40K DARK ORIGINS [1] Chaos Gods, Time & The Warp | WARHAMMER 40,000 History/Lore

[Music] [Music] this great evil where does it come from how'd it steal into the world what seed what root did it grow for he's doing this he's killing us robbing us of life and light mocking us at the sight of what we might have known does our ruin benefit the earth does it help the grass to grow his son to showing is this darkness in you to have you passed through this night [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] the certainties within the Imperium of man that we can hold on to in the 41st millennium are sparse soon we'll explore some of the more tangible forces and organizations in the Imperium what I want to embark upon is a three-part exploration of the darker and more shadowy places that are by any reasonable standards far beyond our comprehension ancient history lost knowledge paranoid rumors and outright heresy infects the minds of mortal beings the gnawing desire to gaze upon something that should not and cannot exist the impossible sight of creatures the lone would be enough to cause the strongest minds to lose their footing and the weakest to be tossed carelessly into the void worse would be to succumb to mortal weakness and endure death those few who are approved to explore beyond the boundaries of that which exists beyond the worlds of mankind such as Imperial inquisitors rogue traders and mechanicus may attempt or mistakenly happen upon the origins of the abyss of horror that is the immaterial curiosity may creep in and you may try and piece together the shattered remnants of Eldar mythology or observe and uncover the ancient seemingly ruined or abandoned tombs of these strange the xenos constructs known as the necron or nekron tear few answers are ever to be found answers that are ultimately more likely to reveal a further endless sea of questions than gift you a glimmer of truth what is the nature of chaos and it's immortal entities how did it come to be the Elder have seen such things come to pass and they know this too painfully and too deeply they have felt its power and learned that it cannot be contained or corralled what are the necron the most ancient of races their own history a tragedy but who similarly know all too well what awaits them in the realm of the infinite void some might reasonably wonder how such a place which apparently ignores the laws which we know to constrain and govern our reality could have such severe impacts on the events that take place within our mortal linear perception of time how can this occur and why now firstly I'll say this series has a longer than usual introduction and in each of them there may be more explanations of details some sourced and some necessary logical assumptions but please understand I feel that it's necessary this time to just lay out all my thinking later I may break this down into smaller edited versions that focus more strictly on the narrative elements or individual explanations but the goal of this three-part exploration is mainly to understand what's happening in the big picture and this all started with me asking the question how did the chaos gods come into being and from our point of view when yet this initial starting point ended up expanding over the past few weeks into becoming a sprawling look at the warp its history and how we reconcile it with our own reality chaos the elder the old ones the Necron tear in the war in heaven I also will be assuming that if you're watching this you have already watched my previous video about chaos or the 40k primer if you haven't I recommend watching these first and then joining this series but if you want to stay here I will eventually explain through all the details either way in this first video we'll be looking at understanding more about chaos how time is a problematic component of how we relate to chaos and it to us through the war in the second video I'll be exploring the beginnings of the galaxy the old ones Necron tear nekron and elder gods as well as the war in heaven and lassie will be concluding with my best assessment on how all these pieces fit together to bring us the origins of the chaos gods and even some other curious details about other races and the history of the galaxy it has been I don't mind telling you mentally exhausting now as I always say this is my personal best effort but short of rereading every piece of official material ever written are not infallible what I've put into these three videos are my best explorations of the issue and I always base this on sourced material first and logical speculations second when I use a source or reference to validate a theory or understanding I always use material that is as reasonably recent as possible and not excessively contradicted and then cross-reference these things with other sources as best that I the reason I wanted to make this clear from the outset is because the topics we'll be looking at can bring out a lot of dissenting opinions many people consider some of the origin narratives to be closed cases and definitive when they are in actuality anything but now I've dug in deep on this one so I will say this if you disagree with my opinion or if you feel that you have a piece of reasonable official reference that sheds a light upon something please note that reference with a title and preferably a rough page reference and if you can a quote in context now I say this because you would not believe the amount of speculative opinions that are all floating around often with no sources backing them up but then becoming seemingly commonly accepted yet when put under scrutiny not only fail the logic test but failed to materialize in any reasonable fashion within the source material so I do get a little bit more pedantic these days about people saying I read somewhere well if you read it somewhere go find it and then tell us where you read it as you guys have seen in the addendum I made regarding the Emperor part 3 I'm always open to listening to and shifting opinions for me I care about coming to the best conclusions possible but if you can't provide a source it's hard to give it much credibility as I said just stating that I think I read this somewhere one time it doesn't cut it and what is it they say trust but verify you should all know by now that I'm a big supporter of people wanting to write for example fan fiction or to speculate heavily on events within 40k it's fun it's really interesting and to me that's what 40k is all about I spent forever when I was younger writing my own background material however for me that fanfiction all that speculation should be done within the logical understanding of the existing framework because otherwise you're just making up random nonsense random nonsense like I used to as a kid for example my house Lord who is half fly with for molecular acid hands would be able to grab hold of Imperial Guardsmen and literally hug melt them to death or my other Kaos Lord who could absorb the souls of enemies and basically never die on the battlefield gaining wounds from their souls it's all fun stuff as a kid but it's also game breaking madness that if you try and put into actual context can undermine muddy the water in regard to everything else although I did really love my crazy acid hand in fly man because he was brutal so these videos may be a little bit more substantive than a visual narrative and I often tried to marry the two things together but in these two videos you may have to forgive me if they are on the lighter side of visual editing I now often see comments from you guys saying Lewton this is your most complex video or this one has eclipsed the other but trust me when I say that these three videos are my most complex they have been far more taxing than anything else I've tackled before which is why it's taken me three weeks primarily because they've acquired so much extra referencing cross-referencing philosophical exploration or just trying to form the narrative around scientific understanding that I'd barely read about before I didn't quite reach the point of writing things all over the walls and windows but it was getting close and there are multiple aspects that have to be factored in for example the all too often heavily fragmented and shrouded ancient history of the oldest races in the galaxy the needs to reconcile issues of causality having to balance and make sense of continually contradicting sources while also picking through and deciding how trustworthy your sources their bias or their agenda or if their characterization or use of terminology is even correct ultimately it becomes very difficult to select which pieces of the puzzle are the ones you need and the deeper you start thinking about it the more it becomes like falling into an endless void of confusion much of the information we have to work from despite what some will always try to claim is regularly extremely vague while some things may appear or are collectively assumed to be near certainties but then when you actually go and read the specific source yourself the reality then causing to question your original understanding or may even render it no longer relevant the reality is that in 40k at this stage there are so many references that some get pushed aside into the shadows with all of that in mind I think it's important to say that no matter what you might read or hear things are very rarely definitively retconned in 40k because that just isn't how the universe of 40k works they're very often deliberately vague nature of 40k and it's constant contradictions which despite what some would often suggest are often meant to exist as well as previous information not to automatically replace what came birth for this reality of visible contradictions I think just becomes intolerable for some people and personally I sympathize with this to a degree it can be very annoying when you just want to know what the hell actually happened but this is what 40k is and it has been for decades regardless though of how any of us may want things to be the actual reality is that usually law elements are not immediately retconned but instead they are slowly moved sideways and made less visible until they reach their new accepted alignment and that new position very well could be something actually being reckoned but when I say slowly I mean 10 years not six months during that process of realignment everything related to that description appears as an overlapping blurry multiple exposure where all things seem possible and worse even when it has been realigned it's still going to be there which is confusing for some people so if you ever read someone saying that this has been retconned since forever don't necessarily trust it not until you go and look actually for yourself or you find someone else listing a source for you because people miss remember things very very easily or they just choose to stick with their own version of events because they know most others aren't gonna be bothered to go and look up what it is that they're saying or that they don't have the ability to go and look up what they're saying