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

https://qntm.org/responsibility

by pdkl95 • 5 years ago

401 158 5 years ago

qntm.org

philgeorge• 5 years ago

Nice! So... essentially this is what inspired Devs?

marvel_boy• 5 years ago

I guess Devs is what inspired this.

teraflop• 5 years ago

Check the date... this story was published in 2007.

flixic• 5 years ago

Yes, it’s acknowledged as the main inspiration for Devs. IMHO short story is much better. Devs drag out the same amount of ideas over many hours.

ggm• 5 years ago

Nobody reads the paper. I barely skimmed the abstract

socialist_coder• 5 years ago

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 you can before your simulation ends =)

I don't believe the part about all the simulations being linked though. I don't see why that would have to be the case. Our simulation could have "started" 1 second ago and we wouldn't know it.

drdeca4• 5 years ago

Currently accepted models of physics, aiui, don’t permit unlimited computation within a bounded space and bounded time?

Err, wait, I was going to cite Bremermann's limit, but that is for if moving from one quantum state to an orthogonal quantum state? Maybe that doesn’t rule it out completely if the computation is done in a way that doesn’t involve enough rotation of states to be able to distinguish? Ok, but I expect that with enough math that loophole could be ruled out.

choeger2• 5 years ago

First of all, the chance that you are a simulation does not depend on the number of simulations in existence. In fact, there is no such chance, as there is no random distribution process you are observing, except you claim that every observer has one of finitely many souls somehow assigned to them. Such things belong into the realm of religion. But even then, either you are real or not. If you are not, there is no reason to assume that you exist in reality.

And then there is the fundamental laws of nature. If our universe is indeed a simulation, then it is either just an approximation of reality, or reality follows different laws of nature. In that case, again, it makes no sense to think of oneself as a random choice between one reality and many simulations, as oneselve's existence depends on one specific kind of universe.

drdeca4• 5 years ago

A physically random process isn’t needed for probabilities to make sense.

Further, suppose a computer agent knew that it would soon have 6 copies of itself (including current state) would be spun up, each in a different vm, and for each vm, a different simulated environment, but that the current copy of itself would also continue running. While each of the simulated environments differ from each-other and the true/outer environment, they don’t differ in a way that can quickly be detected. Different actions in the simulated environments and the “real”/original environment, would have different effects in the original environment, effects which the agent cares about.

In order to best produce outcomes in accordance with what the agent cares about, how should the agent act? I think it makes sense for the agent to act as if there is a 1/7 chance that it is in the original environment, and a 6/7 chance it is in one of the 6 simulated environments. How could it be otherwise? Suppose the original, and each of the vm copies, is given a choice between two options, X or Y, where if it chooses X, then if it is the original, then it gets +m utility of benefit in the original environment , but if it is one of the copies in a vm, instead it gets -n utility of benefit in it cares about in the original environment. If it chooses Y, then there is no change in the reward.

The combination of values of m and n which combine to result in it making sense for to choose X, are exactly those such that would make it make sense assuming it has a 1/7 chance of being the original and 6/7 chance of being in a vm.

That being said, I don’t think we are in a simulation. I just don’t think that the concept of “assigning a probability other than 0,1 or 1/2 to being in a simulation” is always unreasonable in all conceivable circumstances. I just happen to think that it is highly unlikely for us.

nimbleal2• 5 years ago

Is there a consensus (or most popular) theory for how mind/consciousness would work in the simulation theory? How do things in a simulation become subjects of experience?

paraknight• 5 years ago

Conciousness is an emergent property of a physical brain firing neurotransmitters between synapses, just as an economy is an emergent property of society buying and selling things, or ant colony behaviour is an emergent property of the behaviour of individual ants for example. It's not somehow "above" the simulation, just a higher order of complexity defined by lower-level rules, similar to a glider in Conway's Game of Life.

_0w8t2• 5 years ago

Forget about simulation. We do not have answers to basic questions how consciousness works in real world. For example, we have no idea how what we perceive as time flow appears, we do not know why many/most people feel that they have free will when equations of physics are fully determined.

otabdeveloper4• 5 years ago

can simulate a universe

That's a pretty huge and unfounded assumption.

bspammer2• 5 years ago

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.

thret• 5 years ago

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.

NKosmatos2• 5 years ago

Nicely written, I was reading as fast as possible to see how the story will develop. It’s a well known theme and there are numerous similar stories, but this one had a nice human touch.

