So I was reading this fic (The Tale of a Friendship) where Taylor has a save/load power, and she tells people she's just "dreaming" different scenarios. They mostly just think she's a bit unhinged when she acts weird in the realities she doesn't keep.
But it got me thinking about the actual implications. If someone like Coil told you, "This timeline is a simulation and I'm about to collapse it, ending your existence," wouldn't that be absolutely horrific? From that timeline's perspective, it's 100% real. For everyone in it, "collapsing the simulation" is functionally identical to killing them and their entire universe.
We see it as a cool thinker power from the outside, but from inside the discarded simulation, it's the apocalypse. If people truly believed it, the reaction wouldn't be "meh, just a dream." It'd be sheer existential terror because they and everyone they now are going to be erased.
It's kinda terrifying that the only thing preventing mass panic is that Coil is smart enough to never, ever admit the truth.
Apparently WoG says that it's a precog power, so nothing has actually happened until he decides on the timeline, don't quote me on that though
I think Wildguy didn't think things through, really, because to precog people's behavior that well you would need to be simulating the actual people to the point that the simulations were self-aware.
Not really? Shards absolutely have the mass processing power to brute-force precog stuff. Path to Victory is literally just the ultimate precog power, perfectly planning out anything and everything to get the results you want, Coil's power being alternate choice precog is nothing in comparison to that.
"brute force precog" is simulation. If they are accurately predicting people's behavior then they are running conscious-level simulations.
That can't be happening because then why even give out powers for the Cycle?
Because they're fundamentally stupid themselves. If they were capable of creative use of their own powers they wouldn't need the cycle.
That, and simulation is more computationally expensive than getting the meat hardware to do it.
Same reason that geoengineering projects like riverworks are still planned using scale models. Maybe you can write a good enough turbulence simulator to model water flow perfectly (you can't). But even if you could, it often still works out cheaper to use the exacting physical measurements that you'd need to take for such a computer model anyway, scale them down, and run physical water through to see what happens.
Even if they are, if they can scan and simulate humans, then scan their own powers too - that should be possible
I am sure that they can model their own powers completely, but that doesn't mean that they are capable of creatively interpolating their use and application.
They don't have to, if they can simulate human brain, they can outsource that.
If they can't then they can't do Brute Force predictions.
IIRC the canon explanation is that they found the Cycle system was more energy-efficient than simulation. Remember, the Cycle was supposed to run for centuries, and the amount of possible causes and effects to simulate increases exponentially second-by-second as the butterfly effect plays out.
Because the precog thing was a stupid retcon when WoggyBoggy could have just said it was a "Quantum superposition" thing and nobody would have questioned it.
Coil is just soft Contessa. Where Contessa simulates as many timelines as necessary until she finds one that leads to her goal, Coil simulates 2 timelines side by side. So Coils power isn't adding anything new to the wormverse
Coil is also a cauldron cape. It is entirely possible his shard is part of a larger precognition apparatus, broken and misconfigured, running a past powerset that it already tested, is running a psychology experiment rather than a direct test of the power, exists to be an antagonist against more important powers, or any number of other things. There's too many variables to know why it is the way it is, other than knowing the entities didn't consider it useless because they didn't discard it.
Right, but to do so, would effectively have the shard temporarily simulate tons of people so effectively that they could be considered self aware AI... and then they're deleted.
It doesn't matter where the simulation is happening, what matters is the creation and destruction of digital consciousnesses of such complexity that they'd be considered sapient.
If you simulate a black hole on your computer, do you ever run the risk of being spaghettified by your screen?
Of course you don't! It's just a simulation; an abstraction of the real thing.
For literally every other phenomenon we don't mistake a simulation for the the thing being simulated.
Consciousness is the only thing people make the mistake for. Why?
Because as far as we can tell 'consciousness' is just a particular set of electrical impulses. A computer simulation is also a set of electrical impulses. Why is the one running on meat hardware different from the one running on silicon? We currently don't know and can only guess at this, but from where we stand right now, the most likely answer is 'nothing'.
Your example with the black hole focuses on how it affects the real world, which isn't even the issue. The simulated AI could never interact with the real world and it would still be problematic to create it. The reason is because we value the creation of intelligent life and to create it simply to destroy it is barbaric (to most of us).
If you want to compare apples to oranges, all you need to do is abstract a bit; take a few steps back.
Forget they're different colours, different species, different densities, etc..
They are both orbs of similar size and boom, suddenly a comparison can be made. But it's a comparison between two orbs of similar size, not between an apple and an orange.
Comparing a computer to a brain is only possible if enough steps of abstraction are taken. If you zoom in to a computer chip, you will find that it is completely unlike a brain.
