I’ll refer you, first, to a great piece of commentary that has emerged from this talk: Whitney Trettien’s Digital Storytelling, Zola, Experimentalism, and the Scientific Method. Trettien knows literature, and places Michael Young’s work and Katherine Hayles’ thoughts in a historical and theoretical context.
The only thought that I might add is somewhat techno-utopian. Our lives are not intrinsically meaningful or teleological; we don’t have purposes, per se, except insofar as we create our own—a state of affairs that may be satisfactory to the existentialists among us, but one which many people will never successfully come to terms with. One of the many ways in which literature has functioned has been to create the relief of structured narrative: an immersive world where purposeful events take place. Sometimes, we create such narratives by selective remembrance of actual events, creating histories and myths.
Young’s games are designed to anticipate possible user actions and find ways to incorporate these actions while still moving the story to its predetermined narrative conclusion. As people spend more of their lives online, intersubjectively transforming virtual worlds into real ones, I can imagine a future where such systems, augmented with tremendous computing power, will allow people to carry out much of their lives within teleological narrative structures—meaningful existence, delivered by technology.
The accompanying dystopian thought: who will be the meaning-makers for these anti-existentialists, and how can we be sure that these narrative storytellers will have everyone’s best interests at heart?
Showing posts with label simulation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label simulation. Show all posts
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Simulating cities from the Republic to Micropolis
Last week, the source code of the original SimCity video game was opened under the GPL license as “Micropolis.” SimCity is the prototypical simulation-as-entertainment game, but constructing imaginary cities to see how things turn out has a long history:
Indeed, so it is with all of the socities imagined by the political theorists. How could their utopias come about except through the single-party rule of ideologues? Every attempt to create a civilization that followed the blueprint of some singular political theorist has resulted in tyranny—at least, every attempt that was not checked by the actions of some other party equally bent on seeing their theory of government brought to fruition.
This is also why I have become wary of strict constructionalist interpretations of the Constitution, for instance. I recognize the need for stability, particularly in the day-to-day operations of government and the guarantee of individual rights. But such a document also serves to give power to the intellectuals who drafted it, far in excess of what is fitting for a democratic society. The Constitution is, among other things, a tool for the long-departed to exert their political will on the people.
It would be interesting to see a SimCity which places you not in the role of a God-like mayor, but of a citizen. The player could have various means at their disposal to steer the direction of the city through persuasion and politicking.
If we could watch a city coming to be in theory, would we also see its justice coming to be, and its injustice as well? (Plato’s Republic, 369a)SimCity was also one of the first “god games,” strategy games where a player is given a bird’s eye view of a city, social group, or ecosystem and allowed god-like power in managing its development. The idea transfers well to political philosophy as state-simulation, for who is ultimately the ruler of the Republic? It is not the guardians but the theorist, Plato himself. The guardians were not free to imagine, for instance, that the best thing for their city might be to set up a representative democracy.
Indeed, so it is with all of the socities imagined by the political theorists. How could their utopias come about except through the single-party rule of ideologues? Every attempt to create a civilization that followed the blueprint of some singular political theorist has resulted in tyranny—at least, every attempt that was not checked by the actions of some other party equally bent on seeing their theory of government brought to fruition.
This is also why I have become wary of strict constructionalist interpretations of the Constitution, for instance. I recognize the need for stability, particularly in the day-to-day operations of government and the guarantee of individual rights. But such a document also serves to give power to the intellectuals who drafted it, far in excess of what is fitting for a democratic society. The Constitution is, among other things, a tool for the long-departed to exert their political will on the people.
It would be interesting to see a SimCity which places you not in the role of a God-like mayor, but of a citizen. The player could have various means at their disposal to steer the direction of the city through persuasion and politicking.
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Bits become atoms
It is often said that the conceit of the first Matrix film—with the “whoa” it brings forth from both the protagonist and viewer—is a variation on the “brain in a vat” thought experiment often given in introductory philosophy classes to illustrate the position of the universal skeptic. As described in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Most of the simulated worlds we’re familiar with mimic reality at a very high level of emergence. Physics engines used in video games, for instance, copy the effects of Newtonian physics with macroscopic objects treated as primitives. But in the real world, the behavior of macroscopic objects emerges as a consequence of the crowd behavior of microscopic objects. Since the physics engine does not simulate these, it must substitute other causes to reach the same effect.
Take, for instance, the fact that two solid objects which collide will bounce away from one another rather than pass through each other. In the real world, this will occur because the particles which make up the solids will electrically repel each other; in a physics engine, this effect must be created with explicit collision detection and response rules.
