D&D 5E 4E Cosmology

[Aldarc]

What I love about 4e lore and the World Axis is so tight and works together like real world mythology. That drew me into the PoL setting more than any previous setting. It is great from that aspect.

However, I spend an inordinate amount of time working on deities and similar exalted beings (love me some primordials). At some point I realized the tight PoL setting didn't make sense for my understanding of the divine (and similiar entities). My default assumption when it comes to deities, and by proxy the cosmos, is that mortals do not, and possibly cannot, understand them. Therefore, and myth, tale, or cosmology mortals develops is invariable wrong to some degree or another. So a tidy cosmology / lore didn't make sense to me from that perspective.

So, back when I played 4e, I started thinking of ways to modify the default 4e setting to make it less comprehensible. First and foremost was that any idea of the cosmology would be incorrect. Any description of the cosmos is limited by our ability to observe, describe, and understand its true nature. That was freeing. Now, it so happens the easy, and nostalgic, thing to do to add some crazy was to mash it with the great wheel, so I started working on that. What I came up with ended up being very similar to what became the 5e cosmos (mine had some differences), so I was surprised to see my work in the 2014 DMG!

This is incredibly backwards IMHO. I was quick to abandon the Great Wheel because it is inorganic, tidy, tight, and neat. It is concerned with the aesthetics of symmetry. In contrast, the World Axis is messy and organic. The domains of the gods exist in the Astral Sea, but who can say how many domains there are? They don't follow symmetry. Neither does the Elemental Chaos. It is chaos. It sounds more like the World Axis didn't work from your human love of symmetry and, in particular, the Great Wheel so you just shoehorned the Great Wheel into your cosmology. You traded one "tidy cosmology / lore" for an even tidier cosmology / lore, and you didn't make it less comprehensible, as you traded it for a model that makes it more comprehensible with very little resembling the World Axis that you claim to love. LoL. What a joke.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

If Alice says that light is a wave, and Beth says that light is a particle, both are correct.

Neither is completely correct.

I would argue both are wrong if--exactly as I constructed it--they claim that it is EXCLUSIVELY a wave or a particle and never even slightly the other. Which is why I went out of my way to make that abundantly clear...and then every single person just completely ignored that.

Sometimes, I wonder why I even write things if folks are just going to pretend I never did so.

That's the kind of thing we're talking about when we discuss the planes- multiple perspectives can be correct, because no mortal fully understands the issues being discussed.

And I keep telling you, I was told that ALL of that is 100% pure perspective, that any perspective is equally and fully correct BECAUSE perspective is reality in the planes.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Great Wheel is my chocolate, World Axis is my Peanut Butter. I prefer chocolate but they're both lovely and blend well in any ratio.

Now that we've established that "the Great Wheel" is more like "a Great Wheel", since it can apparently be reinvented at a moment's notice for any reason or no reason at all and everything previously said about it may be invalidated anytime, sure. It's not so much a cosmology anymore as it is a mirage, and any two mirages can be welded together no matter how nonsensical.

I prefer rather more...concrete worldbuilding. That is, if I've said X is true, I can't just back out of it later. I have to actually say WHY it stopped being true. 5e's Great Wheel keeps whatever it likes and rejects whatever it doesn't without ever saying or explaining that, and the audience is just supposed to know that the contradictory things aren't canon anymore.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

The domains of the gods exist in the Astral Sea, but who can say how many domains there are? They don't follow symmetry.

Indeed, the gods wanted their domains to be beautiful and symmetric. That beautiful symmetry was destroyed during the Dawn War, and the Astral Sea that results is littered with the corpses of dead gods, entire domains scoured of all life and left as deserted islands in a silver sea, and sharp-beyond-any-definition-of-sharpness bits and pieces of the Lattice of Heaven that the Primordials destroyed. Reality in the World Axis has never completely recovered from this!

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Not ones which have the form described by Noether's Theorem! It's even worse than @EzekielRaiden is stating because much of modern physics was arrived at by applying this theorem and deriving conservation laws from symmetries (or vice versa) and then demonstrating that they hold. If NT is not applicable then you must assume we arrived at much of this physics by pure luck. That really is not a tennable position to take.

Noether’s Theorem merely shows that the maths works for the maths. It doesn’t prove that the maths tells us anything about reality. That is simply a matter of faith. The clue is in the word “theorem”. None of the practicing scientists I have worked with it have professed that faith, although I have heard it from high school level science teachers.