Thanks OP for making us aware of the great site (qnrm.org) since it has many other short stories.

ro_bit2• 5 years ago

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.

AaronFriel• 5 years ago

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.

ro_bit2• 5 years ago

That makes sense. Anyone not living close to the "asymptote" of universe generations can't prove that they're in a simulation, but they can't prove they aren't either. Maybe each of those universes keeps trying to simulate an infinite number of slightly varied universes in the hopes of simulating their progenitors, making an infinite amount of uncertainty and suffering in their attempts.

Viliam12345• 5 years ago

If they do anything that scares or abhors the people above, they could be turned off.

But maybe also if they are too boring. :(

kybernetikos4• 5 years ago

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...

tobmlt2• 5 years ago

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!

kybernetikos4• 5 years ago

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.

konjin2• 5 years ago

These guys seem nice, and surprisingly already mentioned ethical implications early, so their corruption might take longer or develop along unexpected paths.

It's hard to treat people below you worse when you know that he people above you will do the same thing if you do. It's an unstable equilibrium made stable by the fact it's already happened.

Put another way, you won't start tap dancing on someones head when you're in the middle of an infinite tower of tap dancers each standing on another tap dancers head.

FridgeSeal2• 5 years ago

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

SyzygistSix• 5 years ago

I loved Surface Detail. It has my favorite Ship Mind and Class in it :)

GordonS3• 5 years ago

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?

RangerScience3• 5 years ago

The Culture novels are fairly unique (although I'd probably say that about most excellent things). There's some decent fanfic out there (You Just Need Opponents With Gravitas, alas it's stalled out for the second time).

"Iron Sunrise" and "Singularity Sky" come to mind. Maybe also "Quantum Thief".

What of the style / vibe / etc are you looking for more of?

jacquesm• 5 years ago

Charles Stross.

nitrogen• 5 years ago

Greg Egan's Diaspora, Schild's Ladder, and Permutation City feel similar in scale if not exactly style. I've just started reading Alastair Reynolds's books, and those are closer to the sort of space opera of Banks, and so far so good. If you like really long books, Stephenson's Anathem is mind expanding and vaguely parallels some of Egan's books in terms of concepts explored. Finally I'll recommend A Fire Upon the Deep and its sequels by Vernor Vinge.

Also check out Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality for a rationistic fanfic crossover between scifi and fantasy if you haven't already.

You can probably use HN's search feature to find previous scifi reading recommendation threads for more.

lotsofcows• 5 years ago

Dan Simmons Shrike books have the same epic scale of Ian M Banks' scifi with the slightly more prosodic style of Ian Banks' standard fiction.

scubbo2• 5 years ago

I have nothing to add beyond the great recommendations you've already been given, but I'm throwing in an enthusiastic +1 for Diaspora and Gnomon. Quantum Thief, and Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality, are also great.

pulkitsh12342• 5 years ago

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.

gibybo• 5 years ago

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 ?

They have infinite computing power, just simulate all possible initial states?

redm• 5 years ago

I was waiting for them to look into the future to see what becomes of humanity in 100 or 100,000 years.

necovek3• 5 years ago

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.

knorker• 5 years ago

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

necovek3• 5 years ago

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.

NiceWayToDoIT• 5 years ago

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.

laumars• 5 years ago

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.

mywacaday• 5 years ago

Thanks for the laugh. How accurately could we simulate physics/a universe if we simplified some of the constant values like how the fundamental particles behave. Not a physicist or a mathematician so be gentle if it's absolute cod's wallop.

Smaug123• 5 years ago

That's pretty similar to Tegmark's mathematical universe theory, by the way, if you hadn't heard of it.

wcoenen• 5 years ago

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.

RootKitBeerCat• 5 years ago

So did Devs just rip this off?

tucnak• 5 years ago

Deffo.

ur-whale• 5 years ago

What if the double-slit experiment is nothing but a bug in the simulator's code ?

If so: either we found an exploit or we're building an entire complex theory (QM) to explain a mistake ...

rebuilder• 5 years ago

At that point, I'd argue it's not a bug, it's a feature.

hnedeotes• 5 years ago

Imagine being the one assigned to that ticket

jamesgreenleaf• 5 years ago

What if uncertainty is just a kludge added to prevent multiple particles from occupying the same place at the same instant?

boomboomsubban• 5 years ago

If so: either we found an exploit or we're building an entire complex theory (QM) to explain a mistake

The complex theory correctly predicts real world behavior, nothing changes from our perspective if it's some kind of bug.

throwanem• 5 years ago

Something might if the bug were fixed. All our electronics would just be inert silicon, for one thing. Probably also several very important metabolic processes wouldn't work any more.

