RuneScape Forum Archive | The Void & Goddess of the Void

AttilaSquare

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Sepulchre, thank you for your comments too. While your bringing up the points of lore accurately, I think the concepts in lore are kind of messy, and I'm trying to clarify them. You are right that I am grasping at straws, but that's kind of what I do and what I think speculative development of lore is about.

You might find my latest analysis of Summer's End interesting - it is linked above; but it might be worth reading the whole thread On Chaos Druids to make sense of what's going on there.

Sepulchre said :
Perhaps the destruction of Forinthry was so vast and so quick that the afterlife itself couldn't keep up, and as such, the self-maintaining universe made a "quickfix" of sorts. It just recreated everything around it, but threw it into the Void, to separate it from itself. All the dark souls that were destroyed became attached to a new parallel plane.. and many ended up forming the Spirit Beast and its core (hence the name SPIRIT Beast?). I thought the spirit beast came about from slaughter that occurred in the 4th age, but I still think this is a great idea. I started working on some headcannon to flesh it out yesterday, but it'll be a while before I can finish it and post it - maybe in the fall.

Concerning the portals to the spirit beasts realm, I'm inclined to think that these are classic portals, formed just as other pocket dimensions, taking us through either shadow or abyss. They require an item to attune us to the pockets and to grant us entry just like the runecrafting altars. Thus I could see these as normal portals formed before the spirit beast began seeking to straddle the planes.

25-Jul-2016 16:30:39 - Last edited on 25-Jul-2016 16:31:12 by AttilaSquare

Dec

2020

Sepulchre

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It seems I got slightly ahead of myself and mixed up fact and my own theories. Here, I'll show you what I mean. During Summers End, Jallek Lenkin, one of the farmhands, says:

We don't exactly know what the Beast is, but it's been here for a lot longer than we have.

It is a creature born from an overwhelming presence of pain and torment , so we must strike it down with holy power

I had long since started to assume the only overwhelming presence of pain and torment that could possibly exist in the wilderness would be the pain and torment caused by the massive destruction of Forinthry by Zamorak, using the Catalyst. A

World Guardian

must learn to find

Balance

in themselves.
Only then can they

Control

themselves and forge their own

Fate .

26-Jul-2016 08:05:17 - Last edited on 26-Jul-2016 08:07:16 by Sepulchre

Hissing_Faun

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VOID STARES BACK BUG

Screen goes black and quest ends just before battle.

I've done the Conquest training and make it through the first wave of that. When my character appears ready to battle, screen goes black and it's all over.

How can Jagex not make this a Beta quest when this gaping hole exists? How many times am I expected to attempt this infernal quest?

Angry Hissing_Faun

PS It stinks that Jagex won't help with bugs but forges ahead on new junk. CONTACTED IN GAME BY NON-STARRED "MOD"

I've very recently begun playing RS again after a few years. Today during game play, a message appeared on my screen (not in box) from someone asking me a question as if to sell me or give me something.

30-Mar-2019 07:48:45

Dec

2023

Cthris

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AttilaSquare said :

(1) What is the void? Well, we don't know much about it. It's empty.

I don't know about this one; when the player-character visits the void at the end of Summer's end they can talk and breath inside the void, which would be impossible if it were an actual void because a) sound cannot move through a void, b) a void would be devoid of oxegen--thus, no way to breathe.

So clearly the void must have something, and part of that something must be a sufficient amount oxygen needed for someone to breathe.

AttilaSquare said :

(2) Is it empty space? When described, the void often sounds like empty space. But I think space is already something too interesting for the void. The void, if it's really the emptiest emptiness , has to be even more empty than our experience of empty space.

The void isn't empty space, since it must have oxygen, but I disagree with your conclusion that it is empty of space. Again, in Summer's End, it is capable of holding a body, thus it has space.

Part One

18-Apr-2019 04:53:54

Dec

2023

Cthris

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AttilaSquare said :

What's an empty idea?
I can see you are drawing from Husserl. I haven't read Husserl, though I have read both Being and Time, by Heidegger, and Being and Nothingness, by Sartre—not to mention an extensive course on Aristotle's Physics so perhaps I can say something of interest.

If I am understanding you and Husserl correctly, the void, or “consciousness,” in Husserl’s case, is akin to Aristotle's hypokeimenon (often translated as the "underlying substance, though it is not substance in the sense the medieval used it). The hypokeimenon is the x that moves from potentiality to actuality. Except in Husserl, he throws in an extra twist in with the phenomenology. With phenomenology you are the boundary of your world, and the boundary of the world is you. You are in a certain respect responsible for the phenomena that your see. If I am understanding him correctly, this is why phenomena presents itself within a logical structure. Everything must be intelligible because I make it so.

Yet, you differ from Husserl by making it so the self is not responsible for the structuring, but your goddess of the void.

Part Two

18-Apr-2019 04:54:52 - Last edited on 18-Apr-2019 04:57:55 by Cthris

Dec

2023

Cthris

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Here’s my grievance. What is the need for potentiality? Aristotle first made the distinction between potentiality (dunamis) and actuality (entelecheia) to solve the riddle of how something could come from nothing—but since Aristotle, Kant has come along with his idealism and shown that the question of how something can come from nothing is not a question that should bother us because we cannot get beyond the veil of the phenomenal realm.

Nietzsche goes one step further and says the phenomenal realm is all illusion so who cares if it doesn’t make sense. If we really must answer the question of how something can come from nothing its useful to invent a fanciful tale that it says it is because it is by a thing’s will to power.

