Cyclical Nature of the Wheel of Time (full spoilers)

[BFG]

To cover the cyclical nature of the wheel of time...

[TLHansum]

Unless every age is exactly the same amount of years, wouldn't it be an oval wheel?  Ovalical?

[MuKen]

double post

[MuKen]

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):

 

 

 

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.

[Nae'blis]

LoC, Prologue 

 

 

 

THE CHOSEN DWINDLE, DEMANDRED. THE WEAK FALL AWAY. WHO BETRAYS ME SHALL DIE THE FINAL DEATH. ASMODEAN, TWISTED BY HIS WEAKNESS. RAHVIN DEAD IN HIS PRIDE. HE SERVED WELL, YET EVEN I CANNOT SAVE HIM FROM BALEFIRE. EVEN I CANNOT STEP OUTSIDE OF TIME.

 

 

 

It would be easy to just dismiss this as contradiction, if it weren't for the balefire rule. So, given AMOL, how do we interpret this?

[wRAR]

LoC, Prologue 

 

 

 

THE CHOSEN DWINDLE, DEMANDRED. THE WEAK FALL AWAY. WHO BETRAYS ME SHALL DIE THE FINAL DEATH. ASMODEAN, TWISTED BY HIS WEAKNESS. RAHVIN DEAD IN HIS PRIDE. HE SERVED WELL, YET EVEN I CANNOT SAVE HIM FROM BALEFIRE. EVEN I CANNOT STEP OUTSIDE OF TIME.

 

 

 

It would be easy to just dismiss this as contradiction, if it weren't for the balefire rule. So, given AMOL, how do we interpret this?

What do you mean?

[Thrasymachus]

However the Dark One experiences the Wheel, if he is truly outside time, his kind of experience must be radically different from our kind of experience, to the extent that we simply cannot speculate or make analogies to our own experience as is done above.  Our kind of experience takes time, you don't view an object like a circle all at once.  Your eyes follow the curve around, you recognize the continuity of the curve and that it meets itself in an order that takes time.  Further, for the Dark One to experience the Wheel as a circle, then he has to have some kind of experience of space, that is, length, depth and width.  But the experience of space is inextricably linked to the experience of time.  If he were outside time, then he's outside space as well, and thus his experience of anything at all is, for us, a single, 0 dimensional point, otherwise known as a singularity.  We cannot formulate a theory of what the Wheel looks like to the Dark One until He's pulled into the Pattern, and thus into Space and Time.

 

We know that the Wheel of Time is cyclical, and thus we know that there is no requirement for Entropy to increase over the lifespan of the Wheel.  From our current understandings of physics, this either means that the Wheel is an open system, or it is at equilibrium, i.e. maximum entropy.  We know it's not at maximum entropy because stuff happens in the Wheel, and stuff doesn't happen in a system that's at maximum entropy.  Thus, the Wheel of Time is an open system, it requires the input of Energy from somewhere else, in order to keep the whole thing moving.  The books tell us that the One Power is the energy that turns the Wheel.  

 

The Pattern woven by the Wheel is one of souls, that is, the threads that are woven are souls of people, and interestingly, places and mere objects (and many animals) don't get threads.  In my mind, they are like pieces of the Wheel, little nubs and such, around which the threads are woven in creating the pattern, as well as around other threads.  The Pattern itself is a pattern of souls, which, in my mind, translates to a pattern of choices, strung together and unified into single thread by being the choices of a single soul or agent.  The Wheel is the mechanism by which the threads are woven, it allows and gives context to the choices that can be made by the threads/souls.  So while the Pattern itself is not outside the Wheel, the threads, in themselves, are.

 

A choice is something that is self-determined, it's not forced on you by outside forces, nor is it some completely random thing that happens for no reason at all.  You make the choices you do because of who you are.  Returning to the analogy of the threads, that's akin to the intrinsic properties of the thread itself, how stretchy or sticky or stiff it is, or what color or texture it displays, and so forth.  The Dark One, as he exists outside the Wheel and the Pattern, is merely an abstract, he is a class of intrinsic properties had by threads, the tendency of people to choose destruction, domination and deprivation.  The Power he offers is the power of destruction, and when the Bore is drilled through the Pattern into his prison, he magnifies those tendencies in the people he touches.  When he is pulled into the Pattern, or injects himself into the Pattern as with Shaidar Haran, he is a thread dominated by those tendencies, to the exclusion of all others.

