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Unsong Introduction Thread (Sorta)

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Ultima_Reality

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So, although Unsong is already on the wiki and has been for a while, a few of the characters couldn't receive profiles at the time due to most of their ratings being connected to 1-A things. Given that, this could probably be taken as a formal introduction of the verse to the wiki. In any case, I already made a blog for the verse's cosmology, so most of the stuff in here will be a compressed version of what's written there:

User blog:Ultima_Reality/Unsong_Cosmology_Blog

We first start with the Supreme Being of the verse: God, or the Ein Sof.

First of all, God is described as the Absolute Infinite conceptualized by the mathematician Georg Cantor, father of Set Theory and very well-known for his discovery of the concept of infinite cardinal numbers. In the text itself, we are told that there are an infinite number of levels of infinity, with God's "Absolute" corresponding to that number.

This reading we derive from Georg Cantor, the German mathematician who explored the cardinality of infinite sets. He found that though the natural numbers – 1, 2, 3 and so on – were infinite, still there were fewer of them than there were “real” numbers like root 2, pi, and 0.239567990052… Indeed, not only were there two different levels of infinity, but it seemed likely that there were an infinite number of different infinities (and maybe one extra, to describe the number of infinities there were?)

The overall effect on him was much like the man in the limerick:

There once was a fellow from Trinity,
Who took the square root of infinity.
But the number of digits,
Quite gave him the fidgets;
And he dropped Math and took up Divinity.


Cantor began talking about how his discoveries were direct and personal revelations from God, who wished him to preach the gospel of infinity so that an infinite Deity could be better understood. He posited an Absolute Infinite, beyond all the forms of infinity he had discovered, with which God might be identified.

The story then quotes this phrase of Cantor, where he declares his belief that "The Absolute" is not actually the largest infinity ("Genus supremum" = Largest of the species), because it transcends and defines the concept of infinity in the first place, and exists entirely apart from the whole hierarchy of infinities which he discovered, as an unity completely beyond human understanding:

“I have never proceeded from any Genus supremum of the actual infinite. Quite the contrary, I have rigorously proved that there is absolutely no Genus supremum of the actual infinite. What surpasses all that is finite and transfinite is no Genus; it is the single, completely individual unity in which everything is included, which includes the Absolute, incomprehensible to the human understanding. This is the Actus Purissimus, which by many is called God.”

Note that this hierarchy of cardinalities includes the set of all real numbers (Which is represented by P(N), or the power set of the natural numbers), which is itself the cardinality of all spaces of countable dimension, from 1-dimensional space to infinite-dimensional space. Thus, everything from 11-B to High 1-B actually falls under a single cardinality, which is followed by infinitely-many cardinal numbers.

Given how God embodies the Absolute which transcends the very concept of infinity and trivializes the whole hierarchy, He would be High 1-A

Furthermore, all hierarchies are described as ending in God by necessity:

Rabbi Reuben Margolis relates the song to a Midrash. King Nimrod of Sumer demands Abraham worship the Fire God. Abraham refuses, saying that rain extinguishes fire, so if anything he should worship rain. Nimrod says okay, fine, worship the Rain God. But Abraham refuses again, saying that wind drives away the rain clouds, so if anything, he should worship wind. So Nimrod commands he worship the Wind God, and then other things happen, and finally Nimrod tries to kill Abraham and God saves him. The lesson is that all hierarchies end in God, who is above all things.

And He is likewise the fundamental ontological ground of the world as a whole:

There is even a Monogrammaton. The sages took the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and decided that exactly one of them was a Name of God. That letter is “he”. It’s the fifth letter, and it makes an hhhhhh sound like English H. The sages say that the breath makes a hhhhhhhh sound, which I guess it sort of does. Breath is the animating spirit of human existence, God is the animating spirit of the world. It sort of checks out.

“He” is pronounced like “hey” or “hay”. “Hey” is a word we call to get someone’s attention. Attention is consciousness, the highest level of thought, corresponding to the sephirah Keter. When we shout “Hey!” at someone, we are speaking a holy Name of God, invoking the Monogrammaton to call forth the Divine within them. “Hay” is a thing that cows eat. Cows eat hay and we eat cows. We never touch hay, but it is indirectly sustaining us. It is the ontological ground, the secret that gives us life although we know it not.

