I’ve seen many people interpret Elden Ring’s story from an astronomical perspective, but comparatively fewer from other academic angles. Recently, a friend of mine mentioned that Golden Order fundamentalism might represent something akin to a discipline like philosophy of science (while sorcery is closer to pure physics?). I found this idea quite convincing & interesting 🦔
Since I myself am a researcher in this area, I’ve always felt that fundamentalism, in its original form, would contain a substantial amount of mathematical logic. In particular, things like Ramsey’s theorem became, for quite a long time, part of my romantic imagination of what fundamentalism might be.
As for why mathematical logic specifically—on one hand, it’s probably because that’s the field I’m most familiar with (...). On the other hand, it also comes from some speculation based on Goldmask’s questline. I’ve always felt that the body language of Goldmask and the Two Fingers resembles binary encoding and Second-order Arithmetic. (Maybe they are kinds of Turing machines.) This allows one to extend Goldmask’s calculus to phenomena like this: certain theorems are unprovable within Peano Arithmetic, yet become provable in stronger systems such as Second-Order Arithmetic.
Moreover, the fact that Goldmask’s reasoning fails to deduce that Radagon is Marika, which results in a kind of stagnation of his calculus, reminds me strongly of the halting problem, while Marika's secret being a special case of recursive functions. Infinite loops are caused by undefined values. In the equivalence of models of computability, Turing machines that do not halt on some inputs correspond to partial recursive functions that are undefined for those inputs. The unbounded search operator cannot be defined by primitive recursion, since it accommodates undefined values. Once you tell Goldmask that Radagon is Marika, you are effectively providing a definition for the value of Radagon.
An interesting fact: in computational complexity theory and computability theory, there exists a type of Turing machine called an oracle machine. An oracle machine is an abstract machine that can query an "oracle" which can instantly answer any instance of a given problem R in a single operation. The problem R may belong to any complexity class, or may even be undecidable, such as the halting problem. Doesn’t this description remind you of the Oracle Envoys in the game?
You can find many other concepts from mathematical logic that resonate with elements in the game. Perhaps this is because this symbol-driven discipline has given rise to numerous philosophical ideas that might gave the writers some inspirations... This also aligns quite well with the description of fundamentalism as “a faith born from scholarship.” I DO have many colleagues see mathematical logic as their faith 🤣
btw this field has a widely known popular science book titled Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (quite an evocative name huh), and G.E.B is fairly popular in east asia... So I can’t help but speculate that the writers of ER might have read it lol
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