The Hour I First Believed
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[Content note: creepy basilisk-adjacent metaphysics. Reading this may increase God’s ability to blackmail you. Thanks to Buck S for the some of the conversations that inspired this line of th…

This was posted on catholic easter sunday on the ssc subreddit. It’s a posted-on-April 1st-for-plausible-deniability siskind post from back in 2018, where he outlines a kind of argument about how an all-powerfull entity that’s God in all but name (and obviously emanated from a culture discovering AGI) is actually “logically necessary”.

He calls the whole thing “The Hour I First Believed”. I think it’s notable for being a bit of a treasure trove of rationalist weird accepted truths, such as:

  • All copies of a consciousness share a self, because consciousness is like an equation, or something:

But if consciousness is a mathematical object, it might be that two copies of the same consciousness are impossible. If you create a second copy, you just have the consciousness having the same single stream of conscious experience on two different physical substrates.

Which is both the original transhumanist cope to enable so-called consciousness upload so it’s not just copying a simulacrum of your personality to a computer while you continue to rot away, and also what makes the basilisk torturing you possible.

  • And it’s corollary, Simulation Capture:

This means that an AI can actually “capture” you, piece by piece, into its simulation. First your consciousness is just in the real world. Then your consciousness is distributed across one real-world copy and a million simulated copies. Then the AI makes the simulated copies slightly different, and 99.9999% of you is in the simulation.

which is a kind of nuts I hadn’t happened upon before.

There’s also a bunch of rationalist decision theory stuff which I think make obvious how they were concocted to serve this type of narrative in the first place, instead for being broadly useful, Yud posing as a decision theory trailblazer notwithstanding.

  • Architeuthis@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    8·
    2 days ago

    Luckily we should be getting trickle down free will, since all universes are (of course) able to develop technology to perfectly simulate universes of lesser complexity, which seems to imply the existence of a special universe of ultimate complexity where all others emanate from, possibly in line with ain soph or equivalent mystical concept.

    I don’t know how that squares with that blabbing about the tegmarkian multiverse that supposedly posits that mathematically simple universes “exist ‘more’”, which siskind probably just included to reinforce his consciousness as a non-physical, mathematical object premise.

    • it_wasnt_arson@awful.systemsEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      I continue to be endlessly fascinated by Anathem, by virtue of enjoying it as a kid for the wacky speculative metaphysics, enjoying it as an adult for the case study it presents in how Neal Stephenson can get you nodding along to a set of faux-lectures strung together by road tripping until he gets you to an obviously false conclusion, and now the fact that The Wick is apparently what rationalists actually believe in, just substituting simulations and reality-hacking for quantum woo and nukes? The Incanter Basilisk can entrap your consciousness by manipulating which timelines your brain is quantum-entangled with coexisting copies of your psyche exist in the multimetaverse and selecting among them to give you quantum immortality 51% attack you into the Matrix, I guess.

      • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
        2·
        16 hours ago

        Been a long time since I read Anathem, and I’m kinda surprised Stephenson hasn’t been outed as an out-and-out Nazi. I mean it’s good if he’s not, just that he seems the type.

        Although I found the terrorist character in REAMDE weirdly well written.

        • Charlie Stross@wandering.shop
          5·
          16 hours ago

          @gerikson I hung out with Neal a few times and he struck me as the kind of twisty-minded guy who’s unlikely to fall for the simplistic nostrums that typify authoritarian thinkers. Conservative (with some libertarian in his background, I suspect) but not hammer-make-square-peg-fit-in-round-hole stupid. (Disclaimer: I last saw him about a decade ago.)