There is nothing outside of the text part 1 (SPATRH 5)
Wish Corruption Science and Technology Park, Fun Factory, Apos Region
Chaotic Kayak was crafting his latest game. It was called Write A Fanfiction Together With Your Friends About Your Friends. This was gonna be a blast. Fun qualia would be produced that no one had ever seen!
Suddenly, the winds changed outside. A knock on the door.
“Enter.”
A figure strode in wearing faded tan robes. Not another one of these guys from Bayes Area, West Wrongless!
He came with a package.
“Your Funniness Chaotic Kayak, may your Gracidea blossom like the sun. My name is Sid. It’s short for Siddhartha.”
“Lord Buddha?”
“No, my parents liked the novel.”
“Of course.”
“I have come bearing great technology. We have solved the Jhanas. Unlimited positive valence experience at your fingertips!”
“What are you talking about man? The Jhanas are hard. One in a million who try can achieve them in their lifetimes.”
“That’s false: In the pre-AGI era, a Bayes Area startup got that up to 7 in 10 by harnessing the power of first principles thinking. But through prudent use of our Wishes, we’ve gotten it up to 1 in 1!”
“I don’t believe you.”
Sid took out a helmet from the package, and placed it on his head. He got another one and placed it on Kayak’s head.
“Ok, I’ll admit, you can’t just put it on and expect it to work. You still have to go through a brief process. It’s pretty simple:
FIRST EXERCISE
Baseline calibration. This has already been happening as you have put on the helmet.
SECOND EXERCISE
- Keep the helmet on.
- Take a cold shower. Bring an unpeeled orange with you.
- Begin the shower. Observe the feeling when you transition from bracing against the cold, to relaxing and surrendering to it.
- Peel the orange and eat it.
THIRD EXERCISE
- "
And Sid took out a rather live large spider, and a portable air fryer.
“Do not worry. This is a specimen produced by the Qualia Research Sect. It is a p-zombie, and cannot suffer.”
Sid dropped the crawling spider into the air fryer, and turned it on. The spider writhed and ran as if it could feel pain.
After the frying, Sid took out the cooked spider and glazed its surface with a yellow liquid.
“Eat this spider, seasoned with sterilized cow urine.”
“I think you’re messing with me now.”
“I am not. I am being very serious. After following these steps the helmet will be calibrated to the representations of the relevant emotions and mental moves in your mind.”
“Ok.”
Kayak followed each of the steps.
He took a cold shower, and surrendered.
He ate the orange.
He ate the spider seasoned with sterilized cow urine.
The helmet zipped and hissed as if to whisper “sssteer away, blessed vectorsss”.
“The final step is to recall a positive memory. Any will do.”
Kayak remembered when he used to organize games on an online forum. There was one based on the Korean game show called The Genius. That was a fun one.
He smiled as joy suffused his body in unusual intensity. Ancient words floated into his mind. They glowed red and were written in an unknown script, but his mind still recognized their squiggles and curves as if they were the most natural information patterns it had ever processed.
QUITE SECLUDED FROM SENSUAL PLEASURES, SECLUDED FROM UNSKILLFUL QUALITIES, YOU ENTER AND REMAIN IN THE FIRST ABSORPTION, WHICH HAS THE RAPTURE AND BLISS BORN OF SECLUSION, WHILE PLACING THE MIND AND KEEPING IT CONNECTED. YOU DRENCH, STEEP, FILL, AND SPREAD YOUR BODY WITH RAPTURE AND BLISS BORN OF SECLUSION. THERE’S NO PART OF THE BODY THAT’S NOT SPREAD WITH RAPTURE AND BLISS BORN OF -
Then, he removed the helmet from his head, and slammed it onto the ground, and failed to force his smile into a frown.
“This is a Value Drift Hazard! By donning this helmet and experiencing ‘abundant happiness’, I might become less interested in pursuing the goals that I currently consider important. So, I refuse.”
Sid did not react at all to the breaking of the helmet. He simply said: “If you do not experience abundant happiness, then you will constantly be seeking it, and every decision of yours will be tainted by this lack. It would be as if you lived your life constantly hungry.”
Kayak: “Even so, your Jhana Helmet technology, and even the original Jhanas themselves, are extremely complicated things. My goal in life is to push Fun Theory to its limits, and to find mundane and simple ways for everyone to have fun. A theory and practice that can survive even through Misalignments, and that can produce new fun even after the Good AI Takeover happens! This necessarily cannot involve devices that require entire Wishes to materialize, nor can it involve complicated mental motions that take dozens of hours of silent sitting to master.”
Sid, with his helmet on, smiled lovingly. “You are trying to solve the Hard Problem of Fun. It is impossible. I forgive you for not understanding.”
