to star items.

Accepted Paper

If We Knew Not What We Know (How Deities Create a Conflict-Based Order)   
Petr Sourek

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Suppose you do not know what you know. Exactly that is happening in Aeschylus's drama Agamemenon. The choir onstage is not able to understand a word of Cassandra. She had been given a gift of foreseeing the future (Troy's falling, Agamemnon's killing), yet this gift was poisoned.

Paper long abstract

Suppose you do not know what you know. Exactly this is happening in Aeschylus's drama Agamemnon. The choir onstage is not able to understand a word of Cassandra. She is been given a gift of foreseeing the future (Troy's falling, Agamemnon's killing), yet this gift was poisoned: nobody believed/ understood what she said. So she failed to persuade anyone before it was too late.

You may be tempted to think Cassandra is the essence of tragedy. But Cassandra is just a medium (of a message that never arrives on time to prevent the worst). The sense of tragedy develops between the audience and the choir. The audience understands Cassandra's warning but the choir (people's mirror on the stage) fails to grasp her words. The tension between knowing and not knowing, observing one's ignorant alter ego onstage is a tragedy.

Oracles none can understand, gods who prevent oracle apparatus from preventing the future. The deities and demons (bastard gods) plot incessantly against a resolution, they create conflict through this mirage of knowing the future nobody can get any grasp of. So for not knowing and not understanding their predicament, heroes only advance what they fear most.

It is a conflict-based order. The AI deities could create one, maliciously framing every possible rule-book and moral dictionary, beyond the AI-human alignment. Because there is actually no deities-human alignment. Deities are not about shared morals and values. Gods give poisoned gifts that make you wonder what if you knew what you did not.

Traditional Open Panel P106
The digital pantheon: Engineering deities and demons
  Session 2