Category Archives: Proving It

NPCs Cause Fads

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They are programmed to be “normal”. So whenever something trends popular, they jump on board and it becomes more popular. Feedback effect.

Even illnesses and ailments. Perhaps ADHD… Perhaps chronic fatigue.

We accept fads, trends and fashions as simply being an aspect of society, but what if it is not natural.

Only real players can read this post, because NPCs are programmed to not consider they live in a simulation. So I am asking you – do you reckon you follow fads and fashions less that the average person? If so, we could be on to something!

Note: that doesn’t mean something popular doesn’t deserve to be so. NPCs don’t start anything new, ever. But they can amplify something that is trending.

They Keep To Themselves

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I think a way to crack any existential puzzle is to have as many disparate inputs as possible, and absorb it all. I was just watching Stranger Things and simulation theory popped into my head. Meanwhile non-player characters cannot be found out…

It is hard to believe that every NPC is totally unique, like us real people. Inadequacy in the design process, efficiencies, or simply hubris could cause them to have shared traits or commonalities.

Which would have been fine 100 years ago, but today such similarities are more easily discoverable, if the data is available.

In anticipation of the technology – not hard, it turned up in many other simulations – they may have designed the NPCs to not be very social and sharing. Possibly they hide behind a cult like Scientology (or golfers, or cyclists), hiding in plain sight, or possibly they just don’t show up on the radar.

You know how the neighbours of a terrorist thought they kept to themselves, but otherwise seemed nice enough? Maybe all violent extremists are NPCs?

What if hundreds of NPCs loved eating octopus, read every James Bond fan-fiction and never tied their shoe-laces? If they shared all of these things in the socials, or even “private” online chats, that could be discoverable. Easiest just to program them to live a quiet, mostly hidden life.

So, any friends or acquaintances who “aren’t into social media” are worthy of suspicion.

But also, some NPCs may be placed here as a catalyst, like Shakespeare or Darwin. And they seek attention absolutely.

Real players are likely in-between. And would be the only people to read this.

DILF

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I’ve been visiting/looking after my kids, part of a random shared parenting arrangement.

Driving through the resort, the kids point out a guy – standing next to his $180K ute – who their Mum says is a DILF. And he looks it.

Thing is, most of the time in and out out of the resort – Daddy Uber – he is in the same spot doing the same thing. Instead of like, working.

I mention The Truman Show to the kids and they were made to watch it at school!

I might drive in and out a few more times than normal, to check. But of course in a simulation they will know I typed this

Timeliness

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This is a very unusual and perhaps unique thought – the simulation might conspire to make things happen in a timely manner.

Context: I regularly make a 90 minute drive. Typically I listen to the radio and when a song bores me, I start a CD. Not a CD I know well, but a CD randomly pulled from a box of CDs I have not listened tp in decades.

I haven’t looked at track listing, and have no idea of how long the album plays for. Although, obviously, it will be within a range of like 30 mins to 80 mins.

So I listen the the album and – I think 5 times now from 30 journeys – when I arrive home and park, the moment I pull the parking brake the last track finishes precisely then.

Uncanny and no way I can cause it to happen.

Last weekend I attended an expo which had lots of talks. The first we wanted to attend was at noon. Google Maps said it was a 3 hour drive so I allowed 4 hours. I went to pick up my girlfriend at 8 but she was 12 minutes late. Our journey included a detour to see a town (but couldn’t find it), and 20 minutes of a wrong turn and backtracking, and a fuel and coffee stop. By the time we dealt with the queue to get in, and the parking, and finding the tent, we sat down to watch the talk. And the moment we sat down my watch ticked over from 11:59 to 12:00.

I’m not intending to convince anyone, just showing where I am coming from.

If we live in a Truman Show existence, then maybe the system contrives to make us turn up at the right time, by putting obstacles in our path, or whatever.

Something to try and notice.

Diamonds & Salmon

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The nicest things from nature cost the most!

No, of course not, flowers are wonderful and grow for free. 

Some of the nicest things from nature cost the most!

