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Last night I had an urge so I wrote a story. As will become obvious, should you chose to read it, it was inspired by some of my recent reading material. I mostly wrote it straight through, which is very unusual for me, and I've only done one real editing pass on it. Enjoy!
Document IR-305
Initial Investigation Report Regarding the Qualia Disruption Event of 14.8.12.16.14
Submitted on 14.8.13.7.16
CC: Stability committee, historical monitoring committee, ethics oversight committee
NOT FOR EXTERNAL DISTRIBUTION
The consequences of the qualia disruption on 14.8.12.16.14 have been investigated and all evidence points to minimal impacts which rise to the level of ethical concerns. The only evidence of the event that has entered the insim historical record has so far shown negligible effects on subject comfort levels. The Investigation Committee believes the current run can still provide good data and should be continued. However, concerns remain about long term stability as insim civilization approaches a likely computational inflection point. We request that the ethics committee develop new policies for handling the simulation destabilization scenarios which could result.
Starting on 14.8.12.16.14 the current simulation run suffered multiple faults due to a previously unknown vulnerability to temporal harmonics in subject qualia processing. [See technical reports TR-10934, TR-10935, TR-10937 and TR-10938 for more details.] This issue has been resolved as of the 14.8.12.17.0 update, but qualia processing within the simulation was intermittently affected over a span of outsim 16 days. While the effects of this seem to have remained remarkably limited, full institutional scrutiny was decided to be appropriate to address the ethical ramifications and questions of simulation stability.
When the first harmonic shock occurred, total simulation population was 623,904,987. The technical investigation team found distinctive pattern in subject neural logging which made identification of affected individuals relatively simple. [See TR-10948 for details.] In many ways, we were very lucky. The nature of the harmonic meant that less than 1% of the population suffered any qualia degradation at all over the entire span of the incident, and of those the problem remained at subconscious levels in more than 85%. These numbers could have easily been much higher.
The immediate stability impacts were also thankfully minimal. The current understanding of the harmonic vulnerability suggests that the problem manifested almost immediately after the network complexity grew to the point where it was a possibility. As the incident occurred insim between 12.4.10.17.0 and 12.4.12.8.13, most of the subject population still lived in complete isolation in small communities, limiting the possibility of any cultural feedback loops which could threaten stability. That will almost certainly no longer be the case within an insim century or two.
Our primary concerns, once immediate stability was assured, were of an ethical nature. Several external auditors were brought in, including Concordat representatives to present an adversarial examination according to our charter. The questions the members of the ethics subcommittee set forth were as follows:
* Were the qualia interruption events distressing for simulation subjects?
* What were the long-term effects, if any, of the experience on subjects?
* Have the dynamics of the simulation cultures been artificially moved towards any Class I pathologies? (Eschatology traps, predestinarian moral dissolution, etc.)
Committee members agreed that the potential for distress was high enough that quantization of subjective responses was justified. Because the nature of the qualia disruptions fell outside normal sociological sampling concerns, this could not be reliably determined from standard simulation logs. With unanimous consent and the approval of the permanent ethics committee, a series of limited counterfactuals were run. Pithed abstractions were generated for 160,000 of the affected subjects, randomly sampled. These were each put through a total of 8,000 simulation runs, testing various possible subjective disruption experiences. [See ER-7992 for full details.] The process was halted by the automatic subjective distress failsafes in only %0.04 of the runs, which is well within the ethical thresholds established for investigations of this kind.
The conclusions of the subjective response simulation indicate that for the plurality (48%) of subjects, even those for whom the qualia disruption reached conscious levels, it was perceived as a forgettable oddity on par with a benign fasciculation or other transient neurological quirk. Another 21% found it actively unpleasant, but still forgettable. The remaining population for which the incident did reach the threshold of long-term memory was almost evenly divided between experiencing it as a negative (16%) and a positive (15%) experience. For those who found it to be negative, the primary factor was questioning their own mental stability, with theological/metaphysical implications also being a dominant factor. Theo/meta was also a dominant factor in the population for whom these were positive events which were recorded in long-term memory.
Because of the relative predominance of theo/meta implications for affected subjects, the ethics committee decided the possibility of permanent personality shifts were too great to be ignored. As these cannot be reliably estimated from piths, the historical monitoring committee was asked to look for possible effects amongst the members of the affected population. Compete monitoring was not possible due to the scale of the population in question, though as full neural logging had been activated for all of them as of 14.8.12.18.2 (insim 12.4.14.4.11), the possibility exists for future investigations.
Using the analysis tools that have been developed as part of the normal simulation monitoring, the total affected population of 839,554 was winnowed down to a more manageable 8,000 based on personality heuristics. These were able to be investigated on an individual basis, with most being quickly eliminated as not having demonstrated any significant lifestyle changes correlated with the qualia disruption. While it is impossible to put an exact number on how many subjects experienced the event as life-changing, we can confidently say it cannot be any higher than 1,200.
