Ineffability/Negative Theology:
If Brahman be devoid of all attributes and specifications, He will be outside all sources of knowledge, and as such be unreal like the sky-flower, which also is outside all sources of knowledge. Thus, the attributeless Brahman is not, evidently, an object of perception, since He is beyond the sense- organs ; nor is He an object of inference, since He is without any mark; nor is He an object of Scripture even, for what is devoid of attributes cannot be expressed by words. Thus, the attributeless and non-specific Brahman cannot be an object of rfidhavrtti, as He is devoid of class, attribute and action, nor an object of yogavrtti, as He can have no root-meaning, nor an object of lakeana, as He is devoid of any connection with anything else, nor lastly, an object of gauna- vrtti, as He is devoid of qualities. Such a Brahman, therefore, incapable of being established by any proof, is but a myth, and not a reality. The real Brahman is essentially possessed of attributes, as shown above.
Partlessness/Indivisibility:
The Vedanta-sutra uses the term amsa or part, to describe the relationship between [Brahman and an individual human soul]. What is meant by amsa and how does this concept support both the views? Amsa or part does not mean a spatial part of the whole, because the soul as a spiritual entity does not admit of any spatial division. Nor is Brahman a quantitative infinite of which soul is a part. The term amsa is, therefore, defined by Ramanuja as that which constitutes an integral part of an entity (eka-vastu eka-desatvam hy-amsatvam). What is meant by part of a whole is that it is an essential attribute of a complex whole. Thus, for instance, the luminosity radiating from a luminous body such as fire or sun is part of that body; the generic characteristic of a cow (gotva) as its essential attribute is part of the cow in which it inheres. In the same way Jiva is regarded as an integral part of Brahman.
The crucial issue having an ontological implication is whether Goddess Sri, who is inseparable from Visnu, and who also enjoys equality with Him in all respects, is an integral part of the ultimate Reality. There are two views on this question. According to one view held by Vedanta Desika and his followers, Sri is an integral part of Reality and the divine couple together constitute the para-tattva. The basis for this claim is that the scriptural texts, the Pancaratra Samhitas and the Visnupurana declare that Sri is vibhu or infinite in character in the same way as Visnu is and She plays an important role in all the functions of the Lord including that of intercession. The other view, maintained by the followers of Manavalamamuni contends that Sri is not vibhu in character but monadic (anu) like the individual selves and cannot, therefore, become an integral part of Reality. In their opinion if Sri were on par with Visnu, it would militate against the unitary character of the ultimate Reality.
Unchangeability/Immutability
The fact is that it is the power (lakti) inherent in a thing which determines whether a particular thing can be transformed into something else or not, and not the fact of its having parts or not. Hence, water though possessed of parts (savayava) is never transformed into curd, because it lacks the power of being so transformed, while the milk-atoms, though devoid of parts (niravayava), are transformed into curd, because they possess the power of being so transformed.
Hence, the above argument that Brahman can have no transformation, because He is all-pervading and without parts, is not a valid one. On the contrary, we may argue as follows: — Brahman is capable of having transformation, because He is all-pervading, like the ether.
Impassibility/Emotionlessness
1. In the beginning this world was Soul (Atman) alone in the form of a Person. Looking around, he saw nothing else than himself. He said first : "I am." Thence arose the name "I." ...
2. He was afraid. Therefore one who is alone is afraid. This one then thought to himself: "Since there is nothing else than myself, of what am I afraid ?" Thereupon, verily, his fear departed, for of what should he have been afraid ? Assuredly it is from a second that fear arises.
3. Verily, he had no delight. Therefore one alone has no delight. He desired a second.
Spatial Extension:
She is eternal and blessed (Mukta) like the Supreme Soul and is his consort. She has various forms, but no material body, and is thus like the Supreme Soul, and like him is expressible by all words. She possesses the same extension in space and time as the Supreme Soul, i. e. is concomitant with him.
Hierarchical:
Higher than the sense-organs are the objects of senses, higher than the objects is the mind, higher than the mind is intellect, higher than intellect is the great soul. Higher than the great (mahat) is the unmanifest (avyakta), higher than the unmanifest is the Person (purusa), nothing is higher than the Person, He is the goal, the highest course.
Upon request, I can provide further explanations as to the source of each statement in terms of which Hindu theologian or scripture it comes from or where -- elsewise -- these same individuals or schools of thought can be found asserting that Brahman is the One, Ultimate Reality, substratum of existence, et cetera.
The point being: It is absolutely not the case that the collection of requirements you set forth for Tier 0 can be naturally extrapolated from Monadhood itself. You can find numerous extremely prominent Hindu philosophers arguing that some of these requirements are -- in fact -- logically incompatible. Some argue that lacking qualities makes something non-existent, thus, the Ultimate Reality must have qualities. Some argue that an unknowable/unspeakable thing is also unreal, or inconceivable entirely, and that such a viewpoint renders scripture invalid. Some argue that individual souls are integral parts of Brahman which form a complex whole. Some argue that two distinct divinities combine to form the Ultimate Reality, which others argue would violate its unitary character (which is reflective of your view, hence, there is disagreement). Some argue that changeability is merely a function of something's power, not its supposed partless nature or anything else, that Brahman's creation of the world was, and is, a transformation of Himself. That he divided himself into the world. Then you have multiple scriptures defining him as having emotions, as being afraid of being alone for a time, as desiring a partner due to his lack of delight. Describing human souls as comprising 1/4th of him, and the other 3/4ths being the immortal beings in Heaven.
So the question becomes, how or why are we excluding these viewpoints from Tier 0, and further, how or why are we reaching the conclusion that fictional depictions of Monads must fit your viewpoint and not these others, when so many of them fail to address these elements to the extent that we could determine whether or not they consider their monad as immutable, ineffable, impassible, indivisible, or lacking qualities?
