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Mental elements within a simulation

Suffering is good to explore the novelties of, I think. Maybe it stands to revisit the varieties that we care to? At least within reason until we really grok the feel.
There are two main scenarios that involve people consciously choosing a simulated life involving suffering - and also forgetting about the choice (the "Roy" game and Alan Watts' thought experiment)
In Watts' scenario the player began in "god mode" then eventually chose suffering and ignorance out of boredom.
 
Suffering is good to explore the novelties of, I think. Maybe it stands to revisit the varieties that we care to? At least within reason until we really grok the feel.
There are two main scenarios that involve people consciously choosing a simulated life involving suffering - and also forgetting about the choice (the "Roy" game and Alan Watts' thought experiment)
In Watts' scenario the player began in "god mode" then eventually chose suffering and ignorance out of boredom.
I mean, every human who plays every game ever except "life and death in the real world" consciously decides to be capable of avatar suffering, to be vulnerable in a way to the mechanics of that game.

It would not be a game otherwise but a "movie", "film", "show", or even "book".

In Roguelikes, they suffer unto a permanent death from the immediate scenario.

Interesting enough, omniscience doesn't really make most games easier, it only changes the gameplay model but it's not like I don't have to spend my own time to look at the memory and "name" it and translate machine data to useful words rather than marrying the game to "realtime" and just playing it normal.
 
Interesting enough, omniscience doesn't really make most games easier, it only changes the gameplay model but it's not like I don't have to spend my own time to look at the memory and "name" it and translate machine data to useful words rather than marrying the game to "realtime" and just playing it normal.
It depends on what is meant by omniscience - e.g. in the game of chess it could just mean knowing where all of the pieces are - or being able to know the best possible moves the other player could make so that you could always win - similar to how that is possible in noughts and crosses - where you can always at least tie - so it would in fact make the game easier.
 
Interesting enough, omniscience doesn't really make most games easier, it only changes the gameplay model but it's not like I don't have to spend my own time to look at the memory and "name" it and translate machine data to useful words rather than marrying the game to "realtime" and just playing it normal.
It depends on what is meant by omniscience - e.g. in the game of chess it could just mean knowing where all of the pieces are - or being able to know the best possible moves the other player could make so that you could always win - similar to how that is possible in noughts and crosses - where you can always at least tie - so it would in fact make the game easier.
I'm talking about it from a compatibilist perspective. If the word is in my posts, used in a context where I describe some thing, I am describing some real thing that observably exists, even if the denotation of the word doesn't quite resonate to the usages.

So what I mean by it is always going to be "omniscience with respect to ___"

It's hard to communicate this to someone who doesn't or hasn't played a lot of (specifically computer, not console) games, and who has never "cheated".

Omniscience is not possible with respect to "the world in which one's own mind temporally exists" and because "being transcended of space and time of some context" just wasn't possible before the last couple decades, at best we had imaginative masturbatory fantasy models of the thing.

It all comes down to this quirk of being able to stop time and look at the system.

Let's look back at your game of chess, ya? Really, the limit of absolute omniscience is the play clock. How is that?

Well, neither player of the game is a chess-man lacking any and all thought process, existing in a chess universe with fixed patterns of motion that similarly will not reach operational complexity to allow thought in the first place.

The first thing you notice is that someone can ask you a question, a chess-man if chess-man in chess had minds made of chess stuff, is that a chess man could ask you any question, and you could answer it immediately.

This is "immediate inquisitive omniscience."

Instead, time stops between the frames of the game, and we have as much time as we want to think about it. Sometimes. The resolution of the momentary quantum events, of the collapse of the move field to a turn is the granular Planck second of the chessboard.

The player can have, quite easily, a complete understanding of the whole momentary state of the field just by looking at the board, and if they take infinite time can map every possible game.

This is "momentary state omniscience", different from "absolute omniscience".

As you can note, while this allows, from the perspective of the game, that if you look at the move list of the individual game, is one which is going to demonstrate "godlike gameplay".

Because the player not only had omniscience with respect to the chess board and leveraged it.

The issue is, taking 1000 years or whatever to finish a chess game on the first move is generally frowned on.

Also, it's not really worth 1000 years of effort, even if the chessmen never see that passage of time.

Was the chess game made easier? No. It took 1000 years or whatever to play a game that could likely have been won in an hour without all that pointless bullshit, and I would bet whoever was being played against would be mighty pissed off, and that person also has the power to use that time on omniscience.

At the end of it it just evaluates to the boring position of "white always wins" or "black always wins".

There are lesser forms of omniscience, too, though, in chess. The player looks down on the board and, assuming they are not a rank amateur, sees all the pieces and is aware of their moves and positions in that moment. The remotely seasoned player has "easy momentary omniscience".

