40K DARK ORIGINS [4] Time Theory & The Warp - Conclusions | WARHAMMER 40,000 History/Lore

[Music] [Music] [Music] now far back in the midst of time when i originally posted the first part of dark origins i tried to lay out as best i could some understandings of time and how this could impact our perceptions and interpretations of the warp the immaterium and this seems hard to remember now doesn't it that's why we started talking about all of this in the first place all this time stuff but also the idea was connected to our own ideas of space and time that when projected against the warp this can be problematic in regard to its interaction with material space the material one of these most difficult elements to reconcile when related to the origin of chaos gods at any specific moment was which theory of time do we apply to this mysterious realm if we even apply one at all this becomes specifically relevant though as time is often referenced when beings of the warp or based on the experience of those who have traveled there now when we hear characters speaking about the warp and how it's often described that the warp exists as a place with no time this immediately sounds problematic a place with no time what does that even mean well this description of the warp having no time i've explored along with ideas of time travel and the potential paradoxical effects of this basically how it can be extremely problematic my original conclusion was that the only feasible view if you were going to apply one at all was the eternalist view worth remembering that whenever you see 2d illustrations of space-time planes wire frameworks and things like this these are used to illustrate the concepts so that your brain can more easily understand the principles being described what we need to always remember is that these are not really how space time that is space and time exists for us it's simply a very difficult concept to illustrate so it's broken down in this 2d way but actually it is existing in a four-dimensional space i struggled to really work with this described idea of there being no time in the war this is very likely because i was taking things far too literally from my previous thoughts i think it's far better to say that if a demon is speaking about there being no time within the warp of 40k it may very well refer more to them having no real concept of time and this is because of the space or the dimension that they are existing in as i noted last time when we were describing ideas of the present and then how do you even really gain a perception of time if within your space it is not necessarily observable in the way that we do the far more boring and simplistic option is that it may well just be a poor description especially when placed within the context of your average character's knowledge of science in the 41st millennium we often hear these accounts from figures in 40k for whom science is hardly a well-studied or focused field of experience think of robert gullman and his abject frustration when returning to the imperium and falling into essentially a pit of depression as to how backward and ignorant the imperium has now generally become even more so than it was originally which is saying something only made worse by cults of indoctrination of its citizenship leading to them being completely devoid of the ability to even think for themselves or observe basic facts about the galaxy goleman set out to change this though and is now leading the crusade to change things for the better as well as his other crusades this idea of no time though it's really nonsensical even within some bizarro dimension if they're actually no time in any real sense then nothing could truly occur you'd be looking at effectively a dead zone i talked about entropy and causality already in part one and three i just wanted to make a note today that i think is worth bearing in mind and that is that some may think of time as being this thing which allows us to see causality that is to say we see a cause and effect by means of time passing and generally this tends to be how most people think about time time passes you see a result that feels very understandable but in actuality kind of like i alluded to last time it's really the reverse it's not time but it is causality which is responsible for allowing us to see what we observe as time we see cause and effect and by this it allows us to form an understanding of time so having a finite speed on causality is essential for our material galaxy or if you like the material in 40k in order to exist this is obviously seemingly contradictory to how our understanding exists within the war you can think of it like this as physicist sean carroll explained space time tells mata how to move but it's matter which tells space time how to curve so what we remember as well is that time slows down as velocity increases and you move toward the speed of light special relativity and we also know that mass distorts space-time general relativity now an example of general relativity within fiction will be in the movie interstellar we see it demonstrated how time passes at a normal observable rate for the scientists in one location who are in extreme proximity to a black hole its immense mass heavily distorting space time so that while time passes as normal for them but for those who are not in that distorted space time many more years pass however i should note that in the film there's a heavy amount of artistic license basically the amount of time dilation we see was dictated as being necessary for the script but supposedly was very far from being an accurate reflection but that was very deliberate so although the idea of mass distorting space-time and general relativity was the rationalization in the movie based in real physics in order to get it to work they had to make some very big artistic leaps so not entirely like a lot of things in 40k you might think now come back to interstellar later as it's an interesting narrative and the physicist consultant nobel prize winning kip thorne has a whole book that describes how they worked through the narrative in that movie and had to bend the rules so of course this is something we all know sometimes rules have to be bent or at least left open to interpretation in a fictional narrative in order to allow things to seem more interesting or even just being mildly plausible and these are things which are very obviously established norms within the 40k galaxy there is a considerable suspension of disbelief where crazy demon gods are eating the souls of the galaxy humans are wielding four foot chained swords around while shooting automatic fire with coke can size munitions i would suspect the different degrees of artistic license we might consider to give 40k versus something like interstellar would be quite considerable so let's return to those theories of time these ideas about past present and future in part one and also three i described how the only view which made sense overall was that of the eternalist view of time which describes how the past present and future already exist and our sensation of what we would refer to as the present is actually just an effect of human consciousness depending on how deep on that you really want to go of course there's also the idea that free will is basically an illusion our conscious mind and subsequent decisions have no actual bearing on how events might play out however again having actually spoken with some physicists between those previous videos and now this is far from being a fully concluded decision and these kind of ideas are always being actively discussed as we might expect but as well those who might suggest hey maybe it's not so definitive but even an overlap of somewhere in between those theories of eternalism and the growing evolving bloc universes and then that's still before you come to those who believe in multiverses that is the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics which i am not going to get into now whatever you may feel is the case within our reality within the law of 40k there are pieces of evidence which point to this being the case that is to say this idea about the future and the unknown certainty there whether it's somewhere in between kind of like eternalism and growing block the eldar ulthran describes how raw warped power knows nothing of causality here there was no boundary to what had been what it was and what might come to pass from the many descriptions given to us by the eldar there is this common theme of what might come to pass because of their seers their ability to kind of look into the future and at a minimum this suggests some implied doubt about the certainty of future events and we hear this from the emperor as well it should be clear to all by now that the emperor was not able to fully see with some