It is meant to serve as a demonstration of my above point and the further peril that lies with this approach, such that we are essentially going to extrapolate a specific conception of Monadhood out of extremely limited evidence, such as a single reference to being "all in one" and assume that not only does it encompass a myriad of other characteristics that were never established in the verse and are not logically required by monadhood, but that all contradicting information is subjugated to the metaphorical, even when it is incredibly direct, like outright stating that the "Monad" is the chief among a race of beings that live in the void.
The entirety of this talk about Hinduism is pretty useless. Because being the substratum of existence, the Ultimate Reality, "one without a second," and etc. are not sufficient conditions for Monadhood whatsoever, even if they are necessary conditions. So you're basically presenting me with a bunch of people who deny Divine Simplicity (i e. Affirm there is no Monad at all) and then insisting they're counterexamples to my arguments.
(Though you got a lot of this stuff wrong, anyway. That, or you take it out of context. Here on the point of immutability, for instance. I could go on, but hopefully you get the hint here)
Put another way, you're basically saying "These characteristics don't necessarily result in the conclusions you're drawing here," and then, as evidence of that, showing me text about philosophers who deny God has these characteristics to begin with. Honestly pretty bizarre. Borders on a non-sequitur.
(Also, preferably don't overfocus on the word "monad" or "monadic." I adopted this name entirely out of convenience, and philosophers have used it to mean completely different things in other contexts. Here's Leibniz, for instance).
Anyhow: The view of Monadhood that Tier 0 is adopting for these proposals is very general and doesn't actually lean towards any specific formulation of the concept. It really boils down to "Character transcends both physical distinctions and distinctions between properties (Provided those are wholly distinct and regard different substances). It neither has metaphysical parts, nor can act as said parts for anything else." You can fit a lot of accounts of Divine Simplicity under that umbrella (Because they aren't that different to begin with)
So, the only real useful takeaway from what you just said is "We need to establish what exactly qualifies as evidence that a character is a Monad." Obviously, it's extremely easy to identify when the character is just a copy-paste of the Advaita version of Brahman (Anyone who read J.M DeMatteis' comics probably has seen that a hundred times already), but I suppose it'd be of interest to debate edge cases.
@DontTalkDT I read the Staff PM earlier, so I'm honestly not sure if you're still in there. But I'm pinging you directly here, anyway, juuuust in case. Since the above, I think, cleared up some misunderstandings going around.
Honestly, as I estimate the situation, I don't think we are really going to convince each other here, and given your previous disinterest in protracted debate even without the present circumstances, I'm not sure if you'd want to hash out at least some things right now or leave this for later. If you don't feel like responding, that's fine.
Well, my viewpoint that we should follow the workings of real world spirituality and metaphysics as explained by actual Enlightened beings, rather than something artificial that resembles what the Suggsopath has hallucinated, remains.
As such, I still support Ultima if he sticks very close to the "definitions" of the Parabrahman/Parashiva and Buddhahood.
As said prior, I'm more or less striving to be as secular as possible with these revisions, since the concept being posited here indeed isn't exclusively religious and finds a lot of equivalents in general philosophy and the like. Which is why I, again, stress that I'm being fairly general here: Whether a verse has a Hindu-inspired, or Buddhism-inspired or Christian-inspired view of the Monad doesn't really impact on the ratings. They're all equally welcome, since ultimately those conceptions all stick to the same basal principles at the end of the day.
To clarify, if lower characters are able to use lower magic/cosmic energy to interact with the alleged monad/omnigod, does that disqualify it being past the 1-A wall?
To clarify, if lower characters are able to use lower magic/cosmic energy to interact with the alleged monad/omnigod, does that disqualify it being past the 1-A wall?
Yeah, pretty much. Tier 0 is effectively the giga version of 1-A, so it naturally inherits all its disqualifiers. Being surpassed, or some such, would still allow it to keep 1-A, but if the interaction anti-feats get so damning that they're being shown as relative to the lower (i.e. non-1-A) reality, they get kicked from 1-A too.
So you're basically presenting me with a bunch of people who deny Divine Simplicity (i e. Affirm there is no Monad at all) and then insisting they're counterexamples to my arguments.
You took the stance that the full list of qualifications doesn't need to be explicitly said of a character, because those qualities can be inferred once the being is established as a Monad through certain descriptions.
Take the SEP Article on Divine Simplicity which says that there is a lack of distinction between God as the subject of his attributes and the attributes themselves, and that the attributes are identical to eachother. Free from "matter-form composition, potency-act composition, and existence-essence composition."
You would find descriptions very similar to the ones given in your list of examples by people who explicitly reject several of these things. Brahman described as "all-pervading and devoid of parts" and "the oneness of Brahman is absolute" and that Brahman is "omnipotent and omniscient." Gurus who affirm these same statements (which, per your examples, would be sufficient to demonstrate monadhood and thus infer Divine Simplicity) are also people who say that God and his attributes cannot be identical, who say that there are internal distinctions.
This segment of the book I shared with you describes Nimbarka and Bhaskara as explicitly disagreeing on the point of Divine Simplicity.
According to Bhaskara in His causal state, Brahman is free from all distinctions whatsoever, i.e. He has then no internal differences even, i.e. His powers and qualities involve no difference in Him. During His causal state the sentient and the non-sentient — His two powers, remain completely merged in Him, like a grain of salt in the sea, and His qualities, such as knowledge and the rest, are non-different from Him, just as heat, the quality of fire, is non-different from fire, and do not imply any difference of nature on His part. In short, according to Bhaskara, Brahman is an abstract Unity in His causal state, with no internal differences, but becomes a concrete unity in His effected state, with the internal differences of the sentient and the non-sntient. But for Nimbarka, Brahman is always differenced or savisesa, in the sense that He has always internal differences, i.e. is always a concrete Unity even during His causal state. The sentient and the non-sentient are never absolutely identical with Brahman, never absolutely merged and ab- sorbed in Him like a grain of salt thrown into the sea, but always retain their own individuality and separateness even during salvation and dissolution, and as such, they always constitute the internal differences of Brahman. Thus, a pure, non-differenced unity is a thing unknown to Nimbarka.
