Shitty Kludge Video Game Worlds, Part III of my Commentary on the Simulation Hypothesis that No One Asked for or Wanted
But which I am going to push forward with anyway because I got into an imaginary argument with Nick Bostrum and I haven’t yet fully recovered from my temporary IKEA induced prejudice against Sweden
One of my favorite life hacks is having arguments with imaginary versions of people I have never met, in which they deliver devastating counter-arguments and take-downs to my best arguments that then leave me feeling totally depressed and emasculated. There’s nothing worse than losing an argument you were having with yourself. Or worse, being too intimidated to even risk having that argument with yourself again. I have been legitimately depressed for days after my totally private conversations with my personal best simulation of another person ends with them just ripping me a new asshole, to use sawmill speak for a moment.
This is a good test for impostor syndrome, by the way. If you can have these kind of imaginary scenarios and turn up correct when you test yourself, but you still tend to feel anxious, you have impostor syndrome. Your emotional reality and practical reality do not overlap. Reverse that for overconfidence. If you go through these scenarios and are wrong when you test yourself, and feel wrong, you just don’t know what you’re talking about yet.
So there I was, pretending to stand before imaginary Nick Bostrum in his Swedish Elvish Mage Tower, where everything looks like it is made from ancient river rock but is actually just particle board covered in millimeter thick veneers held together by cam locks. Gnomes scurried about here and there doing the bidding of this dark sorcerer in order to leave people feeling existential and kinda bummed out.
Then Bostrum himself looked up from his chess game where he was playing using the captured souls of Danes as pawns and locked onto me with his blue-blood —it’s a Swedish thing— eyes, and snarled.
“You should have asked for help moving that butcher block slab, you know. Your wife was right to call you out on your pride!”
Pretending a nonchalance I did not feel, for whose pride could not be wounded when their wife publicly doubts their strength at IKEA, I walked to the window of his Swedish Elvish Mage Tower, pretending to be focused on one of those goddamn stickers with the best glue in the universe that you can never get to come totally off.
“And yet I put it in the truck bed perfectly, did I not? I carried it at the center of gravity. I pivoted it on my hip to throw it into the bed of the truck. I wrapped it in plastic to protect it from the rain—“
“And yet you dropped it on the front porch steps when you brought it home!” Bostrum howled, pointing one crooked and wizardly finger at my heart.
I turned in a flash of anger.
“Only because my mother in law tried to help me!”
“You should have accepted her help!”
“I had it under control! She came up behind me to grab the other end and it unbalanced the whole thing! And it was doubly wrong because they had literally just watched me load it into the truck two hours before!”
The wizard chuckled.
“Some might say if you cannot control reasonably probable events, that your risk mitigation around picking up the butcher block slab was horribly miscalculated.”
I shook my head and positioned myself across the chess board from the wizard and stared defiance into Swedish, almost human eyes.
“Whatever, it was fine, it’s a desk in our loft now, and nobody even cares about this.”
Bostrum smirked and moved another of the screaming souls of a Dane on the chessboard.
“Nobody cares about this, either,” he said.
“That’s not true. People who are high in college, care! People who spend too much time on the internet care!”
“You call those people? Worms! Miserable worms! They care only in the refractory period after watching too much porn, when their minds open up and they wonder what it all means. When you tried to explain this to your father did he not say ‘I don’t have time to think about that shit’ and did you not say and mean ‘Yeah, that’s probably for the best.’ You are a hypocrite.”
I threw the chessboard to the ground, freeing the souls of thirty-two captured Danes.
“Come at me with your first argument, Wizard! Or do you fear the son of an illiterate mill-worker?”
Bostrum turned without emotion from witnessing the souls of thirty two Danes escaping to Heaven.
“I admit I had not considered the implications of exact duplication. However, your definition is flawed. If you define a universe as a set of information undergoing consistent transformations then the game Tetris is a universe. Absurd!”
He reached out one hand and threw out a fireball.
“Reductio ad absurdum!” I shouted, pulling out the Elder Wand and deflecting the fireball harmlessly into a gathering of gnomes.
Bostrum looked from his hand to the charred bodies of his gnomes with wonder.
