She says that Jesus and suchlike fall under sociopaths by that--except they don't. Godhood in Nasuverse is pretty well defined."I was planning on giving it to Azaka when she came in today, out of curiosity more than anything else; some of these questions are actually pretty good."
"Oh?" Shiki yawns again. "Such as?"
"Not many of the scenario ones. As far as personality quizzes go, they're all pretty vanilla. It's your birthday. Someone gives you a calfskin wallet. How do you react? And suchlike. But there's this one I'm looking at right now which asks you to give your opinion on a pretty weird thought experiment. You want to hear it?"
"...Sure, why not."
"Imagine a box, it says. Imagine a box, and further imagine that inside the box-"
"-The cat is both dead and alive until observed. Right?"
"No, it's a different one."
"Oh."
"Imagine a box, and further imagine that inside the box, there is a man. Let us call him John. On one of the walls that makes up the box, there are two slots – one marked 'IN' and one marked 'OUT'. Now, let it be established that John has no comprehension of the Chinese language, written or spoken, whatsoever. Now, suppose that, outside the box, there is a person whodoes speak and write Chinese, but does not speak or understand English. Let us call him Li. Let us suppose that Li 'speaks' to John in Chinese by writing what he wishes to say on pieces of paper – one piece for each character – and passing them to John through the slot marked 'IN'."
"You were right, this is a weird thought experiment."
"Now, remember that John has absolutely no comprehension of what these characters mean. All he sees is a number of abstract 'symbols' entering the box through a slot. Let us suppose that, on another wall of the box, there is a large poster, on which is printed a complex set of rules for rearranging the symbols – 'if symbol X precedes symbol Y, then move it so that it precedes symbol Z' and so on. So, having been given a number of pieces of paper with these 'symbols' written on them, John, following the instructions on the poster, rearranges the pieces of paper and passes them through the slot marked 'OUT', where they are received by Li. Let us imagine that the complexity of the rules followed by John is such that the 'reply' received by Li is indistinguishable from the reply that would have been given if John did understand Chinese, and furthermore, that this holds true for any potential question or statement made by Li to John."
"So, what's this question actually asking you, anyway?"
"With this in mind, your question is as follows: does John speak Chinese?"
"Well, I'd say it's pretty obvious that he doesn't." says Shiki, standing up and leaning against a shelf to one side of the room. "Even if the result is indistinguishable, he's just shuffling symbols according to how a poster tells him to. There's no comprehension on his part. If anything, it's theposter that speaks Chinese."
"Oh?" asks Touko, removing her glasses and making a slightly unnerving smile as she does so.I'm pretty sure she didn't always have that many teeth, thinks Shiki. "Then how do you know I can really speak Japanese, Shiki? If the result is indistinguishable, isn't it just as likely as not that there's a little Touko Aozaki inside my head who's simply 'shuffling symbols', as you called it, according to an abstract set of rules, with no real comprehension at all?"
"That's-" Shiki stops. She closes her mouth. She scratches her head. She opens her mouth again. "Okay, I'll admit that there's no way to tell, but..." She trails off. Damn her, thinks Shiki. She's gone ahead and proved that consciousness is an illusion, and I haven't even had breakfast yet. Am I in Hell?
"The original form of this thought experiment was put forward by an American philosopher called John Searle back in the 1980s. He was using it to make a point about artificial intelligence, but in this context-" She taps the yellow piece of paper. "-what it's essentially asking you is your position on something called the Problem of Other Minds, which goes back much further than Searle. The central thesis of that is whether or not it's possible to know for certain if consciousness exists outside of your own mind. Stop making that face."
It must be one of the more obscure Buddhist hells, no doubt about it, for those with a highly specific amount of accrued negative karma – instead of being impaled on a mountain of needles or continuously burned alive, you get locked in a room with Touko Aozaki until the sun burns out..."I wasn't making a face."
"You were. If it's any consolation, I'm going to do this to Azaka as well, once she gets here." She laughs, and puts her glasses back on. "Still, you can't deny it's a very interesting question. Definitely a cut above the usual personality quiz bullshit, which is mostly just asking in a roundabout way whether you're a sociopath or not."
"Huh." Shiki walks back over to the sofa, and sits down again. "So what did you answer, when you did the test?"
