I’m having trouble making sense of the Mirror. Atlantean-MIRI built a CEV-viewer to guide the massively powerful optimization they were planning to unleash, sure.
But it’s not just a viewing device; you can put things in and take them out. Why?
Unsatisfactory answer: So you can step inside and live out your life in the room of your heart’s desire. Unsatisfactory because you might want more than one room.
Also, every viewer doesn’t get a freshly minted instance of their CEV; it’s possible for them to see the effects of someone else’s prior interactions with the world. Why?
Answer 1: Because storing things in the mirror was an intended use. But why?
Answer 2: People whose CEV dictates they live together, with the real versions of one another and not convenient copies, need the same instance of the same world.
If the Mirror is the source of phoenixes, then the mirror can be used to create things. Maybe the idea was to produce the singularity within the mirror and take it out? The world doesn’t look like this happened, and I doubt EY’s ending is that no one really wanted a singularity, but maybe there’s some limitation that prevented this. Say, the Mirror piggybacks off the user’s brainpower, so it can’t extrapolate its way to a much Friendlier singularity than the user could have designed. I do take the mirror’s performance so far as evidence it doesn’t extrapolate very aggressively.
The mirror isn’t infinitely powerful. That’s not an unsatisfactory answer, it’s an unsatisfactory attempt at FAI. Quirrel does say the mirror was never completed, or at least wasn’t the final goal of those who built it.
Because the mirror has limits, it can only create one room (at a time); if it could create whole universes it would be absurdly powerful.
As for letting viewers interact with other viewers’ creations, that sounds like a feature, not a bug. If the mirror was used to find out what the CEV of a viewer was, then it was useful for other researchers to observe it and take notes. A person viewing their own CEV would be a partial, unreliable reporter.
I’m having trouble making sense of the Mirror. Atlantean-MIRI built a CEV-viewer to guide the massively powerful optimization they were planning to unleash, sure.
But it’s not just a viewing device; you can put things in and take them out. Why? Unsatisfactory answer: So you can step inside and live out your life in the room of your heart’s desire. Unsatisfactory because you might want more than one room.
Also, every viewer doesn’t get a freshly minted instance of their CEV; it’s possible for them to see the effects of someone else’s prior interactions with the world. Why? Answer 1: Because storing things in the mirror was an intended use. But why? Answer 2: People whose CEV dictates they live together, with the real versions of one another and not convenient copies, need the same instance of the same world.
If the Mirror is the source of phoenixes, then the mirror can be used to create things. Maybe the idea was to produce the singularity within the mirror and take it out? The world doesn’t look like this happened, and I doubt EY’s ending is that no one really wanted a singularity, but maybe there’s some limitation that prevented this. Say, the Mirror piggybacks off the user’s brainpower, so it can’t extrapolate its way to a much Friendlier singularity than the user could have designed. I do take the mirror’s performance so far as evidence it doesn’t extrapolate very aggressively.
The mirror isn’t infinitely powerful. That’s not an unsatisfactory answer, it’s an unsatisfactory attempt at FAI. Quirrel does say the mirror was never completed, or at least wasn’t the final goal of those who built it.
Because the mirror has limits, it can only create one room (at a time); if it could create whole universes it would be absurdly powerful.
As for letting viewers interact with other viewers’ creations, that sounds like a feature, not a bug. If the mirror was used to find out what the CEV of a viewer was, then it was useful for other researchers to observe it and take notes. A person viewing their own CEV would be a partial, unreliable reporter.