Why Ishamael is wrong: The Nature of the Pattern and the Dark One

[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 thread (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.

 

[Eluial Aldaran]

Like I said in the other thread, I love it (and thanks for doing a full write up). I want to think about it for a while and come back with nit picks (because every great theory deserves to be tested, yes?). For now, just one minor thing:

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.

I think it might be more accurate to say there is both only one last battle AND an infinite number of last battles. It's a bit like relativity -- what the truth is just depends on where you're looking in from.

I can't remember the exact quote from Ishmael, but I believe he was referring to the battle between the champions (himself and the dragon) and not necessarily the last battle itself (or maybe he was conflating those two, since he was pretty delusional), in which case he'd definitely be right, because from the PoV of souls inside the pattern, it has happened many, many times (perhaps even actually an infinite number, like he says, though my brain goes ouch when I try to really think about infinity). But even if it was a reference to the last battle itself, he'd still be sort of right (if you buy what I said above).

 

[Aulrick Vendour]

That is AWESOME!
Really, it's great. Meaning the DO doesn't fight multiple times, but one fight...

BUT, and here's where I think you got things wrong: if it's always the same fight, then the DO indeed feels time and fights new fights all the time. It's just that what's ages for humans is meaningless to him. Here's why:

Filled with the Power, standing in a column of light, Rand pulled the Dark One into the Pattern. Only here was there time. Only here could the Shadow itself be killed.

In that moment, the DO felt time. That moment is enough to seperate this fight from others, and make each fight unique. The DO feels time, knows this is a new fight, then is sent back to timeless space. Once there, he attacks the same spot again, because time is again meaningless and he therefor needs not wait, there is no such thing as waiting. But he CAN seperate the fights, because he is pulled back to the pattern each time.
When Rand first meets the DO, the Shadow recognizes him as his nemesis. He names him so. If there had been but one fight which the DO couldn't seperate from others, that shouldn't have been possible.

I REALLY like this theory, but it's conclusion is, I think, wrong. It's true that the DO doesn't feel the passage of time between fights. He attacks, is defeated, and attacks the same spot again, endlessly. The ages are only felt by the people in the pattern. But he does understand that it's a different attack each time, since he is pulled into the pattern each time, then sent back. Which means he has a count of battles, related to the time in the pattern.

 

[MuKen]

Thanks both of you! And I certainly welcome any criticism and discussion that you come up with from reading through this.

I think it might be more accurate to say there is both only one last battle AND an infinite number of last battles. It's a bit like relativity -- what the truth is just depends on where you're looking in from.

Yes that's a good way to put it, it is 1 battle from the outside, but infinitely many from the inside.

In that moment, the DO felt time. That moment is enough to seperate this fight from others, and make each fight unique. The DO feels time, knows this is a new fight, then is sent back to timeless space. Once there, he attacks the same spot again, because time is again meaningless and he therefor needs not wait, there is no such thing as waiting. But he CAN seperate the fights, because he is pulled back to the pattern each time.

The problem with this reasoning is that you are putting together a sequence of events, that includes portions where there are time, and portions where there are no time. This is fundamentally untenable. "No time" doesn't mean "time is frozen" or "time is infinitely small", it means exactly that: NO time. It means that the very concept of a sequence of events does not exist. He cannot experience a last battle, then be sent back to timelessness, then experience another last battle, and so on in that order, because those concepts are incompatible and cannot be sequenced.

There was a last battle or last battles, and there's two distinct and incompatible perspectives you can view it from. From the inside, it is part of a huge cycle of time. From the outside, there is no sequence, there is a single picture of all existence and every part of all of the events in the wheel, unchanging and static.

In the first view, we follow the laws of the wheel as stated by RJ in one of his interviews (I'm paraphrasing here) "every turning looks the same from afar, but if you look closely at the details, you can see variations". So there are multiple Last Battles in a neverending cycle, but the DO starts fresh in each one and does roughly the same thing, because he got to all of them at once by touching the Wheel in one place.

In the second view, there's a wheel-like object, and a mass of "Dark One" outside of it. That mass touches that wheel in one place in what represents a failed attempt to break it. This picture cannot change, because "change" is a concept that only relates to time, which does not exist in this view.

