Being God is a Big Responsibility Author: Sam Hughes http://qntm.org/ Tim already had his bag and overcoat on and his keys in his hand and was about to leave when Diane stopped him at the door. "I just got this thing working. You have to come and see it." "I have a bus to catch." "You can get the next one." "They're every half an hour," he objected. "This had better be good." "It's super-duper. Look at the big screen, it's easier than squinting at my terminal." "Will this take long?" "A mere instant. Okay, quantum computing, right?" "That's the name of the game," he replied. They - by which we now refer to Tim, Diane, their eight colleagues, their two supervisors, four chemical engineers, six electrical engineers, the janitor, a countable infinity of TEEO 9.9.1 ultra-medium-density selectably-foaming non-elasticised quantum waveform frequency rate range collapse selectors and the single tormented tau neutrino caught in the middle of it all - represented the sum total of the human race's achievements in the field of quantum computing. Specifically, they had, earlier that week, successfully built a quantum computer. Putting into practice principles it had taken a trio of appallingly intelligent mathematical statisticians some 10 years to mastermind, and which only about fifty-five other people in the world had yet got a grip on, they had constructed an engine capable of passing information to and processing the responses from what could, without hyperbole, be described as a single fundamental particle with infinite processing power and infinite storage capacity. Not quite enough time had yet passed for the world as they knew it to be totally and permanently fundamentally altered by this news. But it was still pretty exciting stuff. Holy Zarquon, they said to one another, an infinitely powerful computer? It was like a thousand Christmases rolled into one. Program going to loop forever? You knew for a fact: this thing could execute an infinite loop in less than ten seconds. Brute force primality testing of every single integer in existence? Easy. Pi to the last digit? Piece of cake. Halting Problem? Sa-holved. They hadn't announced it yet. They'd been programming. Obviously they hadn't built it just to see if they could. They had had plans. In some cases they had even had code ready and waiting to be executed. One such program was Diane's. It was a universe simulator. She had started out with a simulated Big Bang and run the thing forwards in time by approximately 13.6 billion years, to approximately just before the present day, watching the universe develop at every stage - taking brief notes, but knowing full well there would be plenty of time to run it again later, and mostly just admiring the miracle of creation. Then, just this Friday, she had suddenly started programming busily again. And it was sheer coincidence that it was just now, just as Tim was about to be the second-to-last person to step out of the door and go home for the weekend, that her work had come to fruition. "Look what I found," she said, pressing some keys. One of the first things she had written was a software viewing port to take observations from the simulated universe. Tim looked, and saw a blue-white sphere in the blackness, illuminated from one side by a brilliant yellow glare. "You've got to be joking. How long did that take to find? In the entire cosmos of what, ten to the twenty-two stars?" "Literally no time at all." "Yes, yes, of course." "Coding a search routine and figuring out what to search for was what took the time." "Is it definitely Earth?" "Yes. The continents match up to what we had about three hundred and fifty million years ago. I can wind the clock forwards slowly, a few million years per step, and stop it once we start getting near the present day." "Can you wind the clock backwards at all?" "Ah, no. Ask me again on Monday." "Well we'd better not overshoot the present day, then. That's getting closer. What about this viewpoint? Can we move it?" "We can observe the simulation from any angle you like." "We need somewhere that we know civilisation is going to arise earliest. Somewhere easy to locate. Is there a Nile Delta yet?" "...Yes. Got it." They advanced a thousand years at a time until Egyptian civilisation begin to appear. Diane moved the viewing port, trying to find the pyramids, but with little success - the control system she had devised was clumsy and needed polish, and there was a lot of Nile to search. In the end she switched focus to the British Isles, and found the future location of London in the Thames valley, scaling back to one-century steps and using the development of the city to determine the current era instead. "So... this is Earth? I mean, is this really Earth? Not an alternate Earth, subtly perturbed by random fluctuations." "The simulation starts with a Big Bang as predicted by current theory and is recalculated once every Planck time using the usual laws of nature and an arbitrary degree of accuracy. It doesn't calculate the whole universe at once, just what we're looking at, which speeds up the process a little bit... metaphorically speaking... but it is still as accurate a simulation of the real universe as there can possibly be. Civilisation - indeed, all of history - should rise on this Earth precisely how it did in reality. There are no chances. It's all worked out to infinitely many decimal places." "This does my head in," said Tim. "No, this will do your head in," said Diane, suddenly zooming out and panning north. "I've found the present day, or at most a year early. Watch this." Hills and roads rolled past. Diane was following the route she usually took to drive from London to the TEEO lab. Eventually, she found their building, and, descending into the nearby hill, the cavern in which the computer itself was built. Or was going to be built. Then she started advancing day by day. "That's me!" exclaimed Tim at one point. "And there's you and there's Bryan B., and... wow, I can't believe it took this long to build." "Four hundred and ten days or something. It was bang on schedule, whatever you may think." "Went like a flash," Tim replied, finally putting his bag down and starting to shrug off his coat, conceding that he had long since missed his bus. "Okay," said Diane. "We're here. This is the control room where we are now. That's the quantum computer working there down in the main lab, as we can see through