A further short story by the same author, very short and very suspenseful, about a powerful AI facing an existential task: https://qntm.org/transit
If you like longer stories, then https://qntm.org/ra. "Magic is real. Discovered in the 1970s, magic is now a bona fide field of engineering. There's magic in heavy industry and magic in your home. It's what's next after electricity." Magic as an abstraction layer.
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 just read "There Is No Antimemetics Division," and I was blown away. Really exhilarating science fiction that feels at once hyper-modern and yet retro in that it's more about ideas than characters. Very reminiscent of Ted Chiang. (I was also pretty delightfully confused by the timeline because I read it as a novel when it's actually a collection of short stories.)
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.
I've been hoping someone would fill the shoes of Ian M Banks. QNTM is probably some of my favorite fiction in the same vein. Lena https://qntm.org/mmacevedo in particular deals with some very frightening ramifications of brain simulation. Just running a simulated mind through a deterministic "Red" (ie: torture) script to prep it for the work you need it to do is frightening.
I also read quite a bit of Kris Schnee's work https://www.amazon.com/Kris-Schnee/e/B00IY1HDDY his earlier Thousand Tales novels I think deal with early brain scanning issues well. IE: Flatbed scanning a living brain.
You could give this somewhat of a horror ending by having the characters realise, after figuring out the implication of turning the simulation off, that the top level would not have had the black sphere appear and as such would have no reason to keep their simulation running and were about to turn it off.
True, but they also could just as easily exit debug mode and allow the simulated universe to run to completion. It costs them nothing to do so, and gives the simulated universe a full lifetime. That changes the story from horror to a question of empathy.
You don't 'turn it off'. Its a simulation. They run it over any part of the timeline of the universe, any time they like. It's all there, all the time. The query of the quantum database doesn't create or erase the database.
But if they did turn it off, when they turned it back again everything that was there before would be back, including the memory of having turned it off.
Other than the realisation they they had periodically ceased to exist (or only existed since they last turned it on..) there wouldn't be a great difference.
That said, the black sphere would cause the "top" to diverge anyway at that point, wouldn't it? So it'not really in their control..
I've been an avid fantasy fan since forever, but I'm a relative latecomer to sci-fi novels.
I recently finally completed making my way through all of the Culture novels - thoroughly enjoyed every one, and was kind of sad to have reached the end!
Have you come across any other sci-fi authors that approach the style of Ian M. Banks? Otherwise, any recommendations for other sci-fi with the depth that the Culture series had?
These guys now have godlike powers. Most stories that start there quickly move to how such power corrupts those who have it, or at the very least separate them from their humanity. Either that or a government agency figure it out (how? That could be interesting) and plays the part of the antagonist / devil.
These guys seem nice, and surprisingly already mentioned ethical implications early, so their corruption might take longer or develop along unexpected paths.
The aspect where exercising various powers requires coding time first could lead to some fun race-against-time scenarios. I do wish the featureless sphere had been a utah teapot instead.
I think leaving it at that point was the right choice for the story. But if I were to speculate what a continuation might look like it would involve Diane having planned all this all along to put right some tremendous wrong that happened to her and she is manipulating Tim in some way.
Ultimately I expect we'd come to the question of whether ten billion human brains in vats experiencing continuous ecstasy was better than something more like the current world or not.
The author is Sam Hughes [0] and he has many other stories (especially Ra). Some basic info is also included in the about page [1] and there is also a subreddit [2] :-)
Nice story, each paragraph is pretty densely packed with layers of meaning and wisdom about our own existence and nature of reality.
Although this is pure fiction and speculation, thought experiments like these (existence of free will, laplace's demon), rely on determinism.
Even if we assume the universe to be completely deterministic, we need to "know" the initial seed state (usually called big bang).
That initial seed can and will create vastly different universes (similar to how changing a single pixel in Conway's Game of Life completely changes the emergent behaviour and properties of the patterns, often just destroys the apparent stability in the system).
So, even with the an all powerful quantum computer, the initial state will give vastly different universes (all of them consistent within but not with each other).
We can think about "what" the initial state is ? Is that initial state self contained ? or was it under effect of something else ? Will the computer "generate" the initial state, or the programmer (aka god) has to explicitly hard code it carefully to create an apparent stable universe ?