He is also said to exist beyond all dichotomies and principles which exist within the human world, some of which include basic mathematical/formalistic principles such as "1 + 1 = 2", "P implies not ¬P" and "No mathematical system can prove itself consistent, or else it would be inconsistent":

Someone grabbed her body, the part of her that was stuck on the tower, the part of her that meant nothing. “Stop!” he told her, in a man’s voice. “You’ve got to come back!”

Ana soared. She circled the Transamerica Pyramid, and the giant lidless eye watched her course impassively.

“Listen!” said the man. “One plus one is two. If you don’t eat, you die. P implies not not P. Prices are controlled by the law of supply and demand, and are the only fair way of managing scarcity.”

Ana began to lose altitude.

“Organisms evolve according to the laws of natural selection. Reproductively fit organisms pass their genes on to the next generation. Uh. The wages of sin are death. Everybody dies. In a closed system, entropy always increases.”

Ana flapped her arms vigorously, trying to regain altitude, but her flight had never come from wings to begin with, and she fell further.

“Matter can’t be created or destroyed. Uh, calculus. Taxing a product disincentivizes its production. The light speed limit. No mathematical system can prove itself consistent, or else it would be inconsistent.”

“That’s why you never drink the water in San Francisco,” John told Ana. “It’s not some mystical blessing upon the city. It’s just a couple milligrams of LSD per liter of drinking water. A single swallow and you end up partaking of the beatific vision as mediated through Neil Armstrong. They keep the LSD around to maintain the trance and induct anybody else who comes in. I’ve been here half a dozen times and it still creeps me out.”

“Okay,” said Ana. She looked out the window again. The iridescent sphere was starting to pulsate.

“John’s too humble to say so,” said James. “But he saved your life. We saw that thing you did with the winds, and went up to investigate, but by the time we got up there you were way gone. He was the one who brought you down.”

“Dragged you out of the Ein Sof and into the created world,” said John. “That’s the only way to do it, remind you of all the dichotomies and tradeoffs and things that don’t apply up there.”

God is also described as the simplest possible thing, and as being the concept of "Existence" itself, an infinite wholeness that has the maximum amount of all possible characteristics and attributes, with the diametrical opposite to that being absolute nothingness. These two concepts are represented by the binary digits "1" and "0"

“I’m getting to Leibniz! Right now we’re at information theory. A well-defined mathematical explanation of simplicity. We can measure the complexity of a concept in bits. The number of binary digits it would take to specify the concept in some reasonable encoding system. We can do it with numbers. The numbers 0 and 1 are one bit. Two is 10, three is 11; those are two bits. Four is 100, five is 101, six is 110, seven is 111; so three bits. And so on. We can do it with computer programs; just count how many bits and bytes they take up on a computer. We can do it with images if you can get them into a format like .gif or .jpg. And we can do it with material objects. All you have to do is figure out how long it would take to write a program that specifies a description of the material object to the right level of complexity. There are already weather simulators. However many bits the most efficient one of those is, that’s how complex the weather is.”

“And God?” asked Zoe Farr.

“God is one bit. The bit ‘1’”.

“I find that…counterintuitive,” was the best Zoe could answer.

“Well, it’s easy to represent nothingness. That’s just the bit ‘0’. God is the opposite of that. Complete fullness. Perfection in every respect. This kind of stuff is beyond space – our modern theories of space take a bunch of bits to specify – but if it helps, imagine God as being space filled with the maximum amount of power and intelligence and goodness and everything else that it can hold, stretching on to infinity.”

“The maximum amount of purple?” I objected.

“Sure. And the maximum amount of red, green, blue, et cetera.”