now I am NOT one of those people because I will go and spend an hour or more looking because these fragments of information formulate the whole picture and I'll tell you now if I had a pound for every person I'd read stating adamantly that their source was unquestionably correct because 90% of the time it's either just not there or a very very loose vague quote that could be interpreted in any number of ways now as I said in my recent discussion about the Emperor of man and using specific individual quotes from sources how do you trust a source is one statement from one character good enough what about if that statement is vague what if there is another character somewhere else who contradicts it does Neuer automatically mean more correct you might assume so but in 40k that's not necessarily true what about if something is really vague but also repeated in other place but equally vaguely how about if something is actually very clear in specific but wait the person delivering the source is questionable or maybe they've got a bit of a dodgy agenda you can see how this quickly makes things far from what you would call certain in fact it's not even a certainty on how laws should be delivered some would prefer that things all delivered very clearly in a specific time line with details that ensure no contradictions occur with concrete established events and parameters on the other hand there are those who have been writing the law and a part of Games Workshop for decades who would argue that this is exactly the wrong way to go about things in fact it should always be vague and unclear and questionable because it was never meant to be specific it was meant to be a starting point for people like us to make our own interpretations and I know that from reading so many of your comments people have their own theories own speculations all of which are greatly imaginative and that's fine depending on a certain person's point of view the events and timeline of Warhammer 40,000 slowly come into clarity for us as time passes but we should also remember this is not a battle over who is right and who is wrong it's an ever developing history that rightly will seek to correct and adjust the events and figures within it to organically allow for more expansion and development it'd be crazy to assume that something conceptualized decades ago would be forever set in stone yet at the same time maintaining continuity is always important to ensure the narrative stays true to its origins and is not horribly bastardized or warped by outside influences it's also worth mentioning and remembering that where we gather this information is usually from official sources like codex or supplements except some of these vary greatly in how much information they give very often the first edition which is the period from 1987 to 1993 and third edition 1998 to 2004 give us some of the most detailed descriptions second edition to a degree it's often surprising how across the years very little details have been updated and this is what leads to people saying that if it was written so long ago how can that continue to be true today well you would be surprised for example there are things from third edition that are only mentioned once in very small sections which have been used to continue the narrative into eighth so it's simply wrong to say that things from this time are no longer relevant this idea that because something was written a long time ago can never apply is absolutely incorrect now I personally consider anything from third onward to be relatively viable at least worthwhile of being investigated and cross-referenced first and second a pretty questionable but a lot of it still continues to be true but anyway if we get into talking about that it could fill a video all on its own so with all that said let's get started so let's begin with the thinking that stems from the original texts where the description alludes to the chaos gods arising to full consciousness during the Middle Ages of mankind now before anybody starts writing out some long theory about how they all started during the war in heaven calm down okay we're only just getting started here because when this was originally written the world ending wars of the wars in heaven during the early days of the galaxy were not part of the narrative in the event that would begin to be gently suggested in second edition is now part of the official established background and for that reason many people very reasonably consider the original descriptions from first edition to no longer be the official origins of the chaos gods however this is not at all as clear cut as simplistically saying the war in heaven was huge and really bad and therefore the cows gods must have originated during that time as I said far too often people want things to be very nice and simple and neat to be absolute or definitive in 40k most the time they simply are anything but it is always true some things are fairly set in stone some things are very very clear indeed 40k by its very deliberate nature is clouded vague and regularly lacking in detail so let's just get straight into things with a graphic and unpleasant example now I see all the time people continuing to try and argue that Nergal is and must be the oldest chaos God and people seem happy to argue this despite the fact that it is contradicted in most if not all the chaos codex as is often the case this has somehow arisen from I think unintentional community confusion partly by mixing up or conflating fantasy with 40k law and I know some people think that it overlaps and I will say I am open to that being the case if I need to a small degree but even if it does overlap it's irrelevant to the 40k timeline the other most common talking point is the fundamental misunderstanding around the term grandfather Nergal which is then equated as simply meaning Nergal is the oldest this is excessively simplistic and also just entirely wrong the grandfather Nergal term is just descriptive of Naugles character as a Kaos god it has nothing at all to do with age it stems from Nergal having what's described as a more personal touch that he watches over his followers like a doting patriarch typhus formerly of the death guard now Herald of Nergal gives us a good example as he observes in the novel plague war and unfortunately graphic description of an imperial human port master suffering this personal attention of Nergal and he delights as Nergal ruins the poor man over and over decomposing and recomposing him whilst keeping him alive and in a fashion only that could be described as obscene horror his body rotting flesh tearing splitting bursting and so on so extreme that even typhus was seen his fair share of ravages before is overcome and stands in or observing with grim fascination how the Lord of decay is giving such attention to his suffering typhus watches as the following unfolds to the wretched port master bloody pus was pouring from his choking throat the port master twitched he was still alive and moaning as his body folded itself almost perfectly in half under normal circumstances he would have died but grandfather Nergal is kind and wishes all those who are afflicted by his gifts to fully enjoy the experience and so the man's soul remained confined within his body his eyes robbed madly even as they bloomed with cataracts and sank e'en upon themselves his lips split and his tongue turned black and fell from his mouth to ride away like a salt bathed slug stinking slurry pulled around him his bowels leaked glad it inflated and burst still the man lived a spectacle of rapid decay played out before his eyes and he watched fascinated the sheer variety of death Nergal meted out was a glory in itself and this was the finest typhus had witnessed in some time you're truly blessed by noble such fecundity decays at color such thoughts are gone for life you've become no this little man few of your kind experienced such exquisite extinctions and fear still are permitted to see the cornucopia through both your mortal shells permit you are favored the description gets continuity worse by the way you can find it for yourself if you want to read the whole thing but essentially the grandfather term is all to do with this kind of attention from the god of plague it's all about nur ghouls personality and his characteristics as a power no goals followers like typhus are often enraptured by observing the beauty in art history of decay and just to repeat myself it has nothing to do with any birth order in the warp or growth or sentience of origin it's simply a characterization among his followers so now we've put away that one for you straight away it's worth aswell mentioning that from 6th to 8th edition as 2012 and to now the description regarding the ordered origin of the cows gods has been almost word-for-word the same and the order through all of the codex has been pretty much again the same since the dawn of time these tides and waves have flowed unceasingly through the mirror realm of the war and such as their power that they form a creatures made of the very stuff of unreality eventually these instinctual formless beings gained a rudimentary consciousness the chaos gods were born vast psychic presences made the fantasies and horrors of mortals these are the ruinous powers and each is a reflection of the passions that formed them first amongst them is corn the Lord of battle possessed of towering and immortal fury as inch the bizarre and ever-changing architect of fate weaves powerful sorceries to bind the future to his will whilst great Nergal the god of disease labors endlessy to spread infection and pestilence the last of their number is slow nosh the dark prints indulgent of every pleasure in excess no matter how immoral or perverse now the only other reference I found to some sense of Nergal origin was in the Lords of silence at the end of chapter 11 there is hierarchy even across the great game desire knowledge rage these are the lesser things the subordinate things the ones that came later before them always despair and succor and a slow release into abandonment this was what came first the primordial slop from which all else arose only then to float like phantasms over it in the end despair will prevail again in the end every world will be a plague plant and the tide of decay were once more lap at the foundations of reality drowning all else as interesting as it is this is very vague and that most only alludes to some sense of what came first now we can all make any number of illogical rationalizations as to why it could be any other way the most common one of course is that the necron tears suffered greatly even before any wars as they struggled with that own mortality and so this must have been what led to the creation of Nergal right it's a reasonable rationale unfortunately completely unsupported by actual reference maybe it will be one day but for now it's just a speculative rationalization but as I say other than that's being consistently stated from first to the current time that corn is first so we'll take that actually established knowledge