When Rand first meets the DO, the Shadow recognizes him as his nemesis. He names him so. If there had been but one fight which the DO couldn't seperate from others, that shouldn't have been possible.

That's under an assumption that the DO's knowledge only comes from learning by from experience the way we do. If that were the case, then where he first touched that Pattern DO would have been a complete retard, basically a newborn baby from having had no prior experiences at all. How would he have conversed with anyone and convinced them to join his side? The DO knows what he knows about the nature of the universe, and is capable of recognizing his fundamental opponent in this battle. He knows this the same way the Creator knows things, he just does because that is in their nature.

 

[Aulrick Vendour]

Well, this is confusing...
I understand the problem of mixing time with timelessness, but what other choice do we have? Once he's inside the pattern, time has meaning for him. How do we escape that? Once he's thrown back to timelessness, does he not have a memory of this battle against Rand? Or is it that he doesn't have memories at all? Or that he cannot say if what he knows is past, present or future? Or I suppose he doesn't know what past, present and future mean... But then how can he have an understanding of himself?

 

[MuKen]

Well, this is confusing...
I understand the problem of mixing time with timelessness, but what other choice do we have? Once he's inside the pattern, time has meaning for him. How do we escape that? Once he's thrown back to timelessness, does he not have a memory of this battle against Rand? Or is it that he doesn't have memories at all? Or that he cannot say if what he knows is past, present or future? Or I suppose he doesn't know what past, present and future mean... But then how can he have an understanding of himself?

My view on it is that there's no such thing as memory outside of the Pattern. These things are products of time, you can't have a memory unless there is a past and there is no past unless there is time. To our sensibilities, in the timelessness outside the Pattern, the Dark One is just a concept, the embodiment of the raw idea of doing evil. To his sensibilities there is more to it than that, but whatever more there is is not something we as linear-time-experiencing beings can understand. Just like you cannot truly understand God in our world (no I'm not religious, but the WoT world clearly is).

He became anthropomorphized into a being that we can interact with BECAUSE of human beings boring through reality itself to touch this concept into the flow of time. Once the idea of evil began to experience time, it of course became someone that wants to perpetuate evil. But this being was drawn from a place of timelessness into one point of an infinitely revolving wheel, and then ejected about 1-2 ages later. From his point of view, he hit every revolution at once, because from his perspective, until he got there, there weren't multiple revolutions, just one wheel. So to us, the conscious being of the Dark One is in fact only conscious for 1-2 ages of the cycle, and each one is essentially a separate experience for that consciousness, because they were all "born" and "died" simultaneously.

To put it into terms as close as possible to a human experience, imagine you were suddenly copied (complete with consciousness and memories), and each copy was sent to a parallel universe for a fixed period, then all the copies were torn out of those universes and merged back together. Now adjust that so that all those parallel universes are actually far apart times in one universe that is cyclic. (In fact, you can kind of think of the revolutions of the wheel as parallel universes themselves...). That's kind of what the Dark One went through in his time living as a time-experiencing being.

 

[Aulrick Vendour]

Sorry, the whole copies thing really makes no sense to me. Once the seals were broken the DO was free. If there were more then one when Rand pulled him into the pattern, then why didn't the free one living out side time attack this spot at the same time?

On the most basic level, there will be a problem to explain, in theory, how someone moves from timelessness to timing and back again.

 

[MuKen]

Sorry, the whole copies thing really makes no sense to me.

Don't take the copies-concept literally, that was just a model to try to explain the DO's experience in terms parallel to something we might experience. I was not saying there actually were copies of the DO.

The DO is present in the Pattern at every 2-3rd age of the turning, and the actions he takes are all mirrors of the same presence across the turnings. He can't "carry over" what he learns from one to the next and change what he does, because they are all the same event of the DO touching the Wheel in one place. In each turning, the DO starts off with exactly the same knowledge and memories (that is to say, no memories), sees a similar situation, and reacts to that situation the same way, because they are all the same event of the DO touching the Wheel at that point. He can't know something new in the next turning leftover from the last one, because his presence in the next turning stems from the same event of him touching the Wheel as the last one did. They don't follow each other in sequence because he didn't touch the Wheel multiple times. He only touched it in one place.

