r/PantheonShow 8d ago

Discussion Maddie did to everybody what Stephen did to Caspian

It occurred to me that while Stephen tried to create a copy of himself by replicating and simulating his life events onto Caspian; Maddie attempted to recreate everybody thru countless simulations, replicating those earlier events

87 Upvotes

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u/yusufpalada 8d ago

The difference between her and Steven is that she never violated their free will. Their choices were their own

Even giving them pushes every now and again like what she did with Caspian and his conversation with David was not violating his free will because he was already going to make that decision. She was just speeding it up

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u/FrankensteinsPonster 8d ago

Their choices were their own

How so?

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u/yusufpalada 8d ago

She let the sims play out after creating them, so she didn't directly influence what they did as they went on

She only intervened in ways that didn't affect the choices they made or could make, instead of stephens method which was to crudely bash Caspian onto the vague track of mimicking Holstrom, negating his free will by effectively brainwashing him instead of simply letting him develop naturally

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u/FrankensteinsPonster 8d ago

But do they have free will even without outside influence? Doesn't the idea that she could influence them show how people are simply the products of their genetics and environment?

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u/yusufpalada 8d ago

Given how many simulations she has and how few came close to mirroring her own reality I would think supports the idea that free will/chance is still a factor

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u/FrankensteinsPonster 8d ago

Couldn't that just as well point to the fact that external factors can drastically affect one's choices?

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u/Beejsbj 7d ago

That's just a misunderstanding of "free" will.

Our imagination makes us believe free will allows us to delete momentum.

You ARE the product of your genetics and environment. And "you" influence your genetics and environment in return.

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u/FrankensteinsPonster 7d ago

And "you" influence your genetics and environment in return.

How so?

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u/Beejsbj 5d ago

Because you are part of the system. Not seperate from it, not above it and able to control it and not under it where you are controlled by it.

Your influence over "you" is similar to your influence over your sibling/friend/parent/partner.

Over time, "nudges" is the best way to think of it. Shaping your environment

Seemingly its attention that is key here. Where the gap exists. And how you show up to a moment.

Like it's all deterministic. But it's no longer particles bouncing off things like a billiard ball. Photons that enter your eyes have specific meaning imbued in their patterns. Your interpretation can be cultivated.

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u/FrankensteinsPonster 5d ago

Over time, "nudges" is the best way to think of it

How does one "nudge"? This seems like you're just making up some magic juice so you can keep believing in free will lol.

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u/Beejsbj 3d ago

So, I believe it's deterministic. But we do have will. Decisions are being made. You white blood cells deciding to kill or not kill invaders. And the deterministic system of atoms that compose you and is interacting with other similarly modelled system. The systems with incomplete information are deciding.

You the ego have no free will. You generate your fictional story on the fly. Thst you chose those decisions.

Butt you were made by the system.

And the system has Will.

Well different systems with different capacities of appplying Will.

Attention might be the most direct control. Then mind stuff like thoughts but even then limited, then body perhaps?

Presence is a powerful nudge of attention.

But for something larger in context, like your body and being consistently being at lower weight, will require using the environment to do the nudging, lifestyle shifts.

If you want to change idk personality/toxic patterns, it requires cognitive restructuring.

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u/FrankensteinsPonster 3d ago

Yep, sounds more or less like the generic redefinition of free will you hear from people who want to maintain its existence lol.

We'll have to agree to disagree on whether that's the definition most people use.

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u/runitzerotimes 8d ago

She literally forced the David speaks to Caspian intervention.

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u/yusufpalada 8d ago

She gave him a choice even then to help her or not, she had interacted with other Davids from other sims and they acted differently

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u/ConscientiousApathis 7d ago

You could argue she just had better tools to do it with. Maddie wouldn't need to crudely imitate Stephens father, not when she could just instantiate the actual one and have them do the same thing. It's a pretty decent argument she would bear responsibility for everything that happened in her own simulations.

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u/No-Economics-8239 8d ago

Interesting. How do you see free will manifesting in a reality she creates and controls? Free in the sense they get to do what they want? Unaware that if they don't do what she wants, she will just terminate the simulation and spin up a new one with different starting conditions? Aren't all their thoughts and desires merely settings that Maddie can control?

