Why Ishamael is wrong: The Nature of the Pattern and the Dark One - spoilers



Quote: Originally Posted by MuKen For Rand to interact with the DO, Rand's mind had to interpret what was going on within the context of being Rand, but from the DO's perspective the Wheel is one wheel and he is interacting with one point on it (the Last Battle). He doesn't see "Rand", he sees and fights "The Dragon" a single soul that is present at that point of the wheel in every turning. He made a metaphysical attempt to break it that affected all of the incarnations of the Dragon who are currently doing the Last Battle, and each of those Dragons saw that same attempt in the context of their own age. Rand the Dragon saw himself and the DO showing each other what-if worlds in Rand's time. In the next turning Bob the Dragon will see those worlds from the context of Bob's time, but he is seeing the same battle Rand did, his mind is just interpreting it differently.



But from the DO's perspective, he made one attempt on the Wheel and the Dragon beat him off. There is no "next time" that he can do something differently in.



Ishamael bases his reasoning on the idea that time continues forever, which is a perspective that comes from someone who lives inside the Pattern. We are told repeatedly in AMoL that there IS NO time outside the Pattern. Not that time is somehow "different", but that it does not exist at all. When Rand first leaves the Pattern, he has to "re-anchor" himself to it so he can feel time, which is the only way he can deal with the experience at all. For Rand (and everyone else), experiencing time is what is natural, and the "space" outside the Pattern where there is no time is a foreign and abstract concept.



For the Dark One (and one would assume, the Creator), that timeless existence is the natural state of things. It's told to us that the Dark One only experiences time when entering the Pattern, which is why he can only be destroyed if pulled into the Pattern. There is no such thing as "destruction" outside the Pattern, because destruction is the concept of existing at one moment and then not existing at the next moment. If there is no time, such transitions are meaningless.



So what does it mean to be without time? From an outside perspective, the Wheel and the Pattern do not change. Because "change" is a concept that relates only to time. The Dark One, when outside the Pattern, sees all of existence as one object, there is no "flow" of time. Furthermore, he sees it as a circle, because in the WoT universe, that's what it is. Meaning that although time repeats from the inside perspective, from the outside it is not repeating at all. It just is what it is, one single circle that can be viewed in its entirety.



Now let us examine the Bore and the "prison". Is the Dark One really in a prison? That is a matter of perspective. There is a joke that goes as follows: "An engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician are told to fence in a flock of sheep with as little fencing as possible. (the engineer and the physicist do blah blah blah) The mathematician fences himself in, and then declares 'my side of the fence is the outside'." The "space" that the Dark One is in has no definable size, it is meaningless to say he is either "inside" a prison, or "outside" the Pattern. All that needs be said is that he is separated from the Pattern, and he can only touch it through the Bore.



Now let's go back to the previous point. From outside, he sees the Wheel, the Pattern, and all of time as one object. And since time is a wheel, there is only one part of that wheel he can touch it at: the Bore. So since he only experiences time when touching it, and he can only touch it at one point on the Wheel, from his perspective, there is only one Last Battle, not an infinite number like Ishamael thinks. The Dark One's experience does not continue on forever, he flows through time for that one portion of the wheel, and the rest of the "time" there is no time. He just IS.



What does this translate to in our terms? For that period, the Dark One is "one of us", experiencing the flow of the Wheel's time the same way everyone else does. And how does everyone else experience time? Through multiple repetitions, that carry over the same "bigger picture", but vary in the details with each turning of the Wheel. He doesn't carry memory over from one turning to the next, and cannot learn from his mistakes or do anything different on a larger scale. Because he isn't experiencing a continual turning, he has one "macro-experience" which spans time between the second and third age, and that "macro-experience" gets spun out by the wheel into an infinite number of "micro-experiences" which vary in the details, but go along more or less the same lines.