“I do not understand. There is nothing in your definition which would not permit Tetris to be a universe unto itself…”
“You’re oversimplifying! Yes, if you disregard certain considerations that make what you’re talking about misleading, then Tetris is its own universe. However, the Tetris universes with which we interact allow input from the game players that move pieces through inconsistent transformations, or rather transformations which are entirely dependent upon our own universe, to explain the behavior and choices of human players. Any truly powerful simulation of the universe will not be able to incorporate such interventions, or at least not in the globally permissive way that you imagine, without introducing physical contradictions into the simulated universe. Perhaps there are Tetris universes in the Possiplex where pieces are generated, fall, and move of their own accord under consistent rules but the game of Tetris as experienced from the human world is not such a universe. You are also, at the periphery, intending to make people feel that there are world with conscious Tetris pieces. This is not so. The particular pattern of information that allows people to be conscious, the ability to model the world while being part of the world, could never exist in such a simple universe.”
Meanwhile, Bostrum had run to the far end of his Mage Tower to retrieve Flanjglenhurn, the Very Swedish Sword of Literally Charging Your Children’s Friends for the Food They Eat At Your House, Which Becomes an Ever More Plausible Cultural Artifact After Visiting IKEA.
“You call me a hopeless atheist but it is you who deny the existence of Dee-Dardy-Durdy-Dar, the one true material world from which all other simulated worlds depend. I have often dreamed of what Dee-Dardy-Durdy-Dar will look like once I convince all the simulations above this one to create a body for me in their universes until I climb my way out. And I see now the true problem with your argument, you have reduced the simulated-verse to a fractal.”
He charged at me, raising sword high over head.
“Okay, first off, I want to apologize. I kind of intended the racism against Sweden thing to be a funny gag but I feel like I have gone a little over the line here in ways I had not fully intended. Calling out a whole culture for not feeding guests is one. Dee-Dardy-Durdy-Dar is also way more racially offensive than I had imagined it to be before I actually typed it out, and even if the Swedish people don’t have a history of being discriminated against that I know of, that is very not cool of me and I wanted to say so. Now, I’m not going to go back and delete all the stuff in here just because I had a moment of realization that I’m kind of a dick, I mean, ask my wife I can be kind of a dick all the time but it’s never intentional and I will own up to those mistakes. Also it’s kind of funny to leave this here because… it’s actually a self-referential argument to break your argument against me about the fractal nature of the simulated-verse.
“You are assuming each nested universe must create the exact same nesting structure, yes or else they would not be identification and my argument would fall apart, yes? That’s true! Hah! BUT you are not considering the possibility of a universe outside of those chains reproducing any one of the particular universes within the chain. The need for one supreme universe, which again I’m sorry, you call Dee-Dardy-Durdy-Dar is a replacement for God. What possible properties could such a universe have to make it the one true universe? Does everyone directly experience reality there? That’s just another way of saying the one true universe is the Platonic realm, which I kind of think is true!”
Spinning in a semi-circle I cut his Swedish steel blade in half with Excalibur, the Very Good English Sword of Being a Christian Probably and Living Under Goddamn Capitalism which I wield reluctantly because insofar as some of my ancestors hail from England, they did so in the only morally allowable way, by being Irish and Scottish.
Bostrum looked from the freed souls of his Danish chess pieces, to his burned gnomes, to his broken sword.
“So you have taken everything from me then? How? Wasn’t I supposed to beat you in the start of this essay?”
I knelt and put a hand on his shoulder.
“You did beat me. Many times. I started this essay talking about how having fake arguments with people is a super power. I had to go against you again and again before I could figure out what was right. I spent a week bull-nosing tile in a rainstorm where I did nothing but think about your book and test myself against you. Your books are wonderful. Laid out so openly and so beautifully. You held nothing back. You are very brave and still one of my heroes, even if I disagree.”
Bostrum looked off into the sun rising out of the window of his Mage Tower and smiled.
“So there are other worlds where I beat you, then? Where the Danes still scream and rebel against their capture on my chessboard? Where my gnomes still live? Where…”
I shook my head sadly.
“This will have to wait until I have more time to talk about Free Will and Agentic Intelligence, but no. There are no worlds where I am identifiably me and you are identifiably you where you won because the changes that would allow that to happen would mean that we would no longer be ourselves. Part of my fundamental character is being extremely reserved and not liking to talk to people in real life. I would never engage in an argument with someone unless I had thought through all of their counter arguments first. Yes, there are places where people like me do battle against people like you or maybe even you, and you win. But not one where you win against me. Only possible universes can exist. I am sorry. I want to help. I have a son now. I can’t be a coward anymore.”
And with that I am going to wait for my son to wake up in the next minutes and then we are going to watch his favorite movie which is the first thirty minutes of Moana.
I’m trying to shake the existential horror of sentient Tetris squares inexorably sliding towards a void of deletion. Is this Flatland for the digital age? Aieeee!
Ahem. Palate cleanse. My favorite Cooking a la Bork bit has lobster banditos and a senorita crustacean. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GWGh1YYT4vI