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u/JuiceBuddyG assume infinite amount of stir-fry 8d ago

She doesn't terminate any of her sims, that's why she had billions of them kicking around in there. C'mon man, you already know this.

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u/No-Economics-8239 7d ago

How would I know this? How do you? Am I just to assume she is going around running free range preserves for all the realities and people she has created until the heat death of the universe? Are they all boundless universes where each UI is free to follow in her footsteps and create their own Dyson Sphere? How many turtles can she stack this way until she runs out of resources?

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u/JuiceBuddyG assume infinite amount of stir-fry 7d ago

She literally talks about her billions of sims, and she mentions her memory cap and how she's getting close to it. She talks about how they all turn out differently, for better or worse, but that she doesn't interfere and considers them as real as she is. It's an easy deduction to make that, as the sun of all those points, she doesn't delete sims. Entirely possible that she underclocks them, though, until more compute is available. But even if that were the case, the people within wouldn't even perceive the slowdown. There is also the case to be made that regardless of the tech that Maddie is running on, she herself is being run on Safesurf's tech, which could (and most likely is) massively more powerful that her own and capable of allocating her and her worlds more compute 

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u/No-Economics-8239 7d ago

I agree. But your deduction is just one choice amoung many to read between the lines and decide what choices Maddie might be making and to what degree we can understand what she is saying and how faithful her actions might follow those words. It is certainly an interesting vision of Maddie's little Pantheon. Thank you for sharing.

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u/Chinohito 7d ago

Since she views them as exactly equal to her, killing them would be tantamount to the most heinous mass genocide imaginable.

Maddie is not genocidal.

You act like this is something up to interpretation, but I'd like to know what you think is evidence for the contrary?

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u/gabek666 7d ago

We know this because we watched the show

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u/No-Economics-8239 7d ago

And therefore we all interpreted what we saw exactly the same? Came to the same conclusions? Lived the same reality? I found the ending much more open ended and do not seem to share your certainty.

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u/yusufpalada 8d ago

She is absolutely alright with a sim going off script, shown with the billions of sims which don't match her own timeline that she is still running

She explicitly says: "I don't see them as simulations, because they don't.They make their own choices. Some lead to better histories, while others...Well, I would grieve for the lives lost, but I would never intervene."

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u/No-Economics-8239 8d ago

Sure, but her feelings and protectionism towards her fellow UIs doesn't address the degree to which they are free. If she winds up their entire reality, even if she doesn't interfere afterwards, are they really free? Is their freedom only a choice that Maddie is making for them? The choice to stay her hand and not meddle beyond giving them existence and will?

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u/DenseBeautiful731 8d ago

They didn’t sign up to live that many lives, sequentially or concurrently.

People keep missing this bit.

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u/JuiceBuddyG assume infinite amount of stir-fry 8d ago

Logorythms: (forcefully pushes a kid's life down their wanted path by grooming, manipulating, and outright abusing him, never consider him a real person, plan to kill him if he ever diverges) 

Maddie: (makes billions of worlds and allows them to make their own choices without interference, leaves them to continue their lives untouched even though they don't serve her plans and eat up compute, considers them just as real as herself) 

People on this sub, for some reason: Yeah this is the same thing

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u/Briaaanz 7d ago

Maddie had more access to creating/adjusting reality than Stephen did. Stephen could only hire actors and arrange some basic scenarios, Maddie created an entire universe that was as an exact scenario as she could generate. In order to reach the version of Caspian and her father she wanted, she had to create simulations of everyone else they were in contact with to lead the two of them to her hoped for destination.

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u/Boring_A55_Binch 7d ago

She doesn’t create those specific people herself, though. Whether they come to exist or not is entirely up to how the sim turns out, and out of billions only ten came close to the history Maddie remembered. Each sim starts from like. The beginning of the universe.

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u/Briaaanz 7d ago

How is what she did any real difference to what Stephen was attempting tho?