Where is the protein folding, the mitosis, the ATP burning, the neurotransmitter molecules?
The only comparison is that they both incorporate electrical impulses. The same can be said for lightbulbs or a lightning storm or your car.
Silicon computer gates work on 1s and 0s, but that's because computer engineers realised that it's a pain in the ass if it's not binary. So they designed thresholds where if the signal is over a certain amount it counts a 1 regardless of how high the signal is. Neurons in brains are not binary in the slightest.
The difference between a silicon computer and a biological brain is enormous. We have zero (empirical or otherwise) reason to believe that consciousness can be substrate independent.
The simulated black hole can't affect the real world because it's not a black hole.
A simulation of consciousness is not consciousness. Even if we did a perfect reconstruction of a brain inside a simulation, it would still only ever be a simulation.
That is the philosophical zombie argument and it has no basis in any kind of meaningful model of what consciousness is. It only exists to be dismissed. Neurotransmitters and ATP and proteins are an implementation detail, the consciousness is not in the implementation of the software. There is no magic substance that is created when you rub organic molecules together that is consciousness.
I had this whole argument in mind (because I am absolutely not appealing to p-zombies in the above) but then I remembered this is a Worm subreddit and, in Worm, consciousness is absolutely multi-instantiated: biological entities, Dragon's servers, the Entities/Shards, etc.
But, in reality, we have zero reason to think anything other than biological entities can be conscious. We can assume it's possible, but we don't have any evidence for it.
I do agree with you --I'm a monist, after all, but this is pure assumption. We have no idea what consciousness is, how it happens, why it happens, only that it does happen. Somehow.
We have zero reason to think that there is any special nature to biological processes. We can assume that other biological entities are conscious but we each don't have any actual evidence that any system other than ourselves is actually conscious. You choose to believe that I am conscious because I am implemented on a similar substrate to yourself. But you have no evidence for it.
Hahahah, I love this. Fiction tells us that Data from Star Trek is alive and sapient and over time it's just become an article of faith that "of course" consciousness is electrical signals (and nothing more) and that a simulated person is just as alive as a biological person and so on and so forth, and then these ideas escape out of fictional worlds where this may be "true" but people take it so much for granted that they argue about it in the real world where there is a conspicuous lack of any evidence for any of these things whatsoever.
It's so endemic that it is really rare to see anyone actually using reason and data to discuss the topic, so for that, kudos sir, and again I say, kudos.
I don’t understand what you’re talking about. Coil’s power basically works by using precognition to know both the hypothetical timelines created and which one Coil will keep. Then it autopilots his body to achieve the kept-timeline while also giving him the dummy-timeline that he’ll collapse. Coil isn’t using the precognition—his shard is.
The simulation is self aware that it’s all just theatrics, but that’s just how his power works. The role of Coil’s shard in the cycle could just be a precog shard that autopilots the hosts.
If it's using acausal perception to directly view the future then that's fine. If it's using brute-force simulation then it's got to be creating conscious simulations.
I believe there are word of gods that imply the entities can do both types of precog, but idk which Coil uses
It can't be the former, can it? Because the whole point of Coil's power is that he can view a timeline that won't happen, and the Worm multiverse specifically doesn't run on the Many-Worlds style of branching timeline.
I don't understand what you mean. A universe can be non-deterministic without having a branching timeline. Considering they're capable of actual time travel to an extent, viewing the future doesn't seem too far fetched
But the way Coil's power works is that it's providing both precog visions simultaneously and then figuring out which one he'll choose. How can it be looking into the actual future to simultaneously generate two visions of different things happening?
That could be true for every good precog, and yea maybe it is true, Shards are certainly capable of simulating consciousness
Most precog powers are like that to some extent. I mean, Contessa can devise a path that takes years to complete and it works, so Idk.
Definitely not the case, given that as early as his interlude, Coil muses about the actual mechanics behind his power & iirc brings this up.
Him being a precog also works in how thinkers & precogs interfere with each other, hence his ability to mess with Dinah, or how he & Dinah in some way are meant to shield the Travelers from the Simurgh (iirc)
That doesn't make it credible.
Can this be substantiated with info derived from the parahumans setting (rather than from real life science)? i.e. what prevents it from being true that within this setting, it's possible to create a good-enough short term simulation of self-aware entities without actually making the simulations themselves self-aware? Are there other facts about the setting which were evident as of the time of Worm's writing that cannot be logically reconciled with this?
(I think once Ward is brought into it, OTOH, there's a more obvious argument to be made that the setting is inconsistent in this area, due to the existence of shard hell and the ability to essentially resurrect dead capes whose minds have been uploaded to the shard network)
Philosophical zombies are bullshit.