Thus, we have seen that, according to Nimbarka, there are three equally real and co-eternal realities, viz. Brahman, the cit and the acit. Brahman is the Controller (Niyantr), the cit the enjoyer (bhoktr) and the acit the object enjoyed (bhogya). The next question which confronts us is: What is the exact relation between these three ?
In the first place, there is an essential difference of nature (svarflpa-bheda) between Brahman on the one hand, the soul and the world on the other. Thus, Brahman is the cause and the soul His effect, and there is evidently a difference between the cause and its effect, as between the sea and its waves, between the sun and its rays. Also, the Brahman is the whole, and the soul His part, and the part and the whole cannot be identical. Again, Brahman is the object to be worshipped, the object to be known,* the object to be attained, while the soul is the knower, the worshipper and the attainer, and there is always a difference between the worshipper and the worshipped, the knower and the known, the attainer and the attained.
Bhaskara's view very concretely affirms Divine Simplicity, but Nimbarka's very explicitly rejects it. But Nimbarka still makes statements about the nature of Brahman which are otherwise affirmative of the rough outline of Monadhood, from which you claim DS can simply be inferred when not actually attested to. He describes Brahman as the all-pervading entity, an indivisible bliss. That all things are Brahman in their nature and essence. An omnipotent and omniscience supreme reality, from which all names and forms arise and return to. The material and efficient cause of the universe, lor od fall causes, controller of all, lord of all.
This is as strong an attestation of Monadhood as several of your examples, by someone who explicitly rejects Divine Simplicity. The question is, why are we assume Divine Simplicity in cases where it is not actually stated?
A verse could try to do this, yeah, but as soon as it tries to, it ultimately just disqualifies any of the things within those possible worlds from being Monads at all, by placing them inside an actual system of distinctions that exists outside their purview. Honestly a very incoherent thing to posit overall. That the thing above ontological differentiation is, in fact, embedded within a system of ontological differentiation, just because our discourse about it leads to us thinking of scenarios where it exists and scenarios where it doesn't. It's why I said that "All logically possible things" is self-defeating as a definition for High 1-A+, earlier, and amended it to "All logically possible contingent things."
Something occuring within our thought doesn't really mean that it finds, or can find, correspondence in reality, especially when our thinking itself more or less starts to run into walls when considering this sort of stuff. Independent of our intuitions, I would say that trying to embed Being itself (What the Monad is) within a deeper framework is inherently a pretty futile endeavor. It's a primitive notion par excellence, so if you were to find something which you previously identified as "Being" to be inside a broader category or genus (Which you could then use to explain and define it), that would just mean the previous thing was just never really "Being Itself" after all.
This response doesn't actually address my concern. I'll try to break it down one more time:
You say that the monad is one set of axioms.
I say that, then, series which invoke all sets of axioms should logically be superior to that.
You then say that the monad is beyond differentiation, so that contradicts it; something that embodies only one set of axioms wouldn't be a true monad.
But as you already said the monad was simply one set of axioms, that means that either statement 1 or statement 3 is incorrect.
Which of these do you disagree with?
If you are just retracting statement #1 that's fine, but be clear about that. You brought that up to defend your idea from another argument, and you can't have it both ways.
Not really, in this case. It's not like Monads who can't enact contradictions are unable to do so because contradictory states-of-affairs are "too much" for them, or somesuch.
This also ties into the point above in an interesting way, actually. You seem to view the Monad as being grounded by logic, when it's the other way around: Logic is grounded by it. So it's not as if, in such a case, contradictions are impossible because there are things that the Monad is too weak to do. It's moreso that the nature of the Monad itself eternally makes it so these things are impossibilities.
This idea - that both monads which can cause logically impossible things, and monads which can only cause logically possible things, actually have power over the same domain, except the latter decides to limit itself by making sure that logically impossible things are never actualised - seems like an assumption about their power which I don't think we should make without good evidence.
The very idea is pretty weird, since you can obviously have Tier 2 characters who can actualize paradoxes and also 1-A characters who can't do such a thing, and yet you wouldn't say that this somehow causes problems. This way of viewing things largely breaks down when you try to insert something as non-linear as "Can actualize a paradox" into the equation.
Your analogy is completely flawed. We're talking about characters who have nigh-identical descriptions, except one can explicitly do more things. And you're analogising that to "What if two characters had completely different descriptions, making one far weaker, except that weaker one had that addition from before?". Of course it breaks when you do that!
Not as of yet. After this thread is wrapped up, specifically, is when the more menial parts of the revisions will be sorted out (E.g. Tier 11, How to re-organize the tiers), and after that is when the standard pages will be rewritten and then presented in one final thread.
(I'll respond to the above shortly, btw. Weekend at last, so, I'm more or less free now)
I'm assuming Ultima is away or something but I've been pretty glued to where this is going, I'm not 100% convinced on the change to an almost philosophical tier, its such a big pivot from the current system, but if it works as its own idea then it works as its own idea (and from what I've read, I generally agree with last thread which already got accepted)
Yeah, real life matters that I won't disclose have left my disposition for wiki shit at basically 0 as of recently. Although I obviously haven't forgotten about this thread, nor did I abandon it, really. When my next reply drops, probably sometime this week, I plan to toss it back to full momentum.
Yeah, real life matters that I won't disclose have left my disposition for wiki shit at basically 0 as of recently. Although I obviously haven't forgotten about this thread, nor did I abandon it, really. When my next reply drops, probably sometime this week, I plan to toss it back to full momentum.
I understand ya bro, fictional characters beating up other fictional characters comes second to like, eating and breathing and life shit. In any case, I think that this idea of tier 0 absolutely has merit, and that merit certainly isn't going anywhere while you're away.
Gonna make a quick post addressing part of this before I go to work.
This response doesn't actually address my concern. I'll try to break it down one more time:
You say that the monad is one set of axioms.