However, our friends the phenomenologist flip Nietzsche and hold that it is the phenomenal realm that is real; Sartre goes so far as to deny the existence of a noumenal realm. But if the phenomena realm is the “real” realm then once again you need to explain where all this stuff came from—requiring the actuality and potentiality distinction.

Not to go all meta on you or anything, but why not stop at Nietzsche? i.e. that Runescapes reality is all an illusion caused by things in the noumenal realm—the real world we live in. Its has far less metaphysical baggage.

Part Three--the end

Basically, my overall point is that the void is not the emptiest of empty's, and thus does not need to be understood as an extended empty idea in which infinite potentiality exists, and even if it were actually void of everything, but magically stuff got in it we don't need potentially to explain it, but we can chalk it up to the world of Runescape being an illusion, a product of artistic manifestation.

18-Apr-2019 04:55:15 - Last edited on 18-Apr-2019 05:08:45 by Cthris

AttilaSquare

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Hey, Cythris,

This thread’s been dead a long time, only to receive the strange grave bump above. I’ve reworked this account of the void on page 9 (and the first post of page 10) here . But I don’t want to pass up an opportunity to respond to your thoughts!

To your first objection, I agree! I would want to distinguish between the void as it is in itself - i.e. the abstract set of all possible forms of being - from the phenomenon we encounter in Summer’s End - which “is” the void severely “weakened,” i.e. concretized by the materiality of space, gravity, oxygen, others, etc. so that we have experience of it. The latter phenomenon is simply a pocket dimension, but a pocket dimension of a different sort than anything we had encountered before, e.g. the ZMI’s pocket in the abyss, the runecrafting altar pockets in the shadow realm. I relate it to the void because the void is the invisible, non-spatial aspect of reality to which this pocket’s unique ephemeral existence points. I explain why I think this is an acceptable approach to the episode in Summer’s End in the thread linked above.

So I agree with your second objection also.

18-Apr-2019 07:39:20 - Last edited on 18-Apr-2019 07:42:50 by AttilaSquare

AttilaSquare

Posts: 1,792 Mithril Posts by user Forum Profile RuneMetrics Profile

Cthris said :
If I am understanding you and Husserl correctly, the void, or “consciousness,” in Husserl’s case, is akin to Aristotle's hypokeimenon (often translated as the "underlying substance, though it is not substance in the sense the medieval used it). The hypokeimenon is the x that moves from potentiality to actuality.
Here I have to disagree with your reading of Husserl - this makes him out to be completely idealist. For Husserl, being and consciousness are always correlated, not actually but potentially - to be is to be capable, in principle, of being intended. It is not that the mind is being, or makes being, or renders being intelligible. Rather, intending something is simply always an achievement of consciousness - Husserl doesn’t trace the source of being’s intelligibility to a cause in the mind or the world.

For a nice introduction to Husserl’s formal ontology and its relation to Aristotelian concepts like hypokeimenon , I recommend Claudio Majolino’s essay in Andrea Staiti’s Commentary on Husserl’s Ideas I . (The collection also contains my one published academic article! But I recommend Majolino’s article on its own merits.)

18-Apr-2019 07:40:02

AttilaSquare

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Cthris said :
You are in a certain respect responsible for the phenomena that your see. If I am understanding him correctly, this is why phenomena presents itself within a logical structure. Everything must be intelligible because I make it so.

Yet, you differ from Husserl by making it so the self is not responsible for the structuring, but your goddess of the void.
So, yes and no. Consciousness does not create the intelligibility of being; consciousness constitutes it - “constitutes” is Husserl’s way of describing the function of consciousness in figuring out being, so to speak, without ascribing to it any causal role. He would not say that consciousness is the reason for phenomena possessing logical structure but rather that possessing logical structure belongs to being itself, as does being’s necessary correlation to constitutive acts of consciousness.

To contrast Husserl with Kant, Husserl denies the existence of any thing-in-itself behind phenomena. There are only acts of consciousness and the world, strictly and essentially correlated. This doesn’t mean that the world wouldn’t exist without my consciousness. But it does mean that a world unconstitutable by acts of consciousness is simply an unthinkable world, a confused concept to be dismissed by phenomenology.

Regarding the concept of a Goddess of the Void, which hasn’t featured in my more recent thought on the void, I don’t ascribe to her any causal role either. She would have been merely the divine personality associated with the abstract set of all possible forms of being.

18-Apr-2019 07:40:39 - Last edited on 18-Apr-2019 15:24:35 by AttilaSquare

AttilaSquare

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Regarding your third post, I think I’ve provided most of an answer. By abstracting from any causal explanation in favor of description, Husserl’s phenomenology has very little metaphysical baggage, but also offers no answer to traditional metaphysical questions. I haven’t really tackled the question in RuneScape of “Why does anything exist at all?” (except in a short thread on a hypothetical “tier 0” “being” some years ago). How I don’t want to answer that question is with anything like Nietzsche’s unfalsifiable “everything is will to power.” I’d like my ultimate metaphysical claims to proceed from careful description and to be open to some form of intersubjective criticism. But I haven’t really gotten that far.

I do hope to write up another thread soon drawing together all my recent planar theory and magic theory in a few principles. That could set me up to address the metaphysical question you’re asking.

Thanks for your comments here!

18-Apr-2019 07:41:04 - Last edited on 18-Apr-2019 15:25:22 by AttilaSquare

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The Void & Goddess of the Void