Do you visualize Omega?
I find Omega so profoundly annoying that I don’t bother with problems that include it. I know, it’s just a philosophical tool, but between not believing that such a thing is possible, and believing that if such a thing were possible, I couldn’t recognize it, Omega just has a tremendous ugh field. If I start thinking about it a little more, I get distracted (though less intensely—this isn’t a deal-killer) by questions of motivation. If I had that much power and knowledge, I wouldn’t spend my time nagging people with brain teasers.
In any case, many people on LW do think about problems including Omega. Do you imagine an appearance for Omega? A voice?
Omega doesn’t talk to the likes of us—it communicates on 3-by-5 cards printed with the most elegant font ever designed. But if it did talk to us, it would sound like George Takei.
Were you aware that you’re memetically contagious? ^.^
George Takei’s voice is memetically contagious—I’m just a vector.
There was a thread on this question sometime ago. My answer from there:
I perceive Omega as its consequences only.
Are you sure? I know about people who believe that some entities, with power closer to that of Omega than yours, actually only care about paperclips.
It’s just an abstract concept, either you believe that you understand it or not. What do you mean by ‘recognize’?
If something came to me claiming to be Omega, I wouldn’t have a good way of judging whether to believe it.
If I saw a reason to think about Omega problems, I would push back against the way I visualize the situation.
As it is, I’ve just got more sympathy with a friend who had problems with math because she’d overthink word problems.
What do yuo mean with “Omega”? E.g. Chaitin’s Omega or large cardinals do not fit the remarks.
http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Omega
A being with the ability to predict the future with 100% (or near) accuracy and with arbitrarily-large power. LessWrongian for ‘God’, to a first approximation.
He also is not malicious and/or doesn’t lie, which combined with his infallibility means you can trust whatever he tells you.
I’ve always thought of Omega as being pretty much the same as a comic-book character from my college days—Galactus. I’m not sure why exactly: presumably his god-like qualities, though his habit of zooming off to another galaxy before you pick your box(es) was perhaps an aural cue.
Now that you ask, though, I think a better model might be the character Q from Star Trek. I’ve never actually met Omega, but I’m quite sure he would have just exactly that annoying, in-your-face quality that I really hate in a minor deity.
Hooded figure with a big smiley pin in lieu of a face.
So weird. That’s almost exactly like mine. Only instead of a pin it is a mask.
ETA: I wonder if its because of this.
I think mine was more influenced by the character Boss Smiley, from a Sandman one-off story.
I didn’t personify Omega until now.
Now Omega is Dr. Manhattan. This cannot be undone.
Except Dr. Manhattan timelessly decides whether to ignore you or make your head explode, not whether to give you a small or a large amount of cash.
Oh dear.
But then who is The Comedian?
Who is Ozymandius?
Once you realize what a joke everything is, being the Comedian is the only thing that makes sense. Ozymandius is the smartest man on the pile of paper clips.
I imagine him as being http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_(Doctor_Who)
I visualize Omega as a blurry, grayish cloud of Utility Fog, which somehow appears to have a big, red Omega symbol hovering in front of it, no matter which angle you look at it from.
Omega doesn’t speak, it plants the knowledge that it wanted to communicate directly into your head, so that you know exactly what it wanted to say, with no ambiguity.
Also, it has the ability to plant other thoughts directly into people’s heads, including implanting whatever concepts the person needs in order to understand the concept of Omega, and whatever evidence the person requires in order to believe Omega’s claims, and whatever other changes are necessary to prevent the person from having a mental breakdown when faced with the awareness that they are really talking to Omega.
Nope, don’t tend to visualize it any particular way. It’s just a part of the problem statement. I remember I once pictured it as a ball once in Newcomb’s problem, but then I didn’t next time.
I visualize Omega as a small black floating sphere slightly larger than a human head.
It isn’t a definite image, but it is a rather big robot (10m high or so) with a not so big spaceship (both metallic and predominantly silver), with transparent boxes full of dollar bills. It has a normal male voice, probably cultivated, like an actor or TV star. I have not decided which language Omega speaks. Strangely enough, although the appearance of Omega can vary, I always imagine meeting him on two places not far from each other: first one, second one. In the first spot, Omega is physically bigger and presents the traditional Newcomb scenario or its variations. In the second one, there is a more advanced and smaller version of Omega (it’s a rather narrow street, after all) engaging in counterfactual mugging and that stuff.
This cropped up on one of the open threads a few months ago.
I imagine Omega to be a large hovering red sphere with a cartoonish face and black Beholder-like eyestalks coming off in all directions.
I visualize Omega as a Culture Mind, either disembodied or as an avatar. A Culture Mind is about as close to omniscience as I’ve ever seen convincingly portrayed, so that image works well for me.
I “am aware of” Omega as a hyperturing Superintelligence. Something with the complete physical laws of the simulated universe, the very long string of random numbers needed to determine a specific universe, and the uncountably infinite amount of computing power needed to make predictions easy.
So I don’t visualize Omega, it justs exists somewhere out there in the multiverse as something that doesn’t have a form that I can visualize. It can only be specified.
A hypothetical construct created to explore philosophical edge cases and cause paradoxes (or mathematical, ahahaha, singularities) rapidly turns into nonsense when people claim they would believe its existence rather than the more obvious first assumption that an entity making such claims is a conman or mentally ill.
If you have reasoned yourself into such a position that you would believe in a suicide rock rather than assuming it was the work of a human, or that an entity claiming the powers of Omega is possible rather than the work of a human, then you have used the tools of rationality to make yourself mentally ill and less capable of self-care in the real world.
I visualise Omega as an underlined space __ in a word problem.
I don’t imagine Omega as having a special voice; whenever he says something, I read it in the same generic voice I use for reading Less Wrong posts. However, I definitely have a mental image of him; I imagine him looking like a cross between The Cheese from the Walkyverse and one of Mandark’s lab robots from his first appearance in Dexter’s Lab, except with a subdued color scheme. He is taller than a human being, perhaps 2 or 3 meters in height. He is painted black/dark blue/dark gray and has a dark purplish, superhero-like cape draped from his neck/shoulders. He doesn’t have any legs; his torso ends in a ball slightly wider in diameter than his waist and he floats about half a meter or half a meter off the ground, sometimes floating slightly higher or lower as a function of time like a sinusoidal function. His general body shape is that of an inverted triangle; broad, imposing shoulders and chest tapering down to his abdomen and floating-ball pelvis. He has powerful-looking arms, and his head is wide but not very tall. It looks rectangular from the front. His face covers most of his head as seen from ahead, and is made of a material that looks similar to ASIMO’s (basically like a display) shaped in a bridge like shape, like...
...and with small, solid green or blue or white or gray eyes.
Whenever a problem stipulates that Omaga shows up, I imagine him flying in quickly from the background ( which is a random street unless otherwise specified) and assume an imposing position with his body upraised, his arms folded over his chest, and his cape wavering in the air for a second or two before he pulls out his boxes and sets a table or does whatever the author is having him do on this occasion. The fact that this happens to some poor schmuck (usually me) for no apparent reason is amusing. He always talks in English (though, being omniscient and all, I guess he could talk in whatever language he wanted if the occasion called for it).
EDIT: My drawing didn’t survive being posted too well. Copy-paste into notepad or something to see it better.
EDIT 2: Fixed.
To format your drawing, indent its lines with at least four spaces.
Thank you for your kind help, kpreid.