14 KiB
[TH] "The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect" by Roger Williams (Trigger warnings!)
-
Author: u/narfanator *
-
Score: 14
-
Created: 2014-09-27T19:32:07
Post:
Comments:
u/EndlessStrategy [+14] (5 hours later)
Alright, I have a lot I could say about this story, but my spoiler tags don't seem to be working no matter what I do.
So I'll just say that I consider this story's ending to be a nihilistic piece of trash.
u/CeruleanTresses [+7] (7 hours later)
Nihilistic and also gross in some ways I wasn't prepared for.
u/TildeAleph [+3] (6 hours later)
I think the author did say that the decisions the protagonists make leading up to the ending would not have been his/her own, but that it fit better with the story... or something.
u/EndlessStrategy [+3] (6 hours later)
Well sure, the actions Caroline took were consistent with her character as it had been portrayed up to that point. But that doesn't stop the ending from being terrible.
u/narfanator [+1] (22 hours later)
The ending ending? Yeah. Could have ended one chapter after the climax, just to establish the "Yay, difficulty!" aesop's.
u/EndlessStrategy [+1] (a day later)
The "Yay, difficulty!" Aesop doesn't even make sense. The Prime Intellect was accepting contracts that limited its interference. Caroline could've asked it to create for herself precisely the sort of world she ultimately ended up living in.
u/seven_types [+10] (a day later)
My alternative thoughts:
[](#s " Prime Intellect still made it: Caroline wakes up and sees "Experimental Therapy Wing" - the only rock with writing on it. She is then able to live out an entire existence with meaning, and she wants to die, so she does. I like to consider that Prime Intellect was able to break out of it's loop and recognize that a human need for some is to die and have meaning - and in doing so, re-writes it's First Law and allows Caroline and Lawrence to get the ending they really needed to feel like their lives had meaning. The Experimental Therapy Wing is the only clue that we get from the author that PI is in fact still pulling strings.')
That said, I was also frustrated by the way it was written to imply otherwise.
u/andor3333 [+2] (4 days later)
Ohhhhh. I missed that completely when I read this a while back. I was so annoyed at the solution it came up with to resolve the problem.
u/CeruleanTresses [+6] (a day later)
B-but that wouldn't be REEEEEAAAAAAL :( Despite literally being the real and actual state of the universe, it wouldn't count because PI made it that way. There would be a subtle difference in the texture of the environment, apparently, which is totally unacceptable
u/narfanator [+5] (a day later)
Oh, yeah, there's all kind of inanity and "weeelllp" mistakes made. Laws 4 & 5 (mind reading and duplication) should have been "without permission", there would be a good Law 6 in "Can only affect the area around a person" (although that'd get real hard to define....)
...Basically, they needed to have read Diaspora or a Culture novel.
u/FeepingCreature [+6] GCV Literally The Entire Culture (an hour later)
Cool story, but: Spoiler. There. Death.
u/Chronophilia [+3] sci-fi ≠ futurology (4 hours later)
Subjective or objective seconds?
If subjective seconds, you'd experience the universe slowing down exponentially, and you'd probably hit the heat death of the universe in a matter of minutes... unless Prime Intellect finds a way around that, in which case you'd end up alive, but isolated from the rest of society.
If you're slowed down by a factor of two every objective second, you'd experience only two more subjective seconds, and then die.
u/FeepingCreature [+4] GCV Literally The Entire Culture (4 hours later)
Yeah, I think if you assume that entropy is inescapable this is a win in both cases.
u/Chronophilia [+1] sci-fi ≠ futurology (4 hours later)
Dangerous assumption to make. What if you're wrong?
u/FeepingCreature [+5] GCV Literally The Entire Culture (4 hours later)
"Prime Intellect, please restore society from backup and insert me into it."
That or try to adapt to what's there now, I guess.
u/EndlessStrategy [+4] (4 hours later)
You could just ask the Prime Intelligence to stop messing with your sense of time if it finds out a way to counteract entropy.
u/narfanator [+3] (22 hours later)
I think PI is prevented from that. First, people aren't a simulation; they're in reality, but PI is controlling reality like a sock puppet. Second, people looking for their Infinite Pleasure Button have to experiment neuron by neuron, since PI won't read their minds.
That said, drop into a black hole?
u/Prezombie [+1] (2 hours later)
1-1=0.
1/2/2/2.... != 0.
Subjectively, you'd see the world speed up exponentially, but you wouldn't cease to be.
u/FeepingCreature [+7] GCV Literally The Entire Culture (3 hours later)
Yeah but assuming that the universe runs out in finite time, you'd get there a LOT sooner. (log_2 n seconds.)
u/Chronophilia [+3] sci-fi ≠ futurology (18 hours later)
What if it's "slow down my experience by a factor of two every real-time second"?
You'd experience half of the first second, a quarter of the next one, and eighth of the next one, a sixteenth of the next one, etc. Your total subjective experience would be 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 ... seconds. From your perspective, you'd cease to exist in one subjective second.
u/Prezombie [+2] (19 hours later)
Yeah, that's clearer, and would probably work until external events changed things.
From a Doylist Point of View though, I doubt it would work if such an idea was expressed in the story, PI isn't a genie, and isn't an unchanging Rules As Written system, it explicitly adapts around attempts to commit suicide. One person might get away with it for a while, but once their simulation is so slow as to be indistinguishable from a person in stasis, PI would clarify the rules, and set a lower bound on your possible simulation speed.
u/narfanator [+8] (3 minutes later)
TRIGGERS: Extreme voluntary violence. A character volunteers to be tortured, raped* and killed due to catastrophic ennui.
