Until a few days ago, I'd never heard the term 'Zero-Sum' out of TES context. My opinion on the definition came almost completely from http://www.imperial-library.info/content/etada-eight-aedra-eat-dreamer, especially the bit about evaporation, and the known effects of reading Elder Scrolls. To begin, the Elder Scrolls contain all possible realities and consequences of every actions. As corroborated by Septimus Signus, the full spectrum of realities causes contradictions, but the contradictions are also true. The Elder Scrolls can handle these infinite paradoxes, but mortals can't. My idea was that by reading a piece of information, you bind yourself to it. It'd be like having a memory so profound it always sticks with you. When the Scrolls rewrite themselves, that information you had read suddenly becomes false because of the new information. The Elder Scrolls just go along as normal, but that stuff you just read disappears with you, and it rips a piece of you with it when it goes. With each successive reading, you anchor yourself further to realities that will soon never have happened or will happen, and when they cease to be existent you cease to exist a bit more until you evaporate and cease to exist not only in the present but in all reality, i.e. your history and peoples' memory of you cease to exist as well e.g. the Gray Fox. That was what I thought Zero-Sum was, an absolute nullification of existence caused by reading the Elder Scrolls.

Well a few days ago, I encountered the term, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero%E2%80%93sum_game which I promptly looked up. I dare say that definition is wholly different that my previous theory. So does the definition of zero-sum game relate to the definition of Zero-Sum in the context of TES?

If I were to make a guess, I would say that reaching a state of Zero-Sum would mean that you would suddenly equal everything... I think. The shorthand definition is that everything one person or group gains is equal to another person or group's loss, so that in the end the gain minus the loss equals zero.

e.g. A pizza is cut into 8 slices. I take 3, my greedy roommate scarfs down 5. I gain 3 but lose 5. He gains 5 but loses 3. My gains (3) minus his loss (3) equals zero. His gain (5) minus my loss (5) also equals zero.

In TES context, it sounds an awful lot like CHIM.

Using your metaphor: CHIM is Zero-Summing, but refusing to acknowledge that you only got 3 slices (or lost 5), and instead saying that you got all of the slices, because you and your roommate together got all of the slices.

It's insane. It's impossible. That's why it works.







CHIM, in a more explanatory metaphysical sense, is realizing that you-are-all-is-you. Zero-summing is realizing that you-are-all, and stopping there. And... I'm doing a really bad job at explaining this, I think. :brokencomputer:

Always reminds me of "I am the Walrus"



And right now I feel like I'm sitting on a cornflake waiting for the van to come.

The only reason I came to the CHIM/Zero-Sum connection was because I read someone's post on this forum saying that CHIM was reaching Zero-Sum, and I thought it was nonsense at the time, but after reading the definition of zero-sum game, I remembered that post, and it made sense in a way.

I would say it's gaining everything and losing everything at the same time where "I" exists on two levels as both the winner and the loser.

I gain everything and Aurbis loses everything and infinity-infinity=zero. But I am also Aurbis and I take everything from the other I who is on the gaining side, so in turn I also take everything. In the end I take the universe and the universe takes me; my Self. Both happen simultaneously.

I'm not certain but the Chim may only be seeking an equilibrium (a specific one). Which may actually be a 'good' thing. That or the use of the term zero-sum in-game has a completely different definition to any real-world application. But I'm uncertain about this and am just throwing it out there to be assessed.



edit: Having read the posts below it's obvious that I grabbed the wrong end of the stick and stuck the wrong target with it. So ignore me :shakehead:

I don't want this to be a CHIM discussion unless someone can prove with sources that the two are one in the same, or that Zero-Sum is a means to that end.

I remove (take) myself from the world, and if I do it right, I survive in CHIM. World - 1 Me +1

If I fail, the world takes me back, and I lose (myself.) World +1 Me -1

Is how I see the relation.

The quickest answer to your question is that the notion of "Zero-Sum" exists outside of TES lore and is related to the TES lore version by name only.

The everywhere-but-TES version of Zero-Sum Game comes from Game Theory, which uses Zero-Sum as a very special case of human interaction where "cheating" is the only way to win.