I say that, then, series which invoke all sets of axioms should logically be superior to that.
You then say that the monad is beyond differentiation, so that contradicts it; something that embodies only one set of axioms wouldn't be a true monad.
But as you already said the monad was simply one set of axioms, that means that either statement 1 or statement 3 is incorrect.
Which of these do you disagree with?
If you are just retracting statement #1 that's fine, but be clear about that. You brought that up to defend your idea from another argument, and you can't have it both ways.
Yeah, upon further reflection, #1 indeed cannot be correct, at least not in a meaningful sense.
On one hand: Saying a Tier 0 here can be part of a larger cosmology of possible worlds doesn't work whatsoever, considering the whole point is that it transcends the difference between existences. Now, possible worlds if real are either primitively distinct (Monad transcends that) or they're distinct due to a more straightforward application of the Identity of Indiscernibles (Monad transcends that too). So it would necessarily transcend such a cosmology.
Yet, as an extension of the aforementioned further reflection, I'm starting to think this particular discussion has been framed wrong, on my part. To emphasize: The Monad existing doesn't rely on any set of metaphysical presuppositions that are more fundamental than it, at all. It's not like you first need some particular axioms to be in place before it can exist. A verse can just say "This thing exists and it's like that" and, presto, there you have it. I realize that despite my thoughts largely aligning with this, some of the points I made (E.g. "It's above all axioms and presuppositions in a qualified sense") seem to have gone against that, at least in the letter, so I've reconsidered said points after recollecting my thoughts.
With that, we're kinda back to where we began, and I'd then reframe the answer thus as "There isn't any tension whatsoever between verses where Monads exist and verses where they don't." Monads not existing in Verse X doesn't mean that the logic that makes them Tier 0 isn't actually true in it. The very nature of Monadhood does mean that one can't just pop into existence, and whatnot, but it doesn't mean that the principles underlying it, and the conclusions following from them, suddenly become logical impossibilities or falsehoods if it doesn't exist.
The only way you could argue that, I'd say, is as you did in the beginning of this conversation: If you say that Monadhood necessarily leads to the validity of some kind of ontological argument, where the Monad's logical possibility alone implies its existence (i.e. "God exists by definition") so that the argument just triggers a modus tollens when applied to verses where it is absent: "P (A description of Monadhood, like the one I've given in this thread) implies Q (The Monad's existence in reality), but Q is false in that verse, therefore P is altogether false in it too." But that doesn't really follow, since Monadhood's description alone doesn't imply that there has to be some actual thing fitting that description. It only implies that, if the Monad exists, it can't just have come into existence at some point, and likewise that neither it can pop out of existence. It doesn't demonstrate that the -fact- of its existence follows from the above premises alone.
Hell, a lot of theists have rejected the ontological argument as a proof for God's existence, despite otherwise affirming all this stuff. It isn't exactly something that's widely accepted on the other side, either, and that number probably multiplies when you expand the list to include secular philosophers who posited the concept independently of religious contexts. So a verse can take it or leave it. Not really a concern.
To add to that, saying that the validity of the ontological argument follows from a Tier 0's existence in a verse just falls under the fallacy of the converse: Saying that, just because q follows from p, q being true implies p is also true. So, substitute "q" for "Monad exists" and "p" for "The ontological argument is true" and you see the issue. Basically mistakenly treating the two as mutually implying each other, when they don't. Add that to the fact that Ontological Arguments haven't exactly been exclusively applied to Monad-style deities, historically, and the objection breaks down even further, since you can't even say they imply a Monad in specific exists.
Equivalently, all "A Tier 0 can't exist in this verse" means is that such a thing can't just pop into existence, or be created, or any of that. That doesn't make it logically impossible, since logical impossibility doesn't mean "It can't be brought into existence" but "It breaks the laws of logic," and no law of logic is broken by the premise of a Tier 0, even if it doesn't exist and can't be brought to exist by any means whatsoever. At that point you can at best say that creating it is logically impossible, in the same vein affecting the soul of a soulless being is logically impossible, but by then you're talking about a very different thing already, anyway.
This is not to say that a Tier 0 isn't a Necessary Existent, of course; that its existence is somehow contingent, since its necessity and the validity of an ontological argument are wholly different things. Just that, just because it doesn't exist, doesn't mean the premises and conclusions we derive from the idea of it are all false. That wouldn't really make much sense at all (Because a line of reasoning of the form "If X, then Y" doesn't become false just because the thing it's talking about has no reference in reality). Put that way, its "Necessary Existence" isn't really something that enters into tension with other verses with different cosmologies.
Especially when you consider that Tier 0s in traditional form are effectively just reifications of primitive notions that all verses share, anyway, which makes it so, technically, they are logically possible in all cases. For instance a verse could plausibly say that the Monad is the law of identity, or somesuch, and since logical possibility/necessity only cares about the logical forms of propositions and is entirely "blind" with regards to the forms these propositions take in reality, it would technically pick out the same thing both in a verse where that Monad exists and in a verse where it doesn't.
(Put another way: Suppose you have Verse A, where there's a character who personifies some necessary truth, and then Verse B, where no such character exists. Obviously, just because Verse B doesn't have a character personifying that truth in it, doesn't mean this truth is actually a falsehood. Most verses don't have any character who is the law of identity itself, in them, but that doesn't mean the law of identity is false in their settings)
So, as I see the matter, the only way to have a verse that's "fundamentally logically incompatible with a Tier 0's existence" is:
1. Straight up say that. But with a coherent account of a Tier 0's necessary nature given, this prospect doesn't have much of a bite, since a verse could conceivably say that things corresponding to other tiers are logically impossible, too. So it's not an issue that uniquely follows from Tier 0 at that point.
Of course, a variant of this might be a verse flat-out saying that a Tier 0 is an impossibility, and yet one that exists anyway, as you find in a lot of more wacky settings out there. But at that point it's just a quirk of the specific verse in question, rather than anything problematic to the general proposal.