As less than 20 years have passed insim, long term historical effects cannot yet be evaluated. The investigation team will continue to monitor developments and will release updates to this document for the next insim 100 years. This is currently expected to take roughly 4 outsim years, assuming that the simulation population growth continues to follow standard patterns.
The ethics subcommittee agreed that, while regrettable, the subjective distress experienced by subjects was limited. Neither does the experience seem to have triggered any immediate cultural changes which rise to the level of ethical violations. Combined with precautions put in place since the event to prevent a recurrence, significant changes to the simulation run currently in progress are not justified at this time. [Please see ER-7995 for details.]
Simulation stability was the second priority for Investigation Committee. While this is much harder to evaluate, looking at the historicity of affected subjects is generally accepted as a valid proxy. The stability subcommittee was tasked with monitoring the filtered population of 1,200. Specifically, any statistically significant deviations from the subject’s predicted lifecourse as of insim 12.4.10.16.19 are of interest, as that would be the first indication of any historical deviations that could lead to widespread stability collapse. The good news is that 1,180 of the target population have continued to live statistically insignificant lives. Of the remaining 20, 10 of them have seemingly interpreted their experience as a divine sign, making radical changes in their life as a result (4 nuns, 2 monks, 3 preachers, 1 messiah). As of yet, none have shown any indication their new calling will have significant historical effects. 9 of the others have made changes that are less obviously connected with the qualia incident, mostly of a marital nature. It is unlikely that they will ever write a book explicitly describing how they were affected, so any conclusions that can be drawn from them would be purely speculative. The final member of this population, however, has done exactly that, and as such has become the focus of our investigation.
The subject in question is simulation census #2,720,875,806 “George Berkeley”, a resident of one of the northwest islands of Europe which has been gaining socio-political significance recently. He is highly educated but otherwise showed no inclination towards metaphysical thinking. Neither his culture nor even the dominant regional culture have shown much interest in such things before. Yet within a few insim years of the qualia event, he had written multiple works explaining in strikingly modern terms how the subjective human experience is only of interpretations of sensory input, and never of the supposed physical world in which they live. He takes this to the extreme of advocating what he calls “immaterialism” where the only true reality of anything is as ideas in a mind capable of understanding them. Such a mind primarily means humans, obviously, but also that of his monotheistic divinity. [See CR-507056 for the latest summary of the European monotheism cults.] He goes so far as to explicitly argue that the reality in which humans seem to find themselves maintains its internal consistency because it is held in the mind of a god.
While we cannot be sure, as full neural logging for those periods isn’t available, it seems reasonable to assume that this is his best attempt at understanding the experience of qualia disruption. The conclusions he has drawn are shockingly close to our outsim truth -- that it is meaningless for him to question the nature of what his senses give him information, as the only reality of what he experiences is the experience itself, and that all of this is kept coherent because it is being processed by a much larger and more capable mind.
As of the time of the writing of this report, his books have no made a significant philosophical impact on his or any other culture. Nor would that be expected, as they are working with ideas significantly beyond what sociological models predict would be acceptable in the current simulation cultures. Yet he has also prospered, advancing in his clerical profession and, for his technological context, traveling widely. He is definitely not suffering social repercussions for his unorthodox views, unlike some of the other subjects in this investigation. Our concerns stretch beyond their immediate reception, however.
The cultures of which Berkeley is a member seem to be on the edge of a classic industrial takeoff scenario. If this is true, they could experience a computational inflection point within the next few insim centuries. Baring some form of direct intervention, there is no reason to assume his writings will be lost before that happens. [See CR-409936 for details on how the half life of data has increased dramatically over the last few insim centuries.] Berkeley’s ideas will be far more dangerous once computational simulation becomes a common tool. At that point, anybody reading his works only has to make the minor leap to questioning the improbability of their existence to pose a serious threat to simulation stability -- nor will that be an unreasonable thing for them to question. As established above, it is objectively unlikely that Berkeley would have developed these philosophical ideas without the external stimulus. That will be just as obvious to insim readers. Should the very existence of Berkeley’s ideas be taken as evidence for the computational nature of their reality, simulation stability will very quickly decay. We have never seen a simulation survive longer than 60-80 insim days once that feedback loop is created, and those of course involved much smaller subject populations.
We strongly advise that the ethics committee review its procedures for premature halting of the simulation in the case of existential instability. The analysis of previous simulation failures [ER-3471] indicated widespread subject discomfort during that event. We think all will agree in working to prevent a repeat if at all possible.