I just don't see free will being a defining difference. Both were attempting to recreate individuals by manufacturing scenarios to do so. Both kept the subjects in the dark while the attempt was being made.

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u/Boring_A55_Binch 7d ago

Free will is the defining difference. Caspian was robbed of that, these people are not. If he tried to do something different Pope and his lackeys would’ve forcefully pushed him back on the path they wanted. With Maddie’s sims, what happens to the people in them is a consequence of THEIR actions, not events that are PRE-DETERMINED by someone else. She lets the sims that have diverted from her history play out anyway.

The nudges she gives when she intervenes still leaves room for the people in the sim to act differently.

Since you’ve established you don’t see free will as a valid factor here, we’ll probably never come to an agreement on this.

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u/JuiceBuddyG assume infinite amount of stir-fry 7d ago

She did not generate that specific scenario. She specifically says that she couldn't interfere much if at all, "push too hard and it all goes away". She made billions of sims because that's what it took to eventually get one where the people within it actually decided to make the choices they did in her original timeline

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u/Briaaanz 7d ago

Stephen didn't have access to the power and resources that Maddie did and had to operate in a much shorter timeframe.

Maddie had to tweak things to arrange as similar conditions as possible to arrive at the classroom starting point, so yeah, she did generate that specific scenario.

If she just set up the physics on day one of the big bang and then played the Deists' Clockmaker (built the clock mechanism that is the Cosmos, wound it up and then walked away), she would never reach the classroom. A molecule out of place a million years earlier would be the equivalent of a butterfly flapping it's wings and generating a hurricane in a different part of the world.

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u/JuiceBuddyG assume infinite amount of stir-fry 7d ago

Which is why I believe she didn't A) start at the big bang, nor B) run it from the very beginning every time. I believe that the most functional way to run the Dyson sphere to get her timeline under the stated assumption that trying to actually control events made everything break was to use save states, essentially. Run the sim up to a decision point, then make a bunch of copies until you get one that of its own accord follows the "correct" path, then make copies of that one, so on and so forth. Much faster than brute forcing it, still allows for free will without some invisible god forcing you down a path you didn't choose yourself

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u/prettygirlgoddess 8d ago

allows them to make their own choices without interference

Maddie did interfere though. She sent David to the future after he already died, had him walk through the fabric of reality and step out of a hole in the sky, and then had him talk to Caspian to change the course of events. Maddie literally played god from her dyson sphere.

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u/JuiceBuddyG assume infinite amount of stir-fry 8d ago

And that is literally the one and only time she does that, and it was to save three people (including Dave by extension) who by their own words did not want to die. I'm not saying she's perfect, because the Problem of Evil is right there like a big angry cosmic tomato, but there is a massive ethical difference in the level of control exerted by Maddie vs Logorythms 

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u/AlphaStudent 7d ago

Why is this not marked as a spoiler?

Just finished the series and am reading Reddit threads now. Please mark

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u/Briaaanz 7d ago

My apologies! Done

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u/ConscientiousApathis 7d ago

This is a fair take (even though some people on this sub won't want to admit it).

During this scene her father specifically says that he wants to intervene, to which Maddie just says "it has to happen". She is a bit cold and distant during the whole thing, not even answering when asked how many times she has done this. You get this impression she's sort of beyond all of it, and it's hard to gauge how someone like that thinks.

Ultimately I'm kind of reminded of her words at the start of the season, that if people can keep reviving their loved ones as digital copies then no one would ever grow up. That's more or less what happened, Maddie did never grew up, and while it is a happy ending it it definitely feels greyer the longer you think about it.

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u/[deleted] 8d ago

Your right. Maddie is lowkey evil af. She didn't give a shit abt the pain she put so many people through just so she could get with her bf again. Oh, wait, her family gets special priority though, thats why she resurrected her son but let all the others die in safe surf's attack.

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u/n0tAtR0l1 8d ago

But to be fair she put the clones of herself and her family through the pain too no?

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u/Briaaanz 7d ago

So more of a sociopath then?

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u/[deleted] 7d ago

Not really. Her son died and she resurrected him.