“Leibniz was studying the I Ching, and he noticed that its yin and yang sticks, when arranged in hexagrams, corresponded to a new form of arithmetic, because he was Leibniz and of course he noticed that. So he invented binary numbers and wrote a letter to the Duke of Brunswick saying that he had explained how God could create the universe out of nothing. It goes like this. You’ve got God, who is 1. You’ve got nothingness, which is 0. And that’s all you need to create everything. 1s and 0s arranged in a long enough string.”

“How, exactly?”

“The kabbalistic conception is that God withdrew from Himself to create the world. I, for example, am beautiful and intelligent, but not so physically strong. God is perfectly beautiful and intelligent and strong, so by withdrawing a little bit of His beauty and intelligence, and a lot of His strength, and some other things, we end up with an Ana.”

Then, there is an even more primal aspect of God than the Ein Sof, which is called the "Atzmus" and is completely unrepresentable by anything other than the absence of information altogether. If God is 1 and Absolute Nothingness is 0, then Atzmus is neither of those things, and is completely unable to spoken of. It can't even be considered the simplest possible thing, unlike those two, because it is not a "thing" in the first place.

“I have a question,” Zoe Farr said, finally. “If God is just the binary digit 1, and nothingness is the binary digit 0, and the both contain one bit of information – then isn’t neither one the simplest thing? Wouldn’t the simplest thing be zero bits, neither God nor nothingness?”

“That’s Atzmus and you’re not supposed to talk about it!” said Ana.

“Okay, jeez,” said Zoe.

Using the Kabbalah as a reference here (Most specifically Lurianic Kabbalah, which is referenced often in Unsong), Atzmus is essentially the name for the primeval divine essence, with the Ein Sof serving merely as a mediator between it and the created world: The Unmanifest and the Manifest, respectively. Again, to shamelessly quote Wikipedia:

Before Moshe Cordovero and Isaac Luria gave subsequent systemisations of Kabbalah in the 16th century, Medieval Kabbalists debated the relationship between the Divine Will Keter and the Ein Sof. This involved the philosophical need to divorce the sephirot from any notions of plurality in God, and involved the question of whether the Ein Sof describes the essential Divine Being, or God as first cause of Creation. Cordovero lists Keter as the first sephirah, part of Creation. Luria takes an intermediate view that the Ein Sof does not represent the essence of God, nor that Keter is listed as the first sephirah within Creation, but instead the Ein Sof sublimely transcends Keter, mediating between Atzmus and Keter.

The term in Hasidic philosophy for the divine source is Atzmus ("essence"). While the Ein Sof of Kabbalah can only be infinite, Atzmus, rooted higher in the Godhead, is beyond finite/infinite duality. As the Etzem, it both transcends all levels, and permeates all levels. This is reflected in the paradoxical acosmic monism of Hasidic panentheism, and relates to the essence of the Torah and the soul.

Given all of that, Atzmus would be Tier 0

While absolutely no one scales to the Atzmus, God's High 1-A rating actually applies to a fair bit of people. For instance, The Comet King has access to the Shem haMephorash, the truest and most primal Name of God which concentrates the entirety of His multiversal essence, and allows the user to channel all of His power into themselves to reshape creation.

Thirty-six letters. A little on the long side. In general, the longer a Name, the harder to discover but the more powerful its effects. The longest known was the Wrathful Name, fifty letters. When spoken it levelled cities. The Sepher Raziel predicted that the Shem haMephorash, the Explicit Name which would capture God’s full essence and bestow near-omnipotence upon the speaker, would be seventy-two letters.

“IN KABBALAH, WE RECOGNIZE CERTAIN DIVISIONS OF ADAM KADMON AS ESPECIALLY IMPORTANT. A FOURFOLD DIVISION, WHICH WE INTERPRET AS FOUR WORLDS. A TENFOLD DIVISION, WHICH WE INTERPRET AS TEN SEPHIROT. A TWENTY-TWO-FOLD DIVISION, WHICH WE INTERPRET AS TWENTY-TWO PATHS BETWEEN SEPHIROT. AND A SEVENTY-TWO-FOLD DIVISION, WHICH WE INTERPRET AS THE SEVENTY-TWO-FOLD EXPLICIT NAME OF GOD. BY UNDERSTANDING ALL OF THESE DIVISIONS, WE LEARN THE STRUCTURE OF ADAM KADMON AND THEREFORE THE ORGANIZATIONAL PRINCIPLES OF THE UNIVERSE.