If time as we know it, started with the big bang, the no notion of something existing "before" the big bang, doesn't make sense. If time existed before the big bang, then big bang is not the actual initial state (it is an initial state for us, as we cannot know outside the big bang, i.e. the universe).
Therefore, all simulations considering that to be the initial state will be incomplete and incorrect. Maybe we simulate what we can observe with our senses (directly or indirectly), and that will give us a "valid" simulation. For us, that is a perfectly valid simulation, but for the "things" that were before the big bang (if you assume that time was present before big bang), our simulation will have an extremely low entropy.
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.
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.
I could swear Ted Chiang also used to have a website with some of his stories, but I can't find it now by Googling, and Wikipedia doesn't provide much except Internet Archive'd versions of his stories appearing in different places. Did I imagine the Chiang archive?
Lovely story. I once wrote a small medium piece on how it would be great if coders of simulations incorporate spirituality/religion that would be fair to the objects in the simulation. It included Java code - because as buggy as the Universe is, it surely is written in Java.
https://medium.com/@photodiary/implementing-religion-in-ai-l...
I do not quite understand how the guys in the simulation can determine which level they are at. If L1 universe interferes with L2, will the guys in L2 see the divergence in L3? How do they determine their own level?
It's like a recursive function, where you resolve to stop interfering with the lower universe once the upper universe stops interfering with you. You run it N times until nothing happens in your universe. That means you're N universes deep in the stack.
If you run the program once and not observe anything happening, that means you know you're top level. Then you resolve to not rerun the program.
If you run the program once and observe the black sphere, then run it again and not see the black sphere, you know you're level 2. You resolve to not rerun the program. And on it goes.
Imagine you decide to show a "1" instead of the black sphere. You then look behind you. Most likely you see a 1.
Whatever number you see, increment that number by one in the next simulation. If you see nothing, congrats, you're at the top and leave the number as-is.
So initially what each level sees is behind them is: x-1-1-1-1-1
Then after everyone increments by one: x-1-2-2-2-2
Now repeat the step. Everyone looks behind them and increments the number they see by one.
x-1-2-3-3-3
Eventually you'll look behind you and the number won't have changed. You're at one level higher than that.
If there are millions of levels that'd take ages of course. But I think you could use the same idea do it instantly on the computer instead. Just have your simulation computer modify a number on the simulation computer in the next level down.
I think it was a rough determination. Given the evidence (apparently perfect mirroring behavior between adjacent universes) and statistical likelihood, there are probably roughly infinite universes above and below us in the stack.
If everything is simulated, and there is infinite number of simulated realities, as simulation is only reflection of possible reality - then maybe what is simulated continues to live in reality regardless of being switched off as just infinite number of realities that exist always at the same time.
A speculative execution bug? I like the sound of that.
Another HN once theorised / joked that the speed of light was the maximum value an integer could store and planks length was the smallest floating point number.
This idea is close to the idea of modal realism: all possible worlds are real to their inhabitants, in the same way that our world is real to us. No substrate required.
It's still fun to think how simulations or other types of "nesting" interacts with modal realism. E.g. maybe there is an "Occam's razor" type of effect where we should expect to find ourselves in a world with the simplest physics that allows conscious inhabitants, simply because such worlds have more "instances" within other worlds.
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.
I imagine that they couldn't be perfectly confident that they weren't just far enough away from the fixed point that their universe was the same as the one they observed.
A sort of a Roko's Basilisk, except with an omnipresent dread that they might be say, the 2nd or 3rd universe and the first just hadn't messed with them yet.
If they do anything that scares or abhors the people above, they could be turned off. Maybe they're not even sure if the people above them are waiting to see if they only benevolently observe the universe below them.
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...
Something I have been thinking about related to this story: we, as humans, will never know what reality is (not just "our" reality as in "our" universe, but "everything"). You either a) have to accept the idea of infinite as in realities have always existed and have bootstrapped inner realities with time. They never "were created", they just "always existed". So whenever we get to know the details of reality N, we don't know yet 100% what reality N-1 is about (we may have an idea, a theory, but just that). We would never reach to understand/experience reality 0.
