Overall I appreciate what you’re trying to do here, but it’s not convincing.
The biggest problems are in this section:
The first is the machine itself. It is a computational device with audiovisual output. That implies its creators have sensory apparatus that processes both. They see. They hear.
Atmosphere dense enough for pressure wave propagation. Bilateral body plans with clustered sensory organs.
The machine has no idea that light or sounds exist. All it knows is that there’s two forms of output—both of which are interpretable to it. The evidence points equally strongly to creators running in Conway’s game of life as it does to ones in our universe.
There’s definitely a lot of room for improvement here. Particularly the ending. The protagonist misses the crucial point that if the civilization it has modelled can’t possibly contain it, there must be some trickery afoot. IMO most likely some future civilization (maybe the same society that made the NES further down the road?) which is intentionally running an experiment.
The evidence points equally strongly to creators running in Conway’s game of life as it does to ones in our universe.
I disagree here. A Conway’s Game of Life civilization would be very unlikely to create Mario. Mario has 2D glyphs (writing) which would be very unnatural for a species which has evolved in a 2D environment to consume. It would be like humans developing a 3D writing system. Not impossible, but unlikely.
Mario has gravity (or a constant force which represents gravity to beings which evolved in such an environment). Mario uses a non-binary color space. Most of the living entities in Mario are bipedal. None of these things are impossible for a Conway’s Game of Life civilization to create, but it is more likely for our civilization to make them.
Unfortunately, I am not superintelligent, so I can’t say for sure whether or not the logical jumps here are possible. There are thousands of bits of information latent in the design of the game, though, and I find it hard to believe a sufficiently powerful intelligence wouldn’t be able to make something from it.
I think analyzing the “Signal” is the key. It’s an output, and so it is not causally upstream of anything else, but it is evidently not necessary to play the game, so it stands in need of an explanation. And its modality (analog waveforms) is clearly unlike anything else in the machine. The narrator would be able to deduce the concept of “music” by noticing that the frequencies relate to each other by factors of 2^(1/12) that often seem to approximate small whole-number ratios like 3:2 and 5:4. From this it can conclude that the intended users of the machine have some sensory modality that directly perceives waves and does some kind of Fourier analysis of their frequencies, and which is likely distinct from the modality by which the “screen” is perceived.
I don’t know where this gets you exactly, since periodic waveforms can have any number of physical explanations, but it seems a lot closer to the physical world than anything else here.
Is your point that there is a Chinese Room problem here, or is it that (for all the machine knows) it’s turtles all the way down? Both?
Chinese Room = Sound and light are not the same as the programs producing sound and light from the vantage point of the thing in the machine.
Turtles = It’s either the case that the game implies an external universe that the sound emits to, or a simulation of an external universe that sound emits to and so on.
I found myself enjoying the narrative despite the Chinese Room problem because I imagined the AI (perhaps paradoxically) holding all the knowledge gained from our world without any of its specificity—like an engineer struck by amnesia who couldn’t tell you anything particular about who they are or where they came from, but they could tell you what it looks like to model gravity on a computer,
If your point is a turtles point, turtles don’t bother me. I assume (and I think an intelligent AI would assume) that it couldn’t be echoes forever, and the AI’s questions and assumptions would eventually apply to some pre-base-level of reality.
I agree with this—I enjoyed reading the story, but I am confused by the way the world is deduced.
If you have a database of all possible universes and atmospheres and whatever, then I understand that things in the game are evidence for a the game being made by people evolving on a planet like ours.
Still, the evidence seems week, because the whole game has low-resolution graphics, is 2-dimensional and not very detailed. I assume we experience it as a representation of things that could technically happen in a cartoon version of our world only because we do not just see what happens on the screen but add our experience with it and therefore it is not so important that the game itself is not realistic.
But now suppose you do not know what air is, and have no idea of our physics and chemistry. You don’t know, for example, what the clouds on the screenshots represent. You don’t know why some of the things on the screen look like brick walls to us. What kind of pattern is that? Under these circumstances, does that deduction of
“Carbon-based chemistry on a rocky body orbiting a stable energy source. Atmosphere dense enough for pressure wave propagation. Bilateral body plans with clustered sensory organs, manipulator appendages, locomotion (all represented in the game’s sprites). Large brains (the symbolic language and tool-building demand it). Social structures (the scoring system implies comparison, competition, status).”
make sense? Why carbon? Why does the being that is reasoning here know the concept of sound if it has never experienced an atmosphere or sound itself? Why do the sensory organs have to be clustered, why should the units moving through the game represent people or animals (we could also be playing pacman or space invaders here)?
So yes, engineer with amnesia seems to point in the right direction, but maybe a god with amnesia would be necessary?
I found myself enjoying the narrative despite the Chinese Room problem because I imagined the AI (perhaps paradoxically) holding all the knowledge gained from our world without any of its specificity—like an engineer struck by amnesia who couldn’t tell you anything particular about who they are or where they came from, but they could tell you what it looks like to model gravity on a computer,
yeah, i think you have to assume something like this. otherwise they have too strong a prior on human-like computer architecture, gravity, side-scrolling, etc.
there’s still some room here: why is “video game simulation of gravity” available, but not “NES-era platformer”?
A number of aspects of the game point to the presence of air as a surrounding medium, from which it may be possible to deduce the importance of sound to Mario-like beings. Of course, all these points are counterbalanced by the fact that Mario doesn’t usually experience horizontal drag (I think?).
The Koopa Paratroopa has wings which flap as it moves; when they lose their wings, they stop being able to fly.
