Zero point energy | : | Pauli exclusion principle |
Electromagnetism | : | Gravity |
Destruction | : | Preservation |
I know... but you were the one who associated electromagnetism with destruction and gravity with preservation. I was just commenting on your proposed theme.
Shivans are an immune system. Vishnans promote cancer.
secondary: selective pressure for resumption of panontic function. secondary: suppression of destructive firewall strategies."And it makes me think Noemi's question might have almost triggered a request that was too resource hungry to be calculated.
"PRIMARY: imperate! metastatic ontovoric acatalepsis event! subversion of noosphere un - TERMINATE"
Ahhhh I don't want to be an asshole tease, devs are jerks when they do that. But I don't want to just point at either. So maybe I can judo this into an interesting discussion - I think one of the core phenomena we have to understand in building systems, whether civilizations or individual bodies, is how local vs. global incentives compete.
So, as one example: a cell will only survive in the long term if an organism it's part of survives. So individual cells have to be coerced to behave in a way that's good for the organism globally, even if it hurts their own reproductive success. So our bodies create laws - apoptosis, limited telomeres, tumor suppression genes - to punish rogue players who switch over to the defect strategy in the prisoner's dilemma: reproducing wildly, hijacking the resources of cooperative cells to feed their own growth.
Occasionally these rules break down - there's a vulnerability that something learns to exploit. Boom! You get a tumor, or a sociopath, or a predatory megacorporation, or a meme, or any phenomenon that's learned how to exploit the rules to propagate itself. This seems to be a fundamental truth across all kinds of systems, from the molecular (DNA is a molecule that's learned how to replicate itself, and then to jacket itself in organisms that further promote its fitness) to the civilizational (a peaceful artistic country won't succeed in the long run if its neighbor is an aggressive invader).
And the bigger the system, the more resources it's assembled, the bigger the payoff for the defect strategy that learns to exploit that system. A sociopath in a little village might learn how to steal some extra food. A sociopath in a world-spanning civilization might become emperor of Rome, and that's a much better place to be if you're selfish.
hahaha, the idea of the GD being the result of paranoid security systems dogpiling on some tiny thing until they become dangerously obsessed with it is brilliant
In the time HLP was down we had some very good conversation about this!Quote[22:39] <authortuttaway> basically i think that in attempting to criticize what seems like an unusually structured and teleological bit of shivan behavior
[22:39] <authortuttaway> you're unintentionally attributing too much structure and teleology to the shivans
[22:40] <authortuttaway> so what if the anima sticks around and does stuff and leads to misadaptation and gets defeated
[22:40] <authortuttaway> there are more shivans out there
[22:40] <SpardaSon21> infinite Shivans!
[22:42] <Phantom_Hoover> authortuttaway, ooooooh, right
[22:42] <Phantom_Hoover> that is... better
[22:42] <authortuttaway> yeah
[22:42] <authortuttaway> i mean i won't pretend you're not making a good point!
[22:42] <authortuttaway> but i think it's a point that ultimately points (har) back towards the robustness of the shivan design
[22:43] <authortuttaway> now what WOULD be a problem
[22:43] <authortuttaway> and hrm, this is very interesting
[22:43] <Phantom_Hoover> is there some kind of anima lifetime, though?
[22:43] <authortuttaway> is if you got an anima that could, like...recruit shivans out of the basal state to some disproportionate extent
[22:43] <authortuttaway> that was badly put
[22:43] <Phantom_Hoover> yeah, this was discussed earlier
[22:44] <Phantom_Hoover> analogous to a tumour, right?
[22:44] <authortuttaway> right, exactly
[22:44] <Phantom_Hoover> and having a forced shutdown on animas is analogous to apoptosis
[22:44] <authortuttaway> an anima that would cause issues by locking everybody into a fixed state that might be locally optimal
[22:44] <authortuttaway> yeah
[22:45] <authortuttaway> but the solution might lie in the fact that the animae are fundamentally pretty ad hoc, built out of smaller units; their traits may not be able to feed back down the way you'd think of with DNA mutations
[22:45] <authortuttaway> you can't have a tumor without changes in the individual cells
[22:46] <authortuttaway> also, shivan cognition is very - i'm not sure this is apparent from the existing stuff - but extremely ruthless and elimination-driven; it's a mode of thought that is fundamentally hostile to organization
[22:46] <authortuttaway> it's constantly trying to kill itself
[22:46] <Doko> So they are basically teenagers
[22:47] <Phantom_Hoover> so how did the ancient anima survive a few millennia of doing not very much
[22:47] <Doko> (except for the whole killing themselves part)
[22:47] <Phantom_Hoover> (insert tasteless joke about emos)
[22:47] <authortuttaway> well, you might have answered your own question - it wasn't doing very much!
[22:47] <authortuttaway> but also, i'm not convinced a few millennia is necessarily that long for them, structurally
[22:47] <Doko> emos are always fair game in my book
[22:47] <authortuttaway> also i think there's the hint in there that the local threshold is a bit inflamed
[22:48] <authortuttaway> there was trouble recently in the form of the ancients; the anima may have been left online to deal with any flare-ups