This begs for a sequel to "They're Made out of Meat". You know the thing about tabs in Makefiles, how by the time he realized they were a misfeature he already had ten users and didn't feel like he could do that kind of breaking change?

kian• 5 years ago

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.

rkachowski• 5 years ago

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.

FridgeSeal2• 5 years ago

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

Filligree• 5 years ago

*Antimemetics

The quality of the SCPs has increased over time, by and large, though there were always outliers. A good way to find the better stories is to look at the Exploring series on Youtube; for instance, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pJUm4lKOhE

ineedasername• 5 years ago

You use to know they were the same author. You probably don't remember all of your HN posts that don't exist where you compared the different works in great detail whenever it was remotely on topic. The loss seems recent: take your mnemetics.

Zanni3• 5 years ago

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.)

JasonFruit• 5 years ago

I'd never run across any of that, and the Antimemetics Division series is amazing, just brilliantly creative.

loup-vaillant• 5 years ago

After "don't roll your own crypto", we're witnessing "don't roll your own universe".

My, this escalated quickly.

IngoBlechschmid• 5 years ago

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.

solstice• 5 years ago

Ra and Fine Structure are both incredibly engrossing and absolutely mind-bending

beaconstudios2• 5 years ago

Ra sounds similar to "Mother of Learning", another rationalist-adjacent work of fiction about a universe with logical, well structured magic, and a student who gets trapped in a groundhog day scenario: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/21220/mother-of-learning

Its an excellent story, but very long. I'm not sure if it's longer than Homestuck, but the length is comparable.

simsla• 5 years ago

I really liked mother of learning. If anyone knows anything similar, I'd really like to hear it.

RangerScience3• 5 years ago

Both are excellent, but I would definitely not call them similar. What's actually going on, the narrative and prose styles, the kinds of characters, what kinds of things they do with magic, the general vibe - are substantially different between the two.

Highly recommend both.

ItsMattyG• 5 years ago

I didn't consider Mother of Learning to have logical, well-structured magic. Curious what gave you that feeling

ASalazarMX• 5 years ago

On the same topic of rational magic, I'm wary to recommend Mage Against the Machine, because it's entertaining but not a great book, yet the premise of Harry Potter meeting Skynet has a lot of lure and potential. I hope the author improves in the next book.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36373428-mage-against-th...

twicetwice• 5 years ago

I just read Ra on your recommendation (literally just hit the last page and then searched for this thread) and WOW. That just absolutely warped and blew my mind. What an incredible story. Thank you for the recommendation.

julianpye• 5 years ago

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...

lifeisstillgood3• 5 years ago

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.

l33tman3• 5 years ago

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.

lifeisstillgood3• 5 years ago

oh. not free will. ok I get it.

Of course super determinist asteroids become worrying. Or can they adjust those ? If you can interfere can you interfere to produce "good" outcomes ? Steer asteroids away?

varajelle2• 5 years ago

But if they intervene, it is no longer the same universe.

Even if they are in the middle of many levels of simulation, it might not be just one line, but more like an infinite tree.

There could be someone in the next room also simulating the universe, or they could simulate the universe again 5 minutes later, this time without intervening. (Like I wrote in another comment)

Zanni3• 5 years ago

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.

l33tman3• 5 years ago

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..

kybernetikos4• 5 years ago

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.

mannykannot10• 5 years ago

It is a premise of this story that the real universe is completely deterministic, so running a simulation ahead (which will only be observable in the real world, if my analysis in my other post is correct) will merely reveal what has already been determined will happen in the real world's future, like a completely accurate weather forecast. The premises of this story do not permit free will, even in its real world.

mannykannot10• 5 years ago

The author is being slightly inconsistent, with respect to the other premises of the story, in saying there is a feedback loop: as it is set up, simulations have no causal power in the world running them.

If the top-level 'God' people choose to run the simulation faster than real-time, I think we can say that no change will be observable anywhere in the simulation stack, except that the people in them will feel as though they have chosen to speed up their simulation and yet not seen any change in it - which is another of the things that will tell that they are in a simulation and not at the top level. (Note that, as Diane has presumably already said in her paper, free will is definitely an illusion in the simulations. I guess it also is at the top-level, given that their universe is deterministic to the point that it can be simulated to the tiniest detail.)

