Earlier today, I was playing through the Shivering Isles to recollect the experience, as I had not played it in a while, and stumbled upon Dyus. After realizing that he had CHIM, and that in his predicament he wasn't allowed to die, and I'm convinced that he wanted to, I'm curious if he ever attempted to zero-sum. Which brings my question: Could Sheogorath, and by that extension Jyggalag, or any other Daedric Prince stop such an event from happening? Also, can someone who has CHIM be able to zero-sum on their own free will?

Just because he mentions in passing that "individuality is an illusion" doesn't mean that he has CHIM...

And if you have CHIM, you can't Zero-sum of your own will. You only sum if you DON'T get CHIM.

EDIT: removed stupid comment. Feel free to delete this post.

0 sum causes you to completely not exist anymore. Shor didn't 0 sum, for if he did, there wouldn't be Shor anymore.

I thought one zero-summed once he/she/it realized that individuality is an illusion and that humans grasp at it regardless, but then let go of his/her/its individuality...

zero summing is to cease to be real.

CHIM makes the world real.

I'm now afraid of trying to research chim... But really, I'll try to find some stuff. Always want to be helpful

No, that's Nirvana.

Zero sum is like Nihilism materialized. Its realizing everything has an opposite (including yourself) and that since -1 + 1 = 0 that nothing is actually real, existence is an illusion, you are not real and thus you cease to exist.

One can know CHIM and not have achieved it. Dyus may never well know CHIM and not have achieved it, or know of the zero-sum and not have achieved it. Knowing isn't the same as feeling or being.

Makes me think he's got the opposite, since dosen't CHIM involve maintaining your individuality regardless?

I saw CHIM as you are everything, but still yourself (retains individuality)
Zero Sum is when you are everything, but you are also everything (you don't retain individuality)

It may look similar, but the biggest striking difference is if one retains their individuality. If one doesn't, they no longer exist and completely disappear never to return. If one retains that individuality, their imagination is the limit to what they want to do. CHIM in essence is a contradiction, due to a person being everything, but themselves at the very same time.

Again, thats Nirvana, not zero-sum. Zero-sum is Nihilism, zero-sum is realizing nothing truly exists and thus you don't truly exist.

I'm not a real Buddhist scholar, but I think Nihilism could easily be thought of as an extremely incomplete understanding of Nirvana. I couldn't explain the details, but questions like "is this real" and "is this unreal" become less and less meaningful as one reaches enlightenment.

I say semantics

Zero-Sum is what you get when you realize Chim but don't get it.

Zero-Sum?

Ahem

"You can't handle the truth!"

So...Zero-Summing is essentialy getting screamed at by Jack Nicholson.

Well, Nirvana is realizing that the ultimate nature of reality is emptiness/nothingness/impermanence: atman is anatman (self is no self). This should be contrasted with moksha in Hinduism, in which the individual realizes atman is brahman (the individual self is identical to the single permanence behind all of reality).

CHIM is more individualistic (egotistic, even) than either Nirvana or Moksha. Think Nietzschean Ubermensch if the Ubermensch is also God.

I don't know what any of that means... all I know about him is that he has been there so long but stuck still with a mortal mind that he has moved to a point far beyond madness. Into a new form of clarity.

Nihilism is Buddhism for depressed white kids.




I take that as a concession- so give me my cookie.



Or listening to the Jonas Brothers. Those kdis are so horrible they make me want to zero-sum.



Nirvana = Moksha/Brahman. If you think about it Buddhism is really just streamlined Hinduism with all the pomp and polytheism removed.

Nietzsche skirted the line between psudo-Buddhism and Nihilism (which he essentially founded) so equating Nirvana with the Ubermensch is a little unfair, the Buhhdists are more positive and less inclined to accept the lack of value in existence.

In Hinduism there is a permanence behind all of reality (Brahman), in Buddhism there is no permanence behind reality, because the true nature of reality is impermanence. Both Nirvana and Moksha constitute escape from Samsara (Nirvana in Buddhism and Moksha in Hinduism), but Nirvana and Moksha are not the same thing. And Hinduism is polytheistic on the practical level of the everyday practitioner, but ultimately (philosophically) monistic (not montheistic, but actually monistic).

