Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-32182236-20190721003717/@comment-32182236-20200110024856

I do think Undertale has a story. I haven't found any contradictions in the game itself. In people's models? Yes. But in the actual game itself? No.

FNAF? I did point out some contradictions, and even stated that AFH is the closest you could get to a 100% accurate theory. (Though you have helped resolve apparent contradictions. You must just be the one that inspires me to come back to FNAF, and actually make theories over at the FNAF wiki.)

I stated that contradictions are the reason why I gave up on FNAF. If I spotted contradictions in Undertale, I'd probably soon give up on that too, if they didn't get resolved. But I didn't. Everything makes sense. Some mysteries haven't been solved, but there are ways that things can work. I have yet to prove the same proposition both true AND false.

And yes, a finished jigsaw puzzle has no contradictions. So if there are contradictions, either you put the puzzle together wrong, or there is no puzzle (And we should try to put it together other ways, rather than assuming the latter. This is why I only have a problem when the game contradicts itself, not my hypothesis.)

Have you read my other two parts yet, Ferret? I hope you have. I wonder what you have to say about them..

Now to help Jacky out. Or not. Really I'm just responding to your response.

The idea is that if you try every possiblity, you will eventually, inevitably, stumble across the pattern that works, without contradictions. The Perfect Pattern. Sometimes it takes a very long process of trial and error to make a breaththrough this way, which is why I like to call the technique Reverse Engineering a story, but eventually it does work.

Indeed. This is why brute-forcing exists. Though you really will have to look at ALL of them. There might be multiple candidates after all, and in that case, you'll have to put the survivors under the razor.

Just remember if you prove the same proposition true and false under a given branch, that branch is dead.

How do you know when you've found the pattern, or at least a few pieces that fit together? When a coherent story starts to emerge. Just like how a few jigsaw pieces show a glimpse of the picture they were made from.

Define what that actually means. I only see so far as "no contradictions have yet appeared". Which IS a reason to keep investigating, and if it's too complex at first, we should come back to it if the alternatives either don't work, or do but end up more conplex than our original "complex" take...

Consider this: The more pieces that fit into a given pattern, the more likely it is that that pattern isn't random, but actually was part of the artist's design.

Or a result of neccesity based on the laws of the world in question. ALL triangles have a totle of 180 degrees in angles (given that space is flat). This is not random. But does that mean some intelligent designer made it so? NO.

This is just like rejecting the idea that snowflakes are natural because of the complexity they form in, that is nigh-impossible to happen by chance (it's actually less than the probability of a functioning protien of forming by chance via random amino acids).

So are snowflakes intelligently designed?

If, by refining a partially working pattern, you're able to account for more of the puzzle pieces, then you're heading in the right direction.

Not if you're completely ignoring other pieces that are in direct confliction with it, or reach the case where a gap requires two pieces to be in the exact same location! (ie:It requires something to have both happened and NOT happened)

Let's say you take something seemingly chaotic like FNAF, and are able to create a story that is not only interesting, but has a moral message as well, does not rely on any Artist Mistakes, and seemlessly accounts of 95% of the puzzle pieces you've discovered.

It's still wrong, because it conflicts with the other 5%. Just like Newtonian mechanics was still wrong because it failed to account for small anomalies within data, like slightly inaccurate predictions of Mercury's orbit.

What are the odds that this design was not, in fact, the artist's intention, but an alternative solution where all the pieces still fit well, that was spawned out of pure chaotic chance?

Why can't it be neither? Why can't it be the result of having a faulty premise, but using correct logic? For instance, the 95% comes from proper analysis, but because you assumed that an object is a Chekhov's Gun, rather than just a random item, you were grought towards a oath that conflicted with the other 5%, now you messed up, and that also influenced how you percieved the other 95%, coming up with alternative explanations.

Suppose I fire darts randomly, and then paint a target at the spot with the densest collection of darts. Am I a good shooter? No. Was the fact that I hit an abormally large number of bullseyes random? No, because I picked the target after firing.

Randomness and intelligent design aren't the only two possibilities. (And with natural and/or artificial selection on our side, we can do far less "random" things, all without a need for a designer.)

And the better your pattern gets, accounting for more, and more, and MORE of the pieces, which now seem to be drawn toward the greater assembly as if by a magnet, falling into place with increasing rapidity, the greater the chance that you're also on the right track. And the lower the chance that this is all in your imagintion.

Oh. So it didn't conflict with the other 5% at all. Only didn't explain them. That is different. Then it is indeed a Working Theory. Now to see if we can find other Working Theories, and them compare them all against each other via Occam's Razor!

Finally, when one finds a pattern that accounts for all the pieces, that fit together seemlessly, and tell an epic story out of details that once seemed impossible to understand, it's just like seeing the finished picture on a jigsaw puzzle.

At that point, it's a Working Theory. Thus, it is now a definite possibility (rather than simply "possibly possible"). But how probably actually is it? We need to search for the alternatives, and see if we get a more probable working theory.

The chance of this being a random pattern that the artist didn't intend is now Zero.

Hopefully you'll realize by now that you present a false dicotomy.

The pattern we ended up with is just as "random" as evolution, after taking natural selection into account.

Actually, evolution is a very good analogy for this, since backtracking never once happened in this process.

It doesn't matter how you find The Perfect Pattern, or how many limbs you have to go out on in order to assemble it piece by careful piece. Once you *have* The Perfect Pattern, you can submit it as a real, logical answer.

You're assuming that there's just ONE. It would be a really good thing if there really is just one, but we can't just assume there's only one.

We can definitely present it as evidence, but we can't call it a FACT. Just like we didn't call the hypothetical Highs boson a fact until we actually discovered it.

But it's by building and refining these increasingly more probable webs that I come by my answers. And once The Perfect Pattern emerges, people are hard pressed to disprove it.

Of COURSE we try to disprove it. That's what scientists DO. We have a main model that seems to be the best explanation, but the best thing to do is now to try as hard as we can to disprove it. If it's true, the attempts will fail, and we've just made it stronger, so our attempts did a good thing. And if it's false, then we may suceed in disproving it, allowing us to get one step closer to the truth.

So YES. Once a theory becomes the main model, we try as hard as we can to debunk it. That's how we do science. It's the only way we can progress. It's how we proved Newtonian physics wrong in the first place.

So it's a good thing that we do that.