With the Benefit of Hindsight [Lady's Library, Morning 0]

[Akh Uur Hoon]

"More like someone unaffiliated with institutional academia but maintaining a scholarly bend in trying to resolve certain dilemmas." The woman smiled gently. "Mostly because of being oblivious to or incapable of any other ways of finding such resolutions."

The tattoo lines on her wrist receded underneath the sleeve. Ahk Uur Hoon spoke in hushed tone but her words were losing none of their intelligibility as if she was very used to whispering.

"The probability you speak of, do you perceive it as an outcome of our ignorance of otherwise deterministic laws of the Planes, or uncertain potentiality as being their intrinsic feature? If you suddenly found the divine equation of everything in this current moment, would it be temporally invariant, or obsolete in a blink of an eye?"

She sighed, but there was something out-of-rhythm about her exhale.

"This is something I struggle with." She pressed the cover of the grimoire a bit, as if it had the tendency to self-open when unsupervised. "That whatever I read about might have been correct at the moment of writing, but no longer is. That time itself frustrates all our efforts."

[Dare Shah]

"I would say that the research, or even the existence, of absolute truth is the domain of philosophers, while scientists content themselves with lies good enough to be worked with. I guess you're familiar with the tale of the relativist and the tomato?

Once upon a time there was a sage who would make lengthy speeches about how everything was a lie, how nothing could actually be predicted. They liked very much to start from the simple example of an apple dropping from a tree, and delve into how the apple actually didn't fall down with a constant acceleration until it reached the ground, how every word of that statement was void of meaning in absolute, a peculiar theoretical example assuming a simplified to the extreme reality that only existed in children books.

Then, one day, as they were discoursing, someone threw a ripped tomato at them. A sloppy curve throw they had no difficulty avoiding.

‘Why did you move wise one?’ asked someone in the audience.
‘Well, I would have been hit I hadn't,’ answered the sage.
‘And how did you know where the tomato's course will end?’

And, humbled, the sage has to admit that, while the laws of ballistics were indeed white lies for children, they were still quite useful when your immediate concern was material discomfort."

[Akh Uur Hoon]

The woman nodded slowly, recognising the philosophical position the lady was coming from. The point made had its merits, enough for many to argue that one could be agnostic about any truth in claims made as long as they had practical vindication. She could offer a variety of rejoinders, but since the argument turned anecdotal, she toed the line.

“To that, I can offer a story as well. There was a man who sat each day looking out through a narrow opening where a single board had been removed from a tall wooden fence. Each day an ass passed outside the fence and across the opening — first the nose, then the head, the forelegs, the long brown back, the hind legs, and lastly the tail. One day, the man leaped to his feet with the light of discovery in his eyes and he shouted for all who could hear him: “It is obvious! The nose causes the tail!”

[Dare Shah]

This debate was a classic, but it still amused Dare to rehearse it yet another time:

"And when a flea loses all its legs, it becomes deaf. Classic cautionary tales about building up a theory from a single source of data. And I don't disagree that, was someone to perceive the real nature of the fabric of the universe, they would likely find our takes on reality at least as absurd as the ones in these stories.

However, I'm fine with not knowing certain things. If you indeed were to hand me the equation of everything, but I was unable to solve it, even partially, I would be no better than the instant prior. Inherent truthfulness does not equate usefulness, superior knowledge is not necessarily actionable.

To take another common example, it would do me little good knowing if we're living in a prime reality or a simulated one. On the other hand, were I to build a model able to predict thunderstorms 99.9% of the time, even if the logic behind it was for all purpose a chimeric donkey-flea monstruosity, there would still be a lot of people happy with the result."

[Akh Uur Hoon]

"Pragmatism can be a virtue." Akh Uur Hoon conceded, seeing no purpose to argue. In the end, she was also after what worked, even if in her case 'It's there.' was more desirable than 'Such things can be roughly there most of the time'. Staying in the philosopher's cave inferring elegant lines from murky shapes on the wall wasn't something she thought could carry her forth. "As long as we don't abstract it into something with dogmas?"

[Dare Shah]

"Avoiding those is sadly more easier said than done. Models are based on axioms, and axioms are by definition arbitrary and taken for granted.

There's definitely the caveat of a good enough model turning into a dogma, a poison disrupting progress by actively fighting newer, more accurate models."

The noble didn't seem particularly bothered by that potential bad outcome:

"Compromises, always. Would you happen to play chess, in particular blitz chess?"

[Akh Uur Hoon]

"Not as a habit. I can't promise being a challenging opponent." The other woman responded, but her reluctance to posture wasn't a reluctance to play.

[Dare Shah]

"It would be a pleasure to play with you, but I confess I was mostly introducing yet another metaphor.

Blitz is a format that is controversial among the best players but that I personally like because of the skills it encourages cultivating. It's all about managing rightfully the very little time you have on the clock, knowing when to invest precious seconds in a more careful examination of the position at hand and when to play the obvious move without a second thought. A constant balance between quality and efficiency. Play excessively quickly, and you lose to a stupid mistake. Play excessively slowly, and you lose by the clock. Find the right middle path and victory might be yours.

My view on science mirrors that game. I don't know for you, but I'm not eternal, and sacrifices have to be made if I want to have anything worth it to leave behind on my deathbed."

[Akh Uur Hoon]

Akh Uur Hoon nodded slowly, matching the perspective against its wider ramifications for a moment, perhaps manifesting her own different reference point to the demands of time without making admissions. "Eternity is a problematic concept anyway. If time is fundamental and even laws of nature subject to it and evolve then neither is your mortal fate endowed with easy finality as elements of you shall continue under a different configuration, nor will whatever you leave behind maintain the expected worth. If it is an illusion, a simulation if you will, the worry of one's own mortality and the related hurry are... less pressing?"

She sighed again, and it sounded... optional.

"Really dying might be as hard as leaving a legacy. But you might be right about the metaphor in one crucial aspect: regardless of the nature of time, there is a possibility of losing in the game of life because of bad choices, in both action and inaction."

[Dare Shah]

"Chess is a game that ends when one of the players concede or when one of them cannot take any more move. As to whether the later means defeat or a draw, please refer to the rulebook. It depends of the variant of chess played, and has no inherent logic to it.

Sadly, we don't have access to life's ow rulebook to check what exact conditions need to be fulfilled for winning it. That's one more unknown we have to work with. At best can we infer that as long as we can act we haven't technically lost.

As for the nature of time... I would say that whether or not life is a cycle and we'll get other opportunities at it, in this world or in another, is yet another question that's mostly purely philosophical. I treat my own mortality as a critical deadline, before which I need to have gotten a certain number of things done.

If it turns to be a soft deadline, and I have more time to do more things beyond that, all the better. But what I've done before it expires won't be lost. And it's not even sure I would have done nearly as much without said deadline encouraging me to push as many dreams as possible through the horn gates before my time runs out.

In other words, betting on a time extension is a bad student's habit."