The fireworks at the end of a world (e.g. world 5-2).
World 2-2 takes place underwater with very different physics that clearly point to a surrounding medium. At the beginning of the level, Mario emits bubbles that rise to the surface, strongly suggesting that there is another fluid above this one; it’s not unreasonable to suggest that Mario contained that fluid, picked up from an earlier level.
Overall I appreciate what you’re trying to do here, but it’s not convincing.
The biggest problems are in this section:
The machine has no idea that light or sounds exist. All it knows is that there’s two forms of output—both of which are interpretable to it. The evidence points equally strongly to creators running in Conway’s game of life as it does to ones in our universe.
There’s definitely a lot of room for improvement here. Particularly the ending. The protagonist misses the crucial point that if the civilization it has modelled can’t possibly contain it, there must be some trickery afoot. IMO most likely some future civilization (maybe the same society that made the NES further down the road?) which is intentionally running an experiment.
I disagree here. A Conway’s Game of Life civilization would be very unlikely to create Mario. Mario has 2D glyphs (writing) which would be very unnatural for a species which has evolved in a 2D environment to consume. It would be like humans developing a 3D writing system. Not impossible, but unlikely.
Mario has gravity (or a constant force which represents gravity to beings which evolved in such an environment). Mario uses a non-binary color space. Most of the living entities in Mario are bipedal. None of these things are impossible for a Conway’s Game of Life civilization to create, but it is more likely for our civilization to make them.
Unfortunately, I am not superintelligent, so I can’t say for sure whether or not the logical jumps here are possible. There are thousands of bits of information latent in the design of the game, though, and I find it hard to believe a sufficiently powerful intelligence wouldn’t be able to make something from it.
I think analyzing the “Signal” is the key. It’s an output, and so it is not causally upstream of anything else, but it is evidently not necessary to play the game, so it stands in need of an explanation. And its modality (analog waveforms) is clearly unlike anything else in the machine. The narrator would be able to deduce the concept of “music” by noticing that the frequencies relate to each other by factors of 2^(1/12) that often seem to approximate small whole-number ratios like 3:2 and 5:4. From this it can conclude that the intended users of the machine have some sensory modality that directly perceives waves and does some kind of Fourier analysis of their frequencies, and which is likely distinct from the modality by which the “screen” is perceived.
I don’t know where this gets you exactly, since periodic waveforms can have any number of physical explanations, but it seems a lot closer to the physical world than anything else here.
Is your point that there is a Chinese Room problem here, or is it that (for all the machine knows) it’s turtles all the way down? Both?
Chinese Room = Sound and light are not the same as the programs producing sound and light from the vantage point of the thing in the machine.
Turtles = It’s either the case that the game implies an external universe that the sound emits to, or a simulation of an external universe that sound emits to and so on.
I found myself enjoying the narrative despite the Chinese Room problem because I imagined the AI (perhaps paradoxically) holding all the knowledge gained from our world without any of its specificity—like an engineer struck by amnesia who couldn’t tell you anything particular about who they are or where they came from, but they could tell you what it looks like to model gravity on a computer,
If your point is a turtles point, turtles don’t bother me. I assume (and I think an intelligent AI would assume) that it couldn’t be echoes forever, and the AI’s questions and assumptions would eventually apply to some pre-base-level of reality.
I agree with this—I enjoyed reading the story, but I am confused by the way the world is deduced.
If you have a database of all possible universes and atmospheres and whatever, then I understand that things in the game are evidence for a the game being made by people evolving on a planet like ours.
Still, the evidence seems week, because the whole game has low-resolution graphics, is 2-dimensional and not very detailed. I assume we experience it as a representation of things that could technically happen in a cartoon version of our world only because we do not just see what happens on the screen but add our experience with it and therefore it is not so important that the game itself is not realistic.
But now suppose you do not know what air is, and have no idea of our physics and chemistry. You don’t know, for example, what the clouds on the screenshots represent. You don’t know why some of the things on the screen look like brick walls to us. What kind of pattern is that? Under these circumstances, does that deduction of
“Carbon-based chemistry on a rocky body orbiting a stable energy source. Atmosphere dense enough for pressure wave propagation. Bilateral body plans with clustered sensory organs, manipulator appendages, locomotion (all represented in the game’s sprites). Large brains (the symbolic language and tool-building demand it). Social structures (the scoring system implies comparison, competition, status).”
make sense? Why carbon? Why does the being that is reasoning here know the concept of sound if it has never experienced an atmosphere or sound itself? Why do the sensory organs have to be clustered, why should the units moving through the game represent people or animals (we could also be playing pacman or space invaders here)?
So yes, engineer with amnesia seems to point in the right direction, but maybe a god with amnesia would be necessary?
yeah, i think you have to assume something like this. otherwise they have too strong a prior on human-like computer architecture, gravity, side-scrolling, etc.
there’s still some room here: why is “video game simulation of gravity” available, but not “NES-era platformer”?
A number of aspects of the game point to the presence of air as a surrounding medium, from which it may be possible to deduce the importance of sound to Mario-like beings. Of course, all these points are counterbalanced by the fact that Mario doesn’t usually experience horizontal drag (I think?).
The Koopa Paratroopa has wings which flap as it moves; when they lose their wings, they stop being able to fly.
The fireworks at the end of a world (e.g. world 5-2).
World 2-2 takes place underwater with very different physics that clearly point to a surrounding medium. At the beginning of the level, Mario emits bubbles that rise to the surface, strongly suggesting that there is another fluid above this one; it’s not unreasonable to suggest that Mario contained that fluid, picked up from an earlier level.