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Halloween Horrors: The Existential Dread of Simulation Theory

Wednesday, October 23rd, 2024

How about a nice helping of existential dread for the Halloween season? But instead of worrying that you’re a fragile shell of decaying cells whose inevitable demise will terminate your brief, flickering existence in a howling void of meaningless nothingness, it’s the worry that neither you nor your too, too fragile husk is real at all, and that you’re just a string of 1s and 0s being run inside a computer.

Welcome to simulation theory!

  • “Would everything we see, everything we experience, everything that exists in our entire universe be artificial? Supporters of simulation theory believe that not only is it possible that we’re living in a simulation, it’s likely.”
  • “Modern simulation theory comes from Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford, who wrote an influential paper on the subject in 2003 assuming that living in a simulation is possible. Bostrom presents the simulation trilemma, which says one of the following must be true:
    1. We destroy ourselves before we’re able to create a simulation.
    2. We’re able to create a simulation, but choose not to. Or
    3. We are definitely in a simulation.

    Bostrom believes each of these is equally likely to be true.”

  • “When a civilization can create a realistic simulation, the most obvious one to create is that of its own early existence. Bostrom calls this an ancestral simulation, and a civilization that can do this wouldn’t just create one simulation, it would create many, and those simulated civilizations might create their own simulations of the universe, and on and on, like Russian nesting dolls of reality.”
  • Elon Musk and Neil deGrasse Tyson both think it’s possible we’re living in a simulation.
  • “In that program, our program, all the laws of the universe, electromagnetism and gravitational force, are written into the program. The speed of light gets a value. There’s code for Planck’s constants of mass, speed, and time. Avogadro’s number is in there, along with a bunch of other rules that govern the behavior of everything that exists, all part of our program. Even consciousness itself is part of our simulation.”
  • Philip K. Dick “believed there are many universes, and sometimes those other realities bleed into ours. He claimed to have visions of this, and even wrote stories like The Man in the High Castle, based on these visions, that in fact plural realities did exist superimposed onto one another, like so many film transparencies.”
  • “One way other realities blend into ours could be The Mandela Effect. The Mandela Effect is when a large number of people have memories of events that don’t match reality. This is called The Mandela Effect because millions of people specifically remember Nelson Mandela died in prison. He didn’t. People remember his wife walking beside his casket in a funeral procession that was on television for two hours that day. This never happened.”
  • I’m snipping the other Mandela Effect examples, but I would swear that Jaws’ girlfriend actually had braces in Moonraker.
  • “Philip K. Dick also felt when we experienced deja vu is because something in our simulated universe changed and a new timeline branched off of the current one. We are living in a computer-programmed reality, and the only clue we have to it is when some variable is changed.”
  • “Ever feel like you’ve lived a moment before? That’s because, according to Philip K. Dick and others, you have. Deja vu is the simulation correcting itself with new information.”
  • It also explains the Drake Equation: “Are we really alone in the universe or does our program only focus on us?”
  • “Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at MIT, said the strict laws of physics point to the possibility of a simulation putting a cap on the speed of light. Sure is a good way to keep your sims from venturing out too far from home.”
  • Skipping over the “error correcting code in string theory equations” bit because string theory is garbage.
  • The deep embedding of math at every level of the universe argues in favor of simulation theory. “We see Fibonacci numbers and the golden ratio everywhere.”
  • “No matter what we study, whether it’s something the size of a galaxy or as small as an electron, everything in the universe seems to follow patterns and rules. In other words, a program.”
  • The continued growth of computing power indicates how powerful computers in the future could run complex simulations.
  • While it’s said that you would need a computer the size of the universe to simulate the universe, that’s not true. Just as in modern simulations, you only need to render what someone is paying attention to at any given time.
  • The famous double slit experiment is evidence that the universe only renders things when we’re paying attention. “It’s as if the particles are aware they’re being observed.”
  • “Even though our universe is full of galaxies, those galaxies may not actually be there. If we’re living in a simulation, then stars and galaxies could simply be projections, and only when we get up close, those projections become more detailed. This is an excellent way to save computational resources. And because we’re stuck with a hard limit of the speed of light, getting to far-off places is really difficult.”

    • Personally, I think simulation theory is probably wrong for a meta-critique reason. All previous metaphorical understanding of the universe (as clockwork mechanism, as organism) have proven wrong, so this one is likely to be wrong as well…

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    “It’s a major award!”

    Monday, August 19th, 2024

    All my hard work as a writer has finally paid off, and I’m now the grand prize winner of a major literary award.

    Chosen from over 6300 submissions to the 42nd Annual Lyttonaid, Lawrence Person of Austin, Texas has risen to the top of our (steaming) pile to take the crown:

    She had a body that reached out and slapped my face like a five-pound ham-hock tossed from a speeding truck.

    Our champion is a published author, blogger, and of course, book lover extraordinaire. Congratulations to Lawrence and a hearty thank you to all the creative (if demented) Bulweriers who kept us chuckling again this year.

    Top of the world, ma. Top of the world…

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    Library Addition: Signed First of R.A. Lafferty’s Slippery

    Tuesday, May 7th, 2024

    The theme this week seems to be “firsts I already had, but signed.”

