Discussion Main / TheoryOfNarrativeCausality

I think the sentence "Another way to look at it is that amazing things don't happen to the Main Characters because they're the main characters — rather, they're the main characters because amazing things happen to them." should be phrased the other way round. Phrased this way is like ordinary life. People may become popular because things happen to them, say an accident or whatever. In fiction, things happen to them EXACTLY BECAUSE they're the main characters. Think for example at all the guys that obtain supernatural powers, by chance or not.

But I'm not native in English and maybe I misinterpreted.

How is this different from the Anthropic Principle?

Who originally came up with this trope name? I first ran into it in the prologue to Witches Abroad, but it may or may not have been started there.

Removed discussion from main page and tried to make the scenario clearer

• There's quite a bit of ambiguity in the question, to those not experienced in formal logic. If you answered the former, it seems quite likely that you believed the question offered the options of "bank teller and feminist" or "bank teller not feminist."
  • The question is extremely ambiguous, and hinges largely on your definition of "active" more than anything else.
    • Not really. The probability of A alone is always going to be greater than the chance of A plus the chance of B. No matter what Lisa might be doing as well as being a bank teller, that's going to be a smaller probability than just being a bank teller alone.

I removed the following philosophical discussion, or rather the two last points (leaving the first):

• Of course, this trope is true in the real world too. If you consider life to be a story, whatever happens, no matter how unlikely on paper, will happen. From a view with no fourth wall it'd be Narrative Causality. Since we're in the world, however, it's just life for us. ...Don't think about this too much, you'll get a headache.
  • Only if there is a writer. Pretty standard theological paradox - If God knows all, then he knows our future course of course of action, making us all puppets on invisible strings. If we have free will, then God, logically, can not be omniscient. If he is not Omniscient, then he is fallible. Stuff like this is done to death with student philosophers, and the average faithful usually reply with 'Billions of people can not be wrong!'.
    • You make a classic mistake. If you try to understand God, your head will likely explode from the tremendous effort required. You could consider that God extends to us free-will as a gift that could easily be removed at any moment, and that God IS omniscient because God can see everything that has, hasn't will or might happen. But don't go there—your head will explode.

I think the second point is missing the point of the first, and the third is missing the point of the second, and overall the discussion (besides of being bit too much of a discussion) isn't really relevant.

(Besides, those comments assume libertarian free will, which is a popular concept because it seems intuitively right, but actually makes no sense. The view of God existing outside time and thus knowing everything not before it happens but all at once at no moment at all should also be mentioned.)