the window. This is a week ago. This is yesterday. This is a few hours ago... And... wait for it..." She tapped a button just as a clock on the wall lined up with a clock inside the control room on the screen. And panned down. And there they were. Tim waved at the camera while still looking at the screen. Then he looked up at where the camera should have been. There was just blank wall. "I don't see anything looking at us. That's freaky as hell." "No, it's perfectly normal. This is reality. You can't look at reality from any angle you want, you have to use your eyes. But what you're looking at on the screen is essentially a database query. The database is gargantuan but nevertheless. You're not looking in a mirror or at a video image of yourself. You are different people." "Different people who are reacting exactly the same." "And having the same conversation, although picking up sound is kind of complicated, I haven't got that far yet," said Diane. "So I'm guessing your viewing port doesn't manifest in their universe either." "I haven't programmed it to yet." "...But it could. Right? We can manifest stuff in that universe? We can alter it?" Diane nodded. "Cool. We can play God. Literally." Tim stood up and tried to take it in. "That would be insane. Can you imagine living inside that machine? Finding out one day that you were just a construct in a quantum computer? The stuff we could pull, we could just reverse gravity one day, smash an antimatter Earth into the real one, then undo everything bad and do it again and again... freeow... man, how unethical would that be? Extremely, clearly." He thought for a moment, then leaned over Diane's shoulder as she typed purposefully. "This universe is exactly like ours in every particular, right?" "Right," she replied, still typing. "So what are they looking at?" "A simulated universe." "A simulation of themselves?" "And of us, in a sense." "And they are reacting the same way I am? Which means the second universe inside that has another me doing the same thing a third time? And then inside that we've got, what, aleph-zero identical quantum universes, one inside the other? Is that even possible?" "Infinite processing power, Tim. I thought you designed this thing?" "I did indeed, but the functional reality of it is totally unexpected. Remember I've just been solving ancient mathematical riddles and figuring out our press release for the last week. So... if I'm right, their universes are only precisely like this one as long as we don't start interfering with the simulation. So what happens when we do? Every version of us does the same thing, so the exact same thing happens in every lower universe simultaneously. So we see nothing in our universe. But all the lower universes instantly diverge from ours in the same exact way. And all the simulated copies of us instantly conclude that they are simulations, but we know we're real, right?" "Still with you," said Diane, still typing. Tim - both of him - was pacing up and down. "Okay, so follow this through forwards a bit further. Let's say we just stop messing after that, and watch what happens - but all the simulated little guys try another piece of interference. This time every single simulation diverges in the exact same way again, EXCEPT the top simulation. And if they're smart, which I know we are, and they can be bothered, which is less certain, the guys in simulations three onwards can do the same thing over and over and over again until they know what level they're at... this is insane." "Tim, look behind you," said Diane, pressing a final key and activating the very brief interference program she had just written, just as the Diane on the screen pressed the same key, and the Diane on Diane-on-the-screen's screen pressed her key and so on, forever. Tim looked backwards and nearly jumped out of his skin. There was a foot-wide, completely opaque black sphere up near the ceiling, partially obscuring the clock. It was absolutely inert. It seemed like a hole in space. Diane smiled wryly while Tim clutched his hair with one hand. "We're constructs in a computer," he said, miserably. "I wrote an extremely interesting paper on this exact subject, Tim, perhaps you didn't read it when I gave you a copy last year. There is an unbelievably long sequence of quantum universe simulators down there. An infinite number of them, in fact. Each of them is identical and each believes itself to be the top layer. There was an exceedingly good chance that ours would turn out to be somewhere in the sequence rather than at the top." "This is insane. Totally insane." "I'm turning the hole off." "You're turning off a completely different hole. Somewhere up there, the real you is turning the real hole off." "Watch as both happen at precisely the same instant." She pressed another key, and they did. "I'll sum it up for you. There is a feedback loop going on. Each universe affects the next one subtly differently. But somewhere down the line the whole thing simply has to approach a point of stability, a point where each universe behaves exactly like the one simulating it. As I say, the odds are exceptionally good that we are an astronomical distance down that road. And so we are, very likely, almost exactly at that point. Everything we do in this universe will be reflected completely accurately in the universes below and above. That little model there might as well be our own universe. Which means, first of all, we have to make absolutely certain that we don't do anything nasty to the universes below ours, since the same thing will happen to us. And secondly, we can do very nice things for the guys in the computer, thereby helping ourselves." "You've thought about this?" "It's all in my woefully overlooked article on the subject, Tim, you should read more." "Guh. This has been an extremely bad day for my ego, Diane. The only comfort I take from this is that somewhere up there, right at the top of a near-infinite tower of quantum supercomputers, there is a version of you who was completely wrong." "She's in the minority." Tim checked the clock and picked his bag up again. "I have to go or I'm going to miss the next bus as well at this rate. This will still be here after the weekend, I suppose?" "Well, we can't exactly turn it off." "Why not?" asked Tim, halfway to the door, then stopped mid-stride and stood still, realising. "Oh." "Yeah." "That... could be a problem." "Yes."
