Math Manipulation

 

Powers in vs debating range in how strong they are from "basically useless" to "useful in specific situations" to "generally useful" to "broken" and then way at the top there's a bunch of really broken weird esoteric powers that don't appear that often because of just how strong they are ranging from things like identity manipulation, cosmic imminence, existentalist reality and so on. One of these powers is math manipulation, and I just wanted to create a blog to express what this powers does, why it's so strong and how to potentially counter it.

Math manipulation is the ability to affect quantification (numbers and mathematical operations. )For this I'm gonna be using the stronger and more often used form of math manipulation rather than the lame version where just the character signifigance is changed rather than the meaning. As in I'm talking about a character who can change 2 from "1+1" to "1+0" in reality rather then change the definition of the human numeral "1" to equal "2." For a comparison imagine a character that can change all cats on Earth to dogs and vice versa, rather then a character who swaps the definitions of "cat" and "dog."

This power is obviously insanely broken, just intuitively. If you are fighting character "X" you can change the equation X+0=X to X+0=0 or just make it a rule X=0 to erase them. You can use similar to make there be infinite of yourself, or fuse the two of you together with equation "A (you) + X = 1" Manipulation of quanification is insanely broken because almost everything is in some quantified. This ties into the deeper reason math manipulation is so broken. 

In vs debating conceptual or abstract objects and entities are often used but concepts have their own conceptual hierarchy. If there is a single labrator, the concept of that labrador is contingent on the concept of labradors in general, the former is reliant on the latter's existence and is a subset of it. The concept of labrators itself is contingent on the concept of dogs, which is contingent on the concept of animals and so on. The reason math manipulation is so broken is it seems that almost every concept is contingent on numbers, and they are contingent on almost nothing. This is humourously illustrated by this XKCD strip

Mathematics, though it may go through many other points to get there, is ultimately determinative of most things in the universe. Quote Galileo: "Mathematics is the alphabet with which God has written the universe."

If you take the number 2 it is defined as "the sum of 1 and 1." Mathematics seems almost entirely contingent on itself, which almost every number being expressed by numbers and mathematical operations. In this way mathematics can be looked almost as the concepts of concepts, meta-concepts that other concepts, if alive, might speak of the way we do of the concepts of red, beauty, and justice, ideals that all patterns tend towards. 

Talking about what math manipulation is broad and covers most things so perhaps more relevantly is what can math manipulation not do? An easy way to find this I would think is to try and find what mathematics is contingent on. While numbers are mostly contingent on just themselves, they still follow logical orderly patterns, in fact one definition I found for mathematics is that it is the science of patterns.

From this we can say that mathematics follows rules, and so mathematics would be contingent on rules, contingent on logic and order, contingent on coherence. Manipulation of any of these is manipulation thus of the structure mathematics resides within.

It also seems intuitive to me that if mathematical manipulation is a subset of order manipulation then chaos manipulation should also be able to counter it. If Chaos Manipulation is defined as the opposite of order manipulation, about making things occur against the rules of how they should it would seem to make sense that if a math manipulator tried to make a chaos manipulator's existence equal to 0, the chaos manipulator could simply ignore that rule. 

Overall I think Math Hax is a specific form of rule/law manipulation, perhaps the strongest form of it, but as such can be countered by the overarching concepts of order and logic, or by its opposite chaos and illogic.