and then make further conclusions around it however as I said nothing in this is quite so simple but we'll come to that yet another thing I feel it's worth getting out of the way early which is the thinking that says because the birth of slow nosh occurred in the most recent of times you then hear people asking well if slow nash's birth was so devastating why weren't the other three as well that is then we usually followed by the additional rationalization that this must then point to the fact that the other three gods were not born during any period of the human age because otherwise we'd surely know about it if it's so devastating when a chaos Scott is born right again no it's important to understand that the creation of Scylla Nash was considerably different because of what field these differences are referenced very clearly in the Harlequins eighth codex the most current it describes how it was through a slow accretion of energies that the cows gods corn Nagaland zinc had been born creation just means formed by cohesion the birth of slowness on the other hand is also described in the Liebherr chaotic a' the 4th 6th and 8th elder codex the actual formation of Senesh was also not a fast process the elders did slide into madness and horror beyond imagination had stirred up the walk to the point it had already created millennia of warp instability the key thing to remember is that the elder themselves are considerably more psychically powerful than your average human pleb even if the chaos gods do have more of a flavor for Humanity also the elder before the fall were far more connected with the war these factors contribute to the eventual event of Stannis's birth being far more devastating than anything else before not to mention that fueled by Elder souls it bursts out of the warp like an atomic chain reaction and as all the psychic energy from the warp stops were sucked into the implosion in the void it consumes billions upon billions of Elder and their souls something that the other chaos gods seemed unable to do consuming Elder souls that is the fundamental difference is very simply that the birth of Senesh involved the elder whereas the other gods did not and for that reason it was far more destructive and there's no singular process that defines how a chaos God should or must come into being either so how did it happen for the other three gods well at its simplest what I've come to believe is that they're actually four potential possibilities with regards to the chaos gods origins I decided to outline these from the start and I think it makes sense to do so even if we don't discuss them in detail in this first video it's good to have a starting point the first three ideas apply specifically to only the gods of corn zinc and Nergal and the fourth includes flesh first is that they were initially formed but not awakened and what we would notice being the earliest days of the galaxy's history so yes the war in heaven but that they were then later truly awakened during the period that we think of as the emergence of mankind this to a degree satisfies all angles second is that they were fully born into the warp in a sentient state during the wars in heaven which occurred again in this earlier period of galactic history we could consider that both of these previous statements are true which I'll explain in more detail later fourth is that because the warp does not observe a linear time as we know it the gods have always existed it also for periods in mortal reality never existed this description of always having existed is attributed to slash across multiple editions but it seems reasonable that if it stands for one it stands for the others as well but again we'll get into all the problems that this brings up later now in all of this there's also another factor in play and it's something that I want to address in this video and I've truly given my best effort to understand that factor is time now I'm no physicist so cut me some slack if something is not spot-on because this stuff melts your brain but you could say that some of the thinking I've done here is unnecessary and over thought but personally it felt necessary to me as I was working through this so feel free to agree or disagree with me on the need to include this personally I feel that it's important still the warping chaos in the sixth edition rulebook is described as follows the sheer mind-boggling impossibility of the warp defies explanation and those who attempt to delve further into understanding its ways inevitably slip into madness I can tell you from how I have felt researching and compiling all of this this is a perfectly accurate description so onward we go please note I will be bringing in some occasional non 40k references in this next section just to help clarify looking into time and causality for me is fairly critical to both the rationalization of the chaos gods and just in helping us to get this stuff clear in the mind because I can see myself referencing back to this in the future now for me in order to discuss the warp and its relationship to the material realm we have to at least to some degree learn about time travel and paradoxes because time travel unfortunately is the thing on top of all the other foggy historical issues and I say unfortunately for reasons I hope will soon become clear and I just decided to come back and actually add in this extra night because if we're talking about time travel there's give me things we're gonna be talking about to do with physics to do with philosophy and some stuff as well to do with perception so really what I've tried to do is just kind of take some of these existing elements and make it fit within what we're talking about within the law so some of this stuff you're gonna have to suspend your disbelief especially of course when it comes to time travel but really we're trying to just deal with the basic elements here to make a bigger picture fit we're not super interested in drilling down on one specific point with that said there's a couple of things I want to clear up from the out sex I think it's important to just kind of get it established now if this stuff doesn't mean anything to you that's okay it probably will make sense as we go along or you might need to kind of come back and think about it some more so basic causality which is cause and effect causality can get very complicated very quickly especially when you pursue philosophical lines of thinking and for our own purposes we really need to be thinking about is just the existence of backwards causation kind of what that means now multiple causes can lead to one effect coupled with whatever conditions are enabling it one cause may lead to multiple effects you can have feedback where an effect gives rise to new causes and effects including back to the cause which gave rise to that one originally in reality the one caused one effect illustration is too basic to really apply in what we're thinking of in terms of reality but most cause-and-effect situations are when you actually get into it's so complex your main priority is to just determine which cause is the decisive part in a whole set circumstances and again like I say you know if you want to look at a cause-and-effect situation you can spin it out to the nth degree but really what you're trying to get down to is just the primary main cause now one more I just wanted to add in here to get this out of the way and get this kind of established again if it doesn't make sense it probably will later backwards causation now that's essentially just where your cause is coming after the effect it's essentially the reverse process now it's important to note that the philosophical concept of backward causation shouldn't be confused with backward causation when we're talking about time travel usually that's where you're returning from the future to the past now these two concepts are only related in the sense that they both agree it is possible through a process of cause and effect to affect the past the difference between the two is that time travel involves a causal loop that's a closed timelike curve which will explain where as backward causation does not essentially backward causation without time travel would involve an actual kind of reversal of time not by the use of a time machine or warping of space-time again if that doesn't mean anything don't worry we'll kind of get through this as we go along but I just kind of wanted to get that in there that the philosophy and the physics is a little bit different but of course as I also said they do kind of overlap with this whole thing so you know we don't need to drill down on it that's my main point it's just kind of like a general concept we're thinking of in terms of time because we're thinking about the warp and we're thinking about chaos and the demons and the fact there's no time there and we're thinking about reality in the material and how there is time of there and we're trying to reconcile those two things so like I said there's a lot of overlap and it's not necessary really to go right down into it and I just said one other thing guys I apologize if my voice is kind of all over the place I'm still in the process of recovering my damaged vocal cords and so my voice gets extremely tired very quickly so if you hear different qualities in my voice it's just because of that nothing I can do about it but it is improving so also some of this stuff can be hard to establish clearly in your mind so below this video in the notes I've included some simple definitions should you feel the need to refresh your memory now throughout all of this keep in mind that what we are considering in the grand scheme of things is that from our mortal perspective the chaos gods were somehow at some time born into existence but that for the warps perspective when this actually occurs is completely irrelevant because there they will have always existed in some sense this is something you'll often see in here in relation to the cows gods and the reason for this is that if the warp has no laws governing time then they could theoretically and very likely do exist at and use information from any point in time as far as this might superficially appear to be it actually makes things extremely complicated and also creates all manner of problems regardless though it is the reality of the material our reference 6th edition chaos demons where has just finished describing the chronological events leading up to the birth of Sloan ash and it states that is how events are viewed from the chronology of the material universe in the warp things are different for the material is not bound by linear time and events do not occur in a strict sequence of cause then effect as his rival gods reckon it Sloan ash has always existed in the warp and yet has never existed at all this description continues through to the current edition of the chaos codex the concept of cause and effect being out of the logical sequences deeply problematic as is the idea of gods and Senesh having always existed but not because of how it affects things in the warp the warp is the