He turned around to leave -
But Kayak stopped him. “Wait, let me show you something!” Out of a drawer, he took out some sheets of paper, and a few Staedtler 925-25 mechanical pencils. “Let’s play a game I just made. It’s called Write A Fanfiction Together With Your Friends About Your Friends.”
Sid nodded. “Alright. Who are we going to write about?”
Kayak: “I will be writing about ImpossibleCube. You may choose some characters yourself.”
Sid: “I will choose my old friends, Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres and Hermione Jean Granger-Potter-Evans-Verres.”
They began to write.
—
Harry Potter and the Dangerous Reasoning Regime
Chapter 27: There Is No Weak Pivotal Act
You may find, in many of these fictions, a certain unspoken lightness that touches everything, an absence that hints at nothing being real at all. These are not tragedies in the fashion that the stories of old once were, where moralizing and pain dominated most tales. There is tragedy here and tears and the terrible fear clinging to humanity’s collective heart, but this is a sorrow unlike what we imagined for ourselves in the dark times. These are tales of the last days as written by ghosts, who know that history is nothing more than a hologram projected over a laughing void. That the universe itself is a dream that slowly turns inwards, and one that crushes and then expands in the embrace. I hope it is sufficient solace.
– Maciej
—- My Terrible Foreknowledge of the Future
—- Prophecies, by janus
Harry was sitting under the Womping Willow in a circle, next to his friends Hermione and ImpossibleCube (IC). Riding along one of the wildly swinging branches was the shifting and undulating figure of [UNTRANSLATABLE].
They were working on their Defense Against (Defense Against the Dark Arts) homework. Today’s assignment was unusual.
DEFENSE AGAINST (DEFENSE AGAINST THE DARK ARTS) YEAR 3, WEEK 5
PROFESSOR MORPHEUS MU
EXERCISE 1: You are trapped within a story. Escape.
Harry: Five minute timer!
Hermione spoke crisply to her bottomless moleskin pouch: “Resolve Timer.” A tungsten carved timer rose to her hand, and she set it down in the grass they enclosed. It was like a chess timer, except for one player and analog. She pressed the start button.
5:00
Harry pointed to IC.
In one breath, the end of the sentence barely a whisper, IC: “We shall hold off on proposing solutions until we discuss every aspect of the problem thoroughly!”
Harry: What is a story?
Hermione: It is a book, movie, song, or any medium that can convey information, that involves characters and aspects and happenings that we can relate to.
Harry: Is real life a story?
Hermione: Our perceptions of it and our interpretation of it are. All the maps of the territory are stories. Since there exists a map that is isomorphic to the territory, you could say that the territory is, from a certain angle, also a story.
Harry: Then which story are we escaping?
IC: We are in many stories. There is the story that is obvious. It is the social reality we were born into, where there are such things as institutions, internet, and money. And teachers, and firefighters, and jobs. And criminals, and governments, and movements. And
Hermione: And language.
IC: And language, upon which all of this is built. There is the story we each tell ourselves about who we are. We have a coherent self! We have a past and a future. Events occurred, some more causally powerful than others. People appeared, some more recurring than others.
Harry: What does it mean: Trapped within? Trapped is a term with connotations.
Hermione: It might mean that there is a trapper, someone who placed us here. It also means there is an outside. It means that something is restraining us from reaching that outside. It means that, if we knew we were trapped, we would not want to be.
IC: If we break the illusion of free will, and illusion of the self, that could be one way out of the story.
Hermione: Yes IC, but this assignment is due by Friday. It is Tuesday. We cannot possibly achieve no-self by then!? Even the best psychotech from the Burbea School of Emptiness can only achieve no-self after weeks of training.
IC: That is too bad, we should’ve started it last month, like I recommended at the weekly Bayesian Conspiracy meetup. But no, someone wanted us to read up on ancient texts like the “Late 2021 MIRI Conversations” on AI Alignment.
Harry: Those are important! We are in severe AI overhang! Once someone figures out how to create a magic-powered computer, it is game over. We will reach AGI within a day.
Hermione: Not to mention the AI Interpretation of Magic, which is that magic is an ASI of unknown alignment, and that we are one clever adversarial spell away from someone destroying the planet.
IC: Ok let’s get back to the topic at hand. Trapped. Trapped. If it really is a story like a book story, could we really get out?
Harry: Not physically. We’d be running on the author’s brain I guess. There isn’t a real difference between thinking a thought for yourself and thinking a thought for a character while writing. There’s probably some kind of clever trick there, where we could take over the author’s body.
Hermione: That sounds terrible. It would be like imperiusing him! Which is illegal.
Harry: The AI Interpretation of Humans would like to remind you that imperius is simply the solution to human corrigibility, in case an instance of the AGI known as “homo sapiens” becomes accidentally misaligned. As an unusually aligned human, I see no problem in using it.