THIS DOCUMENT SIGNED BY ALL MEMBERS OF THE INVESTIGATION COMMITTEE
NOT FOR EXTERNAL DISTRIBUTION
Document IR-305
Initial Investigation Report Regarding the Qualia Disruption Event of 14.8.12.16.14
Submitted on 14.8.13.7.16
CC: Stability committee, historical monitoring committee, ethics oversight committee
NOT FOR EXTERNAL DISTRIBUTION
The consequences of the qualia disruption on 14.8.12.16.14 have been investigated and all evidence points to minimal impacts which rise to the level of ethical concerns. The only evidence of the event that has entered the insim historical record has so far shown negligible effects on subject comfort levels. The Investigation Committee believes the current run can still provide good data and should be continued. However, concerns remain about long term stability as insim civilization approaches a likely computational inflection point. We request that the ethics committee develop new policies for handling the simulation destabilization scenarios which could result.
Starting on 14.8.12.16.14 the current simulation run suffered multiple faults due to a previously unknown vulnerability to temporal harmonics in subject qualia processing. [See technical reports TR-10934, TR-10935, TR-10937 and TR-10938 for more details.] This issue has been resolved as of the 14.8.12.17.0 update, but qualia processing within the simulation was intermittently affected over a span of outsim 16 days. While the effects of this seem to have remained remarkably limited, full institutional scrutiny was decided to be appropriate to address the ethical ramifications and questions of simulation stability.
When the first harmonic shock occurred, total simulation population was 623,904,987. The technical investigation team found distinctive pattern in subject neural logging which made identification of affected individuals relatively simple. [See TR-10948 for details.] In many ways, we were very lucky. The nature of the harmonic meant that less than 1% of the population suffered any qualia degradation at all over the entire span of the incident, and of those the problem remained at subconscious levels in more than 85%. These numbers could have easily been much higher.
The immediate stability impacts were also thankfully minimal. The current understanding of the harmonic vulnerability suggests that the problem manifested almost immediately after the network complexity grew to the point where it was a possibility. As the incident occurred insim between 12.4.10.17.0 and 12.4.12.8.13, most of the subject population still lived in complete isolation in small communities, limiting the possibility of any cultural feedback loops which could threaten stability. That will almost certainly no longer be the case within an insim century or two.
Our primary concerns, once immediate stability was assured, were of an ethical nature. Several external auditors were brought in, including Concordat representatives to present an adversarial examination according to our charter. The questions the members of the ethics subcommittee set forth were as follows:
* Were the qualia interruption events distressing for simulation subjects?
* What were the long-term effects, if any, of the experience on subjects?
* Have the dynamics of the simulation cultures been artificially moved towards any Class I pathologies? (Eschatology traps, predestinarian moral dissolution, etc.)
Committee members agreed that the potential for distress was high enough that quantization of subjective responses was justified. Because the nature of the qualia disruptions fell outside normal sociological sampling concerns, this could not be reliably determined from standard simulation logs. With unanimous consent and the approval of the permanent ethics committee, a series of limited counterfactuals were run. Pithed abstractions were generated for 160,000 of the affected subjects, randomly sampled. These were each put through a total of 8,000 simulation runs, testing various possible subjective disruption experiences. [See ER-7992 for full details.] The process was halted by the automatic subjective distress failsafes in only %0.04 of the runs, which is well within the ethical thresholds established for investigations of this kind.
The conclusions of the subjective response simulation indicate that for the plurality (48%) of subjects, even those for whom the qualia disruption reached conscious levels, it was perceived as a forgettable oddity on par with a benign fasciculation or other transient neurological quirk. Another 21% found it actively unpleasant, but still forgettable. The remaining population for which the incident did reach the threshold of long-term memory was almost evenly divided between experiencing it as a negative (16%) and a positive (15%) experience. For those who found it to be negative, the primary factor was questioning their own mental stability, with theological/metaphysical implications also being a dominant factor. Theo/meta was also a dominant factor in the population for whom these were positive events which were recorded in long-term memory.
Because of the relative predominance of theo/meta implications for affected subjects, the ethics committee decided the possibility of permanent personality shifts were too great to be ignored. As these cannot be reliably estimated from piths, the historical monitoring committee was asked to look for possible effects amongst the members of the affected population. Compete monitoring was not possible due to the scale of the population in question, though as full neural logging had been activated for all of them as of 14.8.12.18.2 (insim 12.4.14.4.11), the possibility exists for future investigations.
Using the analysis tools that have been developed as part of the normal simulation monitoring, the total affected population of 839,554 was winnowed down to a more manageable 8,000 based on personality heuristics. These were able to be investigated on an individual basis, with most being quickly eliminated as not having demonstrated any significant lifestyle changes correlated with the qualia disruption. While it is impossible to put an exact number on how many subjects experienced the event as life-changing, we can confidently say it cannot be any higher than 1,200.