warp anything goes the problem is trying to somehow make any sense of it at all or how one reality without any boundaries manages to interact with one which has strict boundaries I should probably also mention that this is not exclusive to chaos various other races including humanity and the Elder have encounters which allow them to see into the past and the future the Elder even do this is a fairly regular matter of course via their farce ears which gives us plenty of information on how we can interpret the perception of time as it is seen in the world of 40k and how that intersects with the unreality of the warp so from the warps perspective yes the gods may always have existed but we should also consider though is that while they are able to have existed within the warp from our perspective within a linear timeline they may not have always existed and what's hard to understand about that but before we get further into perceptions first a small tangent in researching this I found several instances and people discussing the concept of time in the war more specifically a quoted phrase that crops up in several novels such as fulgrim battle for the abyss descent of angels it's a phrase usually used in describing a demon where it is said to be a creature older than time or in relation to the war things exist in its fathomless depths that are older than time as we know it now much as it a greats me because I find this description to be just incredibly stupid well it's clearly trying to illustrate is that the warp exists fully outside the constraints that bind us in regards to our understanding of what time and means as well as descriptions of the warp generally being utterly incomprehensible to us if you want to go deeper you could argue it may be trying to point towards the concept of the warp having depths that are as yet undetected and unseen where it describes the fathomless depths being older than time there was a theory and actual physics theory that I'd read which suggested black holes could be remnants of past universes that have collapsed in on themselves that this could have happened in a Big Crunch and that they then somehow managed to exist despite subsequent big bangs the premise being that the laws of physics when close to a point of a big bang or crunch become uncertain and as a result such a primordial black hole could survive and why do I mention this well because if we accept the warp is a mirror reflection of our material realm one could assume it goes through a similar process to that which occurs within our own material space and who knows how that affects the entities within if it affects them at all that is now I could then more readily accept that they would be older than we can reasonably comprehend as was stated to be older than time then again it seems just as likely that this phrasing of being older than time is like many descriptions in 40k simply an overdramatic way of referring to the fact that time isn't a thing in the warp now coming back to our perceptions of time our material realm from our point of view exists on a linear time line the warp exists outside of this and obeys none of the laws we consider essential in order to make any sense of things we know this to be true of the warp and with better descriptions than being older than time straight descriptions such as it being a churning ocean of chaos warum ocean madness given form where the laws of physics time nature are meaningless concepts and nothing is as it seems events with individuals ships and so on may be lost for thousands of years in walk space only to then appear having apparently not observed any passage of time a good illustration of this perceived time distortion occurs in the night Lords novel void stalker but we discovered that every marine within the warp can seemingly perceive time completely individually a concept that seems impossibly hard to wrap your head around in this extract Tallis is a chaos marine how long have you waged this war Tallis he shook his head feeling this sudden need to swallow a long time the heresy was the bloodiest decade than the raiding years two centuries of bitter glory before the Imperium came for us and how long since we left the carrion world for the Imperium he narrowed his eyes at the question almost ten thousand year know how long for the traitor legions how long for you tell us he swallowed again beginning to sense where this was leading the war stole all meaning from the material realm even banishing or pretense of physics and the temporal stability the great heresy was days in the past for some of the traitors within the eye and fifty thousand years gone for others all of them each and every soul to betray the emperor in that golden age could claim a different scale of time for the years since tellus would say a century since we left less than many but more than some a century for you a century for first claw that makes here over three hundred years old so in this description we see from Tallis's perspective that it has been ten thousand years since the night Lords left their homeworld in a thirty second millennium to enter the eye of terror in actuality it turns out it's only been three hundred years so fatalis time in the warp has been dragging on for an agonizing length of time however this could easily happen in Reverse as the warp has no respect for the laws of the material it could equally have been a century of time passed in the warp for ten thousand years material space past how you reconcile these perceptions while presumably interacting and planning with fellow Marines in the war is to nobody's surprise not expanded upon for obvious reasons that it's incomprehensible from the fifth edition' Rubik if the emperor fails then a demons of chaos will flood into the galaxy every living human will only become a gateway for the destruction of mankind and the stuff of warp space will submerge the galaxy there'll be no physical matter no space no time only chaos another example of a distorted passage of time occurs for Horus when he emerges from the warp portal on Davin exclaiming to his estar T's retinue how surprised he is that they waited all this time for him and in actuality the time past for them has been very small and they will seem fairly confused as to what Horus is going on about other events point to potential time leaps deliberately caused by cows such as the turning of Horus in the novel false gods Horus is spoken to by a demon who shows him a vision of the future a future where the emperor is being worshipped as a God pilgrims and religious worshippers are flooding the streets while he observes some statues of pry marks statues of Horus and some of his other brother prime Marx however missing and this immediately disturbs Horus the demon twists this vision by misleading Horus into questioning what the Emperor's true overall intentions are and more importantly distorts his perception of how such things could have come to pass most importantly we need to take note that the demon is not simply showing Horus the crafted imaginary vision it's much more than that it's showing him visions and information from the future the past of course is relative to your position in time but that's exactly why this kind of thing creates problems as I'll explain this event with Horus is troubling because it violates the law of causality we of course also assume that we're not subscribing to the concept of multiple timelines which from a few sources do seem to potentially be also a thing in 40k but do you really want us to go off on that thread nope I get great because seriously I'm choosing to opt out from the multiple timelines thing because it just gets horribly horribly complicated and it's alluded to here and there in the law but it could also be people just phrasing things differently maybe in the future we can get into that concept but for now I'm putting a pin in it also just to tease you I did find references to the possibility of the 40k galaxy least the warp being an omniverse but to be fair it was from the first edition supplement and it's an offhand reference that's very unclear it's not a strong enough source to base anything on but we can also discuss that in the future this is a place of worship says Soros the demon nodded and said it is an entire world given over to the praise of the Emperor but why the emperor is no God he spent centuries freeing humanity from the shackles of religion this makes no sense not from where you stand in time but this is the Imperium that will come to pass if events continue on their present course said the demon the emperor has the gift of foresight and he has seen this future time for what purpose says for us to destroy the old faiths so that one day his coat would more easily supplant them all no said Horace I won't believe that my father always refuted any notion of divinity he once said of ancient earth that there were torches who were the teachers but also extinguishers who were the priests he would never have condoned this yet this entire world is his temple the demon said and it is not the only one [Music] the most twisted part of the exchange is of course where the demon explains that these events will come to pass if events continue on their present course this is deliberately manipulative and we cannot know if the demon even has any free will in this situation because it fails to mention the critical information that these events are caused by Horus turning away from the Emperor the demon frames this to make it sound as if Horus continues to remain to be loyal to the Emperor this is the future he'll run into clearly this is not the case and the demon knows it again dismissing the concept of multiple possible futures because that really is Road and anything is constructive or necessary for us to go down as we see it from the perspective in the novel we are in the present time except by showing Horus these visions the actual act of showing him and his subsequent reactions are not the problematic cause and effect that we need to consider the actual cause of Horace's reaction and his subsequent interpretation of the visions shown by the demon is not the literal process of him being shown the vision that's merely the conduit the cause is of course his own actions that will take place in the future actions that will then ultimately create the future that is shown to him in the visions in his past the cause or a significant part of it anyway of Horace's turning takes place in the future not to the past the effect of the future actions via the demon's vision are felt by him in the past causing him to choose the path which we're going to continue this time loop in this reverse process violates the laws of causality this type of situation is more specifically referred to as a predestination paradox now a paradox simply described is something that has a logically unacceptable conclusion so if you're willing to accept that something is full of paradoxes you're basically saying that you no longer care about logic at all at which point basically anything goes anything can happen nothing has any rules for