clarity into the future so for those with the ability of foresight in 40k the farseers the emperor and perhaps even demonic entities seems fairly established between them all that things in terms of the future are not set in stone they're not established in terms of an eternalist view of all things future past present all being set but it also doesn't fit entirely well with the growing block view because the idea there is the future is really a void and there is nothing so it appears to be somewhere in between those things on the other hand one might want to argue perhaps things are actually set but it's just simply our perception that makes it appear that all things are possible and even those who think they can and have some ability to kind of see into the future maybe they're just not able to pin down these specifics but really this comes down to more of a philosophical debate of which side of the fence do you want to sit on most people would avoid the more true eternalist perspective because it is less appealing nobody likes to consider whether their decisions are meaningless and it depends how much weight you want to give to quantum mechanics if we allow ourselves to consider a reality where the future is a blank void and that can only be hinted toward this makes the idea of an eternalist view very difficult but not necessarily impossible because it means that perhaps the future is still somewhat constrained but not entirely formed i think what's important is that i don't think they have to be a binary decision it's not necessarily all or nothing there's room for overlap especially within a fictional verse and given the descriptions by many characters ranging from eldar sears to chaos space marines about the realities and things that they have seen there's room for all perspectives to fit the eternalist view as we know is a far more deterministic perspective that all events including our actions can be determined this is part of newtonian physics basically saying that by knowing the position and velocity of every particle you could reasonably then determine their past present and future states the major problem with this is that it assumes that time functions based off of a singular constant point and this could be called the present we know this not to be the case because we know that time can be observed differently by the distortion of space time so that brings us back around to considering what objectively is the present and don't worry i'm not going to go off on that thread again but i'm just saying that's where you end up coming back to now if we consider things like backwards causation being an established process within the 40k verse which to my annoyance seems at least reasonably likely to be the case although i would say not definitively because just what can you be definitive about within 40k and that's where my head is at with that stuff right now anyway but is it a reasonably likely established process by now in 40k possibly maybe i've used before the example of horus turning to chaos as an example here except that as people have noted you could also argue that perhaps demons and minions of chaos were merely manipulating horus with false visions of future events and yes i know word bearers involvement not accurate visions necessarily of a set future more like options that were possible and as the eldar author and said things that might come to pass so thinking about this sequence of events when it comes to horus we may consider that the future was not set in stone and this really is one of the problems we face when thinking about the nature of all of this because just like a lot of the substance of the 40k verse it really does depend more on your in-fiction perspective than actual documented specifics that even those specifics which do exist they're still open to subjective interpretation bias and just straight up manipulation there are also various other signs for us to follow as i noted the eldar's ability with regard to the perception of time plus of course the existence of human ai starships from the dark age of technology who claimed to be able to travel through time and even weaponry from this era that was said to be able to shift objects as large as entire starships at a quantum level so they occupied that same four-dimensional space creating a cataclysmic process of destruction unseen at any other period in human history and the eldar also lend further weight to all of this with their myth of the highly vague cosmic serpent according to the eldar this is a creature believed to exist in both the material and warp realm simultaneously and the serpent is therefore said to be all-knowing across all time there's also another time-related instance where the dark angels question should they travel through time in an attempt to alter the past and this was by means of the so-called takalka engine patrol cha engine whatever an ancient sentient device possible of warp origin but ultimately it's unknown tatopka was part of a triumvirate of similar entities and when combined can create a rift that bridges both space and time and it is said that it is able to flatten the warp which sounds highly suggestive that it is effectively creating an artificial tunnel similar-ish to a wormhole within this web way an artificial portal to allow travel faster than ordinary warp travel it sounds incredibly like this on its own the kolkata is capable of extremely efficient precise accurate warp jumps during the heresy takalka was discovered by lionel johnson who began to frequently converse with the culka confiding with it above all others towards the end of the heresy takoka became embedded within the dark angels fortress known as the rock and far later in the modern 41st millennium the figure known as cipher revealed how dakota was embedded within the rock and that he believed archangel's history of the fallen could potentially be changed by finding the other two engines and using them to change history to conquer describes to the space marines in answer to their question of who created the machine who created the kolka and he says at the dawn of the galaxy so far removed from humans that they might as well be gods but even they could not tame the warp only coral it for moments at a time but that which creates also devours and i am the foundation of all that was is and will be i am the lens the bridge the doorway quite obviously the dark angels wish to destroy it but cipher explains how the engine exists across the entirety of its timeline that it is in fact divorced from the normal temporal space and that if they were to destroy it then they would destroy it in the past also and so it never would have been this appears to be of no concern but cipher elaborates that if they destroy the machine then lionel johnson would never have been able to use it during the heresy unless the emperor would lose against horus the lion used the takalka to aid rudolph guleman on his battle on the eastern fringe and by expediting this conflict forced horus to assault terror before the ultramarines could arrive to provide support society notes that without takaka the ultramarines would have been slowly crushed by the suppression rune storm and the horus would assault terror at his own choosing and at full strength now the point of all this is that it does appear that no theory of time appears to fit neatly into the 40k verse the eternalist view as i said is more deterministic and suggestive that if all things are not set then at least are more well defined than just being a future void of possibilities other choices were the presenters view which doesn't fit anywhere for me and then we have the growing block the evolving block view this is most people's common perception of time that our past is set and established and our present builds on the events and actions of our past continually determining what we see as the present another way of stating this might be to say that a growing block view helps us define as well a direction of time and again like i said there is still some room for overlap here with the eternalist perspective with a growing block even if there is perhaps some possibilities within our future those things cannot affect us within whatever we might define as the present essentially causal effects do not reach us from the future they only reach us from the past however our past is something that we can say exists not only exists but it continues to inform and affect us in the present developing our future which does not exist yet anything that originates in our past and continues to affect us is said to give weight to this view for example things like radiation these originate in the past but actively continue to have consequences moving forward you could consider that a range of future possibilities do exist and so the future might to some degree