The part of the DO that is outside the Pattern simply "sees" one point of contact, where he touches the Wheel and fails to break it. The part of the DO that is anthropomorphized and sees time from inside the Pattern the way we do is enacting the same age the same way infinitely just like the rest of the Pattern wihch follows the flow of the turning Wheel's time.

On the most basic level, there will be a problem to explain, in theory, how someone moves from timelessness to timing and back again.

That's exactly the point, it only goes "back again" from our perspective. From the outside-the-pattern perspective there is no back and forth, because there is no time. There is one state of the universe, and that is it, that's what it means to be timeless. And in that state, there is a Wheel, and a Dark One that is touching the Wheel at one very specific area, and that touch is failing to break the wheel. That's all there is, and it will never change because there is no time to change in.

It can't be grasped if you look at what happens outside the pattern and try to explain it in terms of a linear-time being's mindset. Why doesn't the DO "remember" this, why doesn't the DO "react" this way to that event? These are concepts that only exist because of time, a timeless being doesn't react to things, and doesn't learn things.

 

[AnAnonymousWOTFan]

But MuKen, he clearly remembers Rand. I don't have the book with me, but he says in the prologue of LoC, "done by my ancient enemy, the one called Dragon" or something of that nature. He has experienced Rand's presence before, has memory of him before, and so your theory falls apart. The DO MUST, by this evidence, experience time in some sense. Perhaps it is not time in the traditional fashion, the context we know and the people of the Pattern know, but it is there. There is some form of linearity, or the DO would not call Rand an "ancient" enemy.

As has been pointed out, the DO has experienced time at some point. The copies analogy does not make any sense - when merging back with the whole, some part of the DO has experienced time, at least.

Something linear must occur for Rand to even interact with the DO. If we extrapolate your argument, then we end up saying that the whole battle with the Dark One occurred at a point in time - which it could not have, because Rand was at least partially anchored in the time of the Pattern. So we end up, by your theory, having a time-experiencing object interacting with one that has no time. Thus, one is interacting on a line where one is putting all those events into a single point. It is fundamentally incompatible. Since the DO is interacting with a thread of the Pattern (Rand) that has time, he too, must have time for the duration of the battle - which causes problems, as you said, for the rest of the theory.

 

[MuKen]

But MuKen, he clearly remembers Rand. I don't have the book with me, but he says in the prologue of LoC, "done by my ancient enemy, the one called Dragon" or something of that nature. He has experienced Rand's presence before, has memory of him before, and so your theory falls apart.

I never said he doesn't experience time at all, quite the contrary I said he experiences time for exactly the period where he was in contact with the pattern. But not for the period after Rand sealed it. That's enough two have seen TWO incarnations of the Dragon (Rand and LTT). Given these incarnations lived thousands of years apart, this is more than sufficient to call him an "ancient enemy". And it is possible there was a less significant breach in the pattern even pre-dating the Bore, or else how were Lanfear and Beidomon able to sense the True Power on the other side? Possibly there has been a 'hole' of varying strength from some accident in the age before the AoL, and the bore just widened it.

Either way, the DO experienced time for a very long period.

Something linear must occur for Rand to even interact with the DO.

Something linear did happen, I thought I made that very clear. Some part of the DO is operating on linear time during the whole time he is touching the pattern.

If we extrapolate your argument, then we end up saying that the whole battle with the Dark One occurred at a point in time

I am not saying it is a single point, I am saying it is the entire time there was a Bore (maybe longer, as I said above), which is a lot longer than a single point. My point is that he only experiences time for the period he is able to touch the Pattern. Once Rand ejects him completely from the Pattern, he does not.

 

[Aulrick Vendour]

I dunno. I think we're looking at this whole "timelessness" idea in the wrong way.
I think that it's not that he's unaware of time, it's just that he doesn't feel it's effects. He knows that within the pattern there IS time, and things change, and he has memories of things that are past attempts to penetrate the wheel. But he is uneffected by time in the sense that he is eternal, much like the elves in LotR. He doesn't grow old, his memories never fade, he just is. And so he's dragged into the pattern and feels time, or feel it when he touches the world to communicate with his minions, and so on, but this to him is a continual state. While for humans it seems like thousands of years past, for him it's just continual state. He's ALWAYS talking to his minions, knowing that for them there is time, but he keeps doing it over and over, aware of time yet uneffected by it.

