(I’m still deeply confused about how reality fluid works. (I think everyone is at the moment.) It seems like if you “simulate” someone then you increase their reality fluid, but are you allowed to “manufacture consent” like that? I don’t know what reality fluid is except significance fluid. It seems like I should act as if I’m not going to be simulated if the simulation will involve bad things happening—it seems like I shouldn’t consent to exist in those worlds. Thus simulating wouldn’t affect my decisions, and thus the simulation doesn’t exist for all intents and purposes, and “intents and purposes” is the only way I know to measure existence. But when someone does something that harms me in the real world I don’t have to consent to it, it just happens—or do I actually have to consent to it? Note that I have no idea what I have or haven’t consented to. These chicken games where agents race to precommit confuse me.
In mechanism design there’s a thing called a participation constraint, where you only get to design games where everyone who plays ends up at least as well off as they were when they entered. I feel like reality itself may be such an institution. Unfortunately even if so it doesn’t really matter, since we’re so confused about what does or doesn’t get to count as consent. Unless there’s some background process that acts as an equilibrium/baseline, like God, then it seems humans can just be interpreted as consenting to get money-pumped (deceived) forever by arbitrary alien superintelligences (demons).
It seems to me that the only reason we care to simulate something is because of some investment we have in the original, “real” world. If original-ness is a limited resource then you can’t just manufacture significance by simulating millions of people in a non-real world; it doesn’t affect what happens in the original non-simulated world. Any time your simulation diverges from the original “real” world then you’re just deluding yourself about what actually happened (or was going to happen). Optimization that happens in the “real” world directly affects it, whereas “simulation” hypothetically only affects it indirectly, and I fear there’s an important distinction there.
Thus when I think about angels and demons I just think about “physical” superintelligences from other planets or summat that directly physically affect our world. We can just say people worshipped the sun as a god because there’s a demon chillin’ in the sun or whatever, controllin’ peoples’ minds with gamma rays. “Simulation” needlessly confuses the matter with questionable metaphysics.)
Agreed. (What makes it merely approximate?)
(I’m still deeply confused about how reality fluid works. (I think everyone is at the moment.) It seems like if you “simulate” someone then you increase their reality fluid, but are you allowed to “manufacture consent” like that? I don’t know what reality fluid is except significance fluid. It seems like I should act as if I’m not going to be simulated if the simulation will involve bad things happening—it seems like I shouldn’t consent to exist in those worlds. Thus simulating wouldn’t affect my decisions, and thus the simulation doesn’t exist for all intents and purposes, and “intents and purposes” is the only way I know to measure existence. But when someone does something that harms me in the real world I don’t have to consent to it, it just happens—or do I actually have to consent to it? Note that I have no idea what I have or haven’t consented to. These chicken games where agents race to precommit confuse me.
In mechanism design there’s a thing called a participation constraint, where you only get to design games where everyone who plays ends up at least as well off as they were when they entered. I feel like reality itself may be such an institution. Unfortunately even if so it doesn’t really matter, since we’re so confused about what does or doesn’t get to count as consent. Unless there’s some background process that acts as an equilibrium/baseline, like God, then it seems humans can just be interpreted as consenting to get money-pumped (deceived) forever by arbitrary alien superintelligences (demons).
It seems to me that the only reason we care to simulate something is because of some investment we have in the original, “real” world. If original-ness is a limited resource then you can’t just manufacture significance by simulating millions of people in a non-real world; it doesn’t affect what happens in the original non-simulated world. Any time your simulation diverges from the original “real” world then you’re just deluding yourself about what actually happened (or was going to happen). Optimization that happens in the “real” world directly affects it, whereas “simulation” hypothetically only affects it indirectly, and I fear there’s an important distinction there.
Thus when I think about angels and demons I just think about “physical” superintelligences from other planets or summat that directly physically affect our world. We can just say people worshipped the sun as a god because there’s a demon chillin’ in the sun or whatever, controllin’ peoples’ minds with gamma rays. “Simulation” needlessly confuses the matter with questionable metaphysics.)
(Compare and contrast with counterfeit money.)