Now suppose the top-level people choose to run the simulation in reverse. Again, I think we can say that nothing will seem to change to those in any simulation, because, at any point in the reversal, everything, and in particular everyone, will be in the same state as they were in the forward pass, which for the people includes having the same memories, plans and expectations - it will be indistinguisable from an instant in forward-running time. They won't even remember that, at some point, the clock was reversed, as that was not something in the forward simulation's past.

This is where it starts to get interesting: if the clock is reversed again and left to run, what will be observed in the simulations, and by the top-level people looking at the first-level simulation, when the simulations reach the time of the original reversal?

Update: I'm leaning towards the view that the top-level simulation continues forward in time from this point, and observes its simulation go around the loop. In general, the Nth simulation goes round the loop N times before proceeding past the reversal point, but no simulation observes that it is going or has gone around the loop, and therefore cannot determine its depth by counting loops.

Alternatively...

The moment the 'camera' appears in a simulation, it has diverged from the 'real' world. Now some of its inhabitants know they are in a simulation, and so they are not replicating what happens in the real world. The butterfly effect will likely ensure that the divergence will become general. I think this could be undone by sending the simulations around a time loop, as then, if my supposition about how these loops play out is correct, each simulation will exit the loop in the same state as the real world, with no memory of the camera having once appeared.

Nition2• 5 years ago

Note that, as Diane has presumably already said in her paper, free will is definitely an illusion in the simulations. I guess it also is at the top-level, given that their universe is deterministic to the point that it can be simulated to the tiniest detail.

The top level could be very different to the first level simulation. The only part that actually needs to be similar is that the real universe and the first-level simulated one both create their own simulated universe.

Chris20482• 5 years ago

The author is being slightly inconsistent

I agree, and I'm not sure the scenario given could happen. The basis of the possibility of the scenario is "the universe is deterministic" and "we have infinite computing power" - but then, is the infinite computer itself part of the universe? b/c as soon as the top layer interacts with the sims, it diverges, which means the sims are not the same as the top layer anymore, so are not equivalent to it even though they are otherwise deterministic - the first sim under the top is deterministic, but dependent on interaction with another deterministic (top level) universe. Hence, the first sim is no longer representative of the top level - the top level can still interact with the first sim, but it can no longer consider it to be a mirror - this is the answer to the paradox of "running the sim into the future" - once the top level observes the sim, it is altered in a way that might cause the sim to diverge.

when the simulations reach the time of the original reversal?

The sum total time of the reversal is finite, so the top (level 0) level will observe the reversal in a finite time, the level 1 will therefor observe the same finite delay wrt the top. Hence each level N will be delayed by the same amount wrt the level above.

The idea of a "loop" would be wrong, b/c when a sim reaches "the time of the original reversal" the result only affects the next sim down. But each sim as level N does go through the loop N times, because it shares the loop of each of its parents, hence if a loop delays by 10s, level N which goes through N loops is delayed wrt top by N*10s

The moment the 'camera' appears in a simulation, it has diverged from the 'real' world

True, but now the "next" sim interference will not be replicated between level 0 and level 1, which in turn can cause level 1 to diverge, and so on.

with no memory of the camera having once appeared

You could just stop all the sims after you interfered with them, and them restart the sim without interfering (or equivalent - like rewinding the sim and then playing it w/o interfering) - the same would happen in all sims too, so they would be, and have, the same pristine sims.

hello-there• 5 years ago

If you liked this story you should definetly check out the TV show DEVS[1]. It's very well produced and good performance. I loved it.

[1] https://m.imdb.com/title/tt8134186/

kkoncevicius• 5 years ago

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.

gus_massa• 5 years ago

About 1: There are some recursions that after some iterations approach a stable cycle, in the most simple cases it can be a cycle of length 2, like A -> B -> A -> B -> ... but there are longer cycles, and in some cases no cycles at all. This example has a lot of possible behaviors changing the parameter r https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_map

mannykannot10• 5 years ago

I don't think there are any causal cycles here - I don't think a simulation can have a causal effect in the sumulation (or real world) which launched it. Even though the simulator can observe the simulated, which might seem to provide a channel for communication, the latter cannot do anything that was not determined by the rules set up by the simulator.

jimhefferon• 5 years ago

A short film related to this story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJj_NMhYwf0 (won a BAFTA).

Lerc• 5 years ago

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.

MereInterest• 5 years ago

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.

konjin2• 5 years ago

They did, but because you have infinite computing power all the lower levels completed the simulation in the time it took to shut down.

curiousllama• 5 years ago

Of course - why do you think the story ended?