 

[MuKen]

If you read again the beginning of Chapter 34, where Rand first exited the Pattern, you will see that Rand had to anchor himself to the Pattern in order for time "to have meaning." As soon as he began to leave it, he began to get "sucked" away, and if he allowed that he would have ceased to exist as Rand, because Rand is a linear-time-based conscious being. He wouldn't be able to continue to be Rand without time.

Not being connected to the Pattern removes the "meaning" of time (exact quoted word). That would imply a lot more than how you are saying we should interpret timelessness.

 

[Aulrick Vendour]

Not really. The word "meaning" can be seen in many ways, one of the more basic ones is how I've described it - the effects are meaningless, but that doesn't mean one is unaware of what time is, or can't understand it's effect on others.

 

[MuKen]

Not really. The word "meaning" can be seen in many ways, one of the more basic ones is how I've described it - the effects are meaningless, but that doesn't mean one is unaware of what time is, or can't understand it's effect on others.

What you are considering the "effect" of time is arbitrarily selective. You say he doesn't get "old", his memories don't "fade". But a memory in the first place IS an effect of time. You have to be affected by time to obtain a memory. You have to be affected by time to even have an experience.

The way you are thinking about the DO's actions describes a person who is affected by time, just not a person who shares OUR time. The model you are describing isn't really a model of "timelessness". It is of an immortal figure living in a separate timeline, from which he can see the entirety of our timeline and enter various parts of our timeline and then return to his own. But that's not what was told to us, we are told he doesn't experience time outside the Pattern, not that he has his own separate timeline.

In fact they say it even more plainly than that. If you read the victory scene again, it's written clearly "Only here (the Pattern) is there time." It's not "Only here is the DO touched by time" but that time only EXISTS here in the Pattern.

 

[Aulrick Vendour]

Are you saying the DO is brought into the pattern, but he's not influenced by time despite of it? That sounds odd...

 

[MuKen]

No...as I said I'm saying the DO only experiences time in the Pattern, not when he's outside. What you are saying, which I'm disagreeing with, is that he is experiencing a separate timeline outside the Pattern that he moves back and forth from.

 

[AnAnonymousWOTFan]

I am not saying it is a single point, I am saying it is the entire time there was a Bore (maybe longer, as I said above), which is a lot longer than a single point. My point is that he only experiences time for the period he is able to touch the Pattern. Once Rand ejects him completely from the Pattern, he does not.

By this argument and summation, which I can accept, you must concede that, therefore, the DO is constantly going from battle to battle with 0 in-between time, rather than one singular battle.

 

[Eluial Aldaran]

Hmm. Let me try (and hope that I'm not mischaracterizing MuKen's argument too badly).

There are two perspectives you have to consider separately.

First is the DO's. For him, imagine that the wheel is like a pie chart on a piece of paper (mmm... pie. It's lunch time here.). A slice of that pie chart is the time from when the bore was drilled to when it was resealed good-as-new (roughly 3000 years). For this section of the pie chart, he is able to touch the wheel and therefore sense time. He has knowledge of the passing of 3000 years. For the rest of the pie chart, though, he senses no passing of time. So really, the only time he "lives" in any understandable-by-humans sense of the word is for those 3000 years (don't go all semantics on me, either, I'm being pretty loose with language here, because this is an inherently difficult topic to discuss).

But the thing is, for him, there is still only ONE pie.

Now zoom in to the mortals living out their lives IN the pattern. For them, the wheel keeps on turning. It is a very different reality. Humanity is doing laps around what is really just one track. However, because they're not reborn as exactly the same person every time, every lap is a little different for them.

The whole point is, you have two realities. One is the DO's and the other is that of everyone inside the pattern. They are different. And yet they are actually the same.

It's hard to conceptualize, but really, not much harder than the infinity of space or the number of atoms in the universe, or what it would be like to be a billionaire :P

Next topic: theoretical quantum mechanics!