me this just takes things that previously were interesting and/or dramatic because of how events unfolded and just kind of makes them pointless and a waste of time this is why I am not especially a huge fan of time travel being thrust into worlds which could well do without it I am a fan of time travel but not where has a habit of undermining the logic of key events because once that's happened it damages the foundations of things and will then usually steadily undermine everything else the situation with the warp and our material reality is annoyingly an even worse situation because it attempts to align and even intersect a realm which has no laws relating to time or physics stacked up against one that does on that basis alone it's set up for problems right from the start so for anyone who had up until now thought or had read others explained about this idea that the chaos gods existed forever it might well be a fun idea but as I said before it also somewhat if not fully has a habit of breaking everything else that's if you're taking it all fairly seriously of course now coming back to our Horus turning example it is true in a sense that chaos are the cause of Horus becoming a traitor but in a weirder realization he actually causes himself to turn to chaos in linear time a cause should always precede an effect if this is reversed then it can create a closed time loop and a paradox which is the case here with Horus it's possible that he wouldn't have turned against the Emperor had he not been shown this vision of the future if we are assuming that choice is even an option and multiple options are viable but the process he enters into is not a reasonably logical one and his vision leads to him taking actions which then caused the future that he's shown to him a future which will then lead him to take those actions to cause that future and so on this process is not logical because it creates a larger problem caused by this and indeed by most closed time loop events in that as a result they make the past present and future hard if not impossible to determine from a causal perspective now I'll put a pin in that and we'll come back to this very shortly firstly I'll just say that this kind of time loop situation is why time travel unless handled mechanically well is not a favourite of mine to just casually throw into a narrative or universe more often than not it's handled very lazily and creates numerous paradoxical situations and these can then undermine any larger narrative attempting to be told making the whole thing basically as I said already feel like a pointless waste of time this is often very annoying because most of the principles around time travel and causality from a layman's version without all the math anyway actually not especially difficult to understand so it's frustrating when time travel is just wedged in to either prop up a narrative or form some convoluted plot device many physicists already consider time travel to the Past to be essentially impossible because generally speaking it's agreed upon that time is a linear unidirectional string this is obviously based on our real-world understanding of time and the laws which exist in our material reality in the war these laws do not apply of course as I am regularly more than happy to point out 40k is not based strictly on reality that's a shock I know but whether or not we like it time travel is very much a thing in the world of 40k it's been referenced numerous times with weird ancient entities self-aware Dark Age of Technology space craft and so on as I say though often feel this isn't a great idea because whilst it's tantalizing as a plot device for authors time travel just even at its simplest has a habit of making things incredibly complicated especially when we might consider that there are different concepts of time travel and you start to get into things like multiple realities timelines time loops scenarios like the grandfather paradox closed timelike curves so on now if we were talking only about the warp that does give us more breathing space not to mention of course that whenever anyone is travelling through the warp in a ship they are effectively already time traveling it's actually surprising it doesn't cause even more confusion in the Imperium than already exists honestly because Geller filled or no just the distances and time differences across the galaxy are going to be so vast Mystikal implications are just insane this is already semi referenced where planets that may suddenly find themselves besieged by xenos even if they get a message out maybe attended from one perspective very quickly but on arrival it turns out the plants actually been dead for centuries this is not an unusual thing to occur in the Imperium and especially when you're sending communications over distances and so on so let us consider a realm without time let's start with that how does that work well we know because the lore tells us it's incomprehensible now for me that's simply not good enough I'm afraid one might want to argue that in an eternal realm which has no reasonable concept of time because it has never existed for them this could be problematic for the entities they're in as they would have no way of perceiving time in the linear sense as we understand it meaning their ability to take specific purposeful actions would become almost random or meaningless because if they're darting in and out of the warp and time varies seemingly almost at random the idea of following up previous actions in reality from the warp is obviously highly confusing you could also assume from our perspective anyway that this could make it extremely difficult for entities in the warp to say locate events or find individuals if from their perspective they are seeing across the entire scale of time as it has existed in the material realm or as we learned earlier time is apparently perceived even separately by all individuals within the war so how the hell does that work let's imagine that we exist in the warp and we're trying to find a specific event or individual to locate it be like attempting to find a grain of sand floating randomly in space lost at some place at some time across the entire galaxy and also it's continually changing position one thing we do know is that warp entities have already taken specific and planned actions into the material realm so we can at least assume they have some way of engaging specifically with events in our reality alternatively if you want to take the excessively simplistic non thinking option you may be happy with the explanation that it's just the nature of the chaos gods and it's all godlike and essentially they just know all in air quotes that they are just somehow able to by ways we cannot fathom to sense a very established version of our timeline it's all laid out for them to move us mortals around like some eternal Galactic board game it's a pretty lazy way to explain it but if that works for you then fine I guess but given you're here and already this far through the video I'm assuming you aren't lazy when it comes these things so let's continue now I'll just say as well that in relation to this idea that because the warp observes no time the chaos gods could appear at any point and have theoretically always existed even if we were to assume that we still should remember that the chaos gods cannot exist in material space they can of course reach out and touch the minds of mortals to sway things in their favor they're able to push demons out into the material world while again remembering that this can only happen in very specific circumstances like possession willing mortal vessels weeks ICA's warp storm tears ritual summoning and so on it also requires great amounts of energy from the warp in order to do this stuff as we uncover past details of ancient times you'll see how this relationship becomes inherently more complicated but for now let's just take it as read that the chaos gods could be anywhere at any time throughout history we still have no real idea about how much of their actions of limited do they have more power to exert relative to different periods in the material realm or is all the emotional and spiritual energy across time just absorbed on mass like some kind of collective finite energy reserve unknown and again not so easy to even wrap your head around this concept itself gets more complicated because if certain events have to occur that is to say as part of a closed time loop then would certain amounts of warp energy that are necessary be pre designated in a sense the more you think about it the worse it gets and especially if you then get into discussing things like a closed timelike curve or grandfather paradox so let's get into that the simplest way to explain a closed timelike curve would be a trajectory through space-time the dials for time travel to the past without exceeding the speed of light you could also describe it as a path in space-time that returns to its starting point and maybe it's like primer our good reference for this the grandfather paradox is another well known and it's a very straightforward example of a paradox the concept being that if you say went back in time to kill your grandfather then you could not have existed so consequently you couldn't have traveled to the past to kill your grandfather so then he's alive which means you do exist and you can then go back in time to kill your grandfather and so on it creates a paradox in the movie primer the two time travelers attempt to avoid any paradoxical situations by isolating themselves away from the world during their present time for a set period so that when they then travel back in time to that previously set point where they isolated themselves they theoretically avoid issues of causality it's a very clever film and one of the best representations of time travel that's been handled well of course their best intentions turn out to be fairly impossible and the whole thing becomes very complicated incidentally if you've never seen primer I strongly urge you to do so anyway these kind of paradoxes are one element that have led physicists to generally agree time travel to the past to be impossible along with some others suggesting that our universe isn't even capable of containing something like a closed timelike curve these issues though don't necessarily apply for us because that relies on us being able to reasonably define what is and isn't possible within the war or to say how chaos gods and even demons may or may not be able to travel through time it could also be that the notion of being able to travel forward or back to a specific point may not be something warp entities even have any control of or perhaps even they understand how inherently dangerous it might be to try and manipulate a time line or time lines depending on which construct of time travel you're subscribing to and how you may want to speculate on the concept of timelines we have a tendency to immediately think of a place without time there's a realm where you could easily just reach out or visit any point in time more specifically choose