The Rules of Parley (in process)

Years ago I came up with the concept of "Parley," which is based directly off the pirate concept of agreement, but instead of treasure splitting or hostage negotiation, you are agreeing upon reality. What I had not considered until recently was the realm of The Word, and the realm of The Law, and how this idea could be a complicated version of the idea of "agreement" in The Bible.

I recently realized how similar a bet and a vow are. They are each methods of agreeing upon reality, where the agreement takes place initially, but reality is not altered until a time period later. In a bet, terms are agreed upon: both contingent event and agreed upon outcome, before the event occurs, presumably while the event itself is still in question by one or both parties. The agreed upon outcome is most simply in the form of either/or depending on who wins. Assuming both parties are bound to this bet, then reality is changed by the event, in the way agreed upon in the outcome. A bet of this kind is seen in Job ("skin for skin!"). Making the bet is an offer and a request simultaneously, offering terms and requesting participation to the other party.

A vow, in this example, is instead an offer and request made in a contingent fashion, an if/then type arrangement, based on an event. An example of this can be seen in Judges 11 with Jephthah's vow. Once the event is resolved in the required way, then an outcome occurs.  So in both a bet and a vow, there is separation between the request and offer, and the moment (moments) of actually altering reality, but in one case it is either/or, and in the other it is if/then. This separation between agreement and change seems to be a critical component to partnered reality crafting, in order to allow stability and meaning to the shared reality.

Imagine a realm instead where whatever can be imagined simply is, immediately. Such a realm would be chaotic, constantly changing, and most importantly meaningless. As soon as one changed their mind about the fabric of what should be, the fabric would change, but in the new arrangement, who is to say additional changes would not also be desired? If they are, then they too would be made immediately, if not then no additional changes would be made and reality would be static. One would need to layer this reality such that desire and knowledge of the result could be separated, but from a timeless perspective this may prove more difficult than it first appears, as eventually it seems desire and knowledge of the outcome would intersect, at which point reality would become static. The separation between beginning and end would be critical to the formation of reality in a meaningful state. 

Interesting side thought here, in a balanced equation, a static end seems unavoidable, but could be layered to be avoided. The issue is that the way in which reality was layered would have to remain in flux as well, as would all paths leading to the layering, because as soon as one of these derivative layers became static, presumably they all would, in time. The issue then becomes can one be "happy" in such a shifting arrangement? Given that static is undesirable but the constant shifting of all layers seems an absolute chaos, could one be consistently happy with everything always changing in some way? If not, it seems happiness would ultimately be impossible, as in any static arrangement there seems to be no basis for happiness, or at least no perspective by which it could be recognized. What seems most desirable then would be to minimize the local changes, or at least having one consistent (yet still changing) component in your field of consciousness (the closer the better), while keeping the total changes in reality, and the way in which they are changed, at the required levels to keep reality from becoming static.

So I was comparing this concept of agreement to a shared dream, where each was able to influence the realm with a thought or a word, but things would only become tangible to both when both agreed they would. I could say "let's have hippos" but if she disagreed there would be no hippos. But if she then said "let's have rhinos" and I agreed, there would be rhinos. Then you could see bargaining spring from this. "You may have a hat, or a cat, if I can have a hippo." Then she can decline again or choose to have a hat in exchange for the hippo, a kind of if/then agreement with a slight delay between offer/request, agreement, and result. More and more complicated methods could be utilized and even the methods themselves could be agreed upon in advance so they can be used in an easier, more structured, way later. Eventually you would come to the parley. 

Imagine now that I had prepared a dream world, kind of like a D&D campaign, and invited her to it. She would be agreeing to terms she did not understand, which can be done broadly but not specifically, simply by entering the realm. As she journeyed through, and interacted with specific items therein, her assessment of the items would shape their reality. So her presence in the dream would be a nexus of constant reality crafting, as the items I thought up became shaped and then real through her direct interaction with them. Like if I envisioned a rhino, but when she saw it, it looked more like a unicorn, it would be a unicorn from then on because my portion of the agreement was in the creation, and hers was in the observation. While I would still know I had created a rhino, it would become less important than knowing that she saw a unicorn, so I would be better off seeing a unicorn as well, to align our experience in the dream. In the same way if I included a scary story, but when she read it she found it to be funny, it would then be a funny story. I might have feelings about the misunderstanding, but that won't change her experience, and I would still know how the story was received, despite knowing how it was intended. To continue to refer to it as "the scary story" would be misaligned with reality, after she had read it. After her observation, its apparent nature has been changed, with apparent nature being more real in this realm than intended nature, once known ("apparent" would be its state in the agreed upon reality, rather than the "intention" which would only have tangibility in my own reality (by "authority")). 

