Fine Structure Explanation Page

To provide proof and explanations for Fine Structure’s ratings
I don’t believe a cosmology blog is necessary because of how straightforward the statements are, hence I will just compile all the relevant information and touch on them briefly 
==Higher Dimension==
A section to explain how the verse portrays higher dimensions, which is the basis of the stronger characters’ ratings. 
Unbelievable Scenes
“It's about dimension. One degree of freedom over your opponent and there is no contest, none at all, and mine fell five to be here”
A statement made by Xio, who is an extradimensional being in the middle of a battle against another extradimensional being called Oul. Here we are informed that an additional dimension puts you on a completely different level of power to someone
“My people play with waveforms during infancy, we can literally alter odds in our favour - but where this thing comes from, my home and the entire cosmos it sits in is a tiny, shiny circle in space that you could crush between your fingers.”
Xio once again comments on the massive superiority his higher dimensional opponent has over him, his entire cosmos is able to be easily destroyed by someone on Oul’s level 
“If the adversary had any mind, any intelligent thought at all, it would have been over in microseconds. But it has no mind. Just firepower.”
Finally Xio explains that the only reason he able to survive is because Oul doesn’t actually possess a mind or any form of intelligence 
Sundown
Thousands of years earlier, Plato described something similar….Or what legs, arms, eyes and light truly are.
This is the narration from the first paragraphs of the chapter ‘Sundown’ (Go to the link above to view the entire quote). Here the novel brings up Plato and explains an allegory he made about prisoners trapped in a cave assuming shadows of objects to be the reality. This part isn’t very important on its own but it gives context to the following information 
There are many possible interpretations which can be drawn from the allegory, especially when one considers the possibility of a prisoner breaking free and stepping out of the cave into brilliant, sunlit reality for the first time. But one of these is the ontological concept that the real world of three dimensions of space and one of time in which we live is, itself, not the whole thing. That all humans are still imprisoned in some fashion; that what is perceived is a literal or figurative shadow of the entire truth; that, in less flowery terms, there exist additional dimensions of spacetime which we are unable to perceive because we are not so free to move through them.
Only, much more so. To make the analogy apply better, many additional directions of freedom would have to be stripped from the prisoners. Their senses of touch and hearing (and smell and taste if they had them) would be taken away, leaving only sight, and utter lack of sensation in/of the rest of the body. The full human body would then be cut down to a single eye, plus a brain and minimal biological support. Not even an eyelid to facilitate blinking, or muscles to allow it to move or focus. And the eye itself would not be permitted such luxury as a moving two-dimensional picture to look at, or even a line, but a dot, a single tiny dim grey pixel on a black background, not shining constantly but winking periodically, just to provide the absolute minimum of sensory input necessary to prove to the owner of the eye that he or she is not simply dead.
Even that would not be enough. To provide the true level of constrast Ching is experiencing, the world outside would have to be bigger, too, much bigger than a simple yellow Sun shining down on simple green grass. It would need to be created like a fractal, with intelligent patterns on every conceivable level, going up higher and higher into the sky, cut and carved into impossibly intricate shapes, with whole universes forming the building blocks of megaverses, themselves forming the foundations of still larger and more complex structures, with every tiniest component picked out in a unique and scintillating colour, voice, texture and emotion, and the whole thing extending upwards for hundreds and hundreds of dimensions, with no end to the wonder in sight.
We get a basic explanation of what the cosmology is like. It’s a structure made of multiple dimensions with entire universes just being building blocks for larger structures which themselves are building blocks for yet larger structures
The fact that it is built as a fractal is also pretty interesting , since iirc higher dimensional Fractals were mentioned to me as a type of structure that could qualify as tier 1 in the new system. Although take that with a grain of salt since I could easily be misremembering or misunderstanding 
“In the stack, everything is made up of smaller things and everything makes up something bigger. Universes combine to form multiverses, and they form rings which line up together to make strings, which are the building blocks of new, bigger universes. And because it's so large and complex, you can slice the entire mess up any way you like and find something living there. The whole place is alive. And intelligent life, too. You can't move for it. You're made of it, essentially. Like a human being is made up of individual living cells, only imagine each atom in the cell was a universe in its own right."
"It's not often that things move up the stack. An atom can't very well enlarge itself to human size. But things from up above can interfere below. Say a human started doing atomic experiments. Gets the cell under the microscope, starts bombarding it with protons or what have you. Interference. Only that picture doesn't really work, because the human can also actually descend to the level of the cell. He can climb into it and walk around.”
Xio, who is currently in the form a human, describes the structure again. He compares the structure to a body and a universe to an atom, although he points out the metaphor isn’t accurate because a human can descend to the level of an atom. I think this bit just goes to make it known that the comparison isn’t one to one and the actual difference may not actually be as finite as a cell and a human 
least significant bits
"Do you believe in God?"
"If by that you mean, do I believe that there exist multidimensional beings of colossal scale and intelligence in planes of reality far above ours, with powers and abilities which would appear in our reality to resemble omnipotence, capable, even, of deterministically predicting human behaviour to great accuracy, before whom our entire universe, all its physical extent along with its past, present and future, is as insignificant nanotechnology, then yes. Seph is dating one.”
Ching talks about higher dimensional entities and notes that from the perspective of lower dimensional beings, they seem to be omnipotent. Now while Omnipotence usually isn’t something to be taken at face value, describing something as omnipotent still indicates they possess some kind of transcendent power from your perspective, which supports higher dimensions in the novel granting the kind of power our tiering system describes . He also talks about all of the universe across all time amounts to nanotechnology, once again showing that there is notable superiority higher D beings have over lower D beings 
The Chaotician
"'Oul' is the closest approximation in human language of the name of a cosmic eighty-plus-six-dimensional hyperweapon which fell out of the control of its creators."
"You do not have an appropriate conceptual framework to understand the destructive capabilities of this being. I have seen what Oul is capable of first-hand, but the three-dimensional vocabulary does not exist to describe the scale of destruction it wrought while I brought it under control.
"Oul is currently contained. The threat it represented to the higher layers of the Structure is neutralised. The absolute worst it can do is to destroy this single universe. That's the good news."
It is stated that 3 dimensional entities conceptually can’t comprehend the destruction Oul is capable of. Once again establishing the power gap between lower and higher dimensional beings 
Science Fiction Future
“It has no mind - that's how it withstood the first kill-command. All it has is firepower. Even within punishing and rapidly contracting constraints, Oul is unimaginably stronger. The thought occurs to Ching that the two of them could battle until they were invisible points fighting for control of a zero-dimensional universe, and he would still be hopelessly outclassed. Xio and Oul were both of effectively infinite capability. But there are levels of infinity. That was how this all began in the first place.”
At last this is the main piece of evidence confirming the ratings. The paragraph goes into how Xio and Oul possess effectively infinite power and points out that there are different levels of infinity, we can tell from this that novel decidedly follows an interpretation of higher dimensions that equates them to higher infinity, thus making the characters fit for tiering under our system 
==Characters==
Now we will go over the tier of different characters 
===Xio and Oul===
Xio is stated by word of god to be 75+5D while Oul is stated to be 80+6D 
Both of them are therefore 1-B 
===Imprisoning God===
The Imprisoning God is a basically a living prison created by Xio to trap Oul within the normal universe. It is capable of altering the laws of physics to prevent any escape from it and it is pretty much the main conflict of the story that there are scientists trying to engineer new technologies and later helping Xio get back to his home, but the god is constantly rewriting physics to make either of that impossible. 
As for its attack potency, it’s at minimum Low 2-C via size but might be Low 1-C 
Low 2-C comes from a statement in this chapter
“I told you. This is bigger than a war, and the person we're fighting is bigger than a world, bigger than a universe.”
The speaker here is Oul in a human form who’s talking to a girl named Anoo Nkube. What happens is the girl discovers the science for duplication but later comes to know that her equations are no longer right, which is the result of the Imprisoning God’s intervention. This is who Oul refers to when he says the the person is bigger than a universe
The Imprisoning God also extends across time, which is why the statement is likely to be Low 2-C instead of 3-A
“The prison in which Alef is suspended is impregnable and inescapable in all known conventional and unconventional spatial directions and, any time another path is discovered and tested, another, narrower set of walls is erected to block those off. There was a time before the walls existed, but the prison is now capped at that end, too - no time travel, no closed timelike curves, no possibility of escape via the singularity at the origin of the universe.
There will also be a time after which the walls cease to exist. Eventually, there will be an instant of total entropy, the Omega Point which no finite energy resource can stave off eternally and beyond which nothing coherent will ever exist. A point when all Alef's intelligent life - cosmic or otherwise - will have passed; when the walls are no longer necessary and the Imprisoning God, task completed, will have expired too.
It is towards this point that Ching is hurled, clinging to his osmium cube, tossed and dragged down the frothing white timestream like an unmanned rubber raft. He accelerates to more than eight thousand five hundred years per second before the Imprisoning God catches wise to what he is trying to do and rips Standing Wave Time Suspension out of Alef's configuration.”
As for Low 1-C, it comes from the chapter Verse Chorus which is about Xio attempting to escape the universe to his higher dimensional home by making use of a multiversal loop 
First he holds some form of special device and free falls from an airplane. While doing so he screams “One”
“True freefall cannot be achieved from a simple parachute jump. Air resistance slows you. The rate at which you accelerate is less than the pull of gravity. Eventually you hit terminal velocity and then you're not even accelerating at all. True freefall, like the discus needs for its hypersensitive components to even be tested, let alone operate, can only be achieved by going into space, or chartering a plane to perform a perfect parabolic power-dive, or the cheap way - recruiting the Four-Dimensional Man and having him make himself intangible to the air.”