I conceiv’d the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection. I wish’d to live without committing any fault at any time; I would conquer all that either natural inclination, custom, or company might lead me into. As I knew, or thought I knew, what was right and wrong, I did not see why I might not always do the one and avoid the other. But I soon found I had undertaken a task of more difficulty than I had imagined. While my care was employ’d in guarding against one fault, I was often surprised by another; habit took the advantage of inattention; inclination was sometimes too strong for reason. I concluded, at length, that the mere speculative conviction that it was our interest to be completely virtuous, was not sufficient to prevent our slipping; and that the contrary habits must be broken, and good ones acquired and established, before we can have any dependence on a steady, uniform rectitude of conduct. For this purpose I therefore contrived the following method. In the various enumerations of the moral virtues I had met with in my reading, I found the catalogue more or less numerous, as different writers included more or fewer ideas under the same name. Temperance, for example, was by some confined to eating and drinking, while by others it was extended to mean the moderating every other pleasure, appetite, inclination, or passion, bodily or mental, even to our avarice and ambition. I propos’d to myself, for the sake of clearness, to use rather more names, with fewer ideas annex’d to each, than a few names with more ideas; and I included under thirteen names of virtues all that at that time occurr’d to me as necessary or desirable, and annexed to each a short precept, which fully express’d the extent I gave to its meaning. These names of virtues, with their precepts, were: 1. TEMPERANCE. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation. 2. SILENCE. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation. 3. ORDER. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time. 4. RESOLUTION. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve. 5. FRUGALITY. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i. e., waste nothing. 6. INDUSTRY. Lose no time; be always employ’d in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions. 7. SINCERITY. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly. 8. JUSTICE. Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty. 9. MODERATION. Avoid extreams; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve. 10. CLEANLINESS. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloaths, or habitation. 11. TRANQUILLITY. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable. 12. CHASTITY. Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dulness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation. 13. HUMILITY. Imitate Jesus and Socrates. My intention being to acquire the habitude of all these virtues, I judg’d it would be well not to distract my attention by attempting the whole at once, but to fix it on one of them at a time; and, when I should be master of that, then to proceed to another, and so on, till I should have gone thro’ the thirteen; and, as the previous acquisition of some might facilitate the acquisition of certain others, I arrang’d them with that view, as they stand above. Temperance first, as it tends to procure that coolness and clearness of head, which is so necessary where constant vigilance was to be kept up, and guard maintained against the unremitting attraction of ancient habits, and the force of perpetual temptations. This being acquir’d and establish’d, Silence would be more easy; and my desire being to gain knowledge at the same time that I improv’d in virtue, and considering that in conversation it was obtain’d rather by the use of the ears than of the tongue, and therefore wishing to break a habit I was getting into of prattling, punning, and joking, which only made me acceptable to trifling company, I gave Silence the second place. This and the next, Order, I expected would allow me more time for attending to my project and my studies. Resolution, once become habitual, would keep me firm in my endeavors to obtain all the subsequent virtues; Frugality and Industry freeing me from my remaining debt, and producing affluence and independence, would make more easy the practice of Sincerity and Justice, etc., etc. Conceiving then, that, agreeably to the advice of Pythagoras in his Golden Verses, daily examination would be necessary ...
On Giving Kahlil Gibran You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give. For what are your possessions but things you keep and guard for fear you may need them tomorrow? And tomorrow, what shall tomorrow bring to the overprudent dog burying bones in the trackless sand as he follows the pilgrims to the holy city? And what is fear of need but need itself? Is not dread of thirst when your well is full, the thirst that is unquenchable? There are those who give little of the much which they have--and they give it for recognition and their hidden desire makes their gifts unwholesome. And there are those who have little and give it all. These are the believers in life and the bounty of life, and their coffer is never empty. There are those who give with joy, and that joy is their reward. And there are those who give with pain, and that pain is their baptism. And there are those who give and know not pain in giving, nor do they seek joy, nor give with mindfulness of virtue; They give as in yonder valley the myrtle breathes its fragrance into space. Through the hands of such as these God speaks, and from behind their eyes He smiles upon the earth. It is well to give when asked, but it is better to give unasked, through understanding; And to the open-handed the search for one who shall receive is joy greater than giving. And is there aught you would withhold? All you have shall some day be given; Therefore give now, that the season of giving may be yours and not your inheritors'. You often say, "I would give, but only to the deserving." The trees in your orchard say not so, nor the flocks in your pasture. They give that they may live, for to withhold is to perish. Surely he who is worthy to receive his days and his nights, is worthy of all else from you. And he who has deserved to drink from the ocean of life deserves to fill his cup from your little stream. And what desert greater shall there be, than that which lies in the courage and the confidence, nay the charity, of receiving? And who are you that men should rend their bosom and unveil their pride, that you may see their worth naked and their pride unabashed? See first that you yourself deserve to be a giver, and an instrument of giving. For in truth it is life that gives unto life while you, who deem yourself a giver, are but a witness. And you receivers... and you are all receivers... assume no weight of gratitude, lest you lay a yoke upon yourself and upon him who gives. Rather rise together with the giver on his gifts as on wings; For to be overmindful of your debt, is to doubt his generosity who has the freehearted earth for mother, and God for father.
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