influence the present just as the past does it may be difficult to change things but it's possible hence the eldar's continual references to things that might be possible but again the past is more than likely impossible to change and that even if you were to try some force would likely conspire to your failing this issue of the past and are you able to alter it is important for me in building an understanding of time and the warp and how this relates to humanity and its history in the 40k galaxy this of course also relates to the warp the gods and beings which inhabit this space to my knowledge i cannot recall an explicit instance within the 40k verse of a clearly defined causal loop where there is a specific alteration of the past by someone traveling from the future that is of course unless you're willing to accept the reference to the orc warlord grizzgut who upon launching a wag unwittingly traveled through time when they were going through the warp grizzgutz and his warband actually appeared out of the warp prior to their entry to it so they actually traveled back in time but unintentionally somehow upon realizing this grizzgutz decides he's going to hunt down his former self and then kill him except grizzgut's reason for doing so is not some grandiose convoluted scheme his reason for doing this is to literally kill himself so that he can steal his gun so that he will then have two of his favorite guns which seems just about as good a reason as any but when we're thinking about these kind of things i always put the orcs kind of in their own sphere because they're kind of their own thing in terms of the way they work and how things relate to the warp and just their interaction with the verse itself at the same time they did travel back through time unintentionally and if you want to take that reference at face value it does give us this idea that when it comes to the warp this is one of the reasons why everything is so complicated within the 40k verse because people can in fact actually travel into the warp and come out of it before they entered into so things get more more complicated wherever you turn originally in dark origins 1 i did suggest like i said earlier that horus turning to chaos was potentially causal loop and that it appeared something was happening during this time there was potentially future visions influencing the past as well as uncertainty around the casting of the primarks to worlds throughout the galaxy however i want to pull that back and say that i think this was too strong of a framing of this situation for me for one there has been new information coming to light or one might say there were at least new possibilities via the excellent book satellite which suggests an alternative interference with regard to the primark's scattering this is like i've said it all along if you only have a singular source for something within the 40k verse you shouldn't necessarily trust it and now that we have alternative explanations there's possibilities there also in regard to horus like i said being manipulated by future reality that's a demon creating a cause or loop situation this need not necessarily be the case and as many of you have pointed out the demon could have maybe been showing more or one possibility and i know as well yes aerobus etc in fact this is one thing though that i'm building toward in relation to the warp itself who can really say what demons are able to see and interpret perhaps this was just one of many options that you might be seeing or maybe it was an entire fiction for horus designed to manipulate him and that also just happened to come to pass and be real my overall point though is that in my opinion there is no significant evidence that i see currently for major problematic causal loops within the 40k verse and those that potentially are there are kind of closed down and as i noted just a moment ago even when the dark angels had the kind of ability or the ambition maybe to do this they concluded it would be too dangerous and could have huge implications my far bigger worry about the possibility of timeline manipulation and causal loops or grandfather paradoxes is it raises all sorts of unknown dangers once it becomes established and is known to be possible similar to say the terminator franchise and from what we see within the 40k verse it seems that at the very least there is the potential for such technology to exist or even that it does exist and then you run the risk of figures traveling back in time and then where does it end what horrors could this create to establish timelines i could speculate and list off any number of catastrophic things here because the list is just endless but imagine some kind of earlier disruption aimed at say the emperor pre-golden age corruption of humanity by chaos or invasions of a xenos the list goes on and on and like i say there are all number of other verses that have in my opinion been absolutely ruined by people messing around in this way just because they couldn't be bothered to think of a a better forward-going narrative and this is why i feel that within 40k and i'm going a bit of a tangent here with my own personal preferences and speculations but i do strongly feel that we need within 40k there to be some sense of an established in-fiction chronology protection and this in fact has been theorized about within physics it was first suggested by stephen hawking this idea that the laws of physics would ultimately prevent any type of functional time machine from forming this is the chronology protection conjecture now further works to consider those ideas have been put forward since and suggest that semi-classical quantum gravity effects whatever the hell that means would also intervene to prevent time machines from forming to establish a definitive chronology protection this would require a full theory though of quantum gravity which does not yet exist but there are whole physicists who work very specifically in that area also the suggestions that backward time travel may be possible but that it would prevent paradoxes this chronology production would prevent paradoxes from happening so an example would be the novikov self-consistency principle and this tells us that any being who might attempt to change the past would be prevented by physical laws from making the change so the idea of free will essentially being constrained and this constraint has a more global character than constraints on free will that follow from the standard local laws of physics interestingly this comes to what we were thinking about in regard to the past becoming defined but the future is still undefined so in terms of chronology protection the idea overall is that if time machines exist there can be no free will there which again points us toward an eternalist view and that would make sense as well if you are wanting time travel to be real the future has to already exist for you to travel to it otherwise where would you actually end up if the future is undefined you would basically just be flying into the void this is something which is never really drilled down on with some of these time travel adventures where people are traveling into the future but i suppose the idea being that it's one possible future so if time travel were possible which it suggested at least within 40k is the case chronology protection and the self-consistency principle basically tell us that you could not somehow kill your younger self if you travel back in time either directly or indirectly it does suggest that you can in fact co-exist and interact but if you attempted to do something that fundamentally would alter the past somehow circumstances would restrict you and dictate that you cannot create situations that would lead to a paradox in time for example the grandfather paradox danovikov supports this point of view with the argument of physics already restricts your free will every day but not probably how you imagine for example you may choose my free will to fly but attempt to fly but gravity and physics will dictate that you cannot so your free will may be to try and walk through a concrete wall the restraints within physics will dictate that you cannot so in a way it is restraining your free will it's preventing you from doing that thing so one respect we do not have true free will it's restricted by the parameters of our universe and we're restricted so the question asked by the idea of chronology protection is basically considering how physics defines our reality and consequently why would those restrictions placed on a time traveler be any different you would already be traveling to a defined place that is considered as being set so trying to change things would be akin to attempting to walk through that concrete wall now i should note this is obviously a view that is not shared by all and