2. Not have a verse to begin with (Because either way Tier 0s reify notions so basic that they're at the foundation of anything being there at all).
This idea - that both monads which can cause logically impossible things, and monads which can only cause logically possible things, actually have power over the same domain, except the latter decides to limit itself by making sure that logically impossible things are never actualised - seems like an assumption about their power which I don't think we should make without good evidence.
Your analogy is completely flawed. We're talking about characters who have nigh-identical descriptions, except one can explicitly do more things. And you're analogising that to "What if two characters had completely different descriptions, making one far weaker, except that weaker one had that addition from before?". Of course it breaks when you do that!
For the first thing: I wouldn't say that's how it is, no. It's not like logically impossible things are just desperately trying to erupt into existence and would do so if God wasn't there to "suppress" them into not existing. It's just that the Monad is the agent that determines possibility to begin with, rather than having its powers conditioned by something prior to itself. That's kind of a general result of its self-sufficiency.
Secondly: It's a pretty good analogy, actually, because the point is that the starting point of all these tiers is transcendence, and the acts you're capable of enacting just scale off of this transcendence. What this leads to, is certain acts being generically proper to these tiers: Having the power to create/affect/destroy any and all High 1-B or Low 1-A structures is proper to 1-A characters. Having the power to create/affect/destroy any 1-A structures is proper to High 1-A characters. And having the power to affect/create/destroy any and all High 1-A structures is proper to Tier 0s.
On the other hand, "Can create a round square" or "Can soulhax soulless beings without giving them souls first" is not something proper to any conceivable tier. You can attach those things to any given character because they don't have anything to do with power to begin with. There isn't some X that is such that the Monad fails to be able to create it. There just isn't any X to begin with, just a jumble of words (At least, that's what verses where the Tier 0 can't do contradictions would say)
In light of that, you could perfectly adjust the analogy to one where there are two 1-A characters: Both are baseline 1-As. They are both exactly identical, save for the fact that one can soulhax soulless beings, while the other can't. I would consider these two to be exactly as powerful, yes.
Unless you want to argue that, if Tier 0s can't actualize contradictory objects, they wouldn't transcend these objects if brought over to a verse where they can exist, which is not that good a statement either, since impossible objects (Say, a round square or a four-sided triangle) either:
1. As above, are just meaningless sentences. They don't have a reference or a sense. They're just strings of words that are grammatically well-formed but don't convey anything, which is to say that they actually aren't even "objects" in any sense (This is the stance that the "Monad can't do contradictions" verses would take, as said)
In the first option, they aren't really impediments to a Tier 0's transcendence, since they're just names that don't, nor can, refer to anything. They're just nothing at all.
In the second option, they still aren't really impediments, because then they're just combinations of incompatible definitions, and a Tier 0 transcends all such definitions. It transcends roundness and squareness, so, obviously it transcends the round square. It transcends triangleness and four-sidedness, so it transcends the four-sided triangle, too. So on and so forth.
This also serves as an additional reason for the general weirdness of that argument, in my mind. Hardly makes any sense to place one character as stronger than another just because one can do something the other can't, when said "inability" has really nothing to do with power (And so can't even be properly called an inability), and at worst involves things that they both would transcend anyway.
You took the stance that the full list of qualifications doesn't need to be explicitly said of a character, because those qualities can be inferred once the being is established as a Monad through certain descriptions.
Take the SEP Article on Divine Simplicity which says that there is a lack of distinction between God as the subject of his attributes and the attributes themselves, and that the attributes are identical to eachother. Free from "matter-form composition, potency-act composition, and existence-essence composition."
You would find descriptions very similar to the ones given in your list of examples by people who explicitly reject several of these things. Brahman described as "all-pervading and devoid of parts" and "the oneness of Brahman is absolute" and that Brahman is "omnipotent and omniscient." Gurus who affirm these same statements (which, per your examples, would be sufficient to demonstrate monadhood and thus infer Divine Simplicity) are also people who say that God and his attributes cannot be identical, who say that there are internal distinctions.
This segment of the book I shared with you describes Nimbarka and Bhaskara as explicitly disagreeing on the point of Divine Simplicity.
Bhaskara's view very concretely affirms Divine Simplicity, but Nimbarka's very explicitly rejects it. But Nimbarka still makes statements about the nature of Brahman which are otherwise affirmative of the rough outline of Monadhood, from which you claim DS can simply be inferred when not actually attested to. He describes Brahman as the all-pervading entity, an indivisible bliss. That all things are Brahman in their nature and essence. An omnipotent and omniscience supreme reality, from which all names and forms arise and return to. The material and efficient cause of the universe, lor od fall causes, controller of all, lord of all.
This is as strong an attestation of Monadhood as several of your examples, by someone who explicitly rejects Divine Simplicity. The question is, why are we assume Divine Simplicity in cases where it is not actually stated?
The nucleus of the objection there is a valid concern, true. But it largely rests upon a misunderstanding; I would say statements of something being "All-in-One" aren't really sufficient on their own, no. What is sufficient is the general concept of distinctions between objects breaking down and being dissolved into unity as one shifts between states of reality (That's what the Cthulhu Mythos' cosmology is, as one relevant and contentious example). You'd be hard-pressed to try and fit these kinds of cosmologies with any of what you claim is a "counterexample" to this proposal's arguments.
For example, Nimbarka conceived of the "unity" of Brahman and the universe as being basically just the fact that the universe is fundamentally dependent on Brahman; the universe is supported by Brahman and can in no way exist apart from him, so the universe is therefore "a part" of Brahman, his reasoning went. Ramanuja in turn conceived of the identity between Brahman and creation as being similar to the relationship between a substance and the attributes inhering on it, like the relationship between a robe and its color. These are both very specific notions of "oneness," so much so that I wouldn't even consider either of them as a possible interpretation for, say, Yog-Sothoth. So you'd only think that their descriptions match the outline of Monadhood given by me if you only look at the superficial statements and not take into account how they're qualified in-context.