The character’s universe is the book Unsong, which is indeed organized along these principles: four books, ten authors notes, twenty-two interludes, and seventy-two chapters.

In the last chapter, the Comet King says:

“Any good enough description of God is also a notarikon for His Most Holy Name.”

God is the force creating maximal goodness in the multiverse, so any description of the goodness of the multiverse is a description of God and therefore a notarikon for His name. So in Metatron’s answer to Ana in Chapter 71

“THERE ARE MANY GATES. NOT ALL OF THEM ARE OPEN. YOU HAVE PASSED THROUGH ONE. YOU ARE STILL OUTSIDE OTHERS. IF YOU SAY THE SHEM HAMEPHORASH AGAIN YOU WILL DESTROY THE WORLD.”

“Many gates? Uriel, we talked about this. We spent years researching. We both agreed that if we could get through the hole in Lake Baikal, we could break into Hell.”

“YES. IT MADE SENSE AT THE TIME. NOW WE ARE HERE OBSERVING FIRST-HAND. I AM TELLING YOU THERE ARE MORE GATES THAN WE THOUGHT. SOME OF THEM ARE CLOSED. YOU CANNOT GET THROUGH THEM.”

“If I just give it more power…”

“THAMIEL IS A FACET OF GOD. BRUTE STRENGTH WILL NOT SUFFICE AGAINST HIM.”

“This is the Shem HaMephorash! It’s literally the power of God Himself! There’s nothing that can stand up to it.”

“YES. THAT IS WHY YOU ARE DESTROYING THE WORLD.”

For reference, here is the draft I made for the Comet King's profile.
 
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My minor blechs are:
  • Feels really weird to have characters at High 1-A instead of 1-A because some mathy stuff like real numbers and cardinals were mentioned, without them actually having a physical existence of any kind.
  • It feels really weird to give Atzmus 0 based on that short statement (which is pretty much just explicit NEP type 2) and some Kabbalistic extrapolations.
Other than that, all I have to say is, cool
 
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Feels really weird to have characters at High 1-A instead of 0 because some mathy stuff like real numbers and cardinals were mentioned, without them actually having a physical existence of any kind
Whether they physically exist or not doesn't really matter, considering that the verse already establishes a firm comparision between them and God. The very fact that the latter is considered bigger than them would already imply that they exist in some manner, anyway.


It feels really weird to give Atzmus 0 based on that short statement (which is pretty much just explicit NEP type 2) and some Kabbalistic extrapolations
How short the statement is has no relevance, just the contents of it, especially since the whole Interlude already gives plenty of context as to its scale, since it describes both God and Nothingness in great length. And it's not like Type 2 NEP can't give higher tiers anyway, particularly when you take into account how misused it is these days, and how it is pretty clearly indicating superiority here.


Other than that, all I have to say is, cool
Neat.
 
I don't have much more to say. I don't have any hard denials, but those things still fill me with an icky wicky.

Also your CK profile sucks and needs references and re-organizing and probably has bad powers or is missing some, but I cbf fixing that until you post it.
 
Obligatory I agree because I haven't read the source material comment
 
Random question, how do you guys even find these obscure (at least i think they are obscure) verses with super high tier cosmology, magic and etc?
 
A friend linked me one of the chapters of Unsong a few years back. Before that we'd often shared the author's blog posts with each other to discuss whatever philosophy bullshit was talked about in it. (The blog and the story itself are both reasonably popular for their niches, Unsong sits near Worm as one of the highest-rated pieces of webfiction!)

I saved the link to the chapter, but didn't get around to reading it until earlier this year when I was looking for some new stuff to read. I found it really enjoyable, and I shared it with a few other vsbw people on Discord.

I didn't realize it had a high tier cosmology until after we'd started reading (as it's only occasionally spread out starting a fair number of chapters in).

