Oooh, are you that guy on FFNET who called me an autistic douche? If so, thanks. That review was funny. I was mildly incredulous that someone had read fifteen chapters of the story with such a negative opinion of it. Seriously, why?
In any case, thanks for setting the tone here.
The truth is, integer math is basically counting.
No, it's a formal description of the process of counting. If the process of counting differs from that description, then what we call integer arithmetic isn't a meaningful representation of it.
If didn't exist, as in truly exist, then you end with its results being violated.
Of course the question is which results and how. For whatever reason, you seem to believe despite a tremendous amount of in-narrative evidence to the contrary the slightly different natural definition of what numbers are must perforce produce extravagant violations. Which it does; chakra exists there, and electrons certainly don't. Now, if you were to ask why the violations were subtle enough to produce a superficially similar world, that would actually be lucid. Insightful, though, would be asking why kaede ended up there, as opposed to the certainly vastly larget set of multiverses where things truly are incomprehensible.
'Cause, you know, this is a ratfic, and everything happens for a reason.
The concepts of integer math are even fundamentally present in human language.
Wrong. Only some human languages. The people in the linked article also interpret "half as much" as the square root of a quantity as opposed to the quantity divided by two. Likely for the same reason that an exponential increase in actual sound intensity is required for a linear increase in percieved intensity; our brain's "intuitive math" seems to be exponentially based.
This is basically a justification for saying " magic!" But it's not a rational one, despite your attempt to present it as such.
Allomancy in Sanderson's Mistborn series would seem a justification for magic if not fully explained, too, and it's considered a paragon of rational worldbuilding.
Even fully explained in naruto canon, Chakra remains "lol magic".
Given that I've never written a full explanation of the math that establishes it's uses and limits in the world you really have no basis for concluding that what I'm doing is canonical chakra instead of allomancy.
If you're wondering why I didn't, consider that six year olds don't typically have access to cutting edge natural philosophy and mathematics in a preindustrial, pre-mass-media society. They don't even typically have access in ours, given how shite the powers that be are at communicating it.
And thus, I choose to believe that something is still screwing with his head. Who knows, maybe that's just the result of having the residual brain damage from having your memories ripped out and your self fused with another person's whose mind's fundamental structures will not be compatible without some time for adjustment.
Who knows, indeed. Certainly not I, given the utter lack of forethought your model of me demonstrates.
I already started reading this story a while ago, but dropped because it was quite frankly, retarded.
Oh good, I'm relieved.
Your editing has made it better, but it's still obvious that you intend to use this "foreign" "logic" as a tool to make the story bend to your whims.
Yes, absolutely obvious. Of course. I've been shouting it from the bell towers. I decided to write a story that runs on magical realism, and then troll /r/rational by posting it here. Then, the supreme idiots of this community naturally upvoted me and agreed that this was a rational fic, albiet somewhat flawed. Then, instead of ending the charade, I accepted those flaws and committed to removing them, despite the fact that this would make my story more rational.
I'm just sneaky like that.
/s
It will be as much of a tool as any well-defined system of magic is. Namely, one exploitable by the enemy.
Because ultimately, if the statements by narrator were true and reliable, nothing in that world is conventionally predictable, and thus not rational because it's claimed to be so Alien as to be non-understandable.
You're conflating conceptually predictable with computationally model-able. Look, does chakra exist in our reality? No. If we studied the behaviour of chakra-inclusive physics in SR, somehow, could we write a model of it? Maybe. It depends on just what level of ultimate conceptual blindness humans are afflicted by. Do we have a veil of maya in our brains that prevents us from truly concieving of concepts not echoed in the nature of our universe? Then we are not ever going to be able to understand this. But, I doubt that this is the case. Assuming it isn't, irst you'd have to find someone willing to seriously develop meta-metamathematics enough to bootstrap the cognitive tools necessary to even talk about the formal system that describes SR Integer Arithmetic.
Say we do all of that. Could our computers run that model? Not in finite time, because Resian functions can at best only aproximate Telation, which is a fundamental operation.
What the fuck do I even mean by that? I mean, imagine Bullshite Aritmetic. It's like integer arithmetic, but every time you add a + b, you get a + b + 10-a * ln(b). a - b returns a - b. All other operations are undefined. In essence, we're talking a system of arithmetic where valid inputs to operations consist of ℤ and any previous outputs, which may well be in ℝ. Following? Great. Use this system to generate the answer to 2+4 under Integer Artihmetic in a finite number of steps.
10-4 = 6
Oh that was easy. Now, here's a new constraint: Your solution must contain an addition in any one of it's steps. Feel free to try this out. Remember that your answer must be computable in finite time, and provide exact results. As this is a formal system, you may not introduce a concept to the system without defining that concept in terms of the system. In particular, the following is impossibru:
unless you can somehow define floor().
Okay, I just pulled that example out of nothing, so it may well be possible. It does, however, give an essential feel for the problem. In Bullshite Arithmetic, you have an operation which approximates addition very well. And if we ever decided to write a full model of SR, we could approximate telation very well. Symbolically, we could understand exactly what it does. Computationally, inputs and outputs of our running a telation would never satisfy the equality telResApprox = telSR. And that is where the problem is. If you can't get exact results from a fundamental operation, you're screwed because computation of the model ceases to provide accurate output on the first step. (In SR, the ever-so-slightly different definition of what a number is allows telation to provide exact results. Note that this is exactly as meaningful as saying an allomancer can burn pewter to become strong, and exactly as entangled with our reality.)
But that doesn't mean that you can't get a nice layperson-level understanding of it. Not at all. if you had to truly understand the math to have a solid, approximate understanding of a phenomenon, popular science would be a less than worthless endeavour, because it would be impossible to even say, "Ee equals em see squared is an equation that lets us know that mass is energy."
Except I just said that, and you understood it. So obviously it is possible to describe concepts without a rigorous formal understanding of them. Certainly, you don't know exactly what the formal system is saying, but you don't ever need to.
Oh, but yes, the narrator is unreliable. All narrators are perforce unrelaible if they are first person, and accurate depictions of a person.
Go watch/read flatland if you want to think about that concept more.
kekekeke sick burn. Here is my rageface: (ಥ益ಥ）
Come on, you've got to know that I'm a bit of a maths geek. If you want to insult my knowledge, or lack thereof, at least choose something plausible.
So if you're going to pull the "it was all a dream" card later on, I can only say that I called it.
No, I'm not. Word of God.
It's such a dick move that I'd be in awe of someone who promised as much as I did, then did so.
Thank you for this opportunity to refine my thinking on these matters. If this was an attempt to mimic that reviewer over at FFNET to subtly probe for future plot developments, now you know I suspected and that all indications in this post are potentially ad-hoc misinformation. Ask directly; I don't care about spoiling those who want to be.