2011-05-04
Sim Universe
When I was on the Anonymous chat rooms dealing with the Tunisian and Libyan and (sort of) Syrian revolutions, I noticed that I was generally getting all my information online, mainly from the BBC website, and discussion was online too. All thought that I had was based on what I could get via my computer via the internet. And if those websites such as the BBC had been faked, and the chat room was similarly controlled by the CIA, I would have been discussing events that weren't even occurring. The whole thing could have just been an imaginary event. That lends itself to the following things:
1. We should be able to set up our own artificial universe, with a website that people get their info from.
2. The current universe may already be set up that way. It's purely the result of people or machines making up some ridiculous story about Jews and Muslims etc etc and we're dumb enough to believe it. Well, we have no choice but to believe it, since we're inside it and forced to live at least the bit we're willing to get off the couch and verify for ourselves, anyway.
3. For someone like me who isn't willing to get up off the couch, it's a simple matter of hacking into my PC and installing the appropriate software, or else hacking into my router. So long as the BBC keeps working, I'll be happy enough even if the news is all faked. People in say the Philippines would need to be employed to continue contacting me and pretending to be Americans or whatever. I don't have the technical expertise to verify that. It would be rare that I ever phoned someone up (which would require intercepting the phone call too). Instead of employing people in the Philippines we could just have volunteers (aka fellow game players). People just shouldn't break the bond of trust, and continue to give opinions as if they were really part of this faked universe.
Here's a proposal document which has had input from others:
SIM-UNIVERSE
(proposal for n computer game/conceptual model for universes)
In reference to the game sim-city, here is a proposal for a sim-universe.
The objective of the sim-universe is to:
1. Discover the Laws of Physics
2. Discover the Prophet (if any exist in the world at that time) - he is presumably in the peace camp advocating some sort of kumbiyah solution
3. Assemble an almighty war machine for an Ultimate Showdown but never actually deploy it (imagine NATO forces assembling in France to launch on Libya, and the Benghazi rebels getting more and more sophisticated while never actually launching an attack on Sirte)
4. Discover the true nature of DNA manipulation, to create organs with ones own tissue, and never die.
5. Strengthen individual liberty.
6. Name the minorities who are being exploited as a political football.
7. An exploited minority is one who actually controls the rules of the universe, and the challenge in the universe is for free people to end his/her exploitation so that the rules can be modified so that "Heaven" is created.
8. Identify universal human rights and extend them worldwide.
9. Create free trade worldwide.
To keep everyone honest, whenever you're chatting to someone on Yahoo Messenger or whatever, you can always ask "which universe?" and if anyone says "real life" the appropriate response to that is "rofl" - there is no such thing as real life - anyone who has gone to the effort of constructing a universe deserves equal credit to whatever universe you think you currently reside in (when you go to sleep, you are in an alternate universe anyway - your imagination is someone else's reality!).
You can choose to "play" on the male or female team. The male team must be determined to solve the War of the Day (e.g. think Libya April 2011 in the "Earth" universe) via war, and must spend all its time creating a grand military alliance that conforms to the Laws of Physics. The female team must be determined that a peaceful solution to the crisis exists and must have a knee-jerk reaction to any talk of violence. The male team must want immediate warfare, but is permanently denied it because the forces are under political control of females, who are the majority of the population in any country that matters. They are only allowed preparations for war, not a real war.
One of the great things about this is that even blind people can play the game, because the universes are completely made up. The person who made up the game is the One True Prophet, but they must always deny (just like everyone in the Anonymous chat rooms will deny being a Fed) that they are him/her, and may be dead in the "real world" by the time the puzzle is figured out anyway. Also, he may have chosen to go for "computer generated everything", so he doesn't know the laws of physics even himself (assuming he's still alive and still an active gamer). The battle of the sexes (left-brain and right-brain thinking) takes place in an Anonymous channel describing the operation and which action should be taken next. People get their "news" from another website, the equivalent of BBC News. Some people will be in a team that creates that News website that speaks of further atrocities and the men are further inspired to continue to create the world's deadliest alliance on record. Hopefully there will be sufficient gamers willing to take on each of these roles for each universe in existence, but it doesn't really matter, because when you enter a universe, you can always find out what the current status of it is, and if it's waiting on news, you know you need to adopt that role yourself or find a different universe. Different universes will presumably differ in popularity.