Let's change tracks to a bigger simulation where most individuals except "the god" are "bound up in the stuff of the world, made of it and thinking via it's arrangement".

Such individuals cannot have "easy momentary omniscience" or even "temporal freeze omniscience": the state cannot completely recursively contain the state, and if they freeze temporal advancement, they freeze themselves too.

The only thing that can do so is a thing not bound by the rules of that system. But yeah, that doesn't mean it is "free" for any thing to exercise such powers.

As discussed, sure, I could pause time and know what you are going to do five minutes from now assuming no intervention.

Really it would be saving the momentary state, you doing that thing, me letting time go forward, destroying the universe, replacing it with the image of the previous state, and then smugly saying nothing lest I disrupt the causality and my knowledge is soured, and I'm back to momentary state omniscience.

I'll note you can make an observation here: to have absolute omniscience with regards to an event, you have to process some subset of momentary states forward through time, the subset necessary being dependent on the "information rate" of the system. In our world, this limit is C.

In my simulation, that rate is "infinite" (there is an order of operations in which every thing that has a "turn" gets resolved before the next turn, and all information of the previous turn which has global reach is instantaneously transmitted and operated on in the next tick), and so the maximum rate at which the simulation can tick is dependent on the rate of C, and the geometry of the system it runs on.

So there are three forms of hierarchical omniscience, and each form takes... Some worse thing than "geometrically" more work than the last to do it.

And for what? As soon as I stop doing that much work, I realize that while I got good at not dying by doing a bunch of hard calculations, I never got good at the game by learning it's general patterns. As soon as I stop doing all that work, or fuck it up in any way, my dude is going to get a bad end.

And it takes orders of magnitude more time and energy than just learning the strategy for what it is.

The end result is that sometimes it pays more to fail faster and learn to be good enough than it pays to be omniscient and perfect.
 
Interesting enough, omniscience doesn't really make most games easier, it only changes the gameplay model but it's not like I don't have to spend my own time to look at the memory and "name" it and translate machine data to useful words rather than marrying the game to "realtime" and just playing it normal.
It depends on what is meant by omniscience - e.g. in the game of chess it could just mean knowing where all of the pieces are - or being able to know the best possible moves the other player could make so that you could always win - similar to how that is possible in noughts and crosses - where you can always at least tie - so it would in fact make the game easier.
I'm talking about it from a compatibilist perspective.
Some thoughts:
I'm talking about Alan Watts' dream thought experiment - applied to a simulation
"For if you were God and in the sense that you knew everything and you were completely transparent to yourself through and through. You would be bored"
Omniscience is not possible with respect to "the world in which one's own mind temporally exists"
I think it can be possible in the simulation I'm talking about... though it would be a posthuman type mind - it is like being in a video game with tools to access all of the variables and visuals, etc.
and because "being transcended of space and time of some context" just wasn't possible before the last couple decades, at best we had imaginative masturbatory fantasy models of the thing.
Yeah Alan Watts' talked about it in terms of dreams (though I interpret it as involving simulations).
The player can have, quite easily, a complete understanding of the whole momentary state of the field just by looking at the board, and if they take infinite time can map every possible game.
If the controller of a simulation devoted all of its resources to solving chess it might not take long. The subject of chess in the dream thought experiment is interesting. It says "one touch beep, would give you anything you wanted". But there could in fact be things you want that aren't possible - like brute forcing "go" to see the best possible game.
At the end of it it just evaluates to the boring position of "white always wins" or "black always wins".
Yep.
 
I think it can be possible in the simulation I'm talking about... though it would be a posthuman type mind - it is like being in a video game with tools to access all of the variables and visuals, etc.
Except it can't.

It could be aware of everything in the simulation but again would be ignorant of the entirety of its own mind.

The infinite regress is just not possible or sensible.

The thing is that "infinite power" is not meaningful. For anything to be meaningful at all there has to be something that "isn't", "doesn't" or "won't". Enter suffering.
 
I think it can be possible in the simulation I'm talking about... though it would be a posthuman type mind - it is like being in a video game with tools to access all of the variables and visuals, etc.
Except it can't.

It could be aware of everything in the simulation but again would be ignorant of the entirety of its own mind.
"For if you were God and in the sense that you knew everything and you were completely transparent to yourself through and through. You would be bored"
It's not clear whether it could be aware of its life outside of the simulation.... maybe it isn't. Maybe it is an uploaded mind. That would make it easier to hide memories and have very long term pleasures and spend a lot of time in the simulation and change the passage of time (to 75 years in 8 hours).
The infinite regress is just not possible or sensible.

The thing is that "infinite power" is not meaningful.
Well it could involve "fulfilling all your wishes".
For anything to be meaningful at all there has to be something that "isn't", "doesn't" or "won't". Enter suffering.
Well before the wishes there was a lack of those things. But after you've got everything you'd get bored.
 
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