JoeAltmaier2• 5 years ago

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.

staticman2• 5 years ago

The story itself says they need to be careful not to turn it off. Also a database isn't conscous but the simulated entities seem to be.

Chris20482• 5 years ago

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..

abellerose• 5 years ago

I don't really understand the ending. Turning the simulation off could in a way be the morally right decision. Depends on how you think about suffering in the simulation. Some will suffer and what about them? That's why I think it's better to shut off the simulation.

blueblisters• 5 years ago

I think the simulation theory posits a fascination of people to simulate ancestral experiences. But I would find it equally (perhaps more) fascinating to simulate random universes with random initial conditions and stochastic physics and see what happens. Or put another way, if we are in a simulation, I see no reason not to consider the possibility that the entity simulating us is doing it just for science.

morelisp• 5 years ago

Yes, the original simulation hypothesis was phrased in terms of a trilemma, one of which seems like it must be true (plus the uncertain base assumption that a simulation of sentience is sentient):

- The fraction of posthuman civilizations capable of running high-fidelity ancestor simulations is very close to zero

- The fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running simulations of their evolutionary history, or variations thereof, is very close to zero

- The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one.

For a certain kind of person who is also the most likely to engage with the hypothesis 3) is the most exciting, so it got the most attention. I think 1) and 2) are more probable and at least as worthy of deep consideration.

laptop-man• 5 years ago

drabble cast is one of my favorite short story podcast

lmarcos3• 5 years ago

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?".

Schiphol• 5 years ago

This is Kant's [first antinomy of pure reason] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kant%27s_antinomies)

lmarcos3• 5 years ago

Thanks for the link!

throw0101a3• 5 years ago

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?".

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.

mannykannot10• 5 years ago

This conclusion requires, as an independent postulate, the premise that there cannot be infinite regress, which, if asserted without independent justification, amounts to begging the question.

seqizz• 5 years ago

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 :)

lmarcos3• 5 years ago

what would be the first question to ask there?

I would ask: what originated reality 0. If the answer is "something" then reality 0 is not reality 0. If the answer is "nothing. It existed since ever" then I would be dissatisfied because my brain cannot conceive that.

ctrlp2• 5 years ago

Good lord the prose is gawd awful. Almost parody levels of tediousness.

wging• 5 years ago

I don't quite agree, but this is very early qntm. You might appreciate his later work.

https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

ctrlp2• 5 years ago

My aversion to this as fiction is there is so much attention to the fictional science and so little to the fictional people. I could just go read futurist prognostications to get the tech part without having to wade through what reads like the proceedings of the IEEE. It's the typical glaring fault of bad sci-fi: it paints the tech photorealistically but paints the people like cartoons. It bores me to tears.

tomrod• 5 years ago

I just bought "Ra" after reading this and the "Transit" article. Absolutely fantastic writing!

_Donny2• 5 years ago

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?

Fantastic story. Will read more from this author!

raldi• 5 years ago

1. Set n=1

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.

swayvil• 5 years ago

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.

JZumun• 5 years ago

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.

EDIT: box to sphere.

varajelle2• 5 years ago

But nothing says the function is ran only only once... There could be someone in the next room also emulating an universe, and not intervening. Or they could emulate the universe 5 minutes later and say "this time we dont intervene"

Nition2• 5 years ago

I think it'd work like this:

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.

_Donny2• 5 years ago

That makes perfect sense. Thanks for the excellent explanation, Nition!

Scene_Cast2• 5 years ago

I remember loving the short stories on this stie! I used to binge read them way back when.

Another site with good sci-fi is http://www.galactanet.com/writing.html - stories by Andy Weir's (writer of The Martian).

JadeNB2• 5 years ago

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?

StavrosK• 5 years ago

There's also https://ipfs.io/ipfs/Qmdpah7j4mLswRLsv55qX4R9RzK3RtCWKfYNt4A...

karmicthreat• 5 years ago

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.

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.

totemandtoken• 5 years ago

qntm is getting a lot of love on hackernews today. They deserve it though, really interesting stuff and a perfect source for procrastination since I have so much else I should be doing...

NKosmatos2• 5 years ago

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] :-)

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8352985.Sam_Hughes [1] https://qntm.org/self [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/qntm/

figassis• 5 years ago

If you enjoyed this, you might like the tb show DEVS. As I read this story I had a sense of seja vu.

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

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