The Death of Richard Dawkins: A short story by Steve Yegge

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/05/programmers-view-of-universe-part-3.html

by mstevens • 17 years ago

59 20 17 years ago

steve-yegge.blogspot.com

mstevens• 17 years ago

If anyone has worked out what his point is, please let us know.

randallsquared• 17 years ago

After a thorough reading, I think his point is that he has a short story he'd like us to read, elsewhere. ;)

access_denied• 17 years ago

As far as I understand it (the blogpost, not the linked story), the point is: listening to the whining of others is pointless.

knowtheory• 17 years ago

Well i can think of several ironies.

You might be able to draw a comparison between the Singularity and the Judaeo-Christian God as well as Dawkins and Jesus.

biohacker42• 17 years ago

That the singularity is a such an unimaginable thing, that all we can do is obsess over every detail in that tiny time and space when the singularity first happens?

arakyd2• 17 years ago

I think the point is to say something about the boundaries of "embedded systems," (a vague concept that I'm not convinced makes any sense outside of certain kinds of world simulations) in the style of Douglas Hofstadter (or that's my guess, as I haven't actually read GEB myself). In part two he says "the goal of this series is to pound a stake through the heart of a certain way of thinking about the world that has become quite popular."

Unfortunately I have no idea what that way of thinking is or what he is trying to say about it, and, frankly, at this point I don't care very much. So far his unintentional point is that this style of writing is hard to do well.

Sorry Steve - I read the whole thing, but I don't understand it well enough to know if it's actually disrespectful, or if I should be mad about anything. Hopefully parts four and five will shed some more light.

rw3• 17 years ago

Steve is saying that miraculous things can happen even without a god or gods around to make them happen. All that is needed is a sufficiently-sophisticated (insert ironic reference to compiler optimization here) understanding of physics. Refer to Arthur C. Clarke's quote:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

lesbianmonad• 17 years ago

It is the Christ story darkly recast as a parable of mankind's urge towards hierarchy and domination, realized through the fetishes of capitalism, religion, and technocracy.

The poor and dispossessed brothers represent mankind's thirst for freedom, for opposition and resistance. They symbolically kill Darwin, the story's central power figure and the main avatar of the hegemonic singularity. Yet they do so in an attempt to erase the boundaries between themselves and that oppressive structure. Darwin, whose domination of humanity has rendered him godlike, grants them their wish and transforms them into the insipid tourist children they wish to become. In the end, their struggle for justice and self-determination has come to nothing, and they go, indistinguishable from the other siblings, for ice cream.

You should also consider its similarity to the 1975 short story 'Let's go to Golgotha'

arakyd2• 17 years ago

Well, lesbianmonad, that's an interesting take I guess, but it's even more obscure than the story itself. I can't figure out whether you actually intended to refer to Charles Darwin or whether you were just smoking too much weed to remember the name of the main character.

pshc• 17 years ago

It's along the same lines as "A programmer's view of the universe, Part 2" post about MarioKart.

The point of the whole Dawkins/COMA bit is to show that the universe is yet another embedded system from which data can flow in and out. The two human boys being teleported into the virtual tour is akin to Luigi's kart being "zapped" out of a video game and into some other process space. The odds of either occurring are astronomical, but the singularity, being a sufficently smart programmer of the universe, intervenes to make the former happen.

If there is a main point I guess it would be that what lies beyond the boundary of the universe is unknowable and stranger than human imagination.

tocomment• 17 years ago

I think there was a South Park episode on this ..

twism• 17 years ago

I'm willing to bet that the "neat programming language" he's referring to is clojure.

rw3• 17 years ago

More likely, the "programming language" is going to be about programming the universe. Here's some inspiration:

And then there's the weirdness beyond M31: According to the more conservative cosmologists, an alien superpower – maybe a collective of Kardashev Type Three galaxy-spanning civilizations – is running a timing channel attack on the computational ultrastructure of space-time itself, trying to break through to whatever's underneath.

- "Accelerando" by Charlie Stross

_cbsz• 17 years ago

Well, the last time stevey got excited about a programming language, it was Javascript. Dig through his blog for the stuff about "NBL" (Next Big Language).

jbrun• 17 years ago

Why does this have 23 points?

robertk• 17 years ago

Steve Yegge wrote it.

adbachman• 17 years ago

Because it's a short bit of worth-reading hard sci-fi written by someone known to much of the HN community who's not known for writing engaging fiction, but clearly capable of it.

So, it's interesting on few levels, but probably divisive in terms of audience (i.e., you're either going to like it or hate it).

The story is part of a bigger narrative, so it's here because it's part of the thread he's been tugging on for a few months. Feel free to ignore.

rw3• 17 years ago

Steve, please continue blogging. Nobody's figured it out yet, or if they have, we probably have few ways to confirm their correctness.

nopassrecover• 17 years ago

Anyone able to help with these questions:

What are external events?

What is going on with Dawkins being out-of-body and able to influence the world?

How did Dawkins get from the date of his death to a simulation in the future? Is it because he was at the moment they've copied in their time bubble?

csbartus• 17 years ago

I think External Event is What We Are All Afraid Of: when the system must be rebooted, softly or hardly.

The cache and temp data is lost, the heavily imprinted / written data persists, and the function remains the same but probably some bugs fixed.

The Death of Richard Dawkins: A short story by Steve Yegge

Related Stories