Normal human interaction is Variable Sum. That means that if people "Cooperate" by pooling their resources towards the greater good, all participants benefit. Against this, however, is the possibility that players in this game "Cheat", or that is, serve their own short-term personal interests by sabotaging the efforts of others. Game Theory explores how games are built in ways where Cheaters benefit more than Cooperators, and why this has such a deleterious effect upon human society when applied outside the theoretical games of Game Theory into the world at large. (I.E. Why work hard to get ahead when you can just steal?)

Zero-Sum Games, by contrast, are special types of games where ONLY cheating will get you ahead. Games like Poker. Or trading on the Stock Market. The only way to make money in Zero-Sum Games is through taking that money away from someone else. To make money yourself, someone else must lose money. By the nature of the rules, ONLY cheating works. Even if you try to team up with someone else, you still have to ultimately screw your neighbor to come out ahead.

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The TES version of Zero-Summing, by total contrast, has to do with reaching a state of enlightenment about the nature of the TES universe where you recognize that you are the http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SchrodingersButterfly (or the victim of Maxwell's Demon or "In the Matrix", or whatever metaphor you prefer,) and as such, you have no individuality but exist as a mere thought that is very eminently about to be forgotten. Without the power to declare individuality, your reality ceases through a form of reverse-Cartisian belief, as you realize that you no longer think, and that therefore, you must declare "I AM NOT!"

To achieve CHIM, meanwhile, is to use this realization to shatter the Mask (Persona) of God (the Dreaming Butterfly), and reveal in its shadow your own face, that you might gain some form of control over God through becoming Its nightmare, and hence, immortality through the ripples on Its disturbed and changed beliefs.

Sadly, however, to even write that statement out, I have to juggle at least five different branches of Philosophy and Psychology simultaneously, so I'm not sure how helpful that might actually be...

At the risk of complete deviation, I'll ask you how Maxwell's Demon relates to TES Zero-Sum and separately, what a reverse Cartesian belief is. Denying duality? As for Maxwell's Demon, are you referring to Morton's Demon? A sort of Descartes scenario where the mind is real but the body (or the illusion of a false truth) is not? In all you're saying that Zero-Sum is a complete opposite of CHIM, as in a capital "I am" for CHIM and a capital "I am not" for Zero-Sum?



I think I understand what you mean, but the terminology escapes me. You're idea is that CHIM is destroying God and taking his place by removing God's existence entirely, so that no memory of God has ever existed, and the Divine vacuum caused by God's disappearance is filled by you? I've surely butchered your theory entirely, but I'm trying very hard to figure out what you're saying and corroborate it with my thoughts on the matter.

As for juggling Philosophy and Psychology could you, for my sake, truncate it to Descartes' Meditations, as that is what I am most familiar with, and in context it feels like this talk of denying the Self or the Mind (Zero-Sum) and conversely denying God and trumpeting the Self as God instead seems to fit within those ideas of his Second Meditation, even though denying or becoming greater than God goes against everything in his schema.

Still it seems like everyone has their own angle at defining CHIM, and I'd hate this thread to become yet another similar CHIM debate. Unless of course we can assume that Zero-Sum is the exact opposite. In that case we take the definition of Zero-Sum, reverse it and thus arrive at the definition of CHIM by default, which I admit would be quite the victory in my book.

Beyond Descartes, Plato, and Aristotle, I have very little education in Philosophy, so if any of this concerns Kant or Heidegger or those schools of thought (which I shy away from for various reasons), please don't throw it on all at once.

Yes, I figured I was using too many obscure terms...
... And sorry, but I'm going to have to talk about CHIM, there's simply no way to avoid it without leaving a giant hole in the theory I have.

The Mask is the Persona, and the Shadow its opponent from the symbolism of Jung.

Jung was a student of Freud who rewrote much of Freud's work, creating the Persona partially in place of the Super Ego, and Shadow partially in place of the Id. The duality is more complicated than man's "civility" versus "nature" dualism, however.

The Persona is the mask we all wear over our true selves. It is not just the mask we wear to deceive others, however, it is also what we want to believe in ourselves.

The Shadow, meanwhile, is the mockery of the Persona, the things we reject about ourselves, that we hate and fear about ourselves.

To Jung, the archetypes of the Persona and the Shadow's conflict were one of the core dualities in virtually all storytelling. The hero of a story is almost always the Persona - they exemplify all things we wish to believe in ourselves. A proper villain, then, would be that hero's Persona's opposite, the Shadow of that Persona that the hero represents.