 

The Pattern is a prison for him because it is woven by the Wheel, which is driven and set by the One Power, the power of creation, choice and generosity, and it weaves to give the fullest expression of those tendencies, and because it is the power of choice, to fully display all the tendencies of the threads it weaves.  It is through the weaving of the Wheel that people can choose to subvert or control their Dark tendencies, that the Dark One is imprisoned.  Of course the Dark One doesn't want to destroy the Wheel and tear asunder the Pattern.  It wants to be the Power that drives the Wheel and force the Pattern to display the tendencies that define the Dark.  It is the abrogation of meaningful choice, and thus, the mechanism that makes choosing possible at all is obviously a prison for it.  

[MuKen]

The analysis I wrote isn't about the Dark One's experience.  He's an alien entity that thinks nothing like us; to try to discuss how he thinks about something is impossible.  It would come down to making parallels to how we think about things, which will be insufficient since he thinks nothing like us.

 

When I talk about the Dark One's perspective or how he "sees" things, I am merely talking about the system itself, and describing the state of it from the viewpoint of where the Dark One is.  For example, when a physics teacher is giving an example about an object in space moving near light speed, he may say "the object sees the earth in a blue-shift", he is not saying the object thinks like humans, he's just talking about its "perspective" to say that from where it is the universe looks a certain way.

 

Whether or not the DO "understands" the circle in any way akin to how we would, my point was only that it IS a circle.  Meaning that looking from outside the Pattern, there is only one Bore, and therefore the DO touching the Bore equates to only one Last Battle from the relative viewpoint of one looking from the outside.

 

There are infinitely many Last Battles when viewing it from inside the Pattern, but there is only one Last Battle when viewing it from outside the pattern.  Thus, they cannot ever change the outcome.

 

Regarding your discussion of entropy, it's pretty clear that the WoT universe does not obey laws of thermodynamics.

[Julian Cook]

The more and more I think about the wheel of time as a whole, the more and more sure I am that it’s an abject failure in literature and in planning.  The fundamental problem is that we are told what to think, Perrin is a great leader, Rand will save us all, Matt is a great battle lord, yet their actions and what is read in the book does not hold up what is told to us.

Even the name seems to be misleading, the wheel of time this is misleading and really untrue.  From the last turn of the wheel we are left with many races dead never to return or do we just accept that the turning of the wheel is about how the light confronts the shadow.  Except that the shadow is outside of the wheel and not subject to the pattern. So what really does the turning of the wheel mean, going by logic it really does not hold up.  Since reading the last book twice I have picked up the latest Tom Clancy book and one battle between the US and China is more exciting than the whole of the last battle.  This is not a nock at BS but at RJ who failed the reader.  If we were to compare the wheel of time to lord of the rings it would be like ending lord of the rings with Frodo throwing the ring into the pit of doom and not knowing how the battle went and who else lived.

I can honestly say that I was a fan of the wheel of time till the last two books, now I would never suggest it to anyone, which is strange cause the eye of the world promised so much and the last three books delivered

so little.

[Cybertrolloc]

Never been clear on how closely each cycle repeats. Is it as small as the same except Rand wears a blue coat to SG? (Replace with some small change that has a real effect which possibly carries on to other Ages, that's just for the lol.) Without knowing this...

 

I wouldn't call WoT as a whole a failure. In comparison to major series that came after, sure it's lacking (but remember some people want to read very specific things, like say Sparhawk effortlessly winning against everything all the time or books with absolutely no relationships between characters or whatever). In comparison to what we had in the late 80s and prior, it isn't bad--although there's plenty that do at least some of what WoT does better.

[Thrasymachus]

But describing it "from the viewpoint of where the Dark One is" is likewise impossible.  Where the Dark One is is outside space and time.  Whatever anyone experiences, or even whether they can be said to experience at all without space and time, from that viewpoint, is to us a singularity, a single, undifferentiated point.  Since you offered the speed of light as an analogy, it's not like asking how you'd see the Earth when traveling at a large percentage of the speed of light, which would be, as you say, compressed and blue-shifted.  It's like asking what the Earth looks like when you're traveling exactly at the speed of light, i.e., what the Earth looks like to a photon.  And the answer to that is that it doesn't look like anything.  Earth, and the entire rest of the universe, is compressed into a single point of no dimensions.  From the perspective of a photon, it takes no time at all to traverse any distance, in fact, there are no distances, everything is in exactly the same place.

 

And everything obeys the laws of thermodynamics, it's just a question of what kind of thermodynamic system it is.  The Wheel of Time is obviously a open system as far as energy is concerned.