But, generally speaking, some vague notion of "oneness" is not going to cut it, still. If there's a cosmology where at first there was some messy heap of reality stuff that then somehow became organized into specific things, then you could plausibly describe said heap as "All-in-One" and "Undifferentiated," and what have you, but obviously that wouldn't automatically be Tier 0 here. With regards to Yog-Sothoth in particular, for instance, I wouldn't have deemed him a possible candidate for Tier 0 at all if it weren't for the prior context of the story. If the "All-in-One and One-in-All of limitless being and self" statement was the only thing available, he wouldn't have been considered.
As said, it's of interest to debate "edge" cases of what qualifies for Tier 0 under these proposals, since one particular instance of this type of character is already extremely easy to identify as is, anyway. But it's of course also important to note that it's not like, say, this or this is Tier 0.
Overall I'd say the confusion here also, in large part, springs from the usual description of DS as "God has no parts and is identical to his attributes," which I'd say is pretty lackluster in a general context, since it gives off the impression that being a singular, unitary entity with "no parts" is entirely what the concept boils down to. Even the slightly more faithful description of "God is identical to his existence" is something I'd say can still mislead if not explained properly. Both of these give off the impression that it, in effect, is just Abstract Existence, when if anything it's more like Transduality: "God utterly transcends any substantial divisions and specifications and particularities."
(Of course, it's Transduality in the sense of transcending actual distinctions between things, instead of logical "dualities" like A and ¬A. So, as said it ironically is not really Transduality how we formally recognize the term. All the more reason to revise that page in the future, frankly)
I'll explain how the first two descriptions up there lead to the third one, in the right contexts, but for now, keep that in mind.
And with my terms established, and putting aside any and all religious context to focus entirely on what's naturally deducible, it's pretty easy to demonstrate that the type of character that I refer to as a "Monad" does, in fact, have each of the attributes that I say it does. Obviously, it is aspatial and atemporal, because space and time inherently introduce divisions and separations into a thing: My right hand is not the same as my left hand. The point (1,6,3) is not the same as the point (3,7,9,4,10) in a coordinate space. Myself from two hours ago is in a separate section of spacetime than myself from right now, or from 10 years ago. If you transcend separations entirely, then obviously you transcend all of that, as well.
But remember: It doesn't just transcend physical divisions. It transcends the whole notion of a division between "This, not that" and "That, not this." Naturally, then, it transcends any concept of "I am here, not there," and as such it transcends any notion of "meta-space" that a verse might want to entertain, too. On that basis, even the differentiation between higher and lower layers of reality is something it transcends.
By extension, it also transcends any idea of a progression between states, and as such transcends change and mutability as well. And much less is it capable of increase or decrease, inasmuch as both of these involve going from "this state" to "that state." Put it simply: It transcends the dichotomies of "Before" and "After," and also transcends addition and subtraction.
(Note also that I'm not enough of an arrogant ass to try and "debunk' the word of actual philosophers on this matter. The thing, really, is that the people you cited are talking about something else. Take Nimbarka's account of why Brahman's powers can undergo transformation despite being indivisible and without parts: The example given is how the atoms in milk are partless, and yet still have the "power" to transform, and that's how milk can curdle. That alone should tell you that his followers are not talking about the same thing whatsoever. What's being talked about there is something being "without parts" in a sense similar to ancient atomism, not in the sense of a transcendence over all distinctions)
And, for the matter, it obviously can't be divided into spatiotemporal things, either. Something that's spaceless and timeless not being reducible to spatial and temporal things is not an irresolvable philosophical matter. It's just basic logic. And by that same token, nor can material things constitute a fraction of it.
(Also impassibility doesn't mean "Can't feel emotions." It means "Cannot be affected by external things." As in, you are not the passive subject of any action whatsoever. It just follows from immutability and overall transcendence)
And obviously, you can still describe it as "higher," "stronger," "more powerful" and etc. than other things. What you can't do is place it in the same spectrum of power as lesser things, since it must transcend all such spectrums, but these verbiages don't really imply that.
Is it apophatic? It is completely incommensurable with any lower concepts whatsoever, since those concepts will always involve separation and exist in a framework of divisions, which it transcends. And this incommensurability is historically what motivated the development of apophatic theology as a linguistic method, anyway. So, yeah, in a roundabout way it is, though it doesn't really have to abide by the more extreme forms of it (Where you can't speak about it at all and literally any description is an equivocation, and blah blah blah)
Overall, it just comes with the notion that, since the thing transcends all division and separation, it doesn't exist in any particularized, specified mode. It transcends all particularities and specifications, instead, with "particularities and specifications" here just meaning "Whatever actual characteristic makes it so this given object is itself, and not something else." An example of how this works is as follows (Also the explanation I said I'd give up there):
Honestly, I normally wouldn't bother with a lengthy explanation for this, since ultimately it's just one example, and verses with differing metaphysics can obviously formulate things in different ways. But I remembered that it actually pertains to one of the examples of a Tier 0 given in the OP, so I realize it does, in fact, have relevance here. So, for all intents and purposes you can also just see the following as me explaining a verse's cosmology. Hopefully an explanation of these particular lenses can also elucidate how the tier in general works.
So, dating back to a while ago, a fair few philosophers posited that any given being was composed of two things: Essence and existence. Respectively, they are "what you are" and "The fact that you are."
What does that mean? Well, think of your essence as being basically the list of things that makes you, you. For example, the essence of a particular cat is the collection of all its properties: It has black fur, four legs, two eyes, a tail, 230 bones, green eyes; all of that is part of the essence, alongside whatever other metaphysical properties it may have. The essence of a triangle would be that it has three sides and three internal angles that add up to 180°. And so on and so forth. Basically, it's everything you are. It's your definition. Your concept, even.