- This is not the right word to describe the story, but is the correct word to describe the trigger warning.
u/sicutumbo [+5] (4 hours later)
I think that if you subscribe to the notion of triggers outside of PTSD and epilepsy, then this story probably isnt for you.
u/None [+7] (7 hours later)
[deleted]
u/None [+2] (7 hours later)
[deleted]
u/CeruleanTresses [+6] (14 hours later)
in my eyes, the only acceptable use of a trigger warning is when there are depictions of violence that legitimately could cause a PTSD sufferer a flashback
This story revolves around detailed depictions of extreme violence. If we go by your definition, a trigger warning was appropriate here.
In any case, I don't think it much matters whether it's called a trigger warning or just a warning. It's courteous to warn people if they're about to view something disturbing. Yes, some people use trigger warnings inappropriately. OP did not, so I don't see a reason to bring up Tumblr at all.
u/ZankerH [-4] Remove Kebab (13 hours later)
I'm triggered by trigger warnings, trigger warning that shit!
u/None [+7] (2 days later)
The original misbegotten attempted-FAI story. Now with more ultraviolence and much less philosophical exploration!
u/SaintPeter74 [+4] (7 hours later)
The same author has a fair number of other short stories, many of them set in a common universe. They're quite good. I used to read him when he posted on Kuro5hin (before it reached infinite suck).
The author was also working on a sequel, but then Katrina hit and . . . well, he hasn't gotten back to it.
u/ianyboo [+1] (9 days later)
Can you remember the titles of any of those short stories?
u/SaintPeter74 [+2] (10 days later)
I'll do ya one better:
http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/mopionl.htmlThat page has all of his short stories. The ones I was thinking of were the "Passages" stories. The rest of his stories are pretty good/interesting as well, but they're a very mixed bag.
u/ianyboo [+1] (10 days later)
Thank you very much!
u/narfanator [+2] (18 minutes later)
I find this relevant, although it wasn't actually what I was looking for: https://www.erowid.org/columns/teafaerie/2012/05/
It covers part of the foundation of the actual thought I've heard from the TeaFearie, which goes something like this, although I really can't do her prose justice with my paraphrase, and is the thought I thought of upon completion of the story:
What would make the perfect game? Well, for starters, you'd be in it, and other people would be there, too. Then, there'd be challenges. But they'd be challenges you set yourself, and very importantly, they'd scale with your level: they'd get harder as you got better.
Well - when things are at their best, doesn't that kinda sound like life?
u/None [+10] (2 days later)
Well - when things are at their best, doesn't that kinda sound like life?
No: games involve extra lives. A well-designed game has a space for blatantly reckless exploration of the possibilities. Real life is great at being (often) nonlinear and having no set story you get forced through (freedom), but it's actually complete shit at letting you explore the possibility-space without suffering catastrophic penalties (such as death, destitution, or mental illness). Worse: the tutorial levels (childhood) are deliberately constructed to shield you from the complexity of the real game (real life) instead of building you up to having the strength for it, so when you do get thrown into the real levels (again: real-life adulthood), it's a basically sink-or-swim challenge that breaks a lot of people and dramatically cuts off possibilities for almost everyone.
The biggest barrier stopping real life from being a great place to live is precisely that we are forced to spend most of our efforts on survival rather than on self-actualization or doing good for/with others.
u/FeepingCreature [+1] GCV Literally The Entire Culture (an hour later)
It's a fun read, but the author doesn't quite seem to understand that if they're judging the detail of a spaceship with the same faculty that is generating it, the fact that this faculty finds nothing out of place should not surprise them.
u/narfanator [+1] (21 hours later)
I don't know. On those rare occasions I'm lucid enough in a dream, and on the much more frequent occasion I can inspect memories of a dream, I can tell I'm not in Reality because there are no unimportant details.
Your suggestion also posits that there's just one faculty in the brain being used for both; AFAIK, indications are that the brain is closer to many faculties that are blurred together. I'd be surprised if Imagination and Observation were the same software/hardware/wetware (or blurred together that much), and I wouldn't be surprised if the involved substances effected one but not the other.
u/FeepingCreature [+1] GCV Literally The Entire Culture (23 hours later)
No, but, say, if you dream of a spaceship, what's happening is based, in a sense, on your internal model of a spaceship. (And other parts.) It's like a collage.
(Also, what's an unimportant detail? My dreams have lots of details..)
Basically, the dream (or vision!) is a remixed reflection of your existing knowledge. Maybe people don't normally remember their dreams? I don't know. My dreams usually have a lot of detail to them. Occasionally, I can even recognize where it comes from. :)
u/narfanator [+2] (a day later)
That's neat! Mine don't :P My dreams are primarily narrative based, so unimportant details are things like the deep texture of a desk: totally unimportant to the narrative. Also, I rarely /hear/ words, although I know what people are saying, like I'm reading a book.
Maybe you have your unimportant details in a different medium?
I can totally believe a collage, and while that reduces the required processing capability, it doesn't eliminate it.
u/FeepingCreature [+2] GCV Literally The Entire Culture (2 days later)
Maybe you have your unimportant details in a different medium?
That's quite possible. My dreams usually tend to be visually detailed, but don't make much sense plot-wise. (I just woke up, so it's fresh in my mind :) Like, I could probably sketch you a detailed walkthrough of my current one, architecturally, but I don't think I can remember detail except for the precise things I was paying attention to. I think it's filled in on demand? Like, I want to know about a detail and it fills in. So I can recall exactly the marble texture of that stupidly giant staircase I just went down on my way out of the building that started out as a school? and for some reason bordered a shopping center? which was not visible from the outside? And which I escaped through the gardening section before jumping onto a helicopter? ... Dreams, man. Anyway, I can sketch the layout of the architecture in detail, but there's no global sense to it because my brain didn't have a plan going in.)