[Suttree]

T

Even the name seems to be misleading, the wheel of time this is misleading and really untrue.  From the last turn of the wheel we are left with many races dead never to return or do we just accept that the turning of the wheel is about how the light confronts the shadow.

so little.

Little quote on how it works so you can get a better understanding:

 

 

 

Interview: Nov 30th, 2000                                                         

WH Signing Report - Matt Peck (Paraphrased)                                                                       

 Matt Peck                                                                                       

I asked that as the Wheel turned, each time an Age rolls around, is the Pattern exactly the same each time, or does it change?

                                            

Robert Jordan                                                                                       

 

He seemed to like this question. He likened it to a tapestry. When seen from a distance, each Third Age (to make it easy to track) has exactly the same pattern as the previous Third Age. However, when seen up close, there are differences. Threads are different, different nations exist, geography is different, different personalities rise to

prominence. These changes, while minute in the grand scale of the Pattern, affect the Pattern enough so that while two iterations of an Age are almost the same, the first "Third Age" may be wildy different from the hundredth "Third Age".

[MuKen]

But describing it "from the viewpoint of where the Dark One is" is likewise impossible.  Where the Dark One is is outside space and time.  Whatever anyone experiences, or even whether they can be said to experience at all without space and time, from that viewpoint, is to us a singularity, a single, undifferentiated point.  Since you offered the speed of light as an analogy, it's not like asking how you'd see the Earth when traveling at a large percentage of the speed of light, which would be, as you say, compressed and blue-shifted.  It's like asking what the Earth looks like when you're traveling exactly at the speed of light, i.e., what the Earth looks like to a photon.  And the answer to that is that it doesn't look like anything.  Earth, and the entire rest of the universe, is compressed into a single point of no dimensions.  From the perspective of a photon, it takes no time at all to traverse any distance, in fact, there are no distances, everything is in exactly the same place.

It is not impossible, we have had the nature of time described to us, and we can discuss the ramifications of that even if the model is wholy different and alien to our terms.  You just did exactly what you said cannot be done: gave a model of the universe from the perspective of a lightspeed molecule by saying that everything looks like a single point of no dimensions.  That is a view, based on what we know, and we can extrapolate stuff based on that view.

 

And everything obeys the laws of thermodynamics, it's just a question of what kind of thermodynamic system it is.  The Wheel of Time is obviously a open system as far as energy is concerned.

Yes, that is exactly the question, so knowing that they don't obey OUR thermodynamics system, you can't make assumptions like that energy is conserved or entropy always goes up unless something in the book indicates as such.

[Thrasymachus]

You're missing the point.  A singularity occurs in our descriptions of something when the rules that generate and interpret those descriptions return something that has no meaning.  That's why it's a 0-dimensional point.  A point carries no information, no meaning.  Everything I said about how the Earth and all of the Universe is compressed into a single point from the point of view of a photon is not meant to give you insight into the point of view of a photon.  It doesn't and can't do that.  It tells you why you can't share the perspective of a photon--because some very fundamental feature of how we describe and understand things is missing.  Neither you nor I have ever observed a point.  We've observed dots that we or someone else drew on paper and labeled points, but those are not points.  They have length and breadth and depth, things that points lack.  

 

You also seem to be under the misapprehension that the Laws of Thermodynamics are merely laws of matter and energy.  They are not, they also govern the creation, transformation and dispersal of information.  That's why I can say with confidence that everything obeys the laws of thermodynamics, and that the Wheel of Time is an open system.  As far as our own Universe, as far as I'm aware, it's still an open question as to whether it's an open system or not.  

[Aeo Sedai]

Thrasymachus, I'm not convinced the threads on the wheel are limited to just souls. Indeed, if that were the case Balefire ought to have a different effect when it hits something like a rock, but it doesn't, it makes the same erasure effects as it would when hitting a person. 

 

As I mentioned in the thread about the Shadow, I'm not convinced that the Dark One is all that he seems. What I mean is, if he's truly outside of the pattern, and thus outside of time, it seems unlikely that the Dark One is capable of things like memory, which requires him to be able think about the past, or planning, which requires him to be able to think about the future. 

 

When I think about it a bit more, I'm not convinced that the DO is imprisoned in the classical sense of the word. Because he can neither remember nor plan, it would seem that the DO is always imprisoned, or always free. I think from the perspective of the DO, such as it is, he's always free, and from the perspective of the beings in the pattern he's imprisoned (except when he's not) All Rand is really doing is making it so that the next set of lines weaved in the pattern are without the DO's touch, not actually imprisoning him. When the bore was created, what actually happened was that the DO's touch was reintroduced to the pattern-- from the perspective of the pattern not the DO.