So from the outside perspective, the Dark One attacks the Wheel in one place, and loses. Period. The fight is what it is, and we saw the result which is set in stone. From the inside, that attack happens countless times, but those are all interpretations of the same fight, it cannot change on a large scale, because the fact that it happens multiple times is only under the interpretation of the Wheel, which demands that the big parts remain the same. You can either view it multiple times under this restriction, or you can view it as one single battle from outside the Wheel. There is no way to view it that results in a different outcome than the one we saw. I'd like to present my interpretation on the nature of the Dark One, the Pattern, and why Ishamael's belief that the Dark One must eventually win is misguided. This is a larger writeup of what I posited in another forum (you can read just this quote as a TLDR summary):Ishamael bases his reasoning on the idea that time continues forever, which is a perspective that comes from someone who lives inside the Pattern. We are told repeatedly in AMoL that there IS NO time outside the Pattern. Not that time is somehow "different", but that it does not exist at all. When Rand first leaves the Pattern, he has to "re-anchor" himself to it so he can feel time, which is the only way he can deal with the experience at all. For Rand (and everyone else), experiencing time is what is natural, and the "space" outside the Pattern where there is no time is a foreign and abstract concept.For the Dark One (and one would assume, the Creator), that timeless existence is the natural state of things. It's told to us that the Dark One only experiences time when entering the Pattern, which is why he can only be destroyed if pulled into the Pattern. There is no such thing as "destruction" outside the Pattern, because destruction is the concept of existing at one moment and then not existing at the next moment. If there is no time, such transitions are meaningless.So what does it mean to be without time? From an outside perspective, the Wheel and the Pattern do not change. Because "change" is a concept that relates only to time. The Dark One, when outside the Pattern, sees all of existence as one object, there is no "flow" of time. Furthermore, he sees it as a circle, because in the WoT universe, that's what it is. Meaning that although time repeats from the inside perspective, from the outside it is not repeating at all. It just is what it is, one single circle that can be viewed in its entirety.Now let us examine the Bore and the "prison". Is the Dark One really in a prison? That is a matter of perspective. There is a joke that goes as follows: "An engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician are told to fence in a flock of sheep with as little fencing as possible. (the engineer and the physicist do blah blah blah) The mathematician fences himself in, and then declares 'my side of the fence is the outside'." The "space" that the Dark One is in has no definable size, it is meaningless to say he is either "inside" a prison, or "outside" the Pattern. All that needs be said is that he is separated from the Pattern, and he can only touch it through the Bore.Now let's go back to the previous point. From outside, he sees the Wheel, the Pattern, and all of time as one object. And since time is a wheel, there is only one part of that wheel he can touch it at: the Bore. So since he only experiences time when touching it, and he can only touch it at one point on the Wheel, from his perspective, there is only one Last Battle, not an infinite number like Ishamael thinks. The Dark One's experience does not continue on forever, he flows through time for that one portion of the wheel, and the rest of the "time" there is no time. He just IS.What does this translate to in our terms? For that period, the Dark One is "one of us", experiencing the flow of the Wheel's time the same way everyone else does. And how does everyone else experience time? Through multiple repetitions, that carry over the same "bigger picture", but vary in the details with each turning of the Wheel. He doesn't carry memory over from one turning to the next, and cannot learn from his mistakes or do anything different on a larger scale. Because he isn't experiencing a continual turning, he has one "macro-experience" which spans time between the second and third age, and that "macro-experience" gets spun out by the wheel into an infinite number of "micro-experiences" which vary in the details, but go along more or less the same lines.So from the outside perspective, the Dark One attacks the Wheel in one place, and loses. Period. The fight is what it is, and we saw the result which is set in stone. From the inside, that attack happens countless times, but those are all interpretations of the same fight, it cannot change on a large scale, because the fact that it happens multiple times is only under the interpretation of the Wheel, which demands that the big parts remain the same. You can either view it multiple times under this restriction, or you can view it as one single battle from outside the Wheel. There is no way to view it that results in a different outcome than the one we saw. Last edited by yks 6nnetu hing; 02-01-2013 at 08:19 AM . Reason: adding "Spoilers" to thread title