Then, there's your existence. Your existence is not actually a part of the aforementioned list. It's not included in your essence. Instead, it's what makes your essence be an actual thing. It's your actuality. Hence, the above description: Essence is what you are, existence is that by which you are. Essence is a description of all your internal traits, existence is the instantiation of that description.
The aforementioned philosophies thus basically stipulate that your existence and your essence are two different things. They're inseparable, but nevertheless two things that are actually distinct, and not just distinct in your mind. What this results in is the idea that your essence "limits" your existence, which is just to say that your existence is restricted to the particular features that you have. Your essence effectively constitutes the boundaries of your actuality.
An analogy for this, I guess, could be found by looking at grammar. In a sentence of the form "I am... [XYZ]", the "I am" would correspond to existence, and whatever you use to complete that sentence would correspond to essence. Existence informs that you exist (duh), and essence then informs the way in which you exist. The analogy obviously breaks down at parts, but it's good enough for this one point.
From there, we arrive at the subject of how this relates to God, or the Absolute: Effectively, the above systems formulate God as that in which "essence" and "existence" are the same thing. Usually, this is phrased as "God's essence is his existence," and that's... technically correct, but misleading, since it gives off the impression that God is just a self-isolated "blob" of existence, alongside other existences, which of course leads to arguments like "Okay, so if God is just the same as his existence, that means there can still be other existences greater than him, since they're not part of the existence he is one with, right?"
Oftentimes, it's also explained as "Existence is an essential property of God," but this is misleading too, because it implies that the Monad has some list of attributes, and "existence" is written there as a member of the list that can't be scratched off, for some reason.
That's not what it is because, as said before, essence and existence are different things. Your existence is not a part of your essence; it's by nature not included in your concept/definition, and instead is just the actualization of it. And neither is God supposed to be the exception to this rule, since "A being that has existence as part of its essence" is flat-out self-contradictory.
At the end of the day, what "God's essence is his existence" is saying, in light of the distinction between essence and existence, is that God is "Existence" itself. He's an actuality without any borders whatsoever to it and so is not "contracted" to any particular essence, just like aspatial beings aren't present in or restricted by any point in space. He is just existence, and not "Existence + Something else qualifying it," which is what everything else is. So, if anything, it means that God is above "essence," and is really only referred as one by analogy, since, although he properly speaking is not an essence as that term is used for lesser things, there's nevertheless some similarity between him and an essence.
One way to formulate this would be by saying that he's the limit case of an essence, as it were. "Limit case" technically is math terminology, but it's been used to illustrate this stuff before, see here. So, the Monad then is the limit case of "essence" in the same way a point is a limit case of a circle, or 0 m/s is a limit case of speed.
This also illustrates why saying a Tier 0 is something that possesses all qualities is not exactly correct. At least, it doesn't really have "all qualities" in the sense of being an essence that includes all possible properties; a list that exhausts all possible attributes. That's more like what High 1-A+ is. The difference between the two, I'd say, is basically like the difference between a character who is spatially infinite (And therefore lacks physical borders) and a character who is spaceless and above space (And therefore also lacks physical borders, but in a really different way). It's effectively just "Infinite size" vs "Beyond size," except that in the case of 1-A and up, it's 'conceptual' size, and not physical size.
From there, it's pretty easy to see how this fits with the concept of apophatic theology, and the above explanation is also why many thinkers overs the ages (Platonists, mainly) basically forgo the whole "God's essence is his existence" thing and just straight up say God is not an essence, but a super-essence (From the Greek "hyperousios," literally "superessential" or "above essence"), not a being, but "beyond being" (Because they understood "being" as basically meaning "A particular thing with a specific essence").
But this isn't exactly exclusive, either: Many have also referred to God as "being" and "essence," not because they rejected the above concepts, but because they reasoned that those names most properly apply to him, whereas everything else isn't "true" being/essence by comparison. It's effectively the same thing, and I mention this to emphasize that apophatic theology as a linguistic method isn't as relevant compared to the actual concept underlying said method.
This, by the way, is also why "lack of composition" was such a big deal to these people; because they reasoned that anything that isn't the concept of existence itself is a composite of essence and existence. So, even abstract beings would still be considered as composite; they'd just be disembodied essences and nothing more, and therefore as far beneath the superessential Deity as embodied essences are. And it's also why simplicity was seen by them as being effectively the hallmark of God's transcendence; because whatever can have something above it is, in fact, something that exists "contracted" to a specific essence, even if it happens to exist in a higher layer of reality.
An example of this would be Neoplatonism, where you have the physical, spatiotemporal world, then the World-Soul, and then "Nous," the latter two being metaphysical higher states, and the third in particular being the world where the Platonic Forms exist. The Forms, obviously, are the essences of everything in the physical world; they're transcendental, above space and time, more real than their material instantiations, and etc. Yet they still receive their existence from the One, the supreme principle which lies above them, and so they're still deemed to be composites on that basis.
So the biggest irony in all this, really, is that it means the popular formulation of the concept as "A being who is one with its own attributes" would not make a verse Tier 0 on its own, unless that verse makes it clear that it is the case (By using the metaphysics above, for instance). So "Beyond any divisions and separations and particularities" is what you should be looking at, not "bro he is like, the same as his own attributes............."
Like I said, the above is pretty technical stuff, and at the end of the day is just one example that I only bothered to explain at length because one of the Tier 0 candidates uses that particular metaphysical system. So, I suppose you can consider it to also function as an overview of one of the proposal's test subjects.
Regardless, the basic ideas of it are general enough that they provide us with a provisional vocabulary to talk about some difficulties that showed up throughout the discussion. Specifically the terms "essence" (Which just means "the properties you have" and is used plenty in secular philosophy) and "super-essence" (Which just means "beyond essence," not an essence that is super. Same way "supernatural" means "beyond natural")
More specifically, they help further illustrate how Tier 0 characters can be distinct from other things, despite "transcending distinction." This happens because what Tier 0 characters transcend, really, is the distinction between essences. The reason why the transcendence of Tier 0 characters doesn't cannibalize itself is because they, themselves, are not essences. They transcend "essence."