Nietzsche would say that Nihilism was a necessary outcome of the death of God (e.g., the loss of faith in transcendental values), and that the Ubermensch was a response to Nihilism (as a creator of values). Besides, I wasn't equating Nirvana with the Ubermensch, I was comparing CHIM to the Ubermensch.

I wouldn't say that. The one real link between him and nihilism that I know of is the accusation he made that dogmatic faiths were ultimately nihilistic. There was no real value behind them, thus they were in fact a faith in nothing. But we are in no way confined to this, it is we ourselves who must decide our "transcendental values", find out for ourselves what is meaningful. That's what it means to be an Ubermensch. At least that's how I understand it.

Nietzsche would be rather offended by the assertion that he founded Nihilism, especially where today most people attribute the phrase to moral (there is no right or wrong) or existential (life has no purpose or meaning) nihilism. Much, if not most, of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, is spent railing against the concept of basic Nihilism, or simple denial of things. His concern was precisely that increasing ability of science to "kill" or at least reduce interest in religion would result in such a situation, where without such a supersensory being, humans would not be able to easily place the forms of morality and religious purpose, nevermind do so on a format that universal or even popular. That concept was not Nietzsche's innovation, as both Kierkegaard and a number of Russians (the best known being Turgenev, but arguably Dostoyevsky as well).

His concept was the confrontation and elimination of nihilism; the point of the Ubermensch was to find someone that could be confronted with or actively find and reject the concept of no universal truths or values, to make new ones anyway, and then to relay those values to others and even persuade others into accepting those values and truths.

He was both strongly anti-theist in his writings (he may or may not have been agnostic or deist in moderation, but was strongly anti-Christian), so comparing it to Buddhism is... problematic. For a reasonable amount of accuracy, depending on what school of Buddhism you're looking at, the viewpoint ranges from reality itself being an unreal manifestation of an individual's karma that should be eliminated, to the perception of reality being an illusion hiding a true reality, but there is a true reality perceived by Tathagatas. In either case, the interest is less in imposing a reality upon the world as eliminating the illusions (typically presented as desires) presented within the self and on the world (or in other schools, ). Nihilism about refusing the substance of the surrounding world (believed to be illusory) around you while being immutable in self, while the Nietzschian ubermensch is about rejecting erected false concepts and understandings of reality, perceiving reality as real, and yet giving specific values to specific things.

The (older-style) typical Buddhist speaking religiously will look at a chair and a flower, and tell you that they are the same. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skandhas are what lead to the sensation of mutability (discomfort, a "bad state" in most varieties of the Buddhist religions). The typical epistemological (reality-denying) nihilist will tell you that they can't know what a chair or flower is, while a typical moral nihilist will tell you that there is no intrinsic reason to not to steal the flower, and the typical compositional nihilist (the closest to Buddhism, but with vastly different goals) will tell you that the chair and flower do not exist, merely simply objects shaped as and perceived as a chair and flower, while other varieties focus on telling us that the flower isn't going to mean anything relevant over its lifespan, or stomp around telling us that the Gods said that flowers were good but they are wrong. The ubermensch is told that the flower is an apple, that the chair is a stool, and convinces you to believe the truth (or even false changes to your pre-existing conceptions). The Buddhist believes this both because he or she believes it to be true and because it will free him or her from a cycle of suffering/discomfort, the nihilist because he or she believes it to be true and finds no moral or religious purpose to it (and may deny that such a thing exists, beyond the possible relevance of truth), while the ubermensch says it whether or not he or she believes it to be true (note that ubermensch can be good or evil), but because people need a moral system.

The ubermensch is a probably not a good idea in the Elder Scrolls world. For starters, the gods do exist, and tell you to sod off if you're a bad person. There's a reasonable pre-existing external morality. Nietzsche believed the ubermensches necessary only because there was none or people believed that there would be none, and/or that the current system is wrong somehow. And while it's easy to alter what everyone believes is the right and wrong thing, even the gods, in Nirn, the results would not be good.

* the above, particularly involving Buddhism, is an approximation; there are a lot of translation and transliteration issues with these concepts, and many are very fragmentary.