As less than 20 years have passed insim, long term historical effects cannot yet be evaluated. The investigation team will continue to monitor developments and will release updates to this document for the next insim 100 years. This is currently expected to take roughly 4 outsim years, assuming that the simulation population growth continues to follow standard patterns.
The ethics subcommittee agreed that, while regrettable, the subjective distress experienced by subjects was limited. Neither does the experience seem to have triggered any immediate cultural changes which rise to the level of ethical violations. Combined with precautions put in place since the event to prevent a recurrence, significant changes to the simulation run currently in progress are not justified at this time. [Please see ER-7995 for details.]
Simulation stability was the second priority for Investigation Committee. While this is much harder to evaluate, looking at the historicity of affected subjects is generally accepted as a valid proxy. The stability subcommittee was tasked with monitoring the filtered population of 1,200. Specifically, any statistically significant deviations from the subject’s predicted lifecourse as of insim 12.4.10.16.19 are of interest, as that would be the first indication of any historical deviations that could lead to widespread stability collapse. The good news is that 1,180 of the target population have continued to live statistically insignificant lives. Of the remaining 20, 10 of them have seemingly interpreted their experience as a divine sign, making radical changes in their life as a result (4 nuns, 2 monks, 3 preachers, 1 messiah). As of yet, none have shown any indication their new calling will have significant historical effects. 9 of the others have made changes that are less obviously connected with the qualia incident, mostly of a marital nature. It is unlikely that they will ever write a book explicitly describing how they were affected, so any conclusions that can be drawn from them would be purely speculative. The final member of this population, however, has done exactly that, and as such has become the focus of our investigation.
The subject in question is simulation census #2,720,875,806 “George Berkeley”, a resident of one of the northwest islands of Europe which has been gaining socio-political significance recently. He is highly educated but otherwise showed no inclination towards metaphysical thinking. Neither his culture nor even the dominant regional culture have shown much interest in such things before. Yet within a few insim years of the qualia event, he had written multiple works explaining in strikingly modern terms how the subjective human experience is only of interpretations of sensory input, and never of the supposed physical world in which they live. He takes this to the extreme of advocating what he calls “immaterialism” where the only true reality of anything is as ideas in a mind capable of understanding them. Such a mind primarily means humans, obviously, but also that of his monotheistic divinity. [See CR-507056 for the latest summary of the European monotheism cults.] He goes so far as to explicitly argue that the reality in which humans seem to find themselves maintains its internal consistency because it is held in the mind of a god.
While we cannot be sure, as full neural logging for those periods isn’t available, it seems reasonable to assume that this is his best attempt at understanding the experience of qualia disruption. The conclusions he has drawn are shockingly close to our outsim truth -- that it is meaningless for him to question the nature of what his senses give him information, as the only reality of what he experiences is the experience itself, and that all of this is kept coherent because it is being processed by a much larger and more capable mind.
As of the time of the writing of this report, his books have no made a significant philosophical impact on his or any other culture. Nor would that be expected, as they are working with ideas significantly beyond what sociological models predict would be acceptable in the current simulation cultures. Yet he has also prospered, advancing in his clerical profession and, for his technological context, traveling widely. He is definitely not suffering social repercussions for his unorthodox views, unlike some of the other subjects in this investigation. Our concerns stretch beyond their immediate reception, however.
The cultures of which Berkeley is a member seem to be on the edge of a classic industrial takeoff scenario. If this is true, they could experience a computational inflection point within the next few insim centuries. Baring some form of direct intervention, there is no reason to assume his writings will be lost before that happens. [See CR-409936 for details on how the half life of data has increased dramatically over the last few insim centuries.] Berkeley’s ideas will be far more dangerous once computational simulation becomes a common tool. At that point, anybody reading his works only has to make the minor leap to questioning the improbability of their existence to pose a serious threat to simulation stability -- nor will that be an unreasonable thing for them to question. As established above, it is objectively unlikely that Berkeley would have developed these philosophical ideas without the external stimulus. That will be just as obvious to insim readers. Should the very existence of Berkeley’s ideas be taken as evidence for the computational nature of their reality, simulation stability will very quickly decay. We have never seen a simulation survive longer than 60-80 insim days once that feedback loop is created, and those of course involved much smaller subject populations.
We strongly advise that the ethics committee review its procedures for premature halting of the simulation in the case of existential instability. The analysis of previous simulation failures [ER-3471] indicated widespread subject discomfort during that event. We think all will agree in working to prevent a repeat if at all possible.
THIS DOCUMENT SIGNED BY ALL MEMBERS OF THE INVESTIGATION COMMITTEE
NOT FOR EXTERNAL DISTRIBUTION
no subject
no subject