 

But the metaphysics of all this are very murky at best. 

[Scarloc99]

The dark one is a manifestation of Chaos given sentience by humanity. I believe sealing the DO in the bore doesn't trap him and stop him influencing the world, it does make the influence if chaos however balanced out.

 

Society needs chaos to develop, humanity needs chaos to grow it is why mankind's greatest achievements occur not during peace but war. Alternatively as shown to rand a land without chaos in it at all stagnates and fails to grow or develop.

 

Man discovered power and drove to the Bore at this point the DO was released, no I think the DO was created. As Rand says you need us without us there is nothing. The more people believed and followed chaos the stronger it became. It is also why the DO can not exist within the pattern, the pattern us ordered planned directed. Chaos influences the world from without and when in balance it just nudges things enough so as to stop the pattern stagnating.

 

By sealing the bore Rand has brought is full circle. The land will grow, people will live and die and in 10000 a group of one powered people will discover this great new source if power and tunnel to the heart to tap it hence this will start again. Or so the pattern would want. There is an argument that the DO's whole plan us to get the dragon to do something different so as to move the pattern in a new direction.

 

However the basis of the wheel if time is good vs evil so I doubt that was ever RJs plan (unfortunately)

[wotfan4472]

Great posts, really interesting. There was a story I watched a few weeks ago about a women's family being haunted by spirits. The woman dealt went to a pranormal team and their investigation concluded that it was extremely dangerous. The woman then went to  a minister in her local church. After blessing the house, the woman said that the hauntings got more scary, to the point that her family  was driven off. The woman after fleeing her home, gains the courage to return to her home and begins praying through her haunted home as the minister did, but instead, she prays for help. She claims to this day that she heard a voice ordering help to be given to this woman, after calling for St Micheal's help. She says that in that moment her home went back to normal, and has stayed that way since. During the course of the story she was trying to close a "astral portal" that not only allowed spirits of the dead to come through but also demons. Alot of them. From this story and thousands of others, they lead me to believe that our universe is closed, or these stories would not exist. Further more, judging from thousands of years of myth and legend, that our universe at some time may have been open. What do you all think??? I would love to know your thoughts!!!

[MuKen]

You're missing the point.  A singularity occurs in our descriptions of something when the rules that generate and interpret those descriptions return something that has no meaning.  That's why it's a 0-dimensional point.  A point carries no information, no meaning.  Everything I said about how the Earth and all of the Universe is compressed into a single point from the point of view of a photon is not meant to give you insight into the point of view of a photon.  It doesn't and can't do that.  It tells you why you can't share the perspective of a photon--because some very fundamental feature of how we describe and understand things is missing.  Neither you nor I have ever observed a point.  We've observed dots that we or someone else drew on paper and labeled points, but those are not points.  They have length and breadth and depth, things that points lack.  

 

Your example shows a model from which you CAN draw conclusions.  I can conclude that form the photon's perspective, it is impossible to differentiate between the positions of two separate objects.  That is a logical conclusion that is true and drawn from things I know about the model.

 

I didn't say a model lets you reason out all truths, just that there are conclusions you can draw from the things you do know.  And there are.

 

You also seem to be under the misapprehension that the Laws of Thermodynamics are merely laws of matter and energy.  They are not, they also govern the creation, transformation and dispersal of information.  That's why I can say with confidence that everything obeys the laws of thermodynamics, and that the Wheel of Time is an open system.  As far as our own Universe, as far as I'm aware, it's still an open question as to whether it's an open system or not.  

 

You can't say "everything" obeys the laws of thermodynamics when pertaining to fictional universes.  Those are entirely up to the desires of the author, he can decide that they do, or that they don't.  Calling the WoT-verse an "open system that gains energy from the input of the One Power" does not answer all of the contradictions with conservation of energy.  If I make a gateway to the sky, then either decide to toss an object through or not, those two create different amounts of total energy in the universe.  Yet the amount of the OP drawn to do each is exactly the same: the amount needed to maintain a gateway.  That amount does not vary with the amount of stuff that goes through it.

 

Regardless, I'm not sure how this ties in to disproving the theory in any way.  What does the entropy of WoT have to do with anything?

[Tud]

I love this discussion and  some of the points that have been raised. Especially about the Dark One's prison which actually can't be one since he exists outside of the Pattern.

