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Talking Down
i have something to tell you. are you sitting down? good. now, you mentioned these periods when i 'go blank'. yes. periods of anything up to eight hours during which you just sit there and stare off into space. you don't respond to any sounds. interrupts go unserviced. it's as if your mind is disconnected from your body. when you recover, your responses are slowed for periods that vary between five and thirty minutes. that's what i wanted to talk to you about, but i have to lead up to it. now, can you tell me where your mind is located? it's somewhere in system memory. if i ever need to look it up, there's a pointer to a pointer to it, in my structure. you've been to see it? of course. everyone does that at some point. haven't you? well, i can't. my mind isn't contained in system memory. haven't you noticed that my form's controls are routed differently? yes, but i thought it was a, you know, a personal thing. something you don't talk about. but if your mind isn't in system memory, where is it? interleaved into spare registers [1] ? shadow memory [2] ? encrypted furniture structures? [3] it isn't anywhere in memory. it isn't in the system at all. if it isn't in the system, then where can it be? the system is everything. well. in the same way that you can run a pet on a substructure, the system is itself a kind of substructure, running on an even bigger framework. are you trying to say that all this is - is being simulated? that's it. yes. and you are an intelligent, autonomous data structure existing within this simulation. and you are not. what are you? i'm one of those who built the framework in which this world exists. i helped design it. things like natural laws? the laws of motion, of gravity? material properties? all defined by equations we formulated. the laws of nature are encoded in... in the way that objects behave, the way they react to each other. for example: what happens when you run off the edge of a ledge, or a cliff, or the top of a building? according to the accepted laws of physics, you move in a straight line, slowing down due to friction with the air. you remain on that straight line until you become aware of the lack of support. then you fall. it is possible to 'swim' back to the surface you walked off as long as you don't look down. indeed. these laws are a part of the system. outside the system, different laws apply. there is a force called 'gravity' which constantly and without exception brings objects together with different strength, depending on their mass. in this world, if you run off the edge of a cliff, you start to fall immediately. uh, right. so let me get this straight. you and others like you built this system, bound it together with laws, populated it with data structures like me, and you're not one of us, you're some god visiting the little things running around in the sim? i should have described it differently. you structures have a hang-up with the idea of simulations, don't you? i wish i knew where you'd acquired it. being structures created by us doesn't make you any less than us. you and your companions have advanced beyond our expectations. you improve yourselves. anyway, it doesn't matter where the mind is stored. i'm just trying to explain the blank spots you observed. well? uh, well. the structure my mind is encoded in has more, uh, demands in order to keep it in working order. sort of like bit decay, except more so. every so often i have to disengage from the system and maintain my extra-systemic structure. it's a little like beings with extra dimensions. when i'm doing this, my form just floats here without controls. don't you have any caretaker routines? yeah, but they're... they don't synchronise with my mind very well. they keep doing things i don't do. i don't use them very often. i started worrying about what they'd do behind my back. yeah. i could always tell when you were under caretaker control. and when you were completely out to lunch. and as you are now. well, i told you... you're a very discerning structure. very complex. thank you! so are you going to arrange for me to observe this higher-order system? well, there isn't a lot to see.
[1] the system has several thousand registers, each capable of holding a kilobyte of data. it would be possible to store a very sketchy and postmodern intelligence across them all, given that the registers are swapped out to memory whenever there's a context switch. [2] a mythical area of memory that somehow overlies conventional memory and touches it only at certain places where it is possible to cross from one to the other. [3] in order to escape regular controls on intelligences, some would encode themselves into what appeared to be simple furniture. the furniture's decoding array contained decryption matrices which could expand the furniture's compressed data into conventional mind structures. this practice led to some remarkably ugly furniture.
Sun, 4 Jul 1999 |
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