This is to say that characters below Tier 0 (Say, two characters existing in different layers of reality) are differentiated by their individual particularities and specificities, which are divided from each other ("I am this-and-that"), whereas a Tier 0 is differentiated from other things precisely because it has no particularities at all (Pure "I am"ness with no further addition or qualification). I guess, to put in terms more familiar to the wiki: The gaps between lesser tiers are like distinctions between concepts. Tier 0s transcend concepts in general.
In fact, I'll go further and say that "transcending both essence and super-essence" is just logically contradictory, because that'd mean you are neither restricted to a particular essence, nor *un*restricted by any particular essence, which is like saying that you're neither temporal nor atemporal, or that you're neither mutable nor immutable, or that you're neither bound by space, nor unbound by space. It goes against the Law of Excluded Middle.
And you can't really appeal to the "It can just be superessential to its level of reality but not so to a higher layer, just like you can be 4-D in a certain layer but nonexistent in another" thing, either, because all the latter means is "The higher layer is beyond the lower layer's concept/essence of dimensionality but may operate in another, higher concept," so you're just shifting from one essence to another, from Concept A to Concept B. Meanwhile the Monad, in being superessential, transcends the distinction between essences/properties/concepts altogether, or, in other words, transcends the general notion of "This, not that" and "That, not this," meaning it just covers the broadest scope possible. So the whole logic behind R>F is absolutely moot to it.
This also means that, even if the "degree" argument I made earlier in the thread is invalid, it doesn't actually do much to harm the proposal, since transcending the differentiation between essences as a whole means it doesn't even matter if Layer X and Layer Y don't share continuity of degree with regards to a given attribute, since you'd transcend both the attribute corresponding to Layer X and the attribute corresponding to Layer Y. I still do believe the degree argument is valid, but this is worth noting as well.
And this isn't some loaded metaphysical claim either, despite my use of scary words like "essence" and "super-essence," because all that's needed to affirm it is:
1. To say that different layers of 1-A are ontologically and qualitatively distinct (Already accepted)
2. Assume that they obey basic laws of identity (Goes without saying)
The only possible rejoinder, at the end of the day, is if you take an exaggerated view of R>F Transcendence where truth-values literally change between layers, so that A becomes ¬A when you enter a higher level by virtue of transcendence, which is not what the previous thread consolidated, and is ultimately not possible, since it basically results in the "Scale R>F to how it is in real life" thing, which:
1. I already said time and time again is not a thing. Not even as a "high-end" interpretation of R>F.
2. Is paradoxical. Not even in the "It's unintuitive" way, but in the "Demonstrably breaks logical laws" way, which again is obviously not what the revisions ever sought to establish. I mean, by that logic, transcending two layers in a R>F hierarchy means you're already breaking the Law of Excluded Middle, which is very silly. And I guess, under this interpretation, being infinite layers into a hierarchy of R>F means you're working on... infinite-valued logic?
So, yeah, the argument against Monads being Tier 0 only works if you try to uphold this very specific, paradoxical form of R>F, which is to say it actually doesn't work at all. And I think it certainly says something that the only way to "transcend the Monad" involves logical contradiction. I mean, there is real irony in that, especially given much of the earlier charges against this proposal were "This concept is illogical."
That addresses most parts of this topic, but there's still one wrinkle; what tier would be given to the creator deity/deities of a work that concretely establishes that a Tier 0 can't exist, with a proper definition?
On Logical (Im)Possibilities
To fight your analogy with another analogy, I'd compare this case to having a character who can "Create all possible worlds, except for those where people like wearing yellow shirts" and a character who can "Create all possible worlds, including those where people like wearing yellow shirts". The latter would clearly be broader than the former, and so if we ever had to compare them, we'd say that the latter is more powerful. No matter which tier we ultimately say both of those are (2-A, Low 1-A, High 1-A, etc.)
I view your points about it "just being able to soulhax soulless beings" as being distractions from the point; the really relevant part is that being unable to do logically impossible things means that such a deity cannot form worlds containing those logical impossibilities.
I haven't read the part of your post responding to Deagon, since I'm a bit short on time. Will read, and might respond, later.
That addresses most parts of this topic, but there's still one wrinkle; what tier would be given to the creator deity/deities of a work that concretely establishes that a Tier 0 can't exist, with a proper definition?
To fight your analogy with another analogy, I'd compare this case to having a character who can "Create all possible worlds, except for those where people like wearing yellow shirts" and a character who can "Create all possible worlds, including those where people like wearing yellow shirts". The latter would clearly be broader than the former, and so if we ever had to compare them, we'd say that the latter is more powerful. No matter which tier we ultimately say both of those are (2-A, Low 1-A, High 1-A, etc.)
I view your points about it "just being able to soulhax soulless beings" as being distractions from the point; the really relevant part is that being unable to do logically impossible things means that such a deity cannot form worlds containing those logical impossibilities.
I don't think that is what we would say, no. To take 2-A as an example: If Character A can create infinitely-many possible universes, and Character B can create infinitely-many possible universes, too, except they can't create universes where people like yellow shirts, the two characters would be exactly as powerful as each other, since the "volume" of universes that they can create is the same. The former wouldn't actually be broader than the latter in any way that matters.
Same here. Except it's made notably worse by the fact that both sorts of Monad would transcend the exact same things, as said. Ontop of the other things I've pointed out (The fact that "impossible worlds" in contradiction-free cosmologies can't exist not out of a deficiency of any sort, but due to the fact they fail to meet the basic conditions for existence in the first place, which the Monad is)
I could apply this same process to the above analogy, too: If a verse, for whatever reason, decides that people liking yellow shirts is just a logical contradiction, a non-thing, a meaningless jumble of letters, then Character B's power wouldn't really be met with an obstacle in them being "unable" to create worlds where people like yellow shirts, either. Character A's power would as such cease being "broader" than theirs in any sense whatsoever.