certainly not time travel fans for the obvious reason it would heavily undermine that entire genre although in some ways it doesn't because you could still go to those places and experience them but you could not for example assassinate someone or manipulate events in general in some ways it's actually more beneficial because within fiction there's often been this presumption if you go to the past even the most minor of interferences would set off essentially a butterfly effect leading to potentially major alterations through a sequence of events you see this in stuff like back to the future whereas chrono protection is basically saying that couldn't happen which means you could visit the past with relative safety if it were even possible in the first place which is extremely doubtful but with the example of back to the future the idea with the chrono protection is that basically that situation wouldn't have even been able to happen he wouldn't have been able to interfere there and set off this weird chain of events now also i don't want to go too far off on a huge side tangent but it'd be wrong of me not to note an interesting series that looks specifically at this idea and that is stephen king's mini series titled 11 22 63. it was by far away not the best series but for the purposes of this it raised some very interesting ideas that i have not really seen approached anywhere else most time travel fictions involve paradoxes or uncertainties about how time travel was achieved thinking about primer or then you also have the big hollywood time travel stuff the excellent and the unusual idea with 11 2263 is that from the outset it establishes fairly clear parameters about traveling to the past the simple version is as i just described the past is set because it's happened and those things have already been observed they're basically locked in however you can still travel there and interact to a degree and it explores this idea that is not the people or the places that are a danger to time travelers to the past but that is in fact the past itself actively resists change like trying to mix oil and water within the series though this actually goes a step further because as the space of the past seems to become almost kind of self-aware and actively attempts to prevent you from altering things to even a dangerous degree if you do something that really [ __ ] with the past the past [ __ ] with you so what you see in this sequence is the main character whilst in the past attempts to phone his father for advice this obviously can't happen he has a lot of interference on the phone line which is the past pushing back against him he walks away from the phone and so nothing happens but when he attempts to go back to the phone to try and call his father for a second time this is when the past pushes back even stronger and he realizes that it nearly cost him his life but essentially strangers within the past begin attempting to dissuade the character from making changes and the closer he gets to achieving genuine major changes in the past then the more severe the effects around him become and in fact it becomes quite threatening and the suggestion is within 11 22 63 whereby you can exist in the past providing you are careful and you don't create too many ripples in the water but the bigger you start splashing around the more the reality begins to push back against you and ultimately it's assumed that the past is attempting to eliminate the inconsistency who's not meant to be in this time and then to prevent the alteration i will say that this show is not the best example in some ways because and spoilers he is able to effect a change in the end as is often the case with a book to screen translation it's not made completely clear in the show but in the actual book it's explained that when it goes to the past it doesn't reset but essentially it's beginning a new time thread or timeline and this is where you're heading towards again this idea of multiple verses different timelines etc and while small alterations can be made that are insignificant to timelines and those are tolerated by the past major changes can create effects that threaten reality itself ultimately the character realizes that the past can't really and likely shouldn't be altered not entirely dissimilarly than the dark angels coming to the same conclusion the implications for meddling in the past are just too serious however you want to look at it so like i say it's not the best example but this idea about the past being set and essentially unable to be altered in any significant way sits well within all this stuff we're thinking about here and also that goes forward to things like interstellar as well where he's able to make very minor gravitic infractions into the past but nothing more now as i said this has become ever more important to me as i've considered it because if machines like to culka to culture exist as well as demons and warp entities in a place that is outside of our ordinary space and presumably they could access any point in time of their choosing so this idea also that the past is locked in place i find to fit most conveniently within the framework that i'm trying to rationalize in fact i find it more than fitting i find it to be absolutely necessary if demons within the warp can truly see all of time it has long been questioned if slaanesh exists over the whole of time given the warp is said to exist outside of our understanding of space-time then how is it that these gods have not then affected humanity in its past or the eldar for that matter perhaps they try but are unable to for the reasons that we just considered perhaps every attempt they make resists them actively they're simply unable to change certain laws of reality they may well exist in a realm that defies all the laws of the material but for them to enter into material space once here they must then follow the laws of material space with of course some slight bending of rules considering the strange nature of the 40k reality with psychic powers and so on so we may think of these entities within the warp as being present but unable to contribute to those time periods before they came into being this would help us to somewhat reconcile ideas of just how they interact with our material space which is one of the really big problems when it comes to the warp so overall in terms of which theory of time we might consider in regards to 40k i think that for me this feels like a little bit of a cop-out but with all things considered my best framing is some form of the growing block but with simultaneously some possible future being all present within the block universe so essentially i want to consider the past as being absolutely locked in place in the future has some definition based on the influences at a quantum level so still something of an eternalist view but simply that things are not fully determined already and i feel like this is not to say that some events are perhaps not predestined or necessary but that our will still has an impact on our future to quote the eldar sears again what might come to pass however within the warp i think that's not necessarily true at all i think within the warp you definitely could have something like the eternalist view and essentially we're having kind of two things going on there and the reason for this will be the potential that is happening at kind of a higher level we'll talk about that shortly but the other thing that i absolutely subscribe to is this idea of chronology protection 100 i'm on board here because that actually goes beyond just my personal let's be real heavy bias of disliking backwards time travel messing around and creating weird alternate timelines undermining narrative and maybe paradoxes i think it's actually more fundamental than that because as i noted i think within 40k you must have some sense of chronology protection to prevent just all hell breaking loose literally and chaos gods being able to interfere across all of time and the compromise might be okay mortals in the materium could travel back and maybe manipulate things in a small way but again then we're back into heavy questions of just how possible that would be and even then the chaos of paradoxes in time is really something i don't want to see or have to consider within the verse causal loops as i explained previously can be incredibly problematic not least because once a time loop exists it's near impossible to determine which action came first being a growing block time theory coupled with the idea of an embedded unchangeable past helps us to resolve that dilemma somewhat along with the idea that we could philosophically consider that perhaps a degree of the autonomous perspective like i said also can be applied to the future and this perhaps is a little bit more rigid than we might like