"Me? I said that he did. Speak Chinese, I mean. The reasoning I used was that there's only one perspective from which John doesn't speak Chinese, and that's John's. From the perspectives of everyone who isn't John, he does. Since 'people who aren't John' outnumber 'people who are John' by a factor of several billion to one, I concluded that John spoke Chinese by popular opinion." She puts out her cigarette. "Back then, you see, I used to write English pretty slowly, and that was something like the third-last question on the exam, so when I got to it with about five minutes left, I had to rush it. Hence, a stupid answer like that."
"I see." Well, I don't know if it'd be fair to call it stupid; it actually does make sense, in a twisted kind of way,thinks Shiki. "Although it seems pretty strange, to put the nature of consciousness up to what amounts to a vote. Metaphorically speaking."
"Believe me, that answer was by no means the strangest. The Academy gets all kinds of characters. There was one guy – damn it, if I'd found that picture I'd be able to show him to you – who wrote an entire essay just for that one question, in which he made the argument that 'society' as we understand it doesn't exist. I probably still have a copy downstairs somewhere."
"'Society'?"
"His thesis went something like this: Humans are born, raised, live, grow old, and die, all without ever leaving their own 'box'. In this instance, it's not a language puzzle – instead of Chinese characters, what comes in the 'IN' slot is the sum total of human interaction – in essence, everything everyone ever says or does to you. The 'poster' in this case contains a set of rules which we call 'culture' or 'civilisation'. Everything you learn from your parents, your friends, your teachers, et cetera – everything that goes into creating your world view, that's the 'poster'. As an example, let's take a statement like 'theft is wrong'. There's nothing implicit in the laws of nature which says that stealing things is wrong, because the laws of nature don't have anything to do with morality. Neither the concept of 'theft' nor the concept of 'wrong' are innate to humans. They have to be taught. The key difference between this idea and Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment is that this idea allows the contents of the 'poster' to be altered by material from the 'IN' slot. Every human starts off with a blank poster, and over the years, it's filled with more and more rules for taking the 'input' of human social interaction and converting it into 'output' – your own participation in that social interaction. So, if we're talking about 'theft' being 'wrong', we have to think about it in terms of the 'input', the 'output', and the 'rules'."
"Like a computer program?"
"Similar. He was a Magus, so he probably wouldn't have drawn that comparison. Going back to the 'theft' example, let's suppose that our 'input' is asituation in which you could steal something. I don't know, suppose you see a person drop a banknote on the ground without knowing it. That's our 'input'. So, when that 'input' travels through the slot to the inside of the 'box', it gets processed according to the 'rules'. Obviously, the rule that 'theft is wrong' is going to be of key importance here. But how did that rule get there to begin with? Well, it starts with someone else. That someone else, be it your parents, or whoever, they have to make some meta-rules: rules which say, 'there are such things as rules', 'rules are to be obeyed' and 'not obeying rules results in negative consequences for me'. These meta-rules are the primary means by which the content of the 'poster' is influenced by the 'input'. So the rule 'theft is wrong' is added to the 'poster' through the meta-rules. The person inside the box accepts that 'theft is wrong' is a rule that falls under the definition of 'rule' in the meta-rules. Do you understand me so far?"
Just nod. "Essentially, yes."
"So now we have our 'input', and the 'rule', 'theft is wrong'. But that's not the only rule influencing how we act – what the 'output' will be in this situation. You've also got the rule 'money is something to be acquired'. Now that rule is a consequence of capitalism, which is an aspect of 'civilisation'. Intellectually, we know that money can be exchanged for goods and services because we've been taught that through experience. That aspect of civilisation gives us some more rules, such as 'thispiece of paper is worth less than that piece of paper' – even when those pieces of paper may be chemically identical. I'm not going to go into religion, suffice to say that that adds both new rules and new meta-rules as well. Anyway, all of these 'rules' get used to process the 'input' and eventually the 'output' pops out – let's say, for instance, that you decided to take the banknote and return it to the guy who dropped it. In this case, the rule 'theft is wrong' won out over 'money is something to be acquired'. His idea was that every human is fundamentally just 'shuffling symbols' inside the 'box' – mindlessly accepting input and manipulating it according to arbitrary, abstract rules that we only have because 'culture' or 'civilisation' imparts them to us through meta-rules. Internally, there's no such thing as society, or even morality – just rules and meta-rules, which the vast majority of people go about their lives entirely unaware of."
