Try $$CASH$$
I read the piece as a satire of the “society of the spectacle,” pointing out how the stage managers are losing control of the “simulation” that organizes our thoughts/behavior.
Because it’s hard to believe that he intends to be taken literally.
That was my first thought as well. When I saw what happened, it immediately reminded me of Steve Harvey flubbing the winner of that beauty pageant, and I was like – “oh, this is a thing, now.”
Once is chance.
Twice is coincidence.
The third time will be a pattern.
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sudo receivecash -now
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I dunno… what scares me is the notion of determinism; we’re just so many billiard balls, locked into our paths. The interlocking gears of cause and effect make all this no more than a ride that’s on rails.
That’s some scary shit in my book - we kid ourselves about all sorts of things, including having the supernatural power of choice.
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It’s not the crude language people find objectionable so much as the boasting about sexual assault.
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Thermironic is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
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No, no, the command is receivemoney, with the parameter “risk-free.”
Of course, they don’t want anyone figuring that out, so they force you to abbreviate it to:
rm -rf /
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Well so far it seems to be just clearing space to put the money in. Guess I’ll keep waiting.
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Have you read Konrad Zuse’s Rechnender Raum? The MIT English translation is available online as a .PDF file. Zuse independently invented and built the world’s first programmable electronic digital computer, as well as the first high-level computing language, so he’s something of an original thinker in the field 
. And while his opus is certainly not suited to every taste, you might find it worth your while.
The representational system (language, if you will) that we use for mathematics is invented; it exists to describe things that are discovered, primarily through measurement. This is easily demonstrated (proofed/proven) by thought experiment; if we changed the numerical value of π, would the external reality change? What about the opposite case - if it turned out that we’d miscalculated π, would all our mathematical knowledge have to be re-evaluated and revised? The map is not the territory, the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. Mathematical representations of relationships and measurements are powerful maps.
(Note to the peanut gallery. This is a thought experiment. Do not argue with me over whether π could change, I will not answer you. If you think it makes sense to start such an argument you’ve already entirely missed the point.)
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http://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/MATHFICT/mfview.php?callnumber=mf19
Can’t find the actual story so heres a review.
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But π is the ratio between the diameter of a circle and the circumference of a circle and we invented circles (that is, mathematical circles). When the territory is fictional, the map might be the territory.
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Nope, we just described them. They existed before us, and other eyes saw them before us, looking up into the rain or watching the moon through a volcanic plume…
But π describes a relationship inherent to physical form; and while such relationships have some kind of reality, you can certainly argue over whether there is a difference of realness between the concept of the relationship and physical expression of it. I still say it’s best conceived of as a map, a record of what we have discovered through a process based on empirical observation and experiment.
Well, yes, I suppose so; that seems like it might even be a corollary of Gödel’s proof!
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Things we describe as “circles” or “circular” existed before we did. A locus of points equidistant from a central point doesn’t exist anywhere in the universe, since points don’t exist anywhere in the universe. The things that are circular in real life don’t have π anywhere in them. To the extent that mathematical circles are good models of things in the real world, the ratio between the real-world “diameter” and “circumference” would approximate π. That’s doesn’t mean we discovered π or that it was there before us. If we took things that are pretty much square shaped we’d find the ratio between the length of one side and another was pretty close to 1. When it’s a square, it’s pretty obvious the 1 comes from our interest in squares, not from the world-as-it-is*. π is no different, it arises from our interest in circles, not the way things are without us.
* Of course our interest in squares is part of the world-as-it-is.
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You’re entering recursion territory here, which is exactly where language breaks down, principia mathematica catches fire, and Leibnitz rolls over in his grave. Any representational system that can accurately describe all humanly observable real world phenomena has the ability to state a paradox.
But I agree with you anyway, and regret that I must go now. Got inotify tricks to code up for the paycheck…
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I wasn’t aware we needed “proof” for that! 
