One thing that this review completely skips—and that’s no critique, Project Lawful is really long and multifaceted—is Yudkowsky touching on anthropics. Many worlds, “realityfluid” is a common topic. How this intersects with tropes, which the characters meta-narratively discuss and which is one of the biggest parts of the plot. It’s one of the fun parts of reading Project Lawful, though a large part of it went over my head.
Also, in the narrative, Yudkowsky relays his belief that the past must have a finite starting point. He points to something called the “Lowenheim-Skolem theorem” as proof, but I don’t know enough set theory to understand it or how it would relate to the real world. If anyone has more they can explain about this, I would love to hear it!
Lastly: Carissa Sevar is… fine. A bit too evil for my tastes. The best characters IMO are the gods Nethys and Cayden Cailean. Best part of the whole story was any time any of the gods talked with each other.
When I asked him about it on his Discord, that’s when he responded with the Löwenheim-Skolem. I didn’t want to bother him more until I’ve read up on set theory.
OK, I see it referenced in the fourth comment. Usually Löwenheim-Skolem is referenced in order to state that any uncountably large object has a countably large model (part of “downward L-S”), but here he’s citing “upward L-S”, about the existence of models with arbitrarily greater cardinalities.
L-S is logically independent of well-foundedness, and in any case the speaker appeals to some vague further principle about the conditions under which you “find yourself” (to be existing? to be existing at an exactly identifiable time?). The role of upward L-S seems to be to argue that if past time is infinite, the cardinality of that infinity is indeterminate and therefore so is your exact location in time.
Bear in mind that this is metaphysical technobabble from a work of fiction about beings who know more about reality than we do. Its primary job is to sound like an example of such knowledge. The author may or may not take it seriously.
“The idea is that all the existing things are finite and descended of finite causal graphs. This could potentially be true of a countably infinite set of finite things. But something with an infinite past is not a finite point to obtain some realityfluid from its finite past.”
This is from the invite-only fanfic Discord, not from fanfic itself. I’m not sure I should be sharing it, because I assume a degree of expected privacy, so I won’t share any more direct quotes. But I hope this much is okay; I model Yudkowsky as wanting people to better understand this stuff.
One thing that this review completely skips—and that’s no critique, Project Lawful is really long and multifaceted—is Yudkowsky touching on anthropics. Many worlds, “realityfluid” is a common topic. How this intersects with tropes, which the characters meta-narratively discuss and which is one of the biggest parts of the plot. It’s one of the fun parts of reading Project Lawful, though a large part of it went over my head.
Also, in the narrative, Yudkowsky relays his belief that the past must have a finite starting point. He points to something called the “Lowenheim-Skolem theorem” as proof, but I don’t know enough set theory to understand it or how it would relate to the real world. If anyone has more they can explain about this, I would love to hear it!
Lastly: Carissa Sevar is… fine. A bit too evil for my tastes. The best characters IMO are the gods Nethys and Cayden Cailean. Best part of the whole story was any time any of the gods talked with each other.
Google can’t find any reference to Skolem, Lowenheim-Skolem, Löwenheim-Skolem in the projectawful site...
They don’t name it. This is my inference based on Googling
Here is where Yudkowsky talks about well-foundedness:
https://www.glowfic.com/posts/6827
When I asked him about it on his Discord, that’s when he responded with the Löwenheim-Skolem. I didn’t want to bother him more until I’ve read up on set theory.
OK, I see it referenced in the fourth comment. Usually Löwenheim-Skolem is referenced in order to state that any uncountably large object has a countably large model (part of “downward L-S”), but here he’s citing “upward L-S”, about the existence of models with arbitrarily greater cardinalities.
L-S is logically independent of well-foundedness, and in any case the speaker appeals to some vague further principle about the conditions under which you “find yourself” (to be existing? to be existing at an exactly identifiable time?). The role of upward L-S seems to be to argue that if past time is infinite, the cardinality of that infinity is indeterminate and therefore so is your exact location in time.
Bear in mind that this is metaphysical technobabble from a work of fiction about beings who know more about reality than we do. Its primary job is to sound like an example of such knowledge. The author may or may not take it seriously.
Eli wrote:
“The idea is that all the existing things are finite and descended of finite causal graphs. This could potentially be true of a countably infinite set of finite things. But something with an infinite past is not a finite point to obtain some realityfluid from its finite past.”
This is from the invite-only fanfic Discord, not from fanfic itself. I’m not sure I should be sharing it, because I assume a degree of expected privacy, so I won’t share any more direct quotes. But I hope this much is okay; I model Yudkowsky as wanting people to better understand this stuff.