Diamonds are rare. Muck is common. Do we like diamonds because they are rare, and that is the only reason? Would we like muck if it was rare, and pay $50K per kilo?

It is complicated!

My guess is that truffles and caviar are seen as delicious because they are expensive. And we know things like salt used to be very expensive.

But you don’t need many tweaks to gamify a world. Often just one thing that we are told to desire will suffice. In games like Fortnite it is outfits. My kids have had hundreds of outfits but desire the expensive ones they don’t have, that to my eye are no different. And makes the developers hundreds of millions.

Maybe diamonds are intended to be the goal in our simulation. Regardless of how things actually turn out, our world is different to other simulations by only three factors:

  • diamonds exist naturally
  • they are rare and hard to attain
  • we think they look amazing

Someone from another simulation will think they look like a pebble.

So maybe there is a single thing that this world has unique, to randomise the outcome. It doesn’t have to be what we end up desiring for all time, but most likely will be at least for part of our evolution and history.

It could be anything we have ever fought over, like salt and gold. Or it could be something that is really similar to cheaper versions, but we prefer the expensive one, like salmon.

 

Easter Egg at the Bottom of the Ocean?

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So imagine if our creators decided that a certain level of technological advancement was required before we could discover that we are not actually real.

That could look like a symbol, sign or something clearly un-natural:

  • on something very small (requiring advanced magnification)
  • on something out in space
  • at the bottom of the ocean (which we still find very hard to get to, and dark!)

And it could be in multitudes, or just one instance, the latter meaning we would need to be full scanning and mapping and analysing everything.

Scanning sea-floors could be great for archaeology as well, given that a lot of land has been submerged since we became a modern species. Telling the difference between what was made by us, or our creators would be hard, so I only expect such an Easter Egg to be at the bottom of the deepest parts of our oceans.

They could make it doubly tricky, like only somewhere remote, and you need to use a scanning electron microscope to see it…

Tardigrades and Quantum Entanglement

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I’ve had two opinions around quantum entanglement:

Simulation: An algorithm decides how small something should be to show it, depending on whether someone is watching or not. Just like how a video game doesn’t render anything off-screen, because there is no point and it wastes processing power.

Non-simulation: I always though it was a factor of size and being an object made from a single element.

Turns out a creature can be observed in a quantum entangled state:

In the experiment, researchers placed a tardigrade tun on a superconducting qubit and observed coupling between the qubit and the tardigrade tun via a shift in the resonance frequency of the new qubit-tardigrade system. They then entangled this joint qubit-tardigrade
system with a second superconducting qubit.
https://www.dailygrail.com/2021/12/quantum-tardigrade-scientists-observe-quantum-entanglement-in-a-multicellular-living-creature-for-the-first-time/

So, I consider this to be a strong indicator of us in a simulation, unless some scientists can explain it.

Crash the Simulation

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Computer programs can crash, and we might be inside a computer program.

So how do we crash it?

Over at Scientific American they argue that we can overload the system by creating our own simulations:

The most obvious strategy would be to try to cause the equivalent of a stack overflow—asking for more space in the active memory of a program than is available—by creating an infinitely, or at least excessively, recursive process. And the way to do that would be to build our own simulated realities, designed so that within those virtual worlds are entities creating their version of a simulated reality, which is in turn doing the same, and so on all the way down the rabbit hole. If all of this worked, the universe as we know it might crash, revealing itself as a mirage just as we winked out of existence.

To me this fails because we have our own real world constraints of computing power and storage to deal with first. We would need unlimited computing power and storage here to stack overflow the system that runs our simulation.

My personal theory is that quantum mechanics, where we can only tell the status of a particle if we observe it, is an indicator of resolution limits of out simulation. Maybe if we observe enough quantum particles at once, we will either crash the system, or quantum mechanics will start acting differently, proving we are in a simulation.

Then there is the impossible to answer ethical question – is it wrong to crash the simulation? If we are not “real”, then no harm done. But if we experience life or even consciousness, despite not being real, should that be protected or even sacred?