But what if our physics engines had a great deal more computing power at their disposal, and simulated physics at the microscale, allowing macroscopic effects to emerge? In such a situation, the artificiality of the physical effects is less clear. They are not explicitly created by the programmer, but rather appear as a result of the same processes by which they come about in real life. As artificial intelligence researcher Steve Grand writes in his book Creation:
If we found ourselves in such a simulation, there is no way we could ever find it out; indeed, there is no way we can state with confidence that we are not. We don’t know anything about the nature of the ultimate substrate of this world. It could be a computer, the mind of God, or turtles all the way down. Yet this is the world which we refer to as “real.” I think we’re justified in referring to it as such, but in so doing we have to accept that being real does not necessarily exclude the possibility of being a computer simulation.
Although its portrayal is not entirely consistent, the fidelity of physical behaviors in the Matrix suggest that it’s just such a perfect simulation. The human occupants of the Matrix are shown to be aliens to that world. But it can never be entirely clear that the “real world” to which they escape is less of a simulation than the one they left, or that the natural inhabitants of the Matrix—the programs—aren’t less flesh-and-blood than their jacked-in counterparts. Indeed, both of these conclusions are hinted at in the second and third films.
Consider the hypothesis that you are a disembodied brain floating in a vat of nutrient fluids. This brain is connected to a supercomputer whose program produces electrical impulses that stimulate the brain in just the way that normal brains are stimulated as a result of perceiving external objects in the normal way. (The movie ‘The Matrix’ depicts embodied brains which are so stimulated, while their bodies float in a vats.) If you are a brain in a vat, then you have experiences that are qualitatively indistinguishable from those of a normal perceiver. If you come to believe, on the basis of your computer-induced experiences, that you are looking at at tree, then you are sadly mistaken.I would argue that while this comparison immediately leaps to mind, the real problem raised by the Matrix is much deeper. The brain-in-a-vat Gedankenexperiment implicitly assumes both that there is a real world, and that the computer-generated illusion isn’t it. In the Matrix films, however, this isn’t quite so straightforward.
Most of the simulated worlds we’re familiar with mimic reality at a very high level of emergence. Physics engines used in video games, for instance, copy the effects of Newtonian physics with macroscopic objects treated as primitives. But in the real world, the behavior of macroscopic objects emerges as a consequence of the crowd behavior of microscopic objects. Since the physics engine does not simulate these, it must substitute other causes to reach the same effect.
Take, for instance, the fact that two solid objects which collide will bounce away from one another rather than pass through each other. In the real world, this will occur because the particles which make up the solids will electrically repel each other; in a physics engine, this effect must be created with explicit collision detection and response rules.
But what if our physics engines had a great deal more computing power at their disposal, and simulated physics at the microscale, allowing macroscopic effects to emerge? In such a situation, the artificiality of the physical effects is less clear. They are not explicitly created by the programmer, but rather appear as a result of the same processes by which they come about in real life. As artificial intelligence researcher Steve Grand writes in his book Creation:
A computer simulation of an atom is not really an atom.... But if you make some molecules by combining those simulated atoms, it is not the molecules’ fault that their substrate is a sham; I think they will, in a very real sense, actually be molecules. ... the molecules made from it are second-order simulations because they are made not by combining computer instructions but by combining simulated objects.Suppose we were to take this to its logical conclusion and posit a simulation based on the still-undiscovered Grand Unified Theory of physics, that is, a perfect physics engine from which even the behavior of the tiniest particles emerged from underlying rules rather than being directly simulated.
If we found ourselves in such a simulation, there is no way we could ever find it out; indeed, there is no way we can state with confidence that we are not. We don’t know anything about the nature of the ultimate substrate of this world. It could be a computer, the mind of God, or turtles all the way down. Yet this is the world which we refer to as “real.” I think we’re justified in referring to it as such, but in so doing we have to accept that being real does not necessarily exclude the possibility of being a computer simulation.
Although its portrayal is not entirely consistent, the fidelity of physical behaviors in the Matrix suggest that it’s just such a perfect simulation. The human occupants of the Matrix are shown to be aliens to that world. But it can never be entirely clear that the “real world” to which they escape is less of a simulation than the one they left, or that the natural inhabitants of the Matrix—the programs—aren’t less flesh-and-blood than their jacked-in counterparts. Indeed, both of these conclusions are hinted at in the second and third films.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