So, in this case at least, it was found by chance. But I do know that some other people skim through books, or search for words like "concepts" "dimensions", etc. to try to quickly find higher-tiered stuff. I don't bother with that tho.
 
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The user largely responsible for getting Unsong into the wiki is called Agnaa.

The word Agna comes from Latin, being the 1st declension feminine form of the word Agnus, meaning lamb. Particularly an ewe lamb, a young unweaned sheep. Already we see blatant Kabbalistic connections arising, as Jesus Christ himself was described metaphorically as the "Lamb of God" in the Gospel of John, 1:29 and 1:36, wherein Christ's sacrifice to redeem mankind from their sins in the cross is linked to the sacrificial offering of a lamb at the altar. From the Greek, Amnòs toû Theoû, from the Latin Agnus Deī.

However, that is not the only etymological root of the word Agna that is known to us. Instead, we can turn to its origins in the Proto Indo-European language, aḱanā, from which is derived the English Awn, meaning the bristles on plants, grasses or grains (And its Middle English and Old English equivalents, agene and ægnan), as well as the Greek ἄκαινα, meaning spikes or pricks, the Lithuanian ašnìs, meaning edge or blade (And by extension, the Old Norse, Icelandic, Finnish and Swedish name Agni - itself written in dozens of variations and comprised of the elements Agi and Egg, meaning terror and edge respectively), and a dozen other languages. Most interestingly of all is the Sanskrit अशनि / aśáni, meaning thunderbolt or lightning.

See also, the Sanskrit अग्नि / agní, meaning fire, and also the name of the Fire God from Hindu Mythology, seen as the mouth of the gods and their intermediary to mortalkind, due to fire's innate connection with rituals, and particularly the fire of sacrifice and rebirth in rites of passage. The connection to the sacrificial lamb and Christ's redemption through death and rebirth is obvious to any would-be Kabbalist. The word itself, in Sanskrit, is derived from the root aj, meaning "to drive", and agri, meaning "first". So in that sense, Agni represents the primordial motive fire that drives the universe to arise.

The identical recurrence of the word "Agni" in Sanskrit and Old Scandinavian languages is not a coincidence, because nothing is ever a coincidence. Is it even a surprise that it also shows up again in the Greek name Agnes, meaning "pure, chaste, holy, sacred, purifying", and itself derived from Old Greek hagnós ‎(ἁγνός) and agní ‎(αγνή)? No, of course it isn't...

And we haven't even got into the Gematria Connections yet, which are themselves quite interes - Excuse me, did you just say something? I couldn't quite catch it.

... WHAT DO YOU MEAN, "ARE YOU SCHIZOPHRENIC?", WHAT KIND OF QUESTION IS THAT!?
 
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High 1-A God is pretty straightforward so I obviously agree.

Not sure about tier 0 tho; while he's transcendent to God I kinda fail to see how it would mean more than higher High 1-A.
 
Matthew: Okay. I brought it back, but do not like derailing.
 
I have 0 knowledge on the verse, but at a first glance the high 1A stuff seems fine, I guess.

The Aztmut thing is a bit iffy to me, like Agnaa said. If there are more quotes in-universe about it then that would be nice to be brought up, as using IRL stuff to define some term mentioned that little instead of using the definition provided by the work itself feel weird, at least to me.
 
Sorry, I just noticed a big blunder in my initial post. At first I said this:
Feels really weird to have characters at High 1-A instead of 0 because some mathy stuff like real numbers and cardinals were mentioned, without them actually having a physical existence of any kind.
I actually meant to say:
Feels really weird to have characters at High 1-A instead of 1-A because some mathy stuff like real numbers and cardinals were mentioned, without them actually having a physical existence of any kind.
Apologies for any confusion that came from this typo.

And @Ovy7 Yes that is the only part of the text that mentions Atzmus. Although the rest of that interlude does discuss God as being 1 and Divine Nothingness as being 0 in a good amount of detail.
 
Hmm, there are no such structures (like, based on cardinality or something) in the verse?
 
Nope. The only actual structures in Unsong, when not using back-scaling to God's rating, are (probably) 1-C. There's a series of four worlds, where each is a metaphor for the one before it, ending with reality as the least real.