"The vast majority?"
"It's not impossible for people to become aware that they exist inside a 'box'. In some cases, they even recognise the nature of rules and meta-rules. People whose process of ideation is no longerunconsciously governed by rules and meta-rules – he called those people 'sociopaths'. In his view, sociopaths are those who are aware of the arbitrary nature of the rules that govern the nature and method of their human interactions."
"I think I understand it now. But a sociopath – even if they're aware of the rules, they're still inside the 'box', aren't they?"
"Of course. Even if they know the walls are there, they can't get out of the 'box' as long as they're human. In a very literal sense, the 'box' is what makes us human to begin with. Only gods, beasts and demons live on the outside, as he would have said." She smirks. "Well, that was his theory, anyway. That logic doesn't take you anywhere pleasant. You'd end up having to conclude that people like Christ and Gautama Buddha were sociopaths under his definition. We used to argue about it a lot."
"Right." Shiki nods, stands up, and walks over to the hatstand. "Given that my brain is about to start leaking out of my ears, I think that's enough for this morning."
Gilgamesh Secret Garden said:There are two types of gods.
Those pre-existing that became gods,
and those who were reborn as gods.
The gods of Mesopotamia were of the former category.
Natural phenomena that acquired will and personalities:
such were the gods of antiquity.
[...]
Living things have an instinct to adapt their surroundings to something better suited for habitat.
Viability, I should say.
This the gods of antiquity lacked.
No matter how much energy they wielded,
they merely "existed."
In contrast, the viability of humans was exceptional. One by one it was slight, but they had force in sheer numbers and the mean was high.
Though there are no transcendent beings commanding vast Authority among humans,
they had a higher level of intelligence than other living things and this was distributed across all.
Meanwhile, no matter how powerful the natural phenomena the gods of the heavens were,
the personalities they acquire...
Their inventiveness and cognizance were not much different from that of the humans'.
Do you see?
Even if omniscient, a god can come to only one conclusion and acquire only one personality.
In that respect, the number of humans was a threat.
It was the difference in the magnitude of cognizance...
no, in the capacity for change.
Human desires are boundless, relentless, and unrestrained.
The world evolves in accordance with those desires.
"If humans continue to breed thus, the rules of the planet will change.
There will come a time when it will be no longer necessary for natural phenomena to have wills."
So Jesus and people like, idk, Buddha would fall under the second category of Divine Spirits. And even besides that, the Scripture is explicit of Jesus' divine nature.Representing Gilgamesh's way of existence.
Denoting his origins and the circumstances of the gods of antiquity.
In his words, the gods of this world are separated into two categories.
Those that existed from the beginning,
and those that became reborn as gods.
Those that existed from the beginning are, for example,
celestial objects such as the sun and the moon, and natural phenomena such as storms and earthquakes
that became the objects of worship.
Those that became reborn as gods
are those who had been closer to human,
but for various reasons diverged from humanity and became objects of worship.
Systems that are necessary for flourishing,
such as heroes and saviors, belong to this category.
The gods of Mesopotamia are of the former category.
The natural phenomena possessed wills and personalities,
and reigned as the law of the heavens.
What these gods had sent to censure the humans of the earth was Gilgamesh.
The Keystone of Heaven.
The king who was created by the hands of the gods
in order to bind the earth that was leaving the Age of the Gods.
However, he did not agree to that role.
He prioritized his own pursuits, ruled the kingdom as a human,
and spurned the gods' existences as artifacts of the previous age.
"I shall obey the gods. And I shall respect the gods. But perish.
You have all surrendered your own place the moment you created me."
And thus, in Uruk,
the first king who broke with the gods was born.
King of Heroes, Gilgamesh. The king who was desired to be the keystone, in reality,
became the spearhead that dealt the deathblow to the previous age.
Yeah... It leaves one wondering how the whole "Son of God" thing played out.fuyuki said:God
神 - Kami
(General rendition/imagery of God - probably matches with the Church version - in DDD)
If God's a phenomenon that's perfect and flawless while omniscient and omnipotent, demons are phenomena that are absurd and nontangible while human and incompetent.