to effect those events there except there's nothing really to suggest as actually the case one way or the other in regards to the war regardless of how or if warp entities could consciously move to specific points in time the whole thing brings up problems simple little problems like you know violating the laws of causality and entropy with causality in our material realm we generally consider both time and consequently causation has a singular direction you cannot take an action that will cause an effect in what we see as the past because the past has already happened and that's now permanently behind us in time for example you take an action to push a glass off of a table that's causing it to fall and smash you cannot undo this effect and the cause has already occurred the other being the law of entropy or the second law of thermodynamics that systems will always flow from a state of order to a state of disorder meaning that the entropy of the universe is always increasing a simple example of this would be heat dispersal the law of entropy describing why heat energy will flow from hot to cold but not the other way around another example you're caught in a time traveling loop where you give an essential item to your past self but you're then in the future have to of course return to the past and give again to continue the loop but because that item is constantly moving forward in time in a linear fashion as the loop continues the object should age that is to say it's entropy or disorder should increase but if that were true then it should eventually deteriorate to a point beyond it becoming practically usable it can no longer function as the essentially required object within the event and so the time loop would break down and at that point nor could the loop have ever begun in order for a timely like this to exist it would need to break the law of entropy now of course there are arguably a couple of ways around that very specific example like transcribing the book to a new book but even then where did the book originate where as the starting point well if it was a more complex item that you could not replicate these are the kind of problematic paradoxes that occur with traveling to the past as well as giving either information or instructions that don't occur with traveling to the future but especially with entropy in terms of using critical objects that create or occurring time event whereas traveling to the future as I say doesn't have these problems and so that's generally considered to be theoretically possible these kind of paradoxes have many names but often fairly closely related or even somewhat ambiguous generally speaking though they are what I have already referred to as they close the time loop which is exactly as it sounds a closed period of time that continues to loop so even if the chaos codes were able to move around through our linear time line and take actions to influence events or even themselves those events could become what is referred to as we just said before a closed time loop specifically a predestination paradox or a bootstrap paradox a predestination paradox is where a series of events which could be perceived as the past or present lead to a future event and that future event though will be the ultimate cause of the first event in the past the reason why this is paradoxical is that the past event only occurs because of the action in the future event the bootstrap paradox is very similar but usually involves some physical object like the book we mentioned previously that object would then cause a series of events not dissimilar to the predestination paradox and as we just covered this is problematic because in a sense that object has never specifically originated from anywhere it's a paradox examples of this would be events in movies like Terry Gilliam's twelve Monkeys and also The Terminator in both these movies the main characters are stuck in the described causal loops in Terminator a future self-aware AI Skynet sends the t800 or model one at one Terminator back through time to assassinate Sarah Connor in attempt to alter the future her son John Connor sends car Reese back also to try and save Sarah while additionally already knowing that by doing so car will become his father in the past when the Terminator is eventually destroyed the leftover components of the t800 Terminator sent by Skynet will enable the reverse engineering of the terminators CPU and other materials something that seems could not have occurred otherwise in a deleted scene from the movie we even discovered that the facility where the final battle takes place between Sarah Connor Kyle Reese and the Terminator is in fact an early stage site for Cyberdyne systems that was a scene removed from the original screening their arrival at this location at the end of the film seems accidental on the part of Sarah and Kyle were just running to find somewhere to escape but in this chance decision they set up a whole future chain of events events of course that paradoxically couldn't have happened were it not for the terminator being sent to the Past and this suggests in contradiction to Sarah's assertion things are actually locked into a time loop their arrival at the Cyberdyne facility may have just seemed random to them but it could in fact been predestined and despite the illusion of it they had no free will in deciding that they were going to arrive there there's just one possibility of course regardless though these kind of causality loops could be created by any number of scenarios and involve objects or just information so returning to 40k let's for example say you as a cows God gain information from your future self this needn't be meeting yourself and having an actual one-to-one conversation but regardless you learn of a critical action you must take say influencing the elder into depravity at a certain point to ensure that you are born now I'm not saying that's how it happened but it's just an example or a predestination paradox these causal loops nearly always have a paradoxical nature which means you altima 10 become logically unable to determine where the cause occurs because if the cause was in the future creating an effect in the past you couldn't have reached that future without being affected by the past which is going to cause the future which then leads you to a final position where you are unable to determine the origin of anything and this is the final and most destructive impact of a causal loop and it's something that is usually just put to one side in movies or general pop culture and the reason it's put to one side is because it undermines the entire concept of past present and future because they are defined by causality if a future action is capable of causing a past effect if that sequence of events is even feasible you can no longer say that the past is definitively the past once you've moved into the future the past should already have happened and be inaccessible and so these time-traveling sequences of events render linear time essentially meaningless and this is the big problem with all this kind of stuff now the whole point of talking about this I hope is beginning to become obvious it highlights just how problematic the concept of a realm without any laws of time actually is along hand-in-hand with the whole chaos gods have always existed spell as I said for the beginning it sounds simple enough when you see it or hear it as a passing quote or an offhand remark by somebody he's talking about law and chaos gods when you actually start to engage the brain and you think about it further and what no time and always having existed actually means it creates any number of fairly major problems and that's not all because in 40k the warp has no laws of time fine we understand that now to be the case from there things unfortunately get even more complicated and troublesome than they already were because if we're talking about the concept of time in just one reality one dimension that of our own say material realm we might be able to rationalize and make some conclusions about that perhaps to do with how those in such a reality observe time and so on or even getting into tackling about multiple timelines etc right but in 40k it's not just one reality and this is where it becomes difficult to reasonably reconcile because you have two realms with extremely contradicting laws somehow apparently coexisting and worse also connected with each other having a dimension that sits parallel to another like the material in a material one with linear time and one without is so extremely difficult to come to a reasonable resolution over not to mention that if you read the law as it is back in the very early period of the galaxy or the universe the material and the immaterial apparently were not even as closed off from one another as they are in the present age of the Imperium which I will make some vague expansions on in future videos but again if you just think about that that confliction they're just massively problematic still let's try and just take what we do know now the warp exists as around without time and interacts with our material realm which does and that brings us to backwards causation we've now covered and understand the nature of causal paradoxes and often discussions around chaos and the war lead to the idea that those demons and gods who exists within the warp would be able to and we know have influenced or caused effects in what we would see from our linear perception as the past it's worth reminding that the chaos gods themselves pay extremely minimal attention to the mortal realm they only take note when events or individuals shine extremely brightly and from that you could fairly assume most of the time they are either entirely unaware of anything that we would describe as time instead they merely now and then see an action or sequence of events that they choose to engage with or perhaps consequently have little true free will over such things and just somehow know that they have to play their role in this let us consider having two dimensions existing in parallel one with apparently no time and one with linear time is inherently illogical because somehow being able to connect to a realm free of causality and without time creates so many conceptual problems but just for argument's sake if you were able to exist in say an adjacent dimension where time had no meaning if so would that be a physical journey or would it be more like a sea of invisible information thoughts feelings memories instinctive gut feelings just randomly becoming a point vague and somewhat like a precognition how can we reconcile this idea of backwards causation caused by those in the warp in our material reality that is to say future events causing actions in the past well it brings us to where all this has been leading to which is that we have to consider looking at things from what is called an eternal istván time and this states that time is symmetrical essentially what it's saying is that the past present and future all already exist the sensation of what we would refer to as the