Breaking the simulation would be like death, I expect. Once you achieve it, you’ll never know what comes next.

But if there is a restore point, would we as conscious individuals experience that reboot, or would be cease to exist?

Randonauting starts now

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Because of my autism, which has a preference for routine, I deliberately invite randomness into my life, forcing me out of my comfort zone, and helping me grow as a person.

Randomness has been a bigger part of my life than you would imagine, because decades ago I read The Dice Man, and even today I carry a die in my pocket. Several times a week my lunch is decided randomly, but I have also made major life decisions with dice.

This is all good, except nothing is truly random. If our journey is already preordained, than rolling a die is part of that. Many philosophers have put a lot of thought into this.

So I have stumbled across http://randonauts.com/guide.html which tries to screw up the simulation we live in by sending people to random locations they have never been to before, and never would otherwise. And they use quantum randomness, which they think gets around the preordained aspect.

Meanwhile, I often go on patrol, like a vigilante super hero would (and, yes, I do it more when I have been watching a show like Daredevil). While I try to choose random journeys, they aren’t really random. I suspect that I am not meant to encounter crime in my life.

So by using the Randonaut bot on patrol nights… let’s see what happens!

I don’t have a selfie stick, but this seems like a fair representation of what I am hoping for:

Who Is Who?

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westworld-extra-0

In video games, especially first person shooters, there are players, and there are non-player characters (NPCs) – computer-generated folk who flesh out the story but they are run via AI, and aren’t being played by a real person.

If the world as we know it is one big simulation, then one of the questions that must be asked is who are the players, and who are the NPCs?

The first possibility is that we are all players. That fits quite well because most people think all people are just people.

The second possibility is that we are all NPCs – and we are merely pawns in a simulation being run for unknown reasons.

Neither of those possibilities are worthy of pursuit, because ultimately the simulations are no different for us than if we were in a reality.

The third possibility is that some are and some aren’t. So who is who?

I presume I am a player, because an NPC would probably be programmed to not question their reality, otherwise the simulation loses its focus. (Yes, there is the possibility that the focus is seeing if NPCs can work out they are in a simulation…)

I also presume that real players are the minority. That is because NPCs exist to flesh out a scenario in a FPS video game, because it is easier to program and more economical to have it that way.

Historically there have been some very different individuals who have “stirred things up” or advanced the simulation somehow. Think Buddha, Jesus, Leonardo Da Vinci, Shakespeare, Einstein etc. They stand out like a sore thumb and suggest to me that they were introduced when the simulation stagnated, that they are players with special privileges. You could argue that the only reason we have societies focussed on “progress” is because there is no point running a simulation that doesn’t progress.

Aside from them, I have a few ideas about who are players and who are not:

Players

  • Might fight the system / break rules
  • More likely to be keen on physical and mental pleasures, including drug and alcohol addictions
  • Includes anyone on the Autistic scale, or pretty much anyone who could be judged as being defective
  • Singer-songwriters
  • Writers/Poets
  • Rebels and activists, or anyone who takes an individual stance that puts their life in danger

NPCs

Purely from my own observations and totally guesswork

  • Cyclists and rowers – those who do so obsessively
  • Bus drivers – it has occurred to me that nobody knows one
  • Osteopaths – they all seem to be too nice and perfect, unlike GPs
  • People who look the same – not exactly the same but who feel familiar because you have known people almost the same as them
  • Adherents of organised religion
  • Politicians – only about 10% of them seem to have a soul, and the way they talk is surely programmed
  • Actors – ditto
  • Dancers – ditto
  • Classical singers – ditto
  • People who don’t have strong dislikes

Clearly the simulation will be a failure if the Players can tell who the NPCs are. Unless the aim of the game is to prove that we live in a simulation.

Or, just like Westworld the TV show, perhaps the players can beat the system, or hosts.

Whoever cracks this puzzle will be adept at spotting patterns, and perhaps won’t be able to prove them – just like modern AI systems that will just know the answer and not be able to show the path their logic took…