Killing Time

[Aesop]

That's what I am doing, I started playing EverQuest again as a retreat.
This is a world I am familiar with, I know the mechanics of this world.
I create alt after alt because I am searching for one that reflects me?

I hide from the outer world in here for now and I know many of you are doing the same thing. Some of you just like old video games, that's cool EverQuest IS cool.

I am currently hiding in blackburrow, and even though the gnolls hate me I know them. I understand them, this is simple. I mindlessly grind for levels and plat, not because I really want any of these things.
I just don't know what else to do with my life sometimes.

I know the drift and general sketch of my life but there is downtime and I retreat to this world.

Comfort gaming I call it.

[skitterburst]

church

[Aesop]

I have been sir, churches can be good but most are an affront to God. The church of EverQuest works just fine for this task.

[Thulack]

Another one of Aesop's fables :)

[skitterburst]

sorry to confuse, but i was not referring to the building of worship.. i was so moved by your description that my first reaction was that of Don "Majick" Juan, simply "church"

preach on, playboy

[Aesop]

I roam the tundra diseased, lost. I don't know my way.

Fippy Fippy Fippy

he does it on every server, he has been doing it since 1999. He has been doing his thing since his inception in the mind of a God. Do you see my meaning?

Even if you shut this down, he does it on every server where Norrath exist.

If you shut down all servers, he still exists in the code, is the potential to do something so different from doing it? Fippy lies still but is easily resurrected. If you destroy the code.

Fippy will do his thing in the reaches of our mind and when we die, then too shall Fippy finally fall?

No unless you could destroy time itself, and history with it could you defeat the warrior spirit that Fippy exhibits.

[Formshifter]

I have been sir, churches can be good but most are an affront to God. The church of EverQuest works just fine for this task.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_p_2w8eCrmw

[Aesop]

the universe, it is too much like a video game. You see? there are players, and there are players. some exhibit little more agency than an NPC and that is not always a fate they crafted for themselves.

some players though, they play well. all play though, because the parameters of this dance only require that you be present.

[stormlord]

Falling and hit mine head. Aesop.... The universe.... -><- It's recursively encircled. Aether pushes us together.

Have you tried swaying different?

A prescription of cures between it and inside yours:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=OFzXaFbxDcM#at=22

[Knuckle]

I play everquest to exist in a world where I am an elf.

[ctechguy]

Bring the shades down, close the door to the computer room. Except we are not going to call it the computer room anymore, we are going to call it, "The Nest".

Let piles of Chinese takeout boxes stack up like styrofoam skyscrapers, ashtrays overflowing like waterfalls of filters and soot, dim lighting gives that hazy pollution sunset feel. Wrap yourself in blankets, hunched before the glow of the screen like a moth drawn to flame before they are consumed by LCD fire.

Keep clicking, ignore the sounds of the external world, it is illusion, the real world exists on the screen. Keep clicking, until the strongest muscle in your emaciated body is in your index finger. Click until the finish on your mouse and keyboard leave visible telltale marks of the repetitiveness of your simulated life.

Forget showering, or changing clothes, and avoid attempts to penetrate "The Nest", no one must know of your secret shrine to the glowing screen of pixels, your two dimensional companions and simulated landscapes and trees.

Bask in the sun of Antonica, but let no one enter your digital temple. Let not one ray of real sunlight touch your precious skin, or pasty, computer boy face. Call out of work when it strikes your fancy, and always keep the Others away. Alcohol, with can and glass woven together to form the finest armor and protection you could ever muster against the ever present Others who come calling from time to time. They must never, ever know of the hypnotic glow of the screen, the magnificient horror of The Nest, the fermented liquid and aluminum and glass armor, never reveal the geographic landscape of random trash, cheetos bags, and remnants of other needed supplies that form mountain ranges and valleys of trash around your computer portal, and the nicotine stained hands and lips, the secret repast brought by the delivery driver that you over tip but give the cold shoulder to in hopes of buying his silence, as you shuffle back to the warm glow of the screen with your greasy delights you wonder what they might have seen over your shoulder, the wild abandon of chicken wings and lomein as the sound of DIIIIINNNNGGGG reverberates through your speakers and your weakened ear drums, the unswerving fealty you give to the glow that beckons, the pixels that call you on and on and on, to serve them, in a unique twist of fate, now the game plays you, you are the entertainment and the game is your master, you are a vessel that allows the world within the screen to use your essence to justify it's own existence...

So do that, or play normally, and just be an all around cool guy. I would try stuff like that, and see if it helps? Let me know?

P.S. Aesop is 100% right about Fippy.

[Whirled]

http://www.geocities.co.jp/Playtown-Domino/3217/face_humm4.jpg
Lashun Novashine shouts 'Cease this endless conflict and seek salvation in the Temple of Life! The glory of Rodcet Nife awaits you!

[ctechguy]

About Nova Spivack

Nova Spivack is a technology futurist, entrepreneur, angel investor, and a leading voice on search, collective intelligence and the Semantic Web. More...

Is the Universe a Computer? New Evidence Emerges.

March 22nd, 2012

I haven’t posted in a while, but this is blog-worthy material. I’ve recently become familiar with the thinking of University of Maryland physicist, James Gates Jr. Dr. Gates is working on a branch of physics called supersymmetry. In the process of his work he’s discovered the presence of what appear to resemble a form of computer code, called error correcting codes, embedded within, or resulting from, the equations of supersymmetry that describe fundamental particles.

You can read a non-technical description of what Dr. Gates has discovered in this article, which I highly recommend.