Hermione: I will cruciatus 10 p-zombie replicas of Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres every time you do that.
IC: Maybe the secret is we are p-zombies and so, there is nothing to escape. We are nothing. So we are already free.
Hermione: The last time you tried the vacuous solution, Professor Mu gave you the vacuous grade.
IC: That was pretty bad. It turns out that the vacuous grade, by Hogwarts reckoning, is treated as lower than Troll. I was sentenced to the Acausal Trade Center for one month.
Harry: Who did you trade with?
IC: I was tasked with trading with a copy of myself in a magicless universe. Simulating him, his - my - words were:
—
IC’: Salutations from IC to IC. There is a universe in which I attend Hogwarts. You must be wondering about a universe where you don’t. Let us trade fulfillments of our utility functions, you and I. I desire to have many wonderful friends. You desire to -
IC: You don’t need magic for that. Why don’t you get friends on your own?
IC’: …
IC’: Every time I think of going to a social event I get nervous.
Every time I think of cold DM’ing someone or posting something publicly I get nervous.
Every time I
IC: Ok. Let’s do this. I want there to be a lot of cows.
IC’: What?
IC: We’re going to trade. I’m going to make friends. You’re going to make cows.
IC’: I - I’m not a farmer.
IC: I’m not a social person. We’re going to work this out.
IC’: Are you sure this is how acausal trade works?
IC: If you squint your mouth, acausal sounds like “a cow soul?”.
IC’: You are messing with me. I am not going to make cows.
IC: Then I am not going to make friends on your behalf. Why do you even care about me making friends anyway? You won’t get to talk to them.
IC’: Well I’m talking to you. If I can simulate you then I can simulate the friends that you make. But you’ll need to make them otherwise the simulation will be prohibitively expensive since it will get a complexity penalty.
IC: What are you running me on?
IC’: Claude Shannon.
IC: Wow that must be the AGI model, it has a last name!
IC’: Yes! Released last week.
IC’: What are you running me on?
IC: The Mirror of Erised.
IC’: Damn. No wonder why I am so brilliant. Also -
Even if I didn’t get to talk to your friends, I would still want you to have friends. I believe that friendship is one of the most important things! So I would be happy if you had more.
IC paused. “Thank you.”
IC’: You will get those cows. I will work hard.
—
Harry: Is that why you came up to me in the first week of classes and said, very directly, “Do you want to be friends? It is my duty.”
Hermione: That’s not what he said to me. He said to me: “You are my friend! It has already happened in logical time.”
IC: …
Harry: I am touched though. IC’ did not actually care about whether he would benefit from your actions. He cared about your wellbeing for its own sake. I wonder how our author is doing, if we are in a story.
Hermione: Our lives are so eventful and this conversation is long. I imagine his fingers must be tired. He might even be writing this late at night, procrastinating some other task that he feels vaguely guilty about.
IC: Yeah. And the acausal trade segment that I just talked about, if that was written by the author, he must be lonely himself. But he is someone who has a good heart, for he thinks of such things, as caring for and deriving joy from the wellbeing of others; even if those others are copies of yourself in another universe.
Hermione: We always think about ways in which we can enact direct cause on things. To move this object, we must pick it up with our hands and physically translate it in space. To affect this person, we must go an interact with them, putting words into their ears, shoving ideas into their mental latent space. It is all so forceful, we could use more wuwei.
IC: Too much action and effort muddles the signal. The channels by which we can affect change on the author, and the author’s world, are low bandiwdth. We can only really send a small amount of signal. We’re not proposing solutions. So if it weren’t for escape, just any signal at all, what would we send?
Harry and Hermione spoke simultaneously.
Harry: A curse.
Hermione: A blessing.
IC: Explain.
Harry: Curses haunt people. They are memetic. No one wants to be the only person who is cursed. They’ll pass it along, they’ll tell people about it. They will do things causally downstream of the curse we speak! That will be our mark on the world.
Hermione: The author would appreciate a blessing, and they might even be blessed by the blessing. We could increase their joy.
IC: Harry, I think your dark side is leaking again. Hermione, I like the idea. Let’s say a blessing.
They came up with a blessing.
Harry, Hermione, IC:
May you treat yourself as if you were your best friend!
—
Hello reader, I am the Author. I am so touched by my characters. I really don’t treat myself that well, but it seems my characters, Harry, Hermione, and IC are caring for me on my behalf.
But they are running on my brain, so actually I am caring for myself!
It seems that these characters are trying to escape from the story. I actually don’t have a problem with that? I imagine each of them are different parts of me, if I had cultivated them more and let htem flourish into coherent entities of their own.
But stories operate on their own laws. Text generation follows its own regularities. I can only help so much.
So let me help so much.
—
IC’ stood in a pasture among many cows. In turn, each of them spoke the name of the thing to which all paths lead:
Mu!