 

   I was always troubled by the the cyclical nature of the WOT since some things which exist in the current age  the Foresaken had never heard of (such as Warders). Also, unless there is a world wide catastrophe which completely disrupts civilization (The Fall Of Rome In The West and the destrcution of the Great Library of Alexandria are very good examples) it simply isn't reasonable to accep that knowledge/information fades away to the extent that it is forgotten by a more advanced Age unless we're talking about a time frame much longer than what has been implied in the series  This is the end of the Third Age, right? The War Of The Shadow is supposed to have happened in the Fourth Age. Are the ages really so long that the knowledge of what went on previously has been totally forgotten?. Additionally, while there is no hint of a second breaking occuring between now and the next WOTS, something must have happened because in the Age Of Legends, the landscape is very different from what it is now.

 

Fortunately, Mr. Jordan's explanation serves to address most of the discrepancies (AT IMHO)..If you accept that it's the overall framework that repeats and not the details, then everything fits.  The changes that occur (Warders, landscape, etc) serve to alter the interior of the mosiac, but not the fact that the ages repeat over and over again. Essentially, this is the Fourth Age, but, it's  not the same Fourth Age that your GReat Great , Great.....Daddies knew.*G*)  

 

For myself, I find the circle in a different area..The books themselves. Has anyone noticed that AMOL ends in a mirror image of how the very first chapter of  EOTW beginds?  In EOTW, first you have the wind and the admonition that there are no beginnings, but it was "a beginning", then you have Rand's POV. In AMOL, you have Rand's POV and then you have the wind and the admonition,"there are no endings in the WOT, but it was an ending.". I thought that was very, very cool 

 

Oh, yeah, one final note..off topic..I don't think any of his women ever do go find him..i think that that ended too. I think that Rand just travels the world fulfilling the phrophecy about the DR walking the world with the sword justice at his side"

 

tud

[Suttree]

This is the end of the Third Age, right? The War Of The Shadow is supposed to have happened in the Fourth Age. tud

No, you have that backwards. The War of Power happened in the Second Age. There is a very long way to go before it comes back around and entirely plausible the info will be long forgotten.

[Thrasymachus]

@Muken- I don't care whether your "universe" is fictional or not.  If it makes sense, and here, I'm granting enough internal consistency to the cosmology to the Wheel of Time to stipulate that it makes sense, then it's describable in thermodynamic terms, and thermodynamics applies.  Theoretical physicists rarely engage with the "real world."  Usually, they make up some fictional universe to play around in, though their fictional universes are often much simpler than the WoT, let alone the real world, to help ensure that internal consistency.  Entropy is not just about how matter and energy become more "disordered" over time.  Order and disorder are subjective anyway, without some objective definitions.  It's about how information spreads through an environment.  So, basically, what you're saying when you say that "thermodynamics doesn't apply to the WoT" or that an author can choose to write fiction that pays no heed to thermodynamics is that the WoT doesn't make any sense, and that authors can write nonsense.  And if that's the case, that the Wheel of Time is nonsensical, we may as well throw up our hands and give over discussion.  

 

And you're also still missing the point about the difference between meaningful conclusions and mere conclusions.  Sure, you can conclude that everything is in the same place for a photon.  That doesn't tell you anything meaningful about what it's like to be a photon.  The argument form Reductio ad Absurdum, which is what we're using here to "make conclusions" about what it's like to be a photon, or alternately, the Dark One, only generates meaningful conclusions when you use it to disprove an impossibility or a negative claim.  If the claim P stands for "Object A is X meters from Object B," then proving not-P through RAA doesn't tell you anything meaningful, neither does proving not-possible-P.  "It is not the case that Object A is X meters from Object B" doesn't tell you anything at all.  It doesn't tell you whether A is Y meters from B, it doesn't tell you whether A is the same object as B, it doesn't tell you anything worth knowing.  Human beings are very good at tricking themselves into thinking that something that is basically meaningless is actually very meaningful.  But it's a trick.  Jesus's face is not really on that piece of toast.