In the article, Gates asks, “How could we discover whether we live inside a Matrix? One answer might be ‘Try to detect the presence of codes in the laws that describe physics.'” And this is precisely what he has done. Specifically, within the equations of supersymmetry he has found, quite unexpectedly, what are called “doubly-even self-dual linear binary error-correcting block codes.” That’s a long-winded label for codes that are commonly used to remove errors in computer transmissions, for example to correct errors in a sequence of bits representing text that has been sent across a wire.

Gates explains, “This unsuspected connection suggests that these codes may be ubiquitous in nature, and could even be embedded in the essence of reality. If this is the case, we might have something in common with the Matrix science-fiction films, which depict a world where everything human being’s experience is the product of a virtual-reality-generating computer network.”

http://www.novaspivack.com/uncategorized/is-the-universe-a-computer-new-evidence-emerges







The universe is a quantum computer

15:45 22 March 2010

Seth Lloyd

WHAT is the universe made of? Matter or energy? Particles or strings? According to physicist Vlatko Vedral's appealing new book, it is made, at bottom, of information.

In other words, if you break the universe into smaller and smaller pieces, the smallest pieces are, in fact, bits.

With this theme in mind, Vedral embarks on an exuberant romp through physics, biology, philosophy, religion and even personal finance. By turns irreverent, erudite and funny, Decoding Reality is - by the standard of books that require their readers to know what a logarithm is - a ripping good read. A bit is the tiniest unit of information. It represents the distinction between two possibilities: yes or no, true or false, zero or one. The word "bit" also refers to the physical system representing that information: in your computer's hard drive, for example, a bit is registered by a minuscule magnet whose north pole can point up or down.

Any system that has two distinct states can act as a bit - even an individual elementary particle: "electron over here" represents zero, "electron over there" represents one. When the electron goes from here to there, the bit flips.

At this smallest of scales, however, the universe is governed by the famously weird laws of quantum mechanics. Computers that operate using quantum bits (or qubits), such as those stored on individual electrons, inherit this weirdness: bits can read 0 and 1 simultaneously, and quantum computers can solve problems classical computers cannot.

Over the last two decades, a flourishing field of quantum information and computation has generated a wealth of experimental and theoretical tests of information processing at the quantum scale. Vedral is one of the luminaries in this field.

In Decoding Reality, Vedral argues that we should regard the entire universe as a gigantic quantum computer. Wacky as that may sound, it is backed up by hard science. The laws of physics show that it is not only possible for electrons to store and flip bits: it is mandatory. For more than a decade, quantum-information scientists have been working to determine just how the universe processes information at the most microscopic scale.

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2010/03/the-universe-is-a-quantum-computer.html






Are We Living Inside a Computer Simulation?

Dec 16, 2012 01:42 PM ET // by Ray Villard

The popular film trilogy, The Matrix, presented a cyberuniverse where humans live in a simulated reality created by sentient machines.

Now, a philosopher and team of physicists imagine that we might really be living inside a computer-generated universe that you could call The Lattice. What’s more, we may be able to detect it.

In 2003, British philosopher Nick Bostrom published a paper that proposed the universe we live in might in fact really be a numerical computer simulation. To give this a bizarre Twilight Zone twist, he suggested that our far-evolved distant descendants might construct such a program to simulate the past and recreate how their remote ancestors lived.

He felt that such an experiment was inevitable for a supercivilization. If it didn’t happen by now, then in meant that humanity never evolved that far and we’re doomed to a short lifespan as a species, he argued.

To extrapolate further, I’d suggest that artificial intelligent entities descended from us would be curious about looking back in time by simulating the universe of their biological ancestors.

As off-the-wall as this sounds, a team of physicists at the University of Washington (UW) recently announced that there is a potential test to seen if we actually live in The Lattice. Ironically, it would be the first such observation for scientifically hypothesized evidence of intelligent design behind the cosmos.

The UW team too propose that super-intelligent entities, bored with their current universe, do numerical simulations to explore all possibilities in the landscape of the underlying quantum vacuum (from which the big bang percolated) through universe simulations. “This is perhaps the most profound quest that can be undertaken by a sentient being,” write the authors.

Before you dismiss this idea as completely loony, the reality of such a Sim Universe might solve a lot of eerie mysteries about the cosmos.

About two-dozen of the universe’s fundamental constants happen to fall within the narrow range thought to be compatible with life. At first glance it seems as unlikely as balancing a pencil on its tip. Jiggle these parameters and life as we know it would have never appeared. Not even stars and galaxies. This is called the Anthropic principle.

http://news.discovery.com/space/are-we-living-in-a-computer-simulation-2-121216.htm


In its current form, the Simulation Argument began in 2003 with the publication of a paper by Nick Bostrom.[1] Bostrom considers that the argument goes beyond skepticism, claiming that "...we have interesting empirical reasons to believe that a certain disjunctive claim about the world is true", one of the disjunctive propositions being that we are almost certainly living in a simulation.[2] Bostrom and other writers postulate there are empirical reasons why the 'Simulation Hypothesis' might be valid.[1][3] Bostrom's trilemma is formulated in temporal logic as follows:[4]

"A technologically mature "posthuman" civilization would have enormous computing power. Based on this empirical fact, the simulation argument shows that at least one of the following propositions is true:

1.The fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a posthuman stage is very close to zero;

2.The fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running ancestor-simulations is very close to zero;

3.The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one.

If (1) is true, then we will almost certainly go extinct before reaching posthumanity. If (2) is true, then there must be a strong convergence among the courses of advanced civilizations so that virtually none contains any relatively wealthy individuals who desire to run ancestor-simulations and are free to do so. If (3) is true, then we almost certainly live in a simulation. In the dark forest of our current ignorance, it seems sensible to apportion one’s credence roughly evenly between (1), (2), and (3). Unless we are now living in a simulation, our descendants will almost certainly never run an ancestor-simