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#181

Post by pontifier »

dogecoinbase wrote: post #105
4bpp wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I were working for the SCP foundation, I'd be putting some D-class personnel on the problem of figuring out where exactly the line between ideograms/pictures and "textual or verbal form" lies. Can you describe it in Chinese writing? A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebus ? Is the determinant whether any sound sequences used for human communication are being encoded? What about only using the purely pictographic Chi…

This reminds me of an all-time favorite essay: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2756 "We can ask: if consciousness is reducible to computation, then what kinds of computation suffice to bring about consciousness? What if each person on earth simulated one neuron in your brain, communicating by passing little slips of paper around? Does it matter if they do it really fast? Or what if we built a gigantic lookup ta…

Ok, just read the linked article, and there was one part about putting a person in a superposition and what that might be like.

I have a weird theory connected to the "one electron universe" that at the moment right before the big bang there was 1 particle. Because of relativity it's position and velocity must have been exactly 0, but this violates uncertainty, so the particle instantly becomes infinitely uncertain.

Everything that happens in the universe is just part of the process of the waveform of that event collapsing.

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#182

Post by pontifier »

IIAOPSW wrote: post #153
pantalaimon wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if each person on earth simulated one neuron in your brain, communicating by passing little slips of paper around? I do think this kind of group consciousness or meta consciousness exists, on many layers even. That's how society works.

For that matter, does it make a difference if neurons are acoustically coupled or electrically coupled? Why do we think of brains as stopping at the skull?

It all boils down to where you draw the border of "self". It's relatively easy to draw a gaussian shell around your brain, but do you also draw it around your physical body?

Do you draw your shell around your children?

What about your group identity such as your neighborhood, town, sports team, or country.

Can you draw this shell around abstract ideas that you consider core to your being?

Where you draw that shell might change your level of empathy for other people.

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#183

Post by xtiansimon »

geoah wrote: post #15

> SCP-2521 (also known as ●●|●●●●●|●●|●) is a Keter-level SCP not currently contained by the SCP Foundation. He is a creature who steals every piece of information about his nature, as long as the information is expressed in textual or verbal form. Because of that, nearly everything about him is registered by ideograms and pictures. from https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/SCP-2521

The only thing I understood on the site link was the advertisement for IcyHot pain reliever. (>_<)

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#184

Post by hhjinks »

outsidetheparty wrote: post #68

SCP Wiki has really matured over the years; it started out as creepypasta and murder monsters -- many of them well-written, to be sure, and an interesting setting -- but still just basically straightforward horror stories. In recent years some of the writers there have really upped their game, they're tackling much more nuanced and complicated issues than "SCARY THING WILL DESTROY WORLD". I'm particularly fond of htt…

In my eyes, this maturation has come at the expense of the creativity of SCP. Everything feels so sterile now. You have angels, demons, racist monsters that communicate through condensation on windows... SCP, and similar works of fiction, thrive off letting the _reader's_ imagination run wild. In practice, the more you write, the more is known about an SCP, the less interesting it becomes.

The writers of Control knew this. The "Pinstripe World" dead letter[1] is better than any recent SCP I've read, and it's literally just a single sentence repeated ad nauseam. The SCP writers might be better now, but I find their writing much less interesting.

[1] https://control.fandom.com/wiki/Correspondence:_Pinstripe_Wo...

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#186

Post by silicon2401 »

katmannthree wrote: post #141
1_player wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TRIGGER WARNING I felt a peculiar chill down my spine the day I learned about Roko's Basilisk and Information Hazards: there must exist some thought/concept/idea that just learning about it puts your life in danger. "[T]he founder of LessWrong, Eliezer Yudkowsky [...] reacted with horror. [...] Yudkowsky said that Roko had already given nightmares to several LessWrong users and had brought them to the point of breakd…

It's a thought experiment on the viability of retrocausal blackmail, a techno-futurist rebranding of conventional christian eschatology. The real-life hazard is minimal, although probably not strictly zero. There are known real informational hazards for humans, but they generally only affect people with epilepsy or those predisposed to staring at odd optical illusions for longer periods of time than most would consid…

Do you have any examples or references for real informational hazards for humans? I'd love to read more about that

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#187

Post by heftig »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #112
4bpp wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I were working for the SCP foundation, I'd be putting some D-class personnel on the problem of figuring out where exactly the line between ideograms/pictures and "textual or verbal form" lies. Can you describe it in Chinese writing? A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebus ? Is the determinant whether any sound sequences used for human communication are being encoded? What about only using the purely pictographic Chi…

Looking at it from first principles: Information given in the SCP tell us that digitally stored files are affected to. That seems to mean digitally stored text . Text in a digital form is just a way to indirectly reference pictures to be shown on the screen or printed. Sometimes it's a straight lookup table correspondence (ASCII), sometimes more complex (Unicode); there may be noise (OOXML). I'd guess that, in contex…

I don't think either test involved the speaker conveying information about the SCP to the subject. The information was pinned to the wall in pictogram form.

In test 1, the subject was commanded to translate the pictograms into text.

In test 2 the subject was commanded to describe the pictograms verbally.

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#188

Post by gustavorg »

Thorrez wrote: post #170
zerocrates wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They probably meant to say "IOCCC," the International Obfuscated C Code Contest and they're referring I think to this entry: https://www.ioccc.org/years.html#1994_smr

Wow, that Makefile rule... smr: smr.c @${RM} -rf smr ${CP} smr.c smr ${CHMOD} +x smr

why the "wow"? Looks ok to me.

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#189

Post by outsidetheparty »

shard wrote: post #161
outsidetheparty wrote: post #68

SCP Wiki has really matured over the years; it started out as creepypasta and murder monsters -- many of them well-written, to be sure, and an interesting setting -- but still just basically straightforward horror stories. In recent years some of the writers there have really upped their game, they're tackling much more nuanced and complicated issues than "SCARY THING WILL DESTROY WORLD". I'm particularly fond of htt…

Very cute story, although I was hoping by the end of the story that SCP-5031 would be fully rehabilitated and inducted into SCP as an operative or something. It'd be cruel to continue to imprison this sentient being who has learned not to kill. Also, why Keter class? It doesn't seem to have any magical ability to escape captivity.

The author explains the Keter classification in the discussion: "It's a slightly meta nod to the old days (and the coldposts that ape them) where every spooky murder monster had to be Keter. I imagine there was a similar tendency in-universe as well."

Re: ●●|●●●●●|●●|●

#190

Post by outsidetheparty »

hhjinks wrote: post #184
outsidetheparty wrote: post #68

SCP Wiki has really matured over the years; it started out as creepypasta and murder monsters -- many of them well-written, to be sure, and an interesting setting -- but still just basically straightforward horror stories. In recent years some of the writers there have really upped their game, they're tackling much more nuanced and complicated issues than "SCARY THING WILL DESTROY WORLD". I'm particularly fond of htt…

In my eyes, this maturation has come at the expense of the creativity of SCP. Everything feels so sterile now. You have angels, demons, racist monsters that communicate through condensation on windows... SCP, and similar works of fiction, thrive off letting the _reader's_ imagination run wild. In practice, the more you write, the more is known about an SCP, the less interesting it becomes. The writers of Control knew…

Personally I tend to find the "Tales" less interesting -- the creative constraints imposed by writing everything in terms of containment procedures are where much of the fun comes from in my opinion -- but in general I can't say I agree that over-explaining is a new problem. Finding the right balance of how much to explain vs how much to leave to the reader's imagination is pretty much the whole deal in this type of writing (or horror writing in general!) and not everyone hits the mark, that's been the case all along I think.
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