Eldraeic Word of the Day: Ulquordaëälathdar

[avatar (Alistair Young)]

ulquordaëälathdar: (lit. “impossible-knowledge-person”, derog.) Agnostic; (Flamic) an adherent to the Agnostic Heresy; one who holds that certain or all knowledge cannot be known, i.e., is intrinsically unknowable, rather than simply unknown, or circumstantially unknowable due to lack of necessary epistemic tools or cognitive capacity.

from ulquordaëlin (“impossible”, itself from ulquor, the degree quantifier of absolute absence, and daëlin “probability, chance”), alath (“knowledge”) and dar (“person”).

 

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This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://eldraeverse.com/2017/06/14/eldraeic-word-of-the-day-ulquordaealathdar

[avatar (Alistair Young)]

Comments migrated from WordPress:

@Specialist290 <carpentereli@outlook.com> on 2017-06-15 22:13:49 wrote

An interesting point of tension here: This seems to imply that all knowledge is knowable; other bits and pieces (such as the local attitudes toward the Mad Scientist) seem to imply that expanding the horizons of what is known collectively are laudable; yet anything and everything to do with Laryssan (cf. “The Dreaming Goddess” The Dreaming Goddess ) seems to imply that actual total knowledge concentrated in one mind is dangerous.

@Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2017-06-15 23:26:32 wrote

The short form is that knowledge != foreknowledge, and even total knowledge doesn’t imply foreknowledge because of, first, indeterminacy, and second, paracausality.

Strongly godlike entities would be, definitionally, exempt from that particular rule along with all the others.

@Khan <gspalletta@gmail.com> on 2017-06-21 06:30:22 wrote

And what do the eldrae have to say about Godel’s incompleteness theorem (emphasis on “theorem” - this is not just a question of philosophy/metaphysics) and the halting problem?

@Alistair Young <athanasius.skytower@arkane-systems.net> on 2017-06-21 11:13:19 wrote

That while the former is intensely annoying, it is limited in its scope to certain classes of formal axiomatic systems and there is no particular reason to believe that reality as a whole (and thus reality-truth) is isomorphic to one of those.

As for the halting problem, and the Church-Turing thesis in general, those apply specifically to Turing machines and Turing-equivalent machines. Since building a Halting Oracle is a simple task given a (canonical) acausal logic processor (whose existence as a form of hypercomputation is implied by any form of FTL communication), no-one there is terribly exercised by that particular limitation.