What prevents someone from creating a fictional setting where they aren't bullshit?
Suspension of disbelief.
Even if Coils shard isn't just looking into an alternate Bet did we ever see Coil using his power for something that would require simulations of that level? Typically he's studying or playing the stock market. At most it's when he's gaming a combat situation or asking Dinah questions and both of those would fall more under some Shard communication.
Any time he is operating with a "safe" timeline where he is interacting with more than a handful of people the interactions between those people would quickly butterfly out of control if they weren't being simulated at an extremely fine grain.
Wildbow not thinking through a piece of world building? The guy who has added a number of major pieces of world building as responses to the audience finding holes in his world building that are equally full of holes? Never couldn't even imagine that being true!
Plus he uses his power to catch Dinah, a precog. If he was also a precog then her power should counter his or they should cancel each other out.
Was there anything about his power being able to see Endbringers? Cause it's possible his power "trumps" most other precog powers along with it's max limit of 24 hours.
Presumably he used his power during the Leviathan attack for safety even if he was in his bunker, and since he doesn't find any weirdness with not being able to get info on what Levi is doing during that time I'd say it's likely he can simulate endbringers
Considering that her power caused such severe migraines that even after capturing her he needed to get her addicted to drugs to coerce her into using it, I think there's a plausible explanation to bypass any potential issues there: She never tried to use her power during the time Coil had to simulate her for the capture mission, or if she did it wasn't until it was too late for any potential result to help her. So either Coil's Shard never had to worry about Dinah's power, or it basically texted Dinah's Shard "hey what would you do in this situation?" and Dinah's replied "I mean TLDR I guess I'd tell her (X) but you don't need to worry about the details, I'm pretty sure your guy's winning this".
The 'timeline' he collapses never existed. He isn't actually splitting anything.
It's all a precog dream. He 'picks' the one most aligned with whatever his goals are and his power puppets his body up until that point.
Think of it like dreaming two possible futures and then being forced to pick one before you're allowed to wake up.
Which is scary in its own, different way.
In Goddamn Teenagers there's a scene about Coil realizing that:
https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/goddamn-teenagers-au-time-travel.1133761/page-10#post-97995802
I also would rather not know!
I think that’s what they meant.
With Coil’s power, he’s basically starting a simulation with data drawn from reality, cloning every thinking thing inside, then killing everyone in the simulation when he “drops that timeline,” a precog aspect of his power ensuring that the timeline he keeps is always reality.
The simulation is detailed enough that, for all intents and purposes, the simulated people are alive, if confined to a simulator on a bit of space whale with no ability to act outside of it. So when he ends the simulation, all those recreated minds are snuffed out in an instant.
If the simulation is good enough to get a full simulation, the people in the simulation were probably conscious.
I'm pretty sure OP knows that, they called it a simulation in the post. Their point is that the people in the simulation are perfectly psychologically identical to the ones in the real world, and since there's no true concept of souls in the Worm universe, this should imply that, for example, Coil's simulation of Skitter is just as much "Taylor Hebert" as the "real" one is.
I mean, it's not like any reasonable Worm fan could argue that artificial minds aren't real people, because that would be a grave insult to our girl Dragon. So if the line isn't drawn at "a person has to be in the physical form of a biological human being", where do we draw it?
Bit long winded, but this is a topic I'm actually super interested in:
You're so right in that it's hard to draw the line in Worm!
You're right that the simulated Skitter behaves in exactly the same way as the real Skitter, so it's down to whether a simulation is the thing being simulated or just an abstraction, e.g. does simSkitter have subjective experience, or is she a just a perfect stand-in with predetermined behaviour?
In our real world, computer simulations are just binary (1s and 0s) logic gates inside silicon chips. You can simulate black holes all day long and you never run the risk of being sucked into your monitor because they're not black holes; just 1s and 0s being flipped.
Ditto for simulating brains. A biological brain (a substrate we know is capable of consciousness) is made out of squishy, wet, gooey, greyness with mitosis and ATP burning and neurotransmitter molecules and all of that good stuff; a simulated brain is just silicon logic gates and, unfortunately for some, we lack any and all evidence that silicon can be conscious.
In the real world, we have zero evidence that conscious entities can be anything other than biological.
However, In Worm, when shards (a non-biological substrate we know is capable of consciousness) are involved, things become blurry as hell!
Is Dragon a simulated brain running on silicon and so simulations can acually be the thing simulated? Is she actually just a portioned off part of Andrew Richter's shard and just thinks and behaves as though she's running on silicon? Or is she something else entirely?
