New Hard Sci-Fi story

Valens-

First, if anyone finds this essay incomprehensible, check out:
"Future Shock Levels"
http://yudkowsky.net/sing/shocklevels.html
Excerpt:
"A Shock Level measures the high-tech concepts you can contemplate
without being impressed, frightened, blindly enthusiastic - without
exhibiting future shock. Shock Level Zero or SL0, for example, is
modern technology and the modern-day world, SL1 is virtual reality or an
ecommerce-based economy, SL2 is interstellar travel, medical immortality
or genetic engineering, SL3 is nanotech or human-equivalent AI, and SL4
is the Singularity. The classification is useful because it helps
measure what your audience is ready for; for example, going two Shock
Levels higher will cause people to be shocked, but being seriously
frightened takes three Shock Levels. Obviously this is just a loose
rule of thumb! ..."

I've long been programming (since the late 1970s). So I find it somewhat
natural to explore that notion. And in a sense, computers really have
stolen the thunder from, the space program and attracted attention and
ideas and money. I think I first came across the beginnings of this idea
of taping into the computational nature of reality in a deep way in the
1989 book _Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an
Age of Information_ by Robert Wright
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060972572?v=glance
specifically the interview of Edward Fredkin who maintains the universe
is a computer (not "is like", or "could be thought of as", which has not
endeared him to mainstream physicists).
Here is Google links on Fredkin:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=fredkin+computer&btnG=Google+Search
see for example:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2002/07/01/MN108224.DTL

I've been musing on this idea and refining it some myself. Some stuff
started from before that coming from the AI field and some ideas in it,
specifically one paper I read on simulating brains as multiple levels of
VMs from the early 1980s.

Obviously movies like "The Matrix" or any "Star Trek:TNG" episode where
the characters think they got out of the Holodeck but are still in it
are also inspirations. But there are lots of other variants of it -- and
it is becoming more and more popular. Here is a recent online story
related to it:
_The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect_ -- A Novel by Roger Williams
http://www.kuro5hin.org/prime-intellect/mopiall.html
(a little too graphically violent for me in parts, especially at the
start). That novel's computer is based on a breakthrough with faster
than light information transmission. Even books like "The Chronicles of
Narnia" have issues with changing space and time and levels of reality:
"ever inward, ever upward?" Jack L. Chalker has his "Well of Souls" series.

In fact, these idea sort of tie into Eastern/Hindu notions of
reincarnation even, if you think about it. :-) Essentially, as in the
novel/movie "What Dreams May Come"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120889/
the notion that people can construct their own reality to an extent (if
not on "earth", then in "heaven", where earth is some testing ground or
"level up"-ing place). [Still, if you are in heaven, how do you know
that isn't a level beyond even that? Even C.S. Lewis has infinite levels
in Narnia's Heaven]

Still, I would think ethical provisions would prevent creating AIs to
fill in for other people acting the way we want them too (implied by
being able to design your own populated city to your tastes), so it
would be a lonely world unless shared by other intelligences with some
forms of rights. Inspired by _The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect_
(where developing consensual rules for worlds shared by two or more
people is a big issue) I've realized that the only ethical way to create
your own simulated universe without AIs is for the simulator to split
your own conscious runtime across all actors (thus running the simulator
X times slower than real time for X AIs, assuming it took a certain
amount of realtime to simulate one AI, obviously this may not be a limit
to future systems if computing continues to grow exponentially).
http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1
Your conscious runtime would be split across multiple beings each with
different memories and perspectives (like a computer running several
application programs at once), so even if you set those conditions in
advance, you are not imposing them on others because all the players are
you. And then you end up with the classical "we are all dreams in the
mind of a common god" philosophy or a similar "we are all god but it is
hard to see that unless you are a Buddha" which is again very Eastern.
(Not claiming to be a Buddha here. :-)

I've sometimes mused over what it would take technologically for example
to make the Harry Potter universe real (hack into the substructure of
reality to tie voice commands and gesture recognizers "lumos, tap" into
operating general purpose reality code). And of course, all that may not
work the first time through in the universe, but if we are ancestor
simulations (Google on "the singularity" or "the omega point") then by
exploiting flaws or shortcuts in our underlying simulator we could
access such commands. And of course, such hooks may already exist in
this simulation if we are ancestor simulations, which some color of
"magic" may tap into already (perhaps debugging hooks?). This sort of
stuff happens already in on-line games live Everquest where players
discover a bug and exploit it somehow. Still, going down that route, of
course perhaps, we might be terminated as a simulation run gone out of
bounds if we do that, like you might reboot a computer. Although more
advanced ethical constructs maintained by future beings might limit such
reboots, the same way we now debate about R&D with stem cells or
embryos, and so future beings might debate about the merits of rebooting
a hacked simulator. They might instead rewind the simulation to a stable
point and rerun with minor changes that cause us to make different
decisions. Or might fell compelled to let it run its course.

Still, then you run into the other philosophical issues of if you can
have anything, do anything, be anything, then what would you have, be,
or do, etc? That is an issue glossed over somewhat at the end of this
(otherwise excellent) story:
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
The novel mentioned above _The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect_ does a
much better job of exploring that problem (although I think
incompletely, but it at least makes one think about it, rather than be
rah-rah about immortality and virtual omnipotence).

Anyway, just all speculation at this point. And it could easily wander
off into anything is possible, exploring the occult (which just means
"hidden", which is a relative term) and so on. Yet, computers might have
seemed occult or magical to those living 2000 years ago (Arthur C.
Clark's line, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable
from magic -- today's laptop might be Merlin's crystal ball?).

Wile I respect Dyson very much, both as a creative thinker and as a
human being, and not having read all his works, it seems to me he stays
away from that sort of speculation, and that weakens some of his
predictions. I'd be curious what he could do with those ideas if he put
his mind to them.

And of course, like much in the computer world (and any magical
storytelling) it often is easiest to just do things the way nature seems
to intend (self-replicating space habitats :-).

The "Mars Base Zero" thread is probably more interesting in the sense of
being grounded in experiment and more on-topic. :-)

--Paul Fernhout