Or b) you don't accept the idea of "infinite" and you think everything has one single beginning, one original "big bang" that bootstrapped everything and that nothing ever existed before that moment, not even time. But as humans I don't think our brains are wired in a way to understand "there was nothing before something", we will always ask ourselves "what is the cause of that?".
> But as humans I don't think our brains are wired in a way to understand "there was nothing before something", we will always ask ourselves "what is the cause of that?".
argue that there must be an Uncaused Cause. Not a "cause" in the temporal sense of a first domino knocking over a second, third, etc, starting with the Big Bang; but rather like Yo-Yo Ma playing his cello causing music. What is the cello player of reality that is causing the reality that we perceive?
Whatever said entity is, it itself cannot be caused by something else, as you get into an infinite regress.
But isn't "reality", in this usage, enforces the idea of always having the N-1? Suppose you can jump between realities (duh) and you've found the reality 0 by asking the right questions on every step, what would be the first question to ask there?
Edit: Just to support that I am on 2nd solution :)
[+] [-] IngoBlechschmid|5 years ago|reply
If you like longer stories, then https://qntm.org/ra. "Magic is real. Discovered in the 1970s, magic is now a bona fide field of engineering. There's magic in heavy industry and magic in your home. It's what's next after electricity." Magic as an abstraction layer.
[+] [-] kian|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zanni|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rkachowski|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] JasonFruit|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karmicthreat|5 years ago|reply
Jeph Jacques of QC fame did Alice Gove which was a good Banks like comic. https://www.questionablecontent.net/alice1.html
I also read quite a bit of Kris Schnee's work https://www.amazon.com/Kris-Schnee/e/B00IY1HDDY his earlier Thousand Tales novels I think deal with early brain scanning issues well. IE: Flatbed scanning a living brain.
[+] [-] Lerc|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MereInterest|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] konjin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] curiousllama|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Chris2048|5 years ago|reply
Other than the realisation they they had periodically ceased to exist (or only existed since they last turned it on..) there wouldn't be a great difference.
That said, the black sphere would cause the "top" to diverge anyway at that point, wouldn't it? So it'not really in their control..
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tobmlt|5 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] GordonS|5 years ago|reply
I recently finally completed making my way through all of the Culture novels - thoroughly enjoyed every one, and was kind of sad to have reached the end!
Have you come across any other sci-fi authors that approach the style of Ian M. Banks? Otherwise, any recommendations for other sci-fi with the depth that the Culture series had?
[+] [-] kybernetikos|5 years ago|reply
These guys seem nice, and surprisingly already mentioned ethical implications early, so their corruption might take longer or develop along unexpected paths.
The aspect where exercising various powers requires coding time first could lead to some fun race-against-time scenarios. I do wish the featureless sphere had been a utah teapot instead.
I think leaving it at that point was the right choice for the story. But if I were to speculate what a continuation might look like it would involve Diane having planned all this all along to put right some tremendous wrong that happened to her and she is manipulating Tim in some way.
Ultimately I expect we'd come to the question of whether ten billion human brains in vats experiencing continuous ecstasy was better than something more like the current world or not.
[+] [-] FridgeSeal|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SyzygistSix|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NKosmatos|5 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8352985.Sam_Hughes [1] https://qntm.org/self [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/qntm/
[+] [-] pulkitsh1234|5 years ago|reply
Although this is pure fiction and speculation, thought experiments like these (existence of free will, laplace's demon), rely on determinism.
Even if we assume the universe to be completely deterministic, we need to "know" the initial seed state (usually called big bang). That initial seed can and will create vastly different universes (similar to how changing a single pixel in Conway's Game of Life completely changes the emergent behaviour and properties of the patterns, often just destroys the apparent stability in the system).
So, even with the an all powerful quantum computer, the initial state will give vastly different universes (all of them consistent within but not with each other).
We can think about "what" the initial state is ? Is that initial state self contained ? or was it under effect of something else ? Will the computer "generate" the initial state, or the programmer (aka god) has to explicitly hard code it carefully to create an apparent stable universe ?
If time as we know it, started with the big bang, the no notion of something existing "before" the big bang, doesn't make sense. If time existed before the big bang, then big bang is not the actual initial state (it is an initial state for us, as we cannot know outside the big bang, i.e. the universe).
