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I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility (2007)

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Re: I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility (2007)

#51

Post by l33tman »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #48

I really badly need tl;dr - How can each simulated universe be the same as the one above an below? Why can't they diverge? If they turn off their universe (killing all those below) why would that turn off the one above? Or is it just hope that if you don't the one above won't ? Because while all decisions are possible we make thrones in our self interest because we hope everyone else is playing the same game.

It's because the story is about super-determinism; the simulated universes below are simulated identically to the one they are in, and statistically they are just one in the middle in that "pillar". So if they decide to destructively interfere with the universe below, all the others in the pillar will have the same idea including the ones above.

Re: I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility (2007)

#52

Post by l33tman »

Zanni wrote: post #50

Okay, this is wonderful, but there's an obvious, nagging question that hasn't been addressed--what happens if they run the simulation ahead of present time? We know they have fine-grain control over the speed of the simulation. There's no actual obstacle to running it forward ... except the feedback loop gets very weird. I want to read that story.

And.. what if, when you run it forward ahead of the present time, you come to a point where the simulation just crashes and you can't simulate ahead of that point no matter what you do?

This is the premise of the tv series Devs. Cool idea but super-bad execution, it just devolves into a standard bad-guy hunting good-guys with pistols story..

Re: I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility (2007)

#53

Post by kybernetikos »

l33tman wrote: post #52
Zanni wrote: post #50

Okay, this is wonderful, but there's an obvious, nagging question that hasn't been addressed--what happens if they run the simulation ahead of present time? We know they have fine-grain control over the speed of the simulation. There's no actual obstacle to running it forward ... except the feedback loop gets very weird. I want to read that story.

And.. what if, when you run it forward ahead of the present time, you come to a point where the simulation just crashes and you can't simulate ahead of that point no matter what you do? This is the premise of the tv series Devs. Cool idea but super-bad execution, it just devolves into a standard bad-guy hunting good-guys with pistols story..

In Permutation City, there's a fantastic moment when they realise that they can speed the simulation up, but they can't slow it down below a certain point, and they work out that the reason for this is because they are the ones being simulated by what they think of as their simulation. When they think they're speeding it up, they're actually just slowing down its simulation of them, and there's no lower limit to that, but there is an upper limit to how fast it can simulate them.

Re: I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility (2007)

#54

Post by FridgeSeal »

rkachowski wrote: post #44
kian wrote: post #35

He's one of the best modern sci-fi writers. The whole collection of short stories here is fantastic, as is the "Anti-mimetics division" series he wrote over on SCP wiki.

i had no idea that was the same author, both the linked story and the anti memetics sequence have taken root in my mind for a long time. Before reading the antiemetics series I had always considered SCP to be an awkward xfiles style fan fiction collection, I'm still looking for more to scratch that itch.

If you’re looking for more, the game Control [1] has some amazing SCP/etc vibes to it.

https://youtu.be/m-As1OGqJkU

https://youtu.be/-oXCMFX9H8g

Re: I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility (2007)

#55

Post by kybernetikos »

ro_bit wrote: post #9

Now I'm curious how the behavior of the people in the "first" universe, unencumbered by the idea of how affecting the machine's reality would affect their own reality, is different from the behavior of the people we see.

Well, as the simulations run and are interfered with, the higher up simulations will diverge more and more from those lower down. An interesting direction this could go in would be if eventually a low-level universe created a person who was needed in a higher universe. Then we could have avatars being created in higher up universes to enable simulated beings to interact, perhaps even up to the top level...

Re: I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility (2007)

#57

Post by FridgeSeal »

tobmlt wrote: post #13

Ian M. Banks novel “surface detail” comes to mind. Please note it is better than the tawdry wiki write up. Somehow, it gets similar points across — similar to this essay, but deeper in feeling. Let me also say the authors here have done really well with so short a format. To paraphrase my toddler son, I want more story!

I was the under the impression that everything on qntm is by one author.

Re: I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility (2007)

#58

Post by thret »

bspammer wrote: post #41
socialist_coder wrote: post #4

Good story and I absolutely believe this to be true. It just seems like the most logical thing. I mean, as soon as any civilization ever can simulate a universe, or even a galaxy, they would. And they would do it infinite times. So the chances that we're the original are infinite to 1. Doesn't mean our lives aren't real though and we should change our behavior. We still experience joy. So experience as much joy as yo…

You have to make the pretty big assumption that it’s even possible to simulate a universe within the universe. Such an assumption is basically like assuming we could move faster than light, or reverse entropy. It seems unlikely to me.

You wouldn't need to simulate the entire universe in perfect detail - just the parts users are interacting with, and just to sufficient detail that they didn't notice anything amiss. This is exactly how we render games.

Re: I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility (2007)

#59

Post by kkoncevicius »

Very interesting story. After reading a few thoughts came to mind:

1. I don't agree with the "midpoint stability" argument. Since these are simulations - the real one is on the top, but there is no "bottom simulation", since every simulation below is also running a simulation. Hence there is no stable middle point - since there is no middle in the first place.

2. About simulating the future. It seems quite obvious that, since everything is based on determinism, they cannot look at the future and change something so that the future they observe is no longer the case. Hence the only possible future they could look at would be that which they wouldn't want to change in any way. Which is really an interesting idea. But furthermore - when they look into the future (say) 100 years from now - the simulation they are seeing would be the one which already "looked" into the future. So the act of looking must have a profound effect - it has to order the future so, that whoever is looking at it would not be able to change it, because: 1) if you can change it then determinism falls apart, and so the whole premise of simulation, and 2) if you would decide to change it then, within the future you see in the simulation, that change has already taken place.

Re: I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility (2007)

#60

Post by necovek »

knorker wrote: post #26
necovek wrote: post #19

It's curious that number of (simulated) universes is countable (there was mention if aleph-0): just like human mind has to start from some assumption (witness axioms in the most formal of fields: mathematics), it's hard for a human mind to move from countable numbers to infinity calculus.

In the scenario they are countable. They even imply a finite universe.

Yet we know for a fact irrational numbers exist, and some of them are even trivial to grasp (like pi, which they mention how they are calculating all the digits of, which is weird on its own since pi has a greater than aleph-0 digits in any numbering system, because it's, well, an irrational number).

But writing a coherent story around non-countable infinity is so much harder because our brains struggle to grasp that concept altogether.

Basically, my point is that our brains have a few limitations which we work around by simply ignoring the stuff that does not compute. And that there are much more approachable things which belong there, like the ratio of a circumference and radius of a circle.

Yet even in the quantum future, it's hard to imagine "real" number of universes because we are so bound by the countable numbers.

I'd like to see a story go that far, but it's likely not to be very readable because humans today don't think of irrational numbers as irrational.

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