to think but we would also determine our own actions but all of this still does not bring us to the final conclusions about the warp or the chaos gods but the theory of time within the 40k verse in my opinion anyway enables there to be something of a more stable and defined position it's the first piece of the puzzle that to my mind helps us more clearly determine those other relationships now briefly i just want to talk about chrono strife i recently covered this in a separate video but it's still an important piece to include in this video for context and i've shortened this down so if you want to check out the full version check out the chrono strife video on the channel now another thing i will say is that games workshop recently announced that they will be reworking the dark imperium and plague war novels it does mean that there will be additional details and that within what i am talking about here specifically things could change or there could be additional perspectives in the future so just bear that in mind so for us remembering that the present is not something observably consistent or even reasonably definable the core concept of maintaining a singular established chronicle of time the imperium is near to impossible given their existing limitations and their incredibly suppressed society when it comes to science and technology as a whole now granted within the imperium they still have some true geniuses within the mechanicus but overall most of the imperium is really something between a medieval and industrial level of understanding when it comes to technology anyway and just because they have advanced weapons and machinery it doesn't mean that this is the level of societal understanding the imperium exists within and i think this is something people regularly confuse having advanced technology and being at that level of understanding are two entirely separate things most of the imperium technology was not created by them much of it they have no idea how to replicate or even how it functions they rely on processes and shared templates of understanding very often when they lose final versions of machines they're unable to make new ones especially if they were to lose a standard template now more recently we have seen primaris being blessed with the works of belisarius core but coal is not developing tech for the whole of the imperium and most of his works have focused on essentially reworking existing tech and just upgrading it for military purposes he hasn't created necessarily anything truly groundbreaking beyond the primaries adaptations in terms of the vehicles they are just kind of like i say variations on a theme and perhaps some small progression forward however it is possible that call and gullman together could lead the imperium toward the light of actual forward progression but this is far from being set in stone gulemon is already inhibited by this state of affairs within the imperium that is to say the ecclesiarchy now chronostrife was a situation that emerged in the imperium after the return of primark goleman the emergence of what is known as the great rift it's a hidden internal conflict happening within the imperium goloman wanted to gather as much knowledge and history as possible from the imperium and also to reform the imperial calendar he hoped to be able to create a sense of order and understanding and perhaps reestablish a reliable imperial history and in dark imperium we learn deeply about just how disordered the process of record keeping in the imperium is and it describes how comparative and corroborative analytical techniques had given way to the recording of gossip hearsay and folklore all was liberally mixed with works of complete fabrication imperial interference in redacting chronicles misguidedly or not had further destroyed much of the past war had eradicated the histories of entire worlds much knowledge had been burned by zealous inquisitors often in an order to suppress a single uncomfortable truth if anything the state of man's knowledge was worse than it was back after the unification wars it also notes to us how knowledge of the warps true nature had been suppressed but patchily so the great deception the emperor had practiced had become impossible to sustain though that had not stopped the inquisition from trying knowledge of demons or the dark gods was absolutely forbidden many innocents had paid the ultimate price for accidentally learning the truth now gulemon faced opposition from the inquisition in his attempts to try and restore a more accurate process of recording details ongoing in the imperium this speaks to the true and completely insane nature of the imperium in m41 that even when you have a primark one of the emperor's sons return to lead the imperium the inquisition actively resists attempts to have them perform their role more effectively the imperium has become basically so fractured so ideologically divided on many levels that it's almost in a permanent state of cold civil war with itself chronostrife was one of these and it is a bitter ongoing internal war within the order chronos over the imperium's dating system during the great crusade and the heresy the standard dating system had provided some idea of the order events over time but like everything else the emperor had created the calendar had become degraded by both dogmatic adherence and thoughtless revisionism essentially what this comes down to and this is fairly critical to my whole thinking now is that within 40k as we well know we see things primarily from the perspective of the imperium it is rare for us to see examples of imperial events being chronicled by say the eldar or the necron you don't see them often in 40k material listing knowledge of humans with dates and accounts of this kind of thing the vast majority of our knowledge comes from the reference perspective and recorded history of the imperium and humanity now the major downside to that is the imperium's record-keeping is so broken distorted and manipulated in many respects it's near enough worthless and that's before you even get to the fact that time is now being distorted by the great rift as the warp overlaps with real space making things perhaps more unclear than they ever had been gilman concluded that if he had any hope at all of rebuilding the imperium he would need to spend a significant effort in trawling through and basically distilling the entire history of the imperiums thousands of years since his time in stasis and now forming it into something where he were able to build some semblance of an established history before he could even begin to understand what to do moving forward he found this to be far more difficult than he had anticipated as it was extremely disturbing just how poorly information had been recorded not to mention it being clouded by extreme ideological or religious views and also the fact that many of those who dared to offer alternative views were then simply incinerated meaning he had no means of cross-referencing other than the surviving records preserved by whichever inquisitional or ministerial body had prevailed so does this mean that in the current time it is not in fact m42 well not necessarily but what it does mean is that it is fairly impossible for us to tell and so for all true intents and purposes it is in fact still m41 like many things there's definitely a strong element of subjective interpretation here but that is equally true for a large quantity of the 40k verse and this all comes back to what i have said all along that things are not set in stone and the very nature of the 40k verse makes any ordinary concept of canonicity you might want to apply to another verse completely irrelevant what's most important to understand about all of this is that even before the great rift the imperial man's empire was so vast that as i've said interstellar distances already prohibited any truly accurate reflection of time and space and just because some things are given an arbitrary date based on whatever was thought to be the correct time and date does not necessarily make it so as interesting as all of this is though what understanding or application can we take from this knowledge well for one thing as we have explored we can consider that the nature of time is even more unclear than we may have thought previously not simply in how it is being used for historical records within the imperium but quite literally in the sense of it distorted by the warp the eye of terror the great rift as these things infringe on real space this is considerably problematic because it makes any deeper conclusions even more challenging but with that said when we do arrive at talking to bigger concepts such as the nature causality which perspective of time do we want to accept the eternal existence of chaos gods and simply by the nature