Back in the old days, demons used to be thought of as messengers of God, but God and demons are completely different; how people are suffering under demons isn't being heard by him.
Since demons are incompetent, they hang around humans, but God doesn't care about humans. Doesn't care about faith and no interest in how humans have fun or suffer; since of course, he just needs himself. That's what it means to be omniscient and omnipotent.
So the only thing he has ever had to say to us is "Bug off, don't bother me."
Which would be the general gist of what Kinoko wanted to say in DDD.
The answer may very well be "both".... Although I'm not sure if Jesus even actually existed in the Nasuverse. There's a good chance that he did, but this
So, Omake system anyone?
I guess maybe.... Sure I guess... Gotta make some omake thread marks...
Okay, but before I'm gonna write it, is it okay to use one of my OC?I guess maybe.... Sure I guess... Gotta make some omake thread marks...
No pls.Okay, but before I'm gonna write it, is it okay to use one of my OC?
Don't worry, he ain't overpower, just a Magus with a Hamon.
>Not OPOkay, but before I'm gonna write it, is it okay to use one of my OC?
Don't worry, he ain't overpower, just a Magus with a Hamon.
At least he wasn't Homura Kotomine from the original HHBA. NOW THAT'S OP.
away, "too soft for this...
Ghost Hamon.
So Battle Tendency JoJo (who could use Hamon from his childhood) would be a big deal. Other Hamon users less so, because they did so by outside interference.fuyuki said:Breathing
呼吸 - Kokyuu
Duh, of course this would have a large effect on physical fitness.
BUT. It also plays a role in the strength of nature interference. Not that important for those western practitioners (people in the Association), but among the teachings in the east, the art of breathing and walking are said to be high level techniques that can't be imitated by learning them.
Image-wise, it'd be the taking in of outer energy, or breath of life, in order to link the inner world (yourself) with the outer world. The processes of sucking, vomitting, and what not are part of those processes used to take in or release the gods. If you want to know more about that, go read a book.
The "proper ways of breathing" are secret techniques among each school. As long as there's one person in a generation that could learn this, then that's good enough, apparently.
Those who use incantations to cast spells are only magi. However, those whose very breathing, movements, bones, very existence are fit for taking in the will of god, then these are pure circuits that surpass magi.
Some of this can be found in Shindo; those who can repel unnatural forces just by clapping or so. But this type of skill takes an entire lifetime to learn.
On occasion, however, there are those who were born with the proper way of breathing and walking. As a result, their body acts as one natural circuit. Often times, these are treated as holy children or prodigies when young and generally get picked up by those of the arcane way in the end. There's also those who manage to mature without being noticed for what they are. Those humans can use mysteries greater than magi, without knowing anything of thaumaturgy.
Kuzuki follows this somewhat, but he doesn't have that much ability in it since it was built up from rigid and harsh training rather than inborn ability. Basically, he just walks and breathes the right way, but has absolutely no talent for magery.
Eh well. This could possibly be an explanation for Ciel, the original Roa, Merem, and God Word, possibly.
But it's still a stand.away, "too soft for this...
『』are just CJK quotation marks; you just basically put two quotation marks next to each other.
Ghost Hamon.
Properly breathing has different implications in the Nasuverse.
So Battle Tendency JoJo (who could use Hamon from his childhood) would be a big deal. Other Hamon users less so, because they did so by outside interference.
That was ZA WARUDO. It would always have been OP.At least he wasn't Homura Kotomine from the original HHBA. NOW THAT'S OP.
Unless you have Star Platinum that is.
That too.
We had to kill her with a ROADA ROLLADA!!!!!Or are Sasaki "Motherfucking" Kojirou the Second, timestopping magical-girl samurai extraordinaire.
Normal quotations mean it's spoken, the bracket quotations are the things that go around stand names.『』are just CJK quotation marks; you just basically put two quotation marks next to each other.
Or Kiritsugu Motherfucking Emiya and his innate time alter. Seriously, he can move through Za Warudo by using his spell, slowing him down, but can know where it would happened.Or are Sasaki "Motherfucking" Kojirou the Second, timestopping magical-girl samurai extraordinaire.