WHAT ARE 'SIMULATIONS' IN WORM?
My actual thinking now:
We start with a thought experiment: pretend that I have completely perfect information of our bodies in my mind, down to whatever granularity you like, and then imagine I'm imagining us having a sword fight, just because they're cool ;)
Do the imaginary stand-ins for us actually feel pain when stabbed, or just act as though they feel pain?
My headcanon is that all of the precog in Worm functions just like very accurate daydreams, or: the simSkitter acts as though it's Skitter, but is actually just a figment of Coil's shard's 'imagination' and so doesn't feel anything.
There is a solution to this. While solipsist philosophers might debate if you can really prove that anyone else is real (and Coil in particular can never really know until a timeline actually closes), the one thing a person can be certain of is their own existence. If you're a thinking, self-aware being, then you, at least, will know it for a fact.
So if you know or were told how Coil's timelines work (and thus knows that discarded timelines are mere simulations, and that the people in them aren't real), then simply by being self-aware, you will also know that you aren't in the discarded timeline. So if Coil ever tells you that he's going to discard the timeline you're in, you can safely call his bluff, because you will know that you're real, and that nothing will happen. You simply proceed on the assumption that you're real and that he's wrong.
The interesting side effect of this is that your simulated self in the actual discarded timeline (since they are copying you) will presumably act identically, as if also certain of their own existence. The only difference is that in their case, they will be wrong. But since they don't actually exist and never did, this shouldn't really matter to you on the face of it. There's no real person who stops existing when the timeline is closed, only alien computer programs shutting off, and the real you will never actually suffer any consequences at any point, because you are never inside a Coil simulation. So fearing the timeline you're in being closed is always pointless, and you should always assume in all scenarios that the universe will go on.
Of course, as far as confronting Coil, you do still have to be careful. Just because you know for a fact that you are real, that doesn't mean you can treat the simulated timeline like it doesn't matter, because you have to remember that the simulated you will act identically. If Coil were to capture and torture the real you, and your response would be, "Oh fuck, I'm real, so the only way I don't die is to give him information and get him to spare me in THIS timeline," then that means you can be certain that your simulated self would give up information under torture as well, which might screw the real you over. So paradoxically, to beat Coil, the ideal tactic is to act as if it's possible that the other timeline is the real one, even while factually knowing that it is not, so as to influence your simulation to protect you.
I believe there is a comedy fanfic where Coil has kept his power going for years and makes people go along with his bond villain play by threatening to discard the universe if it doesn't go his way.
No. There are lots of ways to die in the parahumans setting, as well as fates more horrific than death. "suddenly cease to exist" is one of the least horrific deaths I can imagine.
Besides, the people in the timelines he collapses are philosophical zombies. There's no such thing as "from that timeline's perspective". You might as well ask about the "perspective" of the predictive model of Leviathan in Armsmaster's fight software.
There's no proof that the people in his simulated timelines are p-zombies. P-zombies aren't even a real thing, they're just a hypothetical with no connection to logic or reality.
So swap out my use of p-zombies for "the equivalent of video game NPCs". Believe what you want.
If you're just renaming p-zombies, nothing changes about the argument. If you simulate a mind, you've created a mind.
No
Space whales that simulate the entire solar system at the atomic level aren't a real thing either, and have no connection to logic or reality. I don't intend to be rude, but it's pretty silly to look at a thought experiment and then go "Another thought experiment? Preposterous to even mention it!"
Space whales are part of the setting. This person just says outright without justification that the simulated people are p-zombies, which is like saying that the simulated people are all wizards. P-zombies are a fictional concept which is not a part of the Worm canon and is completely unrelated to Worm. It is preposterous to bring them up out of nowhere, just like it would be preposterous to claim that a specific character is an actual wizard in a discussion like this.
Aren’t there a whole subset of earths might for power interactions, resource extraction, and running simulations?
Now that I think about this, to make it worse: Contessa doesn't see them herself, but PtV has to be running similar simulations behind-the-scenes, but while we don't know exactly how much Coil simulates, PtV has to be at least global in scope. So, if "the simulation of your existence ends" counts as death, Contessa, the strongest cape who dedicated her whole life to saving the world, "killed" more people than "the end of the world" did.
Considering that by this metric, she "kills everyone in the world" every single time PtV runs a new simulation, and the fact that it can't predict the outcome of Trigger Events means that it must be checking every active Path for adjustments every time a Trigger Event happens anywhere, this implies that her "philosophical kill count" is vastly higher than the population of Earth Bet. And if her access to Doormaker means that PtV needs to scan every alternate Earth because she could visit them if it's optimal, she's "killed" more people than Scion would have if he had won.