of traveling in and around the galaxy itself things become so incoherent that reaching solid conclusions becomes ever more remote and this is no great surprise when we're considering things like the nature of the warp but it is certainly enjoyable to lay it all out and see if you can make any of the pieces of the puzzle fit even if you just get the edge pieces in place but are missing most of the rest it gives you something to work with the internal struggle of chronostrife remains ongoing it seems unlikely given his vast genius in planning an organization that of all the primarchs robert gullman could be unsuccessful in the efforts to eventually form some more rational system for managing the imperial time system it may well be that they simply end up having to rely on localized time within systems of the galaxy but who knows what they will be able to coordinate it may well be that somehow they'll be able to develop a means by which to calculate time differentials all around the galaxy and somehow synchronize this but at the same time given the limitations of imperial understanding this seems highly questionable as it would require considerable theoretical research for them to reach that stage and this is just now how things operate in the imperium because remember the mechanicus consider free thinking research to be essentially heresy there's no need for it because the omnisire has created all knowledge and it's just out there waiting to be found so if nothing changes the imperium and ourselves will be left shuffling around the fragments of history like some charred pieces of torn up paper in the vain hope of being able to form something coherent that gives us even a minimal insight to the chronology of the 41st millennium [Music] so then we now come to that most troubling of places a realm beyond our supposed comprehension even imagination the warp itself the immaterium the formless when we reach part 5 of dark origins we'll finally dive into my conclusions about the gods how they came into being and their relationship to the mortal races including the sort of mortal elder but this last section today though i wanted to bring together all those thoughts from the past videos about time reality and the history of the war in heaven to consider just what is the warp itself well we do of course already know this part to a degree the part which is more straightforward that is the warp is quite literally made of souls it is the sea of souls and this has been long described by various observers human demon zenos the eldar harlequins describe how the warp is a dark and dangerous realm that lays beyond the skin of real space it is an endless formless ocean of energy in which malefic entities hunt and whose infinite canvas is shaped by the emotions and desires of mortal minds it was from a slow accretion of these energies that the chaos gods korn nergal and zinch had been born keon of the black legion infamously gifts us a wealth of information in the book talon of horus and yes disclaimer because kion is a chaos marine his accounts are commonly written off as being an unreliable narrator as people consider them to be potentially misleading and untrustworthy understandable perhaps were we to take his words within the context of being an imperial traitor however more objectively some including me would consider it rash and an error to always break the glass for the unreliable narrator hammer just disregarding any and all information on that basis is a big mistake to make within the verse of 40k even if someone's experiences or views are not necessarily 100 accurate they should still be given consideration so says the radical inquisitor in me when it comes to chaos half the problem is how far down the rabbit hole do you want to go in terms of what dimension of chess you're believing them to be playing is it enough to simply ask why would they lie in a specific situation is there always some alternative underhand game at play only the finest inquisitors could answer that question because if they know you know they know and then they're giving you a different answer is it because they know you know that they know they know any who have encountered chaos and certainly those who are corrupted by it like chaos space marines will have a horrifyingly distorted perspective of not just their worldview but also the constructive or destructive nature of their own actions they will have seen things beyond our imagination they will be twisted and manipulated for eternity by the dark gods but this is not to say there can never be degrees of truth to their accounts so kaon describes how the truth is that there is nothing in this galaxy but us it is our emotions our shadows our hates and lusts and disgusts the lie and weight on the other side of reality that's all every thought every memory every dream every nightmare that any of us have ever had the gods exist because we gave birth to them they are our own vileness and fury and cruelty given form imbued with divinity because we cannot conceive of anything so powerful without giving it a name the primordial truth the pantheon of chaos undivided the ruinous powers the warp is a mirror that swirls with the smoke of our burning souls without us there would be no reflection no patterns to perceive no shadow of our desires when we look into the warp it looks back it looks back with our eyes with the life we have given it the elder believed they damned themselves perhaps or perhaps not whether they accelerated or heralded their demise is irrelevant they were damned the moment the first ape-like human picked up a rock and used it to break open his brother's skull we are alone in this galaxy alone with the nightmares of all who have lived and hoped and raged and wept before us alone with our ancestors nightmares so remember these words the gods do not hate us they do not scream for the destruction of all we hold dear they are us they are our sins coming home to the hearts that gave them life we are the gods and the hells that we have made are our own now more specifically for us in considering the warp kaon describes how the warp is neither real nor unreal it is an impossible amalgamation of both between physical laws and the stuff of imagination and nightmares our purgatorial domain is a place where reality itself answers the whims of mortal minds emotion and thought reshape the warp touched matter what you imagine takes form around you what you think happens it takes a degree of strength to simply not destroy yourself with a wayward thought but we adapted over time for those who have never walked where gods and men meet i will cut the description to something simpler it is hardly uncommon for imperial visionaries and astropaths to look too deep too far and suffer the consequences of staring into the abyss they lose their minds and cry of impossible scenes they claim of vistas within the afterlife these twisted towers of flesh and bone rising from the skull and crusted soil of the eyes hell worlds are not architecture brought about by sweat and engineering slaves and mutants and demons did not build these unimaginable constructs the fortresses of the underworld are brought about by ambition willpower not rock creek and dura steel as i said what you imagine takes shape around you now the point of all of this is the concept of there being higher dimensions dimensions even above our four dimensional verse we already know that there is space outside of material space time in 40k not just the warp but also places like the webway which we know to be big enough to contain entire cities and the emperor had his own places for something similar to this set for humanity as well but that's another video let's not forget the necron with their strange dimensional manipulation as that's yet another thing that we shouldn't branch out on here and now overall though the point being with regard to the warp that my overall conclusion is that it exists as something not that is a flip side to our material verse not necessarily a mirror as is often described but that is something more akin in fact to a fifth dimension or at least some form of this right now you're probably thinking well obvious clt it took you this long to come to this groundbreaking realization well hold on i think from the outset anybody would conclude that the warp is another dimension this is hardly any kind of big epiphany to have considering all that we know i could have said that much on day one but what we want to be thinking about is more specifically what you consider this space to be beyond that very simple definition and that's the real detail so what are we thinking about what we're thinking about here something within the realm of brain cosmology that's not brain spout b-r-a-i-n it's brain b-r-a-n-e and yes this is the stuff from interstellar but brain cosmology