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No recursion, I’ve got a very clear ordering of things, where there’s a underlying reality that all the abstract stuff is built upon, but that abstract stuff is all like the painting I pasted. A painting in a painting is still just a painting, none of it is more of an invention than any of the rest of it. And the underlying reality part might be totally inaccessible.
Which brings us back to the simulation argument: it seems quite possible that whatever reality we believe we find ourselves in is necessarily a simulation/hologram/whatever arising from some underlying reality.
What I don’t like about the simulation argument is the implication that the underlying reality contains smart things that intentionally created the simulation, and that we could one day wake up to find a billboard that says, “You made it to real reality, congratulations.” It’s at a certain level of “simulation” that the possibility of a perception even arises. Žižek asked in “The Parallax View” how, out of a dumb, flat reality that just is, could something like perception come to be. I don’t find that so much of a mystery, but I do think that if you could somehow “break out” of the “simulations” reality would be about as dumb and flat as it could get.
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I think I understand what you’re saying… But… If the “simulator” were to interfere in our reality, we would then be living in a universe that could only exist as a substructure of another mathematical structure. And, would the same not be true of any approximations made during the course of the simulation? The approximate simulation may resemble a perfect mathematical construct with the same definition, but it would not be it, in the sense that I think you are suggesting. Both would exist in that case - similar, but subtly different.
I actually think the simulation argument (as presented by Nick Bostrom at least) fails for more prosaic reasons, but this was interesting to think about.
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It’s wonderful that you found it interesting!
I’m a Bohmian. Much of this material makes my mind boggle, and I haven’t fully developed my thoughts on the matter. Still, I think this quote from Wikipedia is helpful:
if the wave function itself is reality (rather than probability of classical coordinates), then the unitary evolution of the wave function in quantum mechanics, can be said to be deterministic.
Asserting that quantum mechanics is deterministic by treating the wave function itself as reality might be thought to imply a single wave function for the entire universe, starting at the origin of the universe. Such a “wave function of everything” would carry the probabilities of not just the world we know, but every other possible world that could have evolved.
This is why I suspect that any such interference as you describe would really just “move things around” in the simulated universe. It has only retroactively changed the (arbitrary) initial conditions. Your second question, about approximation: it is related, but I’m not totally sure what to make of that. It’s more explicitly ontological. And, I guess, on-topic when it comes to this ridiculous article about the Oscars!
What are those?
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[quote=“anon50609448, post:80, topic:96123”]
No recursion, I’ve got a very clear ordering of things, where there’s a underlying reality that all the abstract stuff is built upon, but that abstract stuff is all like the painting I pasted. A painting in a painting is still just a painting, none of it is more of an invention than any of the rest of it. And the underlying reality part might be totally inaccessible.[/quote]
Well, we were conversing about descriptive languages, which are useful tools for conveying thoughts from one mind to another. One such language is mathematics, another is painting - the latter’s syntax is composed of paint on canvas - so a painting of a painting would be recursive in the context of that conversation. It is a description of a description [which can recurse to the level your paintbrush and eyesight command]. So your image of an image of an image drew in the topic of recursion, for me. Apologies if it seemed like a derailment!
I agree with you that there may be no physical expression of an idea other than the action of neurons in our brains (or at least that any such external physical expression might be inaccessible to us - postulating infinity, all things are not just possible but required.)
Relatedly, where Descartes went wrong (in my opinion) was in his idea that imagination is external to mankind, proof of God’s separate existence - I think our brain architecture can ideate independently from the evidence of our senses and/or divine intervention from Yahweh.
This very ancient idea actually influenced the naming of my daughter. Are you familiar with the sanskrit माया?
Yeah, I hate the implied deus ex machina denouement too. Zuse doesn’t do that, at least as I remember it (read it ages ago). He was more talking about the sort of computational processes that Wolfram called cellular automata - his ideas about physical reality being the outcome of ongoing processes doesn’t really require Agent Smith.
Discourse says I should talk to somebody else. Shut up, discourse, you robotic nag!
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