For example, if the heroic quality that we want to personify in the hero of a story is Bravery, then the shadow of that quality is Cowardice. In such an example story, bravery is shown as heroic, and cowardice as villainous. The hero will charge in against all odds and prevail because of his/her ability to overcome their own fear, while the villain will be despicable for behaving in a craven way, trying to sacrifice the kidnapped child to get away themselves, etc.

The key part of this dualism is that we only want to believe ourselves brave, and try desperately to wish away our cowardice when we view such things. At the same time, however, the shadow scares us because the shadow represents the aspects of ourselves that we do not wish to acknowledge, and when best written and presented, will make us understand the villain more than we can really understand the hero who can deny this aspect of their humanity.

Think of the dualism between Batman and the Joker - who seems more human, the man in the mask who shows no emotion and behaves almost robotically from a fierce and inflexible set of morals that bind his every action, or the man who brazenly flips the bird at all of society's mores, and throws reason to the wind to simply do whatever he finds most personally amusing to himself at the moment, whose every action is completely unbound by law or sanity?

The Joker is a riveting character because he represents something deep within the Shadow of most people - a desire for freedom from society. A desire to not have to obey the rules, to openly flaunt them, to be exactly what your every deviant thought tells you to be, to give in to that every urge to just do something completely crazy, damn the consequences.

The best summation of the Shadow is probably felt in Billy Joel's "The Stranger"

(Of course, in the Billy Joel example, the Shadow is the mask, whereas in my own example, the Persona is the mask, while the Shadow is what lies beneath. Just pointing that out so that there isn't a mix-up of the terms.)

The Shadow is often considered "evil", but it really just represents anything about ourselves we have trouble trying to accept. So we put a Persona - a mask - over our Shadows to hide it from ourselves and others.

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To pull all this back in, I believe the Godhead is a Dreaming Butterfly - not a purposeful creator deity, but a cosmic accident. The whole reality of TES is the dream of a higher being, and as such, to achieve the state of awareness of this accident and how we are all connected by being the thought of a single mind. We are dreams - figments of imagination that are nothing more than symbols that exist to represent some other aspect of a mundane reality that exists in this Dreaming Butterfly's waking world.

When I say that CHIM is to "shatter the mask of God, and reveal yourself as the shadow that lies beneath", I mean that CHIM is to recognize that, yes, you are just a symbol to God's own dream state, but that, however, this God is not a Perfect God, but a troubled God. (In other words, not really a "God" by our typical imagining at all, but a simple lowly mortal of some other existence whose dreams accidentally created reality.) By being a symbol, you represent some aspect of the psyche of God, and by becoming God's Shadow, you can force God to confront those aspects which God does not wish to understand or grapple with.

To shatter the mask, you must come to the level of God's consciousness, and declare not "I AM" or "I AM NOT", but declare "I AM YOU". And then proceed to demonstrate your existence as the Shadow of God. For example, shattering the mask of God's belief in Its being moral and enjoying cooperation or fitting in to society by demonstrating that you revel in theft and murder and wonton destruction while at the same time demonstrating that, by being God's own inner voice, you are God's True Face, the Shadow behind the Persona.

By achieving this, you have become God's Nightmare - the existence within God that God does not want to acknowledge, but which nonetheless haunts the Dream. The Shadow gains a perverse power through its being denied - though denied, it cannot be eliminated, and gains the power of your fears. Every time you fear that the Shadow CAN do something in your dreams, it then becomes capable of of those things. Hence, the Shadow gains reality-warping powers.

Are you being chased by a monster in a nightmare? Does just killing the monster work? Of course not, it could just pop back up, whole and unharmed, out of any shadow or be right behind your shoulder even as you read this. The dreamer's fear gives the Shadow its strength, and by having strength, it reinforce the fear.

To become the Shadow of God is to transcend your existence as a mere dream or symbol or figment of the imagination, and actually force God to grapple with some inner conflict within God's own psyche, and through doing so, even a dream can achieve power in the waking world in which it never existed.

Imagine all the Tipping Points in history where one person's random conception of an idea changed the course of history. Consider if those inner demons driving those people at those times when they came up with their radical new inventions or history-altering changes of heart or betrayals actually had sentient dreams that understood what they were, and decided to mold their dreamer into their image.