present is just an effect of human consciousness it's basically an illusion but then in reality our conscious mind and subsequent decisions have no actual bearing how events play out there's some evidence in the law that points toward the concept of causality being absent and that there are no restrictions on past present and future in right of the amore wildrider the elder Farseer autherine describes how raw wolf's power knows nothing of causality here there was no boundary to what had been or was and what might come to pass the description of what might come to pass I think is either a personal view of autherine or trying to keep some mystique about events but in order for things to really make sense we have to accept that all these things exist the Eldar do regularly make mention throughout their law and narratives to cyclical time they're very society is built around concepts of cycles which points heavily toward an eternal estoy nephew so keeping that in mind you might begin to see from its description of all things already existing as to why I said earlier time-travel has a habit of making things become much less enjoyable because no one likes to think their actions have already taken place and that free will is an illusion because it basically makes everything seem meaningless and that's what happens when you start interjecting time-travel or impossible to reconcile concepts like no laws of time all over the place still we have to enable the idea of backwards causation to work as it's something that's already established in 40k so we accept the idea of an eternal esteem of time we must then accept that future events already exist in order to have causal loops in what we could call the past something else which points to this is an alder myth known as the cosmic serpent the serpent is the only creature believed to exist in both the material and the psychic realm at the same time hence the serpent is said to be all-knowing across all of time is probably also points towards some visions and concepts of Rober us and other things which are relative to the various different pieces in the whole puzzle so as we already discussed when we then come to the idea of causal loops we no longer have any way of defining where a chain of events began there's also no choice involved because otherwise it becomes logically impossible so this gives us the unfortunate conclusion that there's no free will involved in anything let's just sidestep around that quite depressing and extremely dull conclusion by using a philosophical argument that any mortals conscious perception of free will is something you truly feel to your very core and that whether such a sensation is real in any metaphysical sense is ultimately irrelevant and unquantifiable to you you are unable to perceive your actions any other way other than being through your own free will so to all intents and purposes free will does exist or to put it more simply what we're saying is let's just not think about that too much because it makes things very boring as I said time travel unfortunately to make this mess of conflicting concepts of work the turn list of you is the only one that allows us to put together some of these pieces of the puzzle so then with this idea that everything already exists across time that would mean the chaos gods can surely see the endgame they can and should already know every single action to take right because they can see everything well obviously not it clearly can't work that way otherwise it already would have and they already would have done we could consider though that just as you may suddenly become aware of a memory from your past or something in the present that triggers our feeding from your memory the same could be said but in Reverse here it would be more like a feeling or a vision of a future event but without it literally having been delivered to you via some interaction or object as per our previous examples movies like arrival touch on this idea of eternalists time and on perceiving memories from your past and future these feelings would be more like a sense of purpose washing over you well you didn't know where in time you were only that you gained a sense of purpose on understanding that such a thing has to happen maybe you receive information in a vision but until a subsequent event occurs you are perhaps unsure of how that information is usable it could be that in the warp because of its abstracted lawless nature certain feelings or memories from what we could see as the past or the future only become brighter and more apparent when they align with a vein from our perceived linear interpretation of time a time like alignment of sense and events that events in our reality could create situations pre determining causal loops then requiring actions by those entities in the warp now I came to this from thinking about what I said earlier where the difficulty of existing in a realm with no concept of time could prevent you from taking any specific pointed actions in the material realm but also us knowing that they have apparently already taken some specific actions which then have caused these closed time loops if you couldn't easily actually locate to that moment you'd have to feel compelled to do it by some other process perhaps even outside of your own conscious freewill so in a realm where time is nonlinear or even non-existent such as the warp you could become aware of time as more of a cyclical or even a completely abstract concept or more simply perhaps just no concept of it at all example in your mind you suddenly have memories or information you previously were unaware of more specifically of actions you feel a compelling need to take to ensure a certain event occurs it might be so compelling you cannot resist the need even outside of your own will you might see a whole sequence of events where specific actions were necessary or that you at least felt were necessary but maybe were unaware of the order or the implications until other events occurred first this would then cause you to take actions similarly to Horus in order to bring about the resulting predestined events so with all of this said I cannot conclude that all of the chaos gods have always been fully manifested in the warp despite it even stating in the law in regard to slowness now calm down okay sit back down because the key word here for me is fully manifested I find it very difficult to accept the concept of slowness always having existed because seriously think about it it's very difficult to reconcile the contradictions and problems such a truth would represent if they have always existed how were there times when the elder for example don't have to worry about their souls being devoured that was a long time all that through the period of galactic elder dominion they weren't brought then by feelings of wanting to slaughter each other scheming to subvert their peaceful time yet later seemingly out of nowhere things spiral out of control if slowness always had existed why didn't that happen right out of the gate now look there's a lot more to it than that but I think in actuality where we find ourselves here is back at the mercy of semantics especially when the only source for such statements are as his rival gods reckon it because that's what it says in the Codex flesh has existed for all time as his rival gods reckon it to me this just comes across as the other gods perception and not necessarily having any literal bearing on strictly how long something has existed if anything it could suggest the opposite that they perceive slowness has always existed but they only see things that way because they have no point of reference no way of gauging it or describing it they can't say that that's the past and this is the future so to them it seems like slash has always existed because they can't understand it any other way with all that said that would be fine with the concept that they may have existed forever in some sense being that the warp is a sea of souls and emotional energy I could very much entertain the idea that for a long time before becoming self-aware the chaos God would be a mass and reactive formation of compatible emotional energies when this formation could reach out and touch the minds of mortals as and when it felt compelled to do so even before it was born into the warp in truth and became conscious for example if we assume that gods have always existed in some sense within the warp Sloane ash may have suddenly found that memories or emotional instincts from the future of its creation before it's really properly sentient as a purely instinctual entity to reach out and begin to try and influence the elder who due to a couple of other reasons are also kind of bit weakened at this point so slash wouldn't have been creating but was maybe severely worsening the elder slide down into depravity before their eventual annihilation as I already said the concept of a chaos God being physically manifested within the walk for all time yet also specifically being born through events by its adjacent material realm literally makes no sense whatsoever and that should be obvious not only because of the connected events of the material realm but also just by the definition of their whole nature that the chaos gods use psychic energy and souls from mortal creatures and this is why the thinking that I've seen some people say before that the birth of a God is a point in time that we see but that they have truly existed throughout all of time that doesn't make sense once you actually start to think beyond just that description instead the idea that for me seems most plausible is again it's a little bit semantics the sense that the chaos gods have always existed but specifically not as a literal warp manifested form okay so they have always existed but from our point of view they haven't always been there and even been there to influence things they are over the warp as much as the warp is them and when it comes to specific events knowledge or actions that would then create a closed time loop it's impossible to say definitively just how that functions in a reality where time simply doesn't exist it's hard to imagine that the gods can be aware of such miniscule moments in time when time for them doesn't exist in any perceivable sense my personal conclusion is that they only become aware of information and actions through a very chaotic perhaps even a random process which to me seems somehow all the more appropriate there is no clearly defined or documented explanation for how any of this works which should be of no surprise to anyone but I've spent solid time thinking it through and this is the only way I've been able to reconcile having a dimension with no concept or perception of time that is not only adjacent to but also interacting with a realm which has a very contradictory well-defined perception of time as a linear unidirectional stream now when we eventually come to the third video I will flesh out things a lot more but just simply I don't believe the chaos gods have always been manifested yet as I said they may have been