Sylvius the Mad wrote...
That's fair, though to clarify I don't actually need to invent some specific exchange to cover the gap. I just need to be confident that a possible exchange could cover the gap (without contradicting the explicit facts within the game).
How can you be confident a possible exchange could cover the gap without knowing what the exchange is? Put another way, how can you know an implicit assumption or premise does not contain a contradiction without making it explicit?
To refer to the syllologism I used before, the mere fact that you are ignorant of the rules of logic (for the sake of argument) and cannot infer that if A=>B and B=>C A=>C and instead you think A => ~C, you would be wrong.
So this is my issue with what you are saying here. If we take your theory of knowledge, not being certain you are right is equivalent to any possible state of affairs, including being wrong.
I didn't say I think it isn't there. I said I don't think it is there. Very important difference.
In the first case I hold an opinion that something doesn't exist.
In the second case I fail to hold an opinion that something does exist.
There is an excluded middle. Content can either be implied or not; it is binary. If you fail to hold an opinion that content is implied, you must by neccesity hold that content is not implied. It is not the same as negating all and every (who have different logical opposites).
Even supposing you are right, however, if implied content exists then your view is wrong. Put another way, implied content is sufficient to reject your view. So if you are going to argue that the failing to hold an opinion that something does exist does not entail the opinion that it does not exist, but some uncertain middle, you have to grant that it is impossible for you to know whether your position is justified.
And if you grant that it is impossible to know your position is unjustified, then by your own admission (regarding how you only understand things obtained through deductive logic) you would not hold that position.
I agree entirely. And using the simple syllogism you describe in your second paragraph, I can deduce the impossibility of some types of implicit content by granting the same primacy to my character concept as I do to the explicit content within the game.
Yes, but this creates the inconsistency which we are currently debating, namely that it is merely subjective preference and not a consequence of your view that you deny one kind of reality and not the other. This sounds vague, I know, but bear with me for a second before responding.
This makes perfect sense to me, as my character concept is the entire reason the game even exists. So, within the setting, my character is what he is, and the world is as it is explicitly presented. Everything left unsaid is constrained only by its inability to contradict either of those two things.
No, you deny the bolded part. If that were so, then you would take lines that other characters provide as truth for granted. You believe that your character concept overrides what other characters say about your character. As to why this distinction matters (I'm sure you will try to deny it) bear with me until I answer the Trask portion of your reply.
To preview, if your character concept
drives the game world, and your character is inerrant in that you as the player can decide at will when your character will hold a false belief about his own experience (which you have said can be done in relation to Trask) then you create the problem I am alluding to.
But all I inject is information about my character. Everything else is left undetermined. As long as the game doesn't tell me things about my character (beyond those things my character can't know, or things that cannot affect his personality - the KotOR revelation, for example), the problem can't arise.
You made a stronger claim before: that your character concept drives the world, and that things that contradict the character concept are things which you argue you can reject. But arguing that things that are appear visually on screen (potentially when your character is not paying attention or otherwise directly observing from an appropriate vantage) are real compared to things you are told by other characters that contradict special character knowledge is a matter of subjective preference, and entirely unjustified by your own view of character primacy.
Put another way, there is no reason for you not to assume the above distinction, but there is equivalently no reason for you to assume it. This is why I say you have provided me with no good reason to accept it.
They're not narrators at all. They're just people living in a world.
Unreliable narrator is a literary expression. Trask, in telling your character about his life, is acting from a literary purpose as a narrator. He is providing background exposition. You argue that your character concept has primacy. Thus for the literary purpose of narration, Trask is
unreliable. The events that he is describing are not in fact events which, for the purpose of the story as driven by your character, occured.
This is a meta-level conversation, but our approaches to gaming are meta-level approaches, so there is nothing improper about speaking about them in these terms.
No, that's not my response at all. It's not that one person lying is plausible. Given my character's design, that person (Trask, in our previous discussion) is saying things that my character is absolutely certain are not true. He doesn't know whether Trask is lying or insane or is honestly recounting things he believes to be true. My character cannot read minds, so he can't know why Trask is saying what he's saying. He only knows that Trask is saying it.
All possible explanations for that disconnect (including the possibility that the PC is a brain in a jar) remain possible.
You keep looking at this trying to figure out what I, the player, think is true about the world. But what I think is true doesn't matter at all. What matters is what my character things is true.
No, the issue is with what you as a player grant that your character can do in driving the world that I take issue with. It is your preference as a player that empowers your character, and I am claiming that you are applying your preference in a way that is not neccesary by your own view merely in virtue of preferentially justifying one thing.
To return to the claim I made several times above: what we are debating right now is whether you have provided a sufficient reason for me to believe that you there is a distinction between rationalizing character interactions, the A-B filler or the Trask situation, and wishfully denying that visual events that are portrayed as happening in game are real. If the only reason you are doing on versus the other is that you prefer to do one versus the other, to me, that is not a sufficient reason to justify your playstyle.
Now, here is the issue: if your character and his experience drive the narrative, and you have control over that which your character experiences, then you are free to introduce psychosis or other kinds of perceptual halucinations to talk away references.
To take a specific example: say the battle at Ostagar. Your character concept is that it was just a dream, you were always a Grey Warden from youth, and Alistair and Morrigan are simply insane (they are saying things that from your character's perspective are not true and clearly refering to events that you know are false). So far, taking a character that appearsin existence after Ostagar at Lothering, you can overwrite the things that both Morrigan and Alistair say, because
your character knows they are not true. Your character does not know
why Morrigan is talking about some battle as if it was real, or why Alistair insists that Grey Wardens that never existed are dead. Your character knows the truth,.
Now, the game does present an Origin and the battle of Ostagar. But those are irrelevant. Your character experiences them merely as a dream. He was already travelling with Morrigan and Alistair, and that is why they feature there. You
know this, because your character knows this to be true from his experience,
and in your own words, your character drives the narrative.
This is what I mean, specifially, about your playstyle allowing you to overwrite the story. If the story revolves around the perceptions and experiences of your character, and these perceptions and experiences are absolutely primary and take precedent over anything that anyone else says, then after the fact of any event you can imagine that event as if it was a dream (or a psychotic episode, or a magic hallucination) and the other characters as simply insane, lying, or mind-controlled.
When you drive experience entirely internally, you lose the ability to use the external world as a meaningful discriminat between states. This is what I am accusing you of. That you want to take characters as unreliable liars when they deny some specific facts does not mean there is something special about that compared to denying the game as a whole.
This is why, when we spoke previously on the Bioware boards, I said that what you are doing is very close to fan-fiction. That was so because you are giving creative
absolute control to your imagination over and above any other authority in game. That you take visual authority for granted is merely your subjective preference and not at all entailed by the theory of interpretation that you espouse. This is my problem with it.
So yes, the character can be a brain in the jar. But the character can also be psychotic and have false perceptual experiences, which are shown as real in game, and denying them as never having happened within the real world of the game is perfectly within reason for your own approach.
There is no reason to assume, by your view, that a visual event is any more special that a narrated event, or any kind of event through any kind of medium as conveyed relative to your character concept.
Put another way: if your character defines the world, instead of the world being defined independently, then the world as a whole has to by neccesity be fluid. That you as the player want to hold particular things fixed is of no consequence to my general claim that there is no overriding reason for me, once I adopt your view, to hold that visual events are special in any way.
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we changed the definition of "irony" to that of "hypocrtical"
