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Lyndon's definitely right. We spent a huge portion of the comic in a sceptre universe, and it's hammered out over and over again that the people in that universe are equally "real". The logic behind it is just: for prophecy to work, you have to use determinism. To deterministically discover the future based on the present, you have to simulate future events with 100% accuracy. Even a tiny deviation ruins your experiment. So, to simulate future events with 100% accuracy, you have to create individuals who are identical in every single way to the individuals you want to generate a prophecy for. You also have to create circumstances for them that are 100% identical to their current circumstances. Anything that could conceivably affect their future in any way must be slavishly modelled. That necessitates an equally accurate recreation of the population of their entire planet. The sceptre is flawed because it can't model prophecy based on interstellar events - its scope is restricted to things that are going to happen in a ginormous, but limited, radius around the point it's used from. Other than that though, everything indicates that the inhabitants of the sceptre universe are as "real" as the characters in the main universe. If they weren't identical in every way, the sceptre's deterministic model wouldn't work, because being "not real" would be a deviation.
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Nov 29, 2019 13:32
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Dinosaurs! posted:Couldn’t the scepter just be simulating the behavior of everyone besides the scepter-toucher the same way tech companies can make a ghost profile of who I am/what I like based on metadata? They don’t actually exist, but the scepter accurately knows what they’d do. Am I creating and destroying universes of people every time I dream? If those "ghost profiles" were accurate enough to actually predict the future in minute detail rather than just being a portfolio of your vital statistics, hobbies and interests (which is what they are), then they too would, by necessity, be as real as you are. You can't deterministically simulate the future from a series of premises: for true deterministic accuracy, you need a complete reproduction of every last circumstance. Likewise, your dreams aren't precisely accurate reproductions of real people or events, they're your brain jumbling your memories around. Not at all equivalent!
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Nov 29, 2019 15:46
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Otherkinsey Scale posted:Not necessarily. Think of it like this: For real. I love how the Sceptre of Death isn't clearly the result of malice. It works imperfectly (and maybe causes immense amounts of non-obvious suffering) because of limitations in its practical design. The "can only simulate a 500 light year radius around the user" thing totally screams "there wasn't enough processing power to do this properly so the wizard had to cheat".
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Dec 1, 2019 23:44
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Klara's mercy allowed swingball to come into the world. A moving argument for compassion if ever I've seen one.
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Dec 23, 2019 01:49
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