largely present in some form or state what it comes down to though really is that this idea of the war being devoid of time is problematic it does to be sure provide plenty of material for our amusement I love the idea that I've seen said somewhere before that for some chaos Space Marines who exist in the warp the black Crusades from their perception are more like a weekly event where they return through the eye of terror regroup quickly restock and like right lads let's get back out there I'm going to smash the Imperium this time when in actuality as they emerge from the warp for Humanity it's been like a thousand years and this kind of thing is illustrated as I said earlier in the night Lords novel void stalker and here's the other thing anybody can spin off wild theories about what lies beyond for example maybe we've only seen the first chaos gods maybe there are more than four perhaps the warp is the true reality and we're living in a false illusion of reality maybe the warp is not a localized mirror of our galaxy but of the whole or many universes and it's all just so far beyond our comprehension you get the idea if I spent some significant time joining random dots of law together I'm sure I could conjure up an endless stream of mad theories about origins and the future of things if I felt compelled to do so because just randomly fitting ideas into an already very fragmented framework isn't that hard to do what's important to remember is that anybody can think up some crazy nonsense because when you have no restrictions you can make anything work and just fit and adjust the pieces as you go along in doing so you're likely to find yourself eventually stranded too far or badly contradicting other elements that you never considered and then you're no longer operating within the you know verse that has been created and exists and this is why often when I see posts from people starting off stating that their theory is based around other theories and maybe even a theory based off of some unofficial fanfiction you usually find people exiting pretty quickly because while it's fun if what we're doing is an exercise in creative writing its subjectively pointless in terms of trying to understand the official law that is but to be clear please understand I'm not suggesting that fanfiction is pointless in fact I hate to get into writing some of my own stuff soon but I personally only enjoy fanfiction when that exists within the established law and boundaries because when you start reaching out wildly beyond that it's no longer part of the actual world we're invested in so I have that's clear it all makes sense what's actually a difficult undertaking and why I think so often we see people referring to say things like well I don't have a source but let me tell you what I think it's because taking what you already know and combining it with the documented history the constraints of reality as we know it and limiting yourself to only a few established pieces to make sense of the puzzle then having to find a way to make those pieces fit is a much more challenging task and actually often requires some deep thought even additional reading and that's just not so easy think about it like this okay adding extra dots to join the dots is all well and good so long as you're placing them where it seems appropriate and not just all over the place because otherwise you're going to end up with a picture that looks nothing like at all what was originally designed and for some people that might be what they want but I personally want to know what the original image was it's like finding a few pieces of a puzzle and then cutting out the missing ones you want with any pattern to make it fit technically yes you have formed laid out and finished your puzzle but by just making up your own pieces which don't even match with the original as you went along its self-defeating and in the end whilst you have filled in all the gaps it just looks wrong my personal opinion is that most people want to use the official pieces of the puzzle and maybe speculate where the black pieces may go or what pieces are needed to fit but always building those guesses reasonably off of what is already set even if that means having to live with a few blank spaces toward the edge but at least they know that those pieces that they do have are the right pieces so at the end of this first video we've learned about the basic framework which is important to understand before we deal with the rest so what I'm going to do is illustrate for you my best conceptualization of the warps relationship to the material reality including the issues around time and this is as follows imagine the warp is a vast and infinite ocean scattered across the ocean are islands that are vast distances apart these islands are the material worlds that exist in our reality each representing and linked with all others the complete and invisible process of linear time order eternalists time as perceived by those who live in the material realm is always there and overlays this whole realm of the material the two realms are inexorably connected one is constantly shifting it has tides and currents and it can be very dangerous or relatively calm at certain times it can be ferocious crashing and lashing itself against the solid islands or forming dangerous vortices out on the ocean itself sometimes isolated other times enveloping islands or whole sections and cutting off worlds from the others were they to be so enveloped by storms it's possible that they could even exist outside of the constant time of the material realm at least until those storms subside and it returns to a state of relative calm but some areas may always be turbulent upon these islands exist powerful bright entities trapped in corporeal vessels and these are the souls of mortal creatures not the old diary though and when these mortal spirits are released from their vessels their energy especially when released on mass could be envisaged as a seismic force having a more powerful effect upon the shifting current and relative state of calm of the ocean in the other realm the continual seeping of emotions and conscious thought into the ocean of the warp is more like a gradual shifting of temperature and salinity creating movement to the coalescing emotional forces within the Co Souls itself the more severe the seismic force the more powerful the resulting storm or extreme event can be the ever-changing wax and wane of galactic emotions directly relative to how strongly the ocean breaks upon the shores of reality you may then imagine specific events that occur as vessels or flotsam that are permanently moored to the solid land and realm of reality yet upon the ocean they can drift and move around in an incomprehensible state of random disorder they never set at permanent coordinates from the perspective of those in the warp itself some may appear ways to be adjacent even connected others are not at all ordered importantly no matter their actual position upon the ocean at any moment they are always permanently tethered or moored to a specific unchanging point on the solid land of reality and no matter the forces tides and storms on the ocean itself that position will not change from the land though unlike the confusing disorder of the ocean these tethered moments always appear in their same position specific and never changing so then we go one step deeper the gods of chaos exist within the further depths of the ocean they are the gods or the monsters of this realm some of these vessels these events that float at random upon the ocean are tethered by a second line to them they can be tethered to demons or other entities or multiple entities that exist and reside in the warp and while they are technically able to see all the events of the material reality at once existing as they do within the ever-shifting deep currents of the ocean it can be difficult to see those events with clarity perhaps when certain events that are directly connected to an entity within the ocean that psychic tether tugs and pulls like a fishing line to get their attention yet unlike fishing one is always hooked to the line and the chances of getting off of it are very small if not impossible but when that line poles the actions that are needed are just a matter of course the difficult thing for us to reconcile is whether or not the future has already happened all things considered we may have to accept that this is in fact the case because not only does that actually play out in some of the different races in the galaxy in terms of their law but it also makes the most logical sense in terms of the restrictions that exist and that we have to work around also knowing the one reality through estab events inevitably interacts with the other no matter their present actions they will always be connected to specific events and those events will always be connected to the land of reality where they occupy a specific and ordered point in time from the perspective of those who exist upon that solid landmass now all of this is fairly difficult to reasonably reconcile it's certainly opened to individual interpretation to me this is how I loosely and very simplistically imagined the relationship between the warp and reality the disorder of one is in many ways irrelevant to the other the warp time has no specific meaning but the event seemed from the ocean of the war no matter how they're perceived by the entities therein will always be permanently connected to specific points in the material reality from a mortal point of view we are only able to view those events in a specific order because we're constrained by the laws that govern the material realm but in the warp they can be perceived and visited in any order how malleable any of this is how much you could truly alter time is very unclear have all events and actions already occurred our mortal figures simply just playing them out over and over again can individuals within the warp in the material realm truly have an impact on those events are some more easily able to be shifted and does the slightest movement of one create a chain effect of entanglement that would lead to unknown disastrous consequences who can really say it will continue in part two we will learn about the origins of the galaxy in the war in heaven and its implications we'll also learn in detail about elder mythology which has a heavy bearing on much of this finally in part three we'll pull all of these various factors together to make conclusions so as always thanks for watching and I'll see you all soon in part 2

Channel: Luetin09

Views: 1,249,513

Keywords: Gaming, Discuss, Channel, Future, 40K, Warhammer 40K, Imperium, Humanity, Mankind, Doom, Fall, Space Marines, Heretic, Heresy, The Emperor of Man, Lore, History, Guide, Warhammer 40000, Warp, Immaterium, Rift, War, Slaughter, Horror, Nightmare, Tabletop, Inquisition, Chaos, Daemon, Origins, Time, Causation, Causality, Grandfather Paradox, Bootstrap Paradox, Time Travel

Id: WxZMOAmtWPw

Length: 88min 6sec (5286 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 26 2019