 

[MuKen]

That's exactly right. The DO's situation is unique, he is the only entity that both was in the Pattern, and exists entirely outside the Pattern (Rand stayed anchored to the Pattern so he could continue to experience time). This view of being in time and out requires you to analyze it from two separate viewpoints. You can't combine them into saying "he did this in the pattern, then left, then came back and did this in the pattern", because that is a sequence of events, and a sequence of events only happens in time. A sequence of events cannot have portions that are timeless. Timeless does not mean "0 in-between time", it means timeless, as in cannot be described with terms that relate to time.

From the outside view, he touches the pie chart in a specific area, and that's all. There is no followup, because followups require time. That touch is either a breaking of the Wheel, or it is not. (It is not, that's what we saw). There are no redos.

That touch translates to a whole experience inside the Pattern, where the DO experiences time. BUT he experiences time according to the Wheel's rules, which are that there are an infinite set of repetitions of the same basic story of Rand beating the DO.

From the inside, you would say "The DO can't win because the Wheel forces the same thing to happen every time." Now someone might answer "But wait, the DO lives outside the Pattern and can defy the Wheel." Except that is not correct either, because outside the wheel, there is no repetition, the battle only happened once. It is only the Wheel that shows that same story from an infinite number of angles.

By this argument and summation, which I can accept, you must concede that, therefore, the DO is constantly going from battle to battle with 0 in-between time, rather than one singular battle.

So with what was just said in mind, where this is wrong is that he is not "going from battle to battle with 0 in-between time". Those battles are all the same touch being spun out. From the outside, it looks like he touched the Wheel and got beaten by the Dragon Soul. From the inside, in each battle the DO begins anew, he will not remember the previous battle. Because each battle stemmed from the same touching of the Wheel. It's not that the second battle stemmed from a touching followed by the first battle. They all stemmed from the touch, his experience is separate in each one, but will follow the same overall story because those are the rules under which you get to have multiple experiences at all. It is either one battle, or it is many battles that are bound by the Wheel to follow the same overall story.

 

[AnAnonymousWOTFan]

That's exactly right. The DO's situation is unique, he is the only entity that both was in the Pattern, and exists entirely outside the Pattern (Rand stayed anchored to the Pattern so he could continue to experience time). This view of being in time and out requires you to analyze it from two separate viewpoints. You can't combine them into saying "he did this in the pattern, then left, then came back and did this in the pattern", because that is a sequence of events, and a sequence of events only happens in time. A sequence of events cannot have portions that are timeless. Timeless does not mean "0 in-between time", it means timeless, as in cannot be described with terms that relate to time.

From the outside view, he touches the pie chart in a specific area, and that's all. There is no followup, because followups require time. That touch is either a breaking of the Wheel, or it is not. (It is not, that's what we saw). There are no redos.

That touch translates to a whole experience inside the Pattern, where the DO experiences time. BUT he experiences time according to the Wheel's rules, which are that there are an infinite set of repetitions of the same basic story of Rand beating the DO.

From the inside, you would say "The DO can't win because the Wheel forces the same thing to happen every time." Now someone might answer "But wait, the DO lives outside the Pattern and can defy the Wheel." Except that is not correct either, because outside the wheel, there is no repetition, the battle only happened once. It is only the Wheel that shows that same story from an infinite number of angles.



So with what was just said in mind, where this is wrong is that he is not "going from battle to battle with 0 in-between time". Those battles are all the same touch being spun out. From the outside, it looks like he touched the Wheel and got beaten by the Dragon Soul. From the inside, in each battle the DO begins anew, he will not remember the previous battle. Because each battle stemmed from the same touching of the Wheel. It's not that the second battle stemmed from a touching followed by the first battle. They all stemmed from the touch, his experience is separate in each one, but will follow the same overall story because those are the rules under which you get to have multiple experiences at all. It is either one battle, or it is many battles that are bound by the Wheel to follow the same overall story.

I am not saying he did this, then left, then did it again. To him, he did it, was sealed off and immediately began doing it again. Time has proceeded forward for Randlanders, and it must also for the DO. However, as you pointed out, there is no time in between.