TITAA #56.5: Escaping the Sim in a Tank
Consciousness - Map Glitch Art - Folklore in France, Iceland, Silesia - Game Clouds and Shadows - AI Video Editing - RAG Links
It was tough picking what to pull out from the weird section this month… always fun to pull together! I decided these two review papers were worth the focus, with a little more meat around them, above the paywall. If you’ve been liking previous issues on science fictional quantum mechanics and art, you might enjoy these two articles.
How to Escape from the Simulation is a fab funny article by Roman Yampolskiy. A thought problem for both us and AI agents: “Could generally intelligent agents placed in virtual environments find a way to jailbreak out of them?” It starts with the question (fair), “Why would we want to break out.” At the end of a short list of benefits, he says, “Also, escape skills may be very useful if we ever find ourselves in an even less pleasant simulation. Trivially, escape would provide incontrovertible evidence for the simulation hypothesis.”
Unfortunately (or not) all esoteric paths (drugs, dreams, death) are excluded from study, to focus on more technical. It’s a long entertaining read, covering a lot of ground in citations and theorizing, including science fictional takes. It does not cite Exadelic, but that one fits right in here; there’s plenty of Greg Egan, though. And what would it mean to escape? Perhaps we could upload consciousness into another container, like these fish and worms in tanks:
In discussing Ways to Escape: “Some useful knowledge about escaping and especially escaping via social engineering attacks may be learned from extensive literature on prison escapes.” 😅 He also covers game simulation hacks a bit, and compares the absurd sequences required to do in-game hacks to magic spells:
Under header What Doesn’t Work: “Religions don’t seem to have influence over simulation as indicated by their inability to outcompete each other.” Neither does saying "I no longer consent to being in a simulation." Finally: “It may be possible to survive the simulation shutdown, but it is beyond the scope of the current paper.” This paper was really a fun read, I loved it, can you tell?
Speaking of consciousness uploads, I also enjoyed "A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications” in ScienceDirect. Another long and involving review, with a section on Quantum Theories (recall I did a Perplexity Page related to this topic which I discussed in the superpositions post and Dark Matter). Quantum entanglement is also discussed in the Simulation article above in the context of glitches that might suggest we are in a simulation. (“Quantum entanglement, nonlocality, superposition, uncertainty, tunneling, teleportation, duality, and many others quantum phenomena defy common sense experience-based expectations of classical physics and feel like glitches.”)
Some founders of quantum theory famously held consciousness as fundamental. Max Planck: “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness” (The Observer, 1931a). Erwin Schrödinger: “Although I think that life may be the result of an accident, I do not think that of consciousness. Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else” (The Observer, 1931b). Also, “The total number of minds in the universe is one. In fact, consciousness is a singularity phasing within all beings.” Arthur Eddington: “when we speak of the existence of the material universe we are presupposing consciousness.” (The Observer, 1931c). Louis de Broglie: “I regard consciousness and matter as different aspects of one and the same thing” (The Observer, 1931d). John von Neumann (less explicitly): "Consciousness, whatever it is, appears to be the only thing in physics that can ultimately cause this collapse or observation."
The quantum section is definitely meaty, but there are also lots of other sections. There is panpsychism (“it reaches ‘a cognitive dead end’”) and materiality theories; the psi (anomalous and altered states) section is ambivalent but also critical; the AI section recaps a lot of basic philosophy takes on machine consciousness and then situates all the previous sections against AI, concluding: “However, the technology is accelerating with fervor and so if AI consciousness is to happen, by design or by default, Quantum Theories is likely how and where it will happen.” Another good article with a ton of detail!
Other bits below in the Esoteric & Weird subsection include a bunch of fun folklore finds, which almost beat the simulation/consciousness into this top bit—but I wasn’t sure how many readers love Icelandic ghost beliefs, Silesian folklore, Castenada’s cult witches, goblins and wolves, and pictures of skeletons as much as I do. We also have the usual AI tool big hits and weird picks especially in animation, plus a meatier round up of recent papers on RAG (retrieval augmented generation) in the NLP/Data Science section. And games news of interest! Read on!
Table of Contents:
AI New (Video & Animation, Procgen/Web/Misc)
Games News (also including AI-related)