So she would journey through my realm, her every observation shaping the world around her and making it real through the process of agreement, an agreement not necessarily intended, but still accomplished. So if observation and assessment are agreement in this state, how much more could word and action be? The touch of a hand, the speaking of intention, would all carry reality crafting ability. This is similar to life in the sense that every man-made object in existence started as a thought. Someone thought of the cell phone or computer being used to write these words, before the device existed, they then used materials to create it, and now the manifestation of that thought is directly in front of you. There was a time gap between thought and tangibility, and I think this is important broadly for a reality that can have lasting meaning, but today anyone would agree on that thought having become a real thing, in the sense that you can use said device to do things. In the dream realm this process is just more rapid and fluid than we see here on Earth. Now in a game like D&D, the concept of thought becoming reality is much more rapid, as the DM will be required with frequency to generate something based on player actions quickly. They take an unexpected path and find themselves at a tavern literally spoken into existence a few moments before, in the realm they have agreed to share. Even in this realm, though, there are persistent elements, like items, levels, abilities, spells, etc.

Now let's say a game of D&D had two DMs, each with their own idea of what they want from the adventure. They would have a shared realm, which players would occupy, and each DM would have unlimited power to say this or that happened in any given moment. One could see this quickly devolving to chaos and infighting with the wrong partnership, and the players would have no bearing or certainty moment to moment on what was real or what to expect. Most likely this would result in the game falling apart. However, what if the two DMs could develop a set of rules between them for what could and could not be overwritten, and how and when the baton of control was passed between them? The smoother this arrangement became, the more it would feel like a dance, and the more tangible the resulting game would become for everyone. One could see how a couple might make this arrangement feel seamless for the group, each idea of one partner getting supported and amplified by the other until the game is significantly more varied and engaging than it could have ever been with either one of them in charge.

A parley would be quite similar. One difficulty is getting on "the same page" to the depth that is required, but once there, things that are taken for granted as static in reality are no longer that way. Essentially it is each party agreeing that the other party and what they can agree on is more real than what was known before entering the parley. In this way, anything can be changed. Another difficulty of it is that any method of legal change can be made using any technique. Just like in the dream, observation, word, action, could all be used, even simultaneously, to affect change or changes. Once this technique is mastered though, a relatively quick parley could result in sweeping changes in the realm, with virtually no limit. This is another challenge of the parley: entering into it is the primary agreement, but the changes made within it can be unilateral. Rebuttals and revisions can be made, and the parley would not end until both parties agreed, but once finished the new rules would be in place. At that point each party would be free to stay or leave or parley again if it was still possible from each of their positions. The issue is, in competitive parley, one could easily be forced into a place where their only reasonable option would be to leave, at which point the shared realm effectively becomes part of the solo realm of the one who stayed. In those cases generally you helped build the place, but do not have the opportunity to enjoy it. However in the case of cooperative parley, such an end might be accidentally reached, at which point both parties find themselves without a partner, one in the resulting realm, the other outside it. In the case of a soulmate as your partner, this would be devastating indeed. It could be there are other players remaining in the realm, and in non-soulmate encounters these other players may retain interest or value to the parley member who remains, but in the case of soulmates, generally when their partner is gone, the realm loses all meaning for them. (I could see this not being the case for reproduction; such a realm, when approached initially from a dream state, would need to be established by both parties but then only retained by one. A difficult move indeed, as possessing a realm and maintaining it without the presence of one's soulmate would be different than any other realm creation attempt, but critical for long term meaning, I feel).

An interesting point about the parley is that it is legally bound and binding, in a similar way to how physics is. Every word, action, and to some degree thought, would make up the "moves" that one is making. It is like writing a contract with several layers, in multiple languages, at once. Another interesting thing about a parley is that because it is not strictly on a surface level, it is guaranteed that you and the other do not communicate in the same "language." Verbally you may, and with practice you might be able to deepen shared communication along a number of lines, but for a complete overlap your DNA and the experience you have used to determine meaning would have to be identical. So, there are depths at which miscommunications will occur, but once a threshold is met, this is actually a positive thing as opposed to negative, to avoid a static lock like earlier described. Past this threshold, gaps in communication would likely largely be the flavor of the resulting reality, rather than something undesirable. It is hard to imagine perfection in such an arrangement, but I imagine past this threshold the actual result would be superior to any calculation of perfection attempted from the outside.

Looking at the various ways heaven is described, it could be said that this life is similar to a parley for the shape of heaven with God. We navigate this reality, and our reactions are gauged to various things; these things take deeper shape (at least from any perspective we can be certain of) and meaning as we observe them. This parley is very similar to inviting someone into a dream realm that you have created, however, which is different than what I imagine the ideal parley would be. 

In the ideal parley, the two parties would begin on equal footing, with a knowledge of what they want, ideally some degree of knowledge of what the other wants, and a level of mastery over the process so that they can put what they want into the process and thus the resulting reality.