Given the amount of effort expected to be expended in these things, the Prophet may allow succession so that when they get sick of playing, others can still enjoy it. To make things easier to start with, we'll assume that all the Laws of Physics that apply to Earth also apply to the new universe. Although if the official news agency starts broadcasting new scientific breakthroughs like the poles of Planet Spock just swapped around and now everything is subjected to anti-gravity instead of gravity, that's the new reality and everything presumably needs to be tied down. That's an extreme example though - probably best to keep the Laws of Physics the same so that we actually have something we can relate to.
Possibly just need to switch country names around to start off with. E.g. China is the world's only/greatest liberal democracy, Australia has the civil war, and the Australian rebels are asking the Chinese for assistance. China is assembling a million-man liberation force, with no plausible enemy at home, and nuclear weapons to protect it even if it somehow misjudged that. East Timor has agreed to allow its territory to be used as a launch pad into Australia. Rest of the world has abstained because they can't stomach the idea of "invading" Australia, while China has a variety of reasons for wanting to see the rebels succeed and is willing to back that with force. What are the news reports for the liberation force being assembled in East Timor? What has the male team been suggesting? Via plausible deniability, the news reports just happen to be taking great ideas from the channel and the assembled force in East Timor gets updated. Reports from Sydney are getting more shrill. Women and children being killed by the bucketload, yada yada yada. What are the Chinese actually able to assemble anyway? Any ideas? Ok, let's make this the first alternate universe, and in the absence of actual software to lighten the load, we'll use committees to provide proof of concept. We'll call it Operation Panda. Shitload better than Operation Odyssey Dawn. The rules for the universe need to be set up so that the universe is actually believable to humans.
Video can be created that looks at least as convincing as:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URZN9HoOxcw
Panda News reports include:
1. Gillard (Australian dictator - Australia is a Marxist state - similar to North Korea in at least one other universe) claims that there are no women and children being deliberately killed.
2. Australian rebels are waving Chinese flags in the street in appreciation of the no-fly zone that the Chinese are operating over northern Australia.
3. Chinese insist that they are in for the long haul.
4. US/UK/France/Russia make a minor amount of noise about this being an internal Australian matter, but mostly just don't want to back the loser.
5. China says that the Australia regime's sponsorship of the Malayan Peoples Army Liberation Front is something that the world as a whole should not tolerate and calls on more people to join the alliance.
Note that by creating one or more alternate universes, we can hopefully abstract the problems we have in our "real" universe, so that more sims and less "real" people die.
There is already this software in existence:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_V
but Artificial Intelligence will be needed to ensure that the moves are all logically correct to be human-believable, so it will be necessary to hand-construct one.
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1. We should be able to set up our own artificial universe, with a website that people get their info from.
2. The current universe may already be set up that way. It's purely the result of people or machines making up some ridiculous story about Jews and Muslims etc etc and we're dumb enough to believe it. Well, we have no choice but to believe it, since we're inside it and forced to live at least the bit we're willing to get off the couch and verify for ourselves, anyway.
3. For someone like me who isn't willing to get up off the couch, it's a simple matter of hacking into my PC and installing the appropriate software, or else hacking into my router. So long as the BBC keeps working, I'll be happy enough even if the news is all faked. People in say the Philippines would need to be employed to continue contacting me and pretending to be Americans or whatever. I don't have the technical expertise to verify that. It would be rare that I ever phoned someone up (which would require intercepting the phone call too). Instead of employing people in the Philippines we could just have volunteers (aka fellow game players). People just shouldn't break the bond of trust, and continue to give opinions as if they were really part of this faked universe.
Here's a proposal document which has had input from others:
SIM-UNIVERSE
(proposal for n computer game/conceptual model for universes)
In reference to the game sim-city, here is a proposal for a sim-universe.
The objective of the sim-universe is to:
1. Discover the Laws of Physics
2. Discover the Prophet (if any exist in the world at that time) - he is presumably in the peace camp advocating some sort of kumbiyah solution
3. Assemble an almighty war machine for an Ultimate Showdown but never actually deploy it (imagine NATO forces assembling in France to launch on Libya, and the Benghazi rebels getting more and more sophisticated while never actually launching an attack on Sirte)
4. Discover the true nature of DNA manipulation, to create organs with ones own tissue, and never die.
5. Strengthen individual liberty.
6. Name the minorities who are being exploited as a political football.
7. An exploited minority is one who actually controls the rules of the universe, and the challenge in the universe is for free people to end his/her exploitation so that the rules can be modified so that "Heaven" is created.