Therefore, all simulations considering that to be the initial state will be incomplete and incorrect. Maybe we simulate what we can observe with our senses (directly or indirectly), and that will give us a "valid" simulation. For us, that is a perfectly valid simulation, but for the "things" that were before the big bang (if you assume that time was present before big bang), our simulation will have an extremely low entropy.
[+] [-] hello-there|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://m.imdb.com/title/tt8134186/
[+] [-] kkoncevicius|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jimhefferon|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zanni|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loup-vaillant|5 years ago|reply
My, this escalated quickly.
[+] [-] Scene_Cast2|5 years ago|reply
Another site with good sci-fi is http://www.galactanet.com/writing.html - stories by Andy Weir's (writer of The Martian).
[+] [-] JadeNB|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philgeorge|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flixic|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] julianpye|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _Donny|5 years ago|reply
Fantastic story. Will read more from this author!
[+] [-] JZumun|5 years ago|reply
If you run the program once and not observe anything happening, that means you know you're top level. Then you resolve to not rerun the program.
If you run the program once and observe the black sphere, then run it again and not see the black sphere, you know you're level 2. You resolve to not rerun the program. And on it goes.
EDIT: box to sphere.
[+] [-] Nition|5 years ago|reply
Imagine you decide to show a "1" instead of the black sphere. You then look behind you. Most likely you see a 1.
Whatever number you see, increment that number by one in the next simulation. If you see nothing, congrats, you're at the top and leave the number as-is.
So initially what each level sees is behind them is: x-1-1-1-1-1
Then after everyone increments by one: x-1-2-2-2-2
Now repeat the step. Everyone looks behind them and increments the number they see by one.
x-1-2-3-3-3
Eventually you'll look behind you and the number won't have changed. You're at one level higher than that.
If there are millions of levels that'd take ages of course. But I think you could use the same idea do it instantly on the computer instead. Just have your simulation computer modify a number on the simulation computer in the next level down.
[+] [-] swayvil|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raldi|5 years ago|reply
2. Make the value of n appear in the simulation
3. If you see that number in yours, increment n and go back to Step 2
4. Else, the number you see is how many simulations down you are.
[+] [-] NiceWayToDoIT|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] laumars|5 years ago|reply
Another HN once theorised / joked that the speed of light was the maximum value an integer could store and planks length was the smallest floating point number.
[+] [-] wcoenen|5 years ago|reply
It's still fun to think how simulations or other types of "nesting" interacts with modal realism. E.g. maybe there is an "Occam's razor" type of effect where we should expect to find ourselves in a world with the simplest physics that allows conscious inhabitants, simply because such worlds have more "instances" within other worlds.
[+] [-] Smaug123|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ro_bit|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AaronFriel|5 years ago|reply
A sort of a Roko's Basilisk, except with an omnipresent dread that they might be say, the 2nd or 3rd universe and the first just hadn't messed with them yet.
If they do anything that scares or abhors the people above, they could be turned off. Maybe they're not even sure if the people above them are waiting to see if they only benevolently observe the universe below them.
[+] [-] kybernetikos|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ur-whale|5 years ago|reply
If so: either we found an exploit or we're building an entire complex theory (QM) to explain a mistake ...
[+] [-] lmarcos|5 years ago|reply
Or b) you don't accept the idea of "infinite" and you think everything has one single beginning, one original "big bang" that bootstrapped everything and that nothing ever existed before that moment, not even time. But as humans I don't think our brains are wired in a way to understand "there was nothing before something", we will always ask ourselves "what is the cause of that?".
[+] [-] Schiphol|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw0101a|5 years ago|reply
Parmenides would like a word:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_comes_from_nothing
One also has to ask "what keeps reality/realities existing?". Why doesn't everything simply just go poof into non-existence?
Aristotle (and Thomas Aquinas, in this Second Way):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Ways_(Aquinas)#Secunda_Vi...
argue that there must be an Uncaused Cause. Not a "cause" in the temporal sense of a first domino knocking over a second, third, etc, starting with the Big Bang; but rather like Yo-Yo Ma playing his cello causing music. What is the cello player of reality that is causing the reality that we perceive?
Whatever said entity is, it itself cannot be caused by something else, as you get into an infinite regress.
[+] [-] seqizz|5 years ago|reply
Edit: Just to support that I am on 2nd solution :)