Zero Sum Reconsidered. Part Two: Mantling The Amaranth

I wanted to take a long hard look at the concept of Zero Sum and maybe challenge some common assumptions on the subject. In Part One I looked at the in-lore source of the concept which turns out to be a single out-of-game MK post et'Ada, Eight Aedra, Eat the Dreamer That's way too much to keep typing, so I'm going to refer to it as "Eat the Dreamer" or "EtD" hereafter. The document records a "spore-dream" from an evaporating Moth Priest who had reached Zero Sum. If you haven't, you might to read Part One and/or EtD before proceeding.

Things We Know, Suspect and Doubt

So, having examined the source material in some detail, there are some things we can say for sure, some that seem strongly hinted at, and there are some generally accepted notions that now seem open to question.

We Know:

  • That reaching Zero Sum involves the loss of the physical body, apparently by evaporation

  • That there is no retroactive erasure from existence. The Moth Priest's testimony would not exist if that were the case

  • That reaching zero sum entails some sort of devastating revelation as to the nature of reality. Not only does the disintegrating Moth Priest have some insight he feels he must share, but when that insight is properly expressed as music, the listeners experience the same discorporation. It seems unlikely that this is coincidental

We May Suspect:

  • That rather than being a failure mode, Zero Sum is a state desired by many. The EtD rubric describes it as the work of a Moth Priest "who reached zero sum". As if they had been striving to attain that goal. And in fact we might imagine from the casual phrasing that many similarly strive, and that this particular priest is just one of those who succeeded.

  • That rather than being erased, there is an expansion of the mind. The tone of EtD suggests the narrator is being bombarded by new ideas, coming one after the other faster than he can narrate. We might assume that he was overwhelmed by this, except that from the depths of verbal incoherence he suddenly transitions to music and expresses the idea perfectly. As if he had only just realised how this might be accomplished. Even the title "Eat The Dreamer" suggests a degree of expansion. If you do devour the Dreamer, must you not then be large enough to encompass Everything?

We May Question:

  • Any connection to CHIM. While both states revolve around a fundamental shift in how the seeker perceives the universe, the ideas behind them would seem to be different. For CHIM the insight is that the world is a dream. The Moth Priest's message however seems to be that existence itself is flawed and that decreation is not to be feared. This isn't to say that seekers after CHIM might never zero sum unintentionally. In seeking to understand the dreamlike nature of reality, it's conceivable that some may have stumbled across the Moth Priest's insight instead, with the same result. But I don't think there's any necessary correspondence between the two.

As a side point, non-existence being nothing to fear finds an echo in one of Dagoth Ur's dream sendings: "Who knows what we might be capable of once we no longer fear death?" Voryn Dagoth has a track record of starting from a flawed assumption and coming to correct conclusions before going on to propose a terribly wrong solution. In this case his solution to the fear of death is that everyone should merge with him. But much as he got half the truth of CHIM, suppose he also got half the truth of zero sum as well?

I'll come back to that.

What other sources are there?

Almost none. There are no more in-lore references with which to work. However, we may be able to draw some inferences from the term itself: "zero sum."

My initial assumption was that the term referred to Games Theory. A zero sum game is one in which, simply put, for one player to win another must lose. In a zero sum game there is no gain that can be made without a corresponding lose from someone else.

But there other ways to look at it. In Latin "ego sum" means "I am", or "I am me" depending on context. So "zero sum" could be taken to mean "I am nothing", as in the willing abnegation of self. In our reality, Buddhism has a term for that state: they call it Nirvana. When you erase the notion of the self, you destroy all barriers between "YOU" and "NOT YOU". By becoming Nothing, you become Everything. Zero sum.

There's also the mathematical approach. /u/sothas did some interesting work on this in Zero-Sum, Amaranth, and Possibilities. Taking those ideas a little further, we can write this:

1 + -1 = 0

The numbers sum to zero. Zero sum.

We can map those numbers onto some of the ideas from EtD. If we take "I AM NOT" as active negation of existence then we can write the following:

"I AM" = 1
"I AM NOT" = -1

"I AM" + "I AM NOT" = 0 -> zero sum

Similarly:

Anui-El = "I AM"
Sithis = "I AM NOT"

Anui-El + Sithis = 0 -> zero sum

The last point is interesting. Anui-El and Sithis cancelling one another out represent the ultimate decreation. Rolling back the first creational subgradient to the Godhead itself. Everything ceases to exist. We all become God. Zero sum.

Or as /u/sothas put it:

> Zero is the ultimate state of possibility. Amaranth is the zero sub-gradient. Zero-sum is returning to that state of possibility within the Dream.

Putting it all together.

My initial inspiration for this article was the idea that instead of being annihilated by the immensity of The All, maybe the zero-summer could merge with it. That perhaps instead of a shameful, disastrous game over, that to zero sum was the Ultimate High. A single eternal moment of "Oh, Wow!"

Maybe that's so. The Moth Priest's apparently expanding mentality would certainly seem to support that interpretation.

That said, I believe there is a deeper meaning to be grasped. The Moth Priest's testimony strongly rejects Aka's Time as being a mistake born of fear. The suggestion seems to be that the Time Dragon does not want his own existence end and so coils in on himself, swallowing his own tail and endlessly devouring himself, endlessly renewing, endlessly looping back on himself. And in doing so, he traps the souls of mortals to be endlessly recycled through the Dreamsleeve, trapped in the flow of time and denied the reunion with the Godhead that is their right. It's a profoundly Padomaic idea, deeply subversive ... and yet who is to say it is not correct?

When Dagoth Ur said "Who knows what we might be capable of once we no longer fear death", perhaps he understood the need for everyone to ultimately merge themselves with the Dreamer. His only error was in supposing the Dreamer to be himself. (And of course, that is how his followers refer to him: "The Dreamer Is Awake!")

In Conclusion

In our world there is a philosophy that holds that the Creator deliberately sundered Himself into countless tiny shards, and that each shard descended into Creation to become a mortal soul. Supposedly it is therefore the duty of each of us to raise their consciousness to the point where we can each in turn merge once again with Divinity so that the Creator can fully understand what it is to be Mortal.

So maybe this is what Zero Sum seeks to do. A brute force approach to that reunion with the Godhead, a shortcut perhaps made necessary by the Tyranny of Time, whereby Aka holds all of us hostage against his own dissolution.

Maybe to Zero Sum really is to Mantle the Amaranth.

Thank you for your attention. I'll take questions from the audience, following which coffee and biscuits may be consumed.