Arika McClure fixes her eye on the loop of purple climbing rope protruding from somewhere around Mitch's neck - the loop connected to the climbing harness he's wearing under the coat and backpack. Meanwhile Mitch is holding down the big button with both hands and shouts the word "One."
Then the device begins to accelerate across other dimensions, and he says “Two”
"Two," gulps Mitch as odd, undetectable other-dimensional centripetal accelerations begin to affect his body. He hangs onto the disc with both hands, carried along behind it as it accelerates
Then alternate versions of him from alternate universes starts appear and and he ends up being pulled along a multiversal loop, each counterpart adjacent to him also being pulled to the position he occupied to replace him. This is when he says “Three”
The universe is like a spiral. All particles moving in circles clockwise or anticlockwise around the central point, each particle one of millions of identical siblings all duplicating each other's actions so the arrangement looks the same whatever perspective you pick. Mitch feels like he's standing between a pair of full-length mirrors facing each other at a shallow, hundredth-of-an-arc-second angle, so that there are millions of his exactly identical alternate selves arrayed out in front of him, and they're racing away, dragging him along, bursting seamlessly through each mirror just as an exactly identical self bursts out of the mirror behind to replace him.
He hangs on for dear life. "Threeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee--"''
Then this is interesting, he says “Four” and the narration clarifies he is disconnected from 3+1D dimensional space
"Four."
Pushing against the cell boundary. Abrading it. Such a small device, with so much drive, a tiny little engine with the power of a sun, grinding against the exterior wall of the universe until a hole is worn and the speed is too great for the vehicle and its passenger to be retained and they spurt off at a tangent, disconnected from three-plus-one-dimensional space and jettisoned out into the scintillating glory of the next least significant Totality.
Mitch Calrus blinks four-dimensional eyes.''
I think what this means is that the numbers refer to dimensions, it makes sense given that the context here is Mitch trying to reach higher dimensions and he said 1 in the process of freefalling, which is moving across 1 dimension
Finally, the imprisoning God is revealed
And then something bigger than his imagination rises up behind it. An eye - he knows it's an eye, a detailed high-resolution sensory perception organ - opens, bigger than the entire multidimensional billion-universe array dropping away below him. It trains itself on him. And the identity of the creature, a packet of pure, refined information, arrives in his mind. And he knows what it is.
Here it is stated that the God is bigger than multidimensional multiverse structure below him and what’s more, this is what Xio immediately says after seeing him 
"Five"
If the numbers really refer to dimensions, which it seems they do, The Imprisoning God would be Low 1-C 
===Other Gods===
There are other gods alluded to in the novel who are infinite dimensional. I figured it would be good to go over them as well 
Mike Murphy and Ching, two characters in the novel have a conversation about “God” after a certain event, and this exchange ensues
"It's not like discovering the Structure is any more shattering a blow to Biblical teachings than discovering aliens would be. Or the discovery of evolution, or the motion of the Earth. So his Creation is bigger than we ever knew? That's wonderful. That's powerful."
"You ever do any set theory?" asks Ching. He flips over a beermat and writes out some numbers, "0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6...". He circles the "3" and labels it, "you are here". At the end of the sequence, after the ellipsis, he writes a lower-case Greek omega, "ω". He circles it and labels it "God". He waits a moment for Murphy to understand, then he adds "ω+1..." after God. Then he circles this, and labels it "?".
"I don't know what this is supposed to mean but I don't find it a compelling argument," says Murphy.
"If the Structure is anything like ordinal arithmetic," says Ching, "there's always a bigger God. There is nobody at the top. There is no top. There's only one end to the sequence, the bottom end, where we are." He scribbles it out. "Of course, it probably isn't. The Structure, I mean. Forget it. This is a cheap laugh at your expense. I don't know. Why do you ask?"''
The sequence is obviously about different levels in the structure and Ching alludes to a god of ω dimensions, which in mathematics refers to infinity. While this was just hypothetical on Ching’s end, the author actually confirmed Gods at that level do exist in the structure 
https://qntm.org/faq
Q: Where does the Structure end? Does it go on into infinity? If it's finite, is there anything outside of it? How did the Structure emerge into being? Is there a final God of the Structure?
A: As alluded to in least significant bits, for every universe there's a bigger super-universe. So, yes, it goes on to infinity. There would be a final infinite God over all of those finite universes, but just like in ordinal arithmetic, there would then be a God+1, God+2 and so on. It doesn't end.
==Note==
In the future, I will probably expand the blog to explain some abilities as well, maybe modify what I have here and add stuff in general. But for now this should do
Category:Fine Structure
Category:Explanation Pages