    Lafferty, R. A. Slippery and other stories. Chris Drumm, 1985. First edition chapbook original, #115 of 176 signed, numbered copies, a Near Fine copy with a quarter-sized sticker remnant at spinefold near the heel that has discolored the paper. (You know those colored circular stickers you can buy at grocery stores to price things for garage sales? Don’t use those for books.) Supplements an unsigned copy. If I had been collecting Lafferty in the 80s (hell, into the 90s), all the Drumm signed Laffertys could be bought for $5 a pop. Woulda coulda shoulda. This was bought off eBay for $40.

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    Library Addition: Michael Swanwick’s Phases Of The Sun/Phases of the Moon

    Wednesday, March 6th, 2024

    Another short-run Dragonstairs chapbook I managed to grab:

    Swanwick, Michael. Phases of the Sun/Phases of the Moon. Dragonstairs Press, 2020 (not offered for sale until 2024). First edition accordion-fold chapbook original (Phases of the Sun goes one way, and then you flip it over and Phases of the Moon goes the other), a Fine copy. Bought for $60 from Dragonstairs and sold out within two minutes.

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    Library Additions: Two Thomas Disch Firsts

    Monday, March 4th, 2024

    These were part of an auction lot:

  • Disch, Thomas M. The Brave Little Toaster Goes To Mars. Doubleday, 1988. First edition hardback, a Fine- copy with previous owner’s name on front free endpaper, in a Fine, Mylar-protected dust jacket. Sequel to The Brave Little Toaster (which I have an inscribed copy of).

  • Disch, Thomas M. The Silver Pillow: A Tale of Witchcraft. Mark V. Ziesing, 1987. First edition hardback, #37 of 250 numbered copies signed by Disch and artist Harry O. Morris, a Fine copy in a Fine dust jacket. Chalker/Owings, page 490. Replaces a slightly less attractive copy.

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    MST3K’s 14th Season Fundraiser Going Slow

    Monday, November 20th, 2023

    You may have noticed that Joel Hodgson and MST3K gang are having a new kickstarter for the next season (for values of “kickstarter” that include “not on the Kickstarter platform”). There are five days left and they are only 38% of the way to the first goal of $4.8 million, which will be six features and six shorts.

    The last two Kickstarters they had blew past their goals.

    This one? Not so much. Despite announcing that Plan 9 from Outer Space will be among the riffed films.

    Donor fatigue? The Biden Recession? Not doing enough promotion? Not enough boost from a non-Kickstarter platform? Disgruntlement over how long it took people to get their promised rewards from the last campaign?

    I think it may be some combination of all the above.

    Maybe the usual Turkey Day festivities will kick it into higher gear. But if they don’t, this may be the first MST3K fundraising effort to fail.

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    Posted in Basketball, Food, Games, Horror, Movies, pics, Science Fiction, TV, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

    A Tale of Two Halloween Lights

    Thursday, November 9th, 2023

    See this?

    This is a two-pack of Hompavo LED Flame Light Bulbs. It simulates having a flickering firelight instead of your outdoor lights for the Halloween season. I’ve been using them since 2021 and they still work fine. If you like that sort of thing for Halloween, I recommend them.

    See this?

    It’s “Red Light Bulb 9W (60W Equivalent) E26 Base, LED Colored Light Bulbs for Halloween Christmas Party Holiday Lighting 2-Pack.” They’re absolute worthless garbage. Both bulbs stopped working within minutes of screwing them in and turning them on. No wonder there’s page after page of one-star reviews.

    Avoid.

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    Halloween Horrors: Strange Sky Sounds

    Monday, October 30th, 2023

    All around the world, people hear strange things from the sky. Here’s a roundup of the various “sky trumpets,” booming noises, hums and other things people have no explanation for.

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    Halloween Horrors: Creepy Spider Light

    Sunday, October 29th, 2023

    Who wouldn’t like a lamp in the shape of a spider wandering around your house at night?

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    I Saw Peter Gabriel in Austin Last Night

    Thursday, October 19th, 2023

    I saw the Peter Gabriel concert at the Moody Center in Austin on October 18. It was the third time I’d seen Gabriel perform live, and he put on a good show. We had tickets facing center stage in the mezzanine section, and they were quite pricey.

    About half the songs are off the forthcoming I/O album, while the other half are from other parts of his career (“Sledgehammer,” “Solsbury Hill,” etc.). His tour ensemble was a mixture of old familiar faces (the always excellent Tony Levin, Manu Katche and David Rhodes) and new (cellist/vocalist Ayanna Witter-Johnson, who was very good).

    They had an interesting multimedia setup with projection surfaces on different stage elements that they could move, as well as close-up cameras for projecting on either wing (and occasionally the giant circular moveable hanging surface that was the centerpiece of the set).

    I think the best song of the concert was an absolutely killer version of “Digging in the Dirt,” which had a nasty, funky, bass-heavy sound to it. There’s not a version with great sound on YouTube, so this will have to do:

    They also did an extremely good version of “Biko” as the final encore.

    Here’s the set list, which seems to be constant across venues.

    I think the last two shows of the tour are in Dallas tonight and Houston Saturday, and overall prices are a bit cheaper than the Austin show. It’s well worth catching if you’re a Gabriel fan.

    As for the Moody Center, the sightlines are very good, the concession prices are exorbitant, and the seats are too small and not particularly comfortable.

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