8. Identify universal human rights and extend them worldwide.
9. Create free trade worldwide.
To keep everyone honest, whenever you're chatting to someone on Yahoo Messenger or whatever, you can always ask "which universe?" and if anyone says "real life" the appropriate response to that is "rofl" - there is no such thing as real life - anyone who has gone to the effort of constructing a universe deserves equal credit to whatever universe you think you currently reside in (when you go to sleep, you are in an alternate universe anyway - your imagination is someone else's reality!).
You can choose to "play" on the male or female team. The male team must be determined to solve the War of the Day (e.g. think Libya April 2011 in the "Earth" universe) via war, and must spend all its time creating a grand military alliance that conforms to the Laws of Physics. The female team must be determined that a peaceful solution to the crisis exists and must have a knee-jerk reaction to any talk of violence. The male team must want immediate warfare, but is permanently denied it because the forces are under political control of females, who are the majority of the population in any country that matters. They are only allowed preparations for war, not a real war.
One of the great things about this is that even blind people can play the game, because the universes are completely made up. The person who made up the game is the One True Prophet, but they must always deny (just like everyone in the Anonymous chat rooms will deny being a Fed) that they are him/her, and may be dead in the "real world" by the time the puzzle is figured out anyway. Also, he may have chosen to go for "computer generated everything", so he doesn't know the laws of physics even himself (assuming he's still alive and still an active gamer). The battle of the sexes (left-brain and right-brain thinking) takes place in an Anonymous channel describing the operation and which action should be taken next. People get their "news" from another website, the equivalent of BBC News. Some people will be in a team that creates that News website that speaks of further atrocities and the men are further inspired to continue to create the world's deadliest alliance on record. Hopefully there will be sufficient gamers willing to take on each of these roles for each universe in existence, but it doesn't really matter, because when you enter a universe, you can always find out what the current status of it is, and if it's waiting on news, you know you need to adopt that role yourself or find a different universe. Different universes will presumably differ in popularity.
Given the amount of effort expected to be expended in these things, the Prophet may allow succession so that when they get sick of playing, others can still enjoy it. To make things easier to start with, we'll assume that all the Laws of Physics that apply to Earth also apply to the new universe. Although if the official news agency starts broadcasting new scientific breakthroughs like the poles of Planet Spock just swapped around and now everything is subjected to anti-gravity instead of gravity, that's the new reality and everything presumably needs to be tied down. That's an extreme example though - probably best to keep the Laws of Physics the same so that we actually have something we can relate to.
Possibly just need to switch country names around to start off with. E.g. China is the world's only/greatest liberal democracy, Australia has the civil war, and the Australian rebels are asking the Chinese for assistance. China is assembling a million-man liberation force, with no plausible enemy at home, and nuclear weapons to protect it even if it somehow misjudged that. East Timor has agreed to allow its territory to be used as a launch pad into Australia. Rest of the world has abstained because they can't stomach the idea of "invading" Australia, while China has a variety of reasons for wanting to see the rebels succeed and is willing to back that with force. What are the news reports for the liberation force being assembled in East Timor? What has the male team been suggesting? Via plausible deniability, the news reports just happen to be taking great ideas from the channel and the assembled force in East Timor gets updated. Reports from Sydney are getting more shrill. Women and children being killed by the bucketload, yada yada yada. What are the Chinese actually able to assemble anyway? Any ideas? Ok, let's make this the first alternate universe, and in the absence of actual software to lighten the load, we'll use committees to provide proof of concept. We'll call it Operation Panda. Shitload better than Operation Odyssey Dawn. The rules for the universe need to be set up so that the universe is actually believable to humans.
Video can be created that looks at least as convincing as:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URZN9HoOxcw
Panda News reports include:
1. Gillard (Australian dictator - Australia is a Marxist state - similar to North Korea in at least one other universe) claims that there are no women and children being deliberately killed.
2. Australian rebels are waving Chinese flags in the street in appreciation of the no-fly zone that the Chinese are operating over northern Australia.
3. Chinese insist that they are in for the long haul.
4. US/UK/France/Russia make a minor amount of noise about this being an internal Australian matter, but mostly just don't want to back the loser.
5. China says that the Australia regime's sponsorship of the Malayan Peoples Army Liberation Front is something that the world as a whole should not tolerate and calls on more people to join the alliance.
Note that by creating one or more alternate universes, we can hopefully abstract the problems we have in our "real" universe, so that more sims and less "real" people die.
There is already this software in existence:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization_V
but Artificial Intelligence will be needed to ensure that the moves are all logically correct to be human-believable, so it will be necessary to hand-construct one.
# posted by Paul Edwards @ 18:24 