exists already outside of that narrative the overall idea is that our visible three and four dimensional verses exist within a higher verse a hyperspace if you will now i should note that as i said this is a genuine area of theoretical physics but and this is a big but i'm not considering it quite so precisely or accurately or deeply so string theory nerds get off my back this is far more my bastardized version of it just to fit some kind of explanation for what the warp is because as we probably suspected from the start coming up with anything more than speculation when asked what is the warp there's always going to be a tall order we'd definitely not be able to make any very specific scientific framework around it but still all the physics and time stuff that we discussed is important to help us just have context in regard and relative to the warp that's really what all that stuff's for it's about our understanding of our material space relative to the warp now the reason as to why i think this concept is a good rough basis to build upon in helping us to make some sense of the warp in the 40k galaxy is because it shares a lot of similarity in the concepts it explores that of extra dimensional space time manipulation forces and beings beyond our comprehension so even if it's a very loose association it all kind of fits within the context of 40k my thinking about this was that a fifth dimension of the warp exists not below behind or in between ours but around our own but just like most of this stuff trying to visualize the concept of for example space-time is very difficult however this fifth dimension would go a ways to explaining how for example the imperium is able to use the warp to traverse the galaxy so able to enter warp points and exit them like a wormhole but to be clear also not a wormhole across the galaxy then the dimensional space of the warp should surround our four-dimensional space to refer to interstellar there is of course the very interesting part at the end of the film that i thought could also be intriguingly applicable to 4dk and help us with these problems around time travel and what it means if the hallish entities of the warp can interfere with our past so at the end of interstellar and i guess spoilers although if you've not seen the movie by now seriously shame on you at the end of the film cooper enters what is known as the tesseract it's not expanded upon with excessive detail as to just what this is but it appears to be an infinite hypercube structure constructed by what are assumed to be the beings of this higher dimension as a means for cooper to understand and interact with the past and because these beings are able to perceive not all four dimensions but one higher five this means that as with the eternalist view of time they're able to see every moment in the past the present and the future they can manipulate gravity within those time frames that is to say they can affect and to a degree interact with objects and events across all of time however they seemingly cannot return to the past and fundamentally alter major events or interact in any way that we might consider time travel in a larger sense essentially it's not creating a path or a device to travel to a past time and then to be physically present there it's more just a means to reach in and touch manipulate the past which is somewhat akin to how i described earlier the idea of chaos beings reaching through into the materium and the perhaps this is also how or the limitation of how they can interact with our past as well now interstellar is obviously far more subtle than 4dk because of its highly scientific nature and it considerably restricts the ability to interact with the past by only these minimal intrusions of gravity this is enough to enable cooper to communicate with his daughter throughout her lifetime and convey the information needed for her to save humanity but this suggestion may suit us well when we're thinking about the 40k warp and its inhabitants because perhaps like i just said they're also able to interact with our past when we think of things like spirits ghosts poltergeists i'm not suggesting i believe in such things but i'm just saying that within the cultural spirit of humanity there has always been this belief in other worldly things so my suggestion here is that similarly to interstellar might it not fit reasonably well for us to consider that those entities within the warp that have become ever more powerful and aggressive over millennia are now reaching back into our past from their eternal state of the warp from the perspective future of humanity i quite like that idea it gives some balance to the idea of things within the warp existing in a space that encompasses all of time from our perspective while restricting them only to interact with humanity in whatever we might deem to be the present but within our materium once the present has become defined then they are locked out from interfering just as we would be if we attempted to interfere with our established events again as we discussed previously now another issue as i already noted previously in origins one would be that for entities within the warp to interact with real space they must have some ability or means by which to locate events and places within our material four dimensional space we know that time does not behave the same way within the warp if indeed there is in fact anything that you consider to be defined as time within our comprehension of this if there's no mortality no entropy it's hard to see how time could be visualized and i should say this is not to suggest like i say that it doesn't exist within the warp we've covered that already but it may be very hard to be aware of time in our conventional understanding especially as four dimensional beings if we're in a fifth dimension and that i think is certainly something which is kind of established when we look at people's description who have entered and experienced the warp and are lost within there as far as the chaotic entities within the warp exist we could consider they must have to some degree an ability to perceive and see all of the past and present future simultaneously and some means by which to engage with it we know they seem to have some ability to reach out into our space of course and they do this by breaching it with horrifying entities but how deep do these powers go and what are the constraints in terms of just when they're able to do this within our time frame these are things that are far more vague this is why i enjoy my totally speculative connection that runs similarly to interstellar they can make some small incursions to our past that are very very inconsequential and are restricted like i said previously about the ideas of chronology protection i think it seems reasonable to assume that we could consider further how demons can only interact with our past and present by using agents and worshipers in material space via the inception of ideas and corruption of mortals to attempt to change things within our material space this seems likely to be heavily limited again within our past however i would like to be open to the idea that more powerful demons could do things like possession and so on even into our past but then even the actual events of this beyond being extremely traumatic for the mortal human would still be very limited but who knows perhaps what they might have been able to manipulate by means of more suggestible humans is pretty open within the 40k verse though similarly to interstellar it's feasible that in the warp the beings can perceive like i said five dimensions but they're not able to locate then a specific point of reference in time this might be different for some who bridge between warp and real space like chaos marines because they have some kind of connection to the material so able to still perceive things a little differently and this would be similar again to interstellar where the idea is that cooper is able to see specific points he's drawn to them because he has had this very specific connection with his daughter she pulls him to her much like gravity now i could see how that might be a reasonable rationalization for saying how chaos marines able to find their way back to certain areas in real space one might imagine that navigating the warp within any sense of direction is going to be near enough impossible and the trait to kion does also allude to the fact that in the beginning the realm of chaos was a true nightmare even for the traitor marines when they first came there that it was totally incomprehensible for them and that it truly laid bare themselves to the void but that over time they had learned to be a part of this space the endless nightmare that it is my alternative suggestion was as i noted in dark origins 1 that demons are true warp