And the point is there is no way to prove that Physical laws are not derived by pure luck - “luck” meaning something we don’t understand and haven’t thought of.

But even if you treat Noether's Theorem as a proof, it is possible that aliens on a distant planet might derive mathematics that is equivalent to our own, but looks very different, in the same way that the World Tree looks different to the Great Wheel.

The human brain was not designed to comprehend the universe, it is pure hubris to suppose it is capable of doing so, any more than the brain of any other animal is. That’s why so many scientists have said variants on:

“The Universe Is Not Only Queerer Than We Suppose, But Queerer Than We Can Suppose”​

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Noether’s Theorem merely shows that the maths works for the maths. It doesn’t prove that the maths tells us anything about reality. That is simply a matter of faith. The clue is in the word “theorem”. None of the practicing scientists I have worked with it have professed that faith, although I have heard it from high school level science teachers.

The only axioms it requires are the ones required to do calculus. That's it. If you think calculus works, then this works. (Mostly because Lagrangians are just systems of differential equations.)

And the point is there is no way to prove that Physical laws are not derived by pure luck - “luck” meaning something we don’t understand and haven’t thought of.

Solipsism is not a particularly productive or useful philosophical approach.

But even if you treat Noether's Theorem as a proof, it is possible that aliens on a distant planet might derive mathematics that is equivalent to our own, but looks very different, in the same way that the World Tree looks different to the Great Wheel.

It is not possible that they could derive mathematics that also work but which deny Noether's theorem. Your insistence on the total absence of any form of knowledge does you a disservice.

If they develop something that is of equivalent descriptive power to calculus, they will derive their equivalent of Noether's theorem. It is not logically possible for them to develop something that can do what calculus does and somehow disprove Noether's theorem. It is one of the most fundamental, bedrock parts of mathematical physics--and it is a mathematical proof. All you need to do is observe a symmetry in nature to find the conservation law. E.g. the fact that physics works the same at time t0 and different time t1 requires that energy is conserved. (And, importantly, if it isn't conserved, the theorem also proves that there must be some kind of damping effect.)

The human brain was not designed to comprehend the universe, it is pure hubris to suppose it is capable of doing so, any more than the brain of any other animal is. That’s why so many scientists have said variants on:

“The Universe Is Not Only Queerer Than We Suppose, But Queerer Than We Can Suppose”​

Frankly? I don't trust most scientists to say a damned thing about philosophy, which is what they're doing here; that's not a physical claim, it's a metaphysical one. Mostly because--from experience, as someone who actually has studied both--most hard-science scientists couldn't philosophize their way out of a paper bag with the bottom cut out. What passes for "philosophy" amongst most physicists, biologists, and chemists rarely rises to the level of an introductory freshman course.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

The only axioms it requires are the ones required to do calculus. That's it. If you think calculus works, then this works.

Sure. It works. The maths works. But the maths is not reality. The maths is a model of reality. If it works most of the time it's a good model, but it doesn't tell us anything about reality, nor does it rule out the possibility that other models can work just as well if not better.

It is not possible that they could derive mathematics that also work but which deny Noether's theorem.

Probably true, but you can certainly formulate mathematics that look different from the maths we use that still obey the theorem.

I don't trust most scientists to say a damned thing about philosophy, which is what they're doing here

Sure, scientists deal with observation. Philosophers just make stuff up without any evidence whatsoever. You can't prove anything just by thinking about it. Philosophy is great if you want to know about morality, or what to do with your life, or if it matters if something is real or not, but it can't telly you anything about reality. If you want to know that, you should try religion.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Philosophers just make stuff up without any evidence whatsoever.

It is generally unkind to insult the professions of ENWorld users.

@pemerton is, as I understand it, a professional philosopher. I don't think he would agree with any of your analysis here; I certainly don't, and if this is all you have to say on the subject, I know all I need to know to conclude that nothing will be gained from continuing this discussion.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

It is generally unkind to insult the professions of ENWorld users.

@pemerton is, as I understand it, a professional philosopher. I don't think he would agree with any of your analysis here; I certainly don't, and if this is all you have to say on the subject, I know all I need to know to conclude that nothing will be gained from continuing this discussion.

Nothing wrong with philosophy, but it’s not for telling you what reality is (and science can’t do that either) nor is it based on observation (it becomes sociology if you examine human behaviour by observation).

 

[TwoSix]

Solipsism is not a particularly productive or useful philosophical approach.

But it works for me, which is all that matters.