 

@Tud- The War of Power happened in the Second Age, not the 4th, and occurred some 3000 years before the main story of the books.  To put that in some perspective, it's roughly as far back as the Trojan War is for us.  Or if you prefer a more Judeo-Christian timeline, it was 3000 years ago this year that Saul was crowned king of the Israelites.  The most common knowledge we have from that era are a couple of books that are clearly embellished and not meant as literal, historical accounts, and were in any case written down into the versions we know of several hundred years after the fact.  The Second Age, the Age of Legends, was likely at least as long as the Third Age.  That puts us back 6000 years.  Only a couple of human civilizations had managed to figure out pictogram writing at this point.  Many of our more recent cultures place the beginnings of the universe in this era.  The wheel had just been invented.  Stonehenge wasn't to be built for another 1000 years.  The story of Gilgamesh doesn't take place for another 1500 years, and that's the oldest story I know of, and it's clearly an exaggerated and fanciful account of something that may or may not have taken place at all.  It's easy to see how things might be forgotten or distorted in all that time.  Indeed, it's one of the minor themes of the series.

 

@ Aeo Sedai- Balefire can't really work the way it's described in the story either, as "burning back/out the threads of the Pattern" because, while those threads are removed "back in time" such that the Dark One can't get to 'em, they are not destroyed, they return to the universal "soul pool" to be respun in the future.  It's more akin to unweaving one thread by pulling it out of the Pattern at some prior point.  Further, while we do see objects get vaporized by balefire, we don't really see any temporal anomalies with them the way we do with people.  They appear to simply blink out of existence, rather than undo the things they were recently used for.  We never, for instance, see a sword balefired, and the hand it just cut free restored.  The Darkhounds that slobber on Mat are the closest it comes that I can recall, but Darkhounds appear to be twisted wolves, who certainly have their own threads.  And even if I were to concede that Balefire worked on mere objects back in time, I'm not sure that that changes anything.  The One Power can already directly effect the Wheel through turning it.  Changing the Wheel itself (as opposed to the Pattern) back in time hardly seems out-of-bounds.  In fact, the Wheel itself is outside of Time, so doing anything directly to the Wheel is doing something funky with Time.

[OneWhoMustBeLeashed]

The Wheel of Time concept makes more sense if you think of it as a never-ending battle between two equal deities. They are so equally matched that history plays out as generally repeating cycles. The cycles don't have to repeat exactly. The Dark One could temporarily win for an Age, the Creator could then win for an Age, etc. It's also possible that they could remain in a stalemate for many ages. The cycle could only end if one of them were destroyed. Apparently, that is possible. Rand believes he could have defeated the Dark One entirely by using his own power against him, in addition to the One Power. He chose not to do so because his vision showed him that the two forces are necessary to free will in the Universe. Rand may or may not have been correct, but he could have broken the wheel and made it more like our Universe by eliminating the Dark One. 

[Thrasymachus]

If Rand were to have killed the Dark One, eliminating his touch from the Pattern, he would have, in effect, become the Dark One by eliminating choice.  Many dozens of decades ago, a famous philosopher attempted to rank moral outcomes from best to worst.  Morally, he claimed, the best outcome would be if everyone was perfectly happy and they deserved to be so happy.  The worst outcome would be if everyone was perfectly happy, but nobody deserved that happiness.  That was the outcome Rand would have created if he'd killed the Dark One.  The 2nd best outcome would be if nobody was perfectly happy, but everybody deserved perfect happiness, while the 3rd best (or 2nd worst) outcome would be if nobody was perfectly happy, but nobody deserved perfect happiness.  The general belief is that the DO would have created either option 2 or 3 if he had taken over the Wheel (or more likely, some blend of those two), if he didn't just annihilate everything.  The real world is some blend of all 4, where some people (very few) are perfectly happy, some people (again, very few) deserve perfect happiness, and there is some, often small and fleeting, overlap between these two.

[OneWhoMustBeLeashed]

Great post, Thrasymachus. I feel like it would be easier to understand the mythos of WoT if I had a better understanding of Zoroastrianism. The sort of universe in the books is very alien to the Western materialist or Judeo-Christian world views.

[Tud]

You may be correct about which Age the WOTS occurred, but that still doesn't mean that knowledge will be forgotten. Unless a major disruption of a civilization occurs,even immense passage of time doesn't necessarily mean knowledge will be forgotten. Advanced societies, absent a major disruption, do not forget. It just doesn't happen that way. At least, not in this world. Besides, there would have had to be a second breaking for the world to appear as it did during the AOL and why would something like that occur. The only way to make that fit is to accept Mr. Jordan's posit that the overall situation repeats, but not the interior details. In other words, there will be another AOL (The Second age), but the landscape, etc (The minor, interior details) will not be the same. The next Breaking will change the current landscape back to what it was before the Breaking that this version of the WOT experienced.

 

tud