That's my view of CHIM.

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NOW bringing THIS back into Zero-Summing, Zero-Summing is where you cannot or will not choose to become the Shadow of God.

To simply realize that you are a Butterfly's Dream puts one in an existential crisis just to begin with, but to then recognize what you are a symbol of would inherently change your essence as a symbol. It's like if, in The Wizard of Oz (movie version), the people in Dorothy's dream that were obviously from her own "real" life, but dressed up as a Cowardly Lion or the like suddenly realized that they were just Dorothy's impressions of someone else in her "real" life?

Would they continue to be capable of acting as that impression would?

Or would the inherent nature of asking themselves what they were break the illusion of their own symbolism?

If the latter, then they can no longer exist in the Dream. They exist only as a symbol, and by doing something that denies their own symbolism, they cancel out their own existence. They have been forced to finish off their Cartesian "I AM" with a "NOT".

A symbol minus its symbolism equals nothing, after all.

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None of this, again, has anything to do with Zero-Sum Game Theory, which was literally originally devised by a mathematician as a way to formulate a betting strategy in Poker, and became a full-fledged branch of Economics. Zero-Sum is, again, just a situation where all acts are forced to be destructive and selfish if you want to gain anything for yourself because of the nature of the game where no gains can be made without winning or stealing something from someone else.

A zero-sum game is not just a game like poker, but also a game like a competition where only one participant can take home the prize, and everyone else is a loser. Hence, winning is everything, and there is no place for cooperation with others (or at least, others outside your own team in team competitions), except to cooperate temporarily to destroy a mutual threat.

It is also part of the destructive influence you see in the likes of the Stock Market, which encourage things like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_selling. By purposefully taking advantage of a position of trust with someone's stocks, you can turn a purposefully-engineered downturn in a stock price into a personal windfall by making someone else eat the difference in stock prices before and after the drop. Because the Stock Market is functionally Zero-Sum when it comes to the trades among its participants (who add zero value if not less for their meddling), they are inherently encouraged to try to scam (or rather, out-scam) their fellow traders.

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I will conclude this by saying that EVERYTHING I have said is essentially the result of my own attempts to mash the notion of Anu, Padomay, and CHIM into my already-existing set of beliefs and understandings of philosophy and psychology (and economics in the case of Game Theory), and as such, will very likely conflict with whatever bizarre hallucinations swim through the mind of Michael Kirkbride or anyone else who "creates canon".

Which is a big fancy way of saying "I have no more of a ****ing clue of what I am talking about than anyone else".

All I can do is disgorge my own take on the matter onto the forum floor, and see who is willing to let their own disgorgings duke it out with my disgorgings in some manic childhood action figure play battle of half-lucid metaphysics.

It's times like these that almost make me wish I took drugs.

Jeesh! I think I'll go and sit in the corner, cry and eat ice cream until I'm consumed by my misery.

Sorry about that, I, myself, am going to have to take a "Play Skyrim and just blast bugs with lightning" break to let my brain heal, as well.

Out of all your posts so far, I like this little addition on game theory and economics. Probably bc i have never dabbled in psychology yet. Or inclined toward math. Who knows!



Charming. Reminds me of the Aurbis

Posts like this remind me that I need to read more Jung, but you did mention my other favorite bit of pop culture philosophy: Wizard of Oz. That film will forever top my list of best movies. I swear every time I watch it, I get a new meaning. I tip my hat to you for that reference. You're now my favorite poster.

And all the econ stuff goes straight over my head unfortunately. Math is not my strong suit, and economic/political theories make my head hurt; partly out of confusion partly of frustration. Interesting nonetheless, but too confusing for my tastes. Amazing that I like Philosophy and Psychology when they mostly (on a non-physiological level) deal in utter abstracts at times that can be more confusing that numbers.

It's OK, I got over myself in the end. It's just that you laid it out so clearly it was hard to just dismiss. Great posts though.

They're not the same, they're polar opposites. Zero-summing is what happens when you fail at CHIM, resulting in you poofing out of existence. If you zero-sum you lose.

That's all I needed to know. What happens if you realize the deck has been stacked, and you quit before you have a chance to lose; rage quitting sans the rage.

Here's a http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Souls,_Black_and_White that seems to point to the phenomenon. In this case, it seems that those that try to learn the nature of souls disappears without a trace.