entities and are aware of all time but they're unable to truly choose those specific points within it they're merely drawn to certain points like i said like gravity or moths to a lamp but they might somehow just feel compelled to carry out or take certain actions like a kind of a gut instinct or feeling whereas hybrid creatures like chaos marines may have more influence and awareness but who also still find existing within this fifth dimension of the warp extremely disorientating and again we know this from some of their accounts and commentary now in regard to the warp itself i've not gone near the ideas of multiple dimensions and realities and so on and nor do i want to because that is really a point at which things truly lose all meaning it's like having multiple timelines it's fundamentally this idea of many worlds and parallel universes with each decision leading off into alternate directions and infinite possibilities i'm not a fan of this at least within narratives because of how much it can undermine them as you see in movie franchises and as one cosmologist uh paul davies said extreme multiverse explanations are more reminiscent of theological discussions multiverse theory may be dressed up in a scientific language but in essence it requires the same leap of faith essentially things like that come down to being near enough of philosophical discussion the debates about multiverses rage unsurprisingly like many theoretical ideas and physicists have ranged from saying it's physics reduced to absurdity to being self-evidently true overall though this idea of the warp being a higher dimension is both fitting and not wildly complicated within what we're thinking about or not in as much as we need it to be anyway plus it sits reasonably well with our understanding of space and time and it helps us reconcile a lot of questions about the behavior of the beings within it the warp and when and where they enter with real space as well as associated time issues most importantly though is that within the 40k verse and how we regularly speak to the warp we always see it as being a separate reality a different space the location by which you travel to point a to point b something like just a mirror an alternate reality of our own and this is because it's often referenced as such in the law that of being a mirror reality the only problem is that this is framing it as an entirely three-dimensional concept what we're talking about the warpers being is a five-dimensional concept essentially that it's something which doesn't exist alongside but in fact encompasses the four-dimensional space the warp does not sit behind the material galaxy it doesn't sit beneath it or above it like our vague concepts of ethereal planes of existence the warp surrounds our four-dimensional space it actually encompasses everything within it and this is how it's able to exist above and beyond our concepts and constraints of time and of three dimensions and four dimensions it's also how we're able to move through it from one point to another which makes sense when you think about it it's even noted that within the warp constructions are able to be made that defy all our laws of physics so i think it's very reasonable to say that we know the warp exists above as a high dimension our four-dimensional now just for the sake of saying it and underscoring it it should i hope be very obvious that these are all my completely personal speculative ideas about the warp i've spent a good amount of time pouring over this now and i do think to my mind this is the concept that i found to be the most reasonable the simplest way of explaining this is to come back again to how we as mortals perceive things it underlines our whole problem that we often want to see things in as simple as terms as possible for example we've all likely seen diagrams of a wormhole as a two-dimensional illustration it's a classic sci-fi description about bending space-time in fact this is actually referenced all across science fiction but it's only an interstellar that they bother to note that you don't just create a hole in space by bringing those two points together and travel through because that is a two-dimensional representation designed to help you understand the concept it's actually a three-dimensional sphere that you'll travel through now additionally to this i found one quote from physicist kip thorne which seems applicable to the 40k warp and the beings which exist within it he uses the term bulk as he's referring to that concept of brain cosmology in interstellar but for the purposes of 40k just replace that with warp because he describes beings that might exist within this higher dimension and he explains that if there are bulk beings warp beings what are they made of certainly not atom-based matter like us atoms have three space dimensions they can only exist in three space dimensions not four there might be other kinds of matter and fields and forces that have four space dimensions and reside in the bulk the warp but if there are we're ignorant of their nature now in his book about interstellar kipthorn delves into this far more deeply and i recommend it but this idea about these higher dimensional creatures again seems something that we could make applicable fairly easily to 40k warp creatures it's often stated how entities and demons from the warp do not really exist in the material space they're said to be extensions of the power of the stuff of the warp itself this is why demons and warp entities are especially vulnerable to things like force weapons unless to ordinary projectile physical weapons i think in actuality they should likely be entirely immune from all weapons confined by our four-dimensional space and that really only those like the grey knights should be able to affect them if at all or i suppose psyches so when we think about physics and descriptions of higher dimensional beings existing constructed of other kinds of matters and forces that we likely never conceive or understand it all sounds highly applicable to the nature of the warp what i think i've found at the end of all of this is what i might frame as a soft blurred overlap between the real physics theory and how things behave from the fictional knowledge we have of the warp demons and warp entities appear in our material space the four-dimensional space but as we might well know they do not really exist here when they fight against mortal entities they're not truly engaging us with matter it's more like they're exerting their gravitational force and fields upon us and are then vanquished to return back from whence they came my core thought for the end of this episode is that the warp is not some purgatory it's not heaven or hell it's not a secret fantasy realm the warp as described it is us and we share it with the memories and nightmares of all of humanity that came before the warp is an all-enveloping higher dimension that surrounds our four-dimensional space the definitive nature of it and just by what process we bleed our imagination and souls into it but surely far beyond our limited but this dimension has now long since breached our material space through both the eye of terror and now the great rift cutting across the galaxy the scale of this is far beyond that of something like a wormhole and so just how one might consider the darkness of the rift to be visible could only likely be that of extremely distorted material space that defies or comprehension it's darkness piercing the souls of mortals and scarring them for eternity if there is one thing that we can be sure of when it comes to the warp and the creation of the entities therein then one must know that the warp no matter what it may have been long ago in the past all that matters for the materium is that it now exists entirely as the realm of the demon and humanity we share the horrors and darkness of the servants of the dark gods who have spoken to this the warp is the mirror of humanity it's no wonder that it is an abhorrent nightmare realm of suffering and despair humanity is finally aware of the true dangers the warp represents and should the imperium ever falter and it seems a near certainty that all will be lost to a new galaxy of unending nightmares and eternal darkness very soon we will be diving into what i expect to be the last part in the dark origins series for the foreseeable future and hopefully tying this all together until then thanks as always for watching if you've enjoyed this series do drop a like and share your thoughts but i'll see you next time for our final descent into the darkness of warp hell so [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Luetin09

Views: 384,351

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

Id: 5-clqwRmJBs

Length: 75min 37sec (4537 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 24 2020