So reality/the physical world (Assiah) is a metaphor for Yetzirah, which is a metaphor for Briah, which is a metaphor for Atziluth, where the Ein Sof exists in unity with God, lacking any separate existence from it.

There are no actual cardinality-based structures in the verse.
 
Nope. The only actual structures in Unsong, when not using back-scaling to God's rating, are (probably) 1-C. There's a series of four worlds, where each is a metaphor for the one before it, ending with reality as the least real.

So reality/the physical world (Assiah) is a metaphor for Yetzirah, which is a metaphor for Briah, which is a metaphor for Atziluth, where the Ein Sof exists in unity with God, lacking any separate existence from it.

There are no actual cardinality-based structures in the verse.
Welp, that complicates thing xD. Then I could see God being 1A instead of High 1A... unless this is some Mathiverse lvl shiet.
 
At least Mathiverse was leaning much more on those things physically existing.

This is just Cantor coming in one chapter and saying "There's different levels of infinity, and God is like the Absolute Infinity." (Albeit with much more statements elaborating on what that means, you can read that short interlude in its entirety here). The actual cosmology doesn't include mathematical constructs.

In fact, reality used to be purely divine without physics or mathematics, until Uriel altered reality on the level of Briah to make it function on mathematics instead.
 
What Agnaa has explained certainly complicates matters for
the highest tiering.
 
For my own personal theology, I find the statements of how God created every single possible universe that was good, from a perfect, spaceless, timeless universe, to every single possible variant of that, the garden of universes eventually expanding into universes like the main setting of Unsong with many arbitrary occurrences, and random syllables which create supernatural effects, to be the most compelling description of Omnipotence I've heard in fiction. But as far as I understand, our system lowballs something like that to 2-A.
 
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It's always Ultima with these ones, eh.

I can understand Agnaa's initial complaints, I agree that it seems like some weird logic is going on there, but I don't know the verse nor do I intend to debate Tier 1 any more than I already have. 'pologies, but I'll leave this one to the usual suspects to deal with.
 
Agnaa: How do you think that we should tier these characters?
 
Maybe possibly ratings would be better? Going by the scans + what you said, it looks like something good.
 
I personally don't really see the point of "possibly" ratings. Whether those cardinal numbers physically exist within the verse's cosmology or not is irrelevant when God is pretty explicitly defined as being above their scope regardless, and as being the endpoint of all defined hierarchies. The characters even explain at one point that everything is existence is a metaphor for God in one way or another, and the only thing that's exempt from this is God Himself, so those statements would connect to Him anyway.

This is similar to how you don't need to have infinite-dimensional or infinitely-layered cosmologies in a verse for it to be 1-A, as long as it makes it clear that something transcends all possible sizes/extensions of the setting, even if those don't really exist in it.
 
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@Ant 1-A for God and those who scale. Either no key for Atzmus, or 1-A, possibly High 1-A for it as a compromise.

But I would prefer for other high-tier experts to weigh in, as I have a notably terrible track record with evaluating Outerversal verses.

@Ultima This is similar to how you don't need to have infinite-dimensional or infinitely-layered cosmologies in a verse for it to be 1-A, as long as it makes it clear that something transcends all possible sizes/extensions of the setting, even if those don't really exist in it.

That's why I'm fine with 1-A being given, despite the only other hierarchy that exists in Unsong ending at 1-C. That mathy connection feels too loose for me to give High 1-A off of it :v
 
Agnaa seems to make good points, but it is unfortunate that Sera seems to have disappeared and opted to not log in to our new forum, as she was one of the few people who properly understood our new system.

@DontTalkDT @YuriAkuto

What do you think?
 
A bit unsure. High 1-A is the most I can see, but God being 1-A or High 1-A are interpretations of the same scans, so I'm unsure for him.
 
That's why I'm fine with 1-A being given, despite the only other hierarchy that exists in Unsong ending at 1-C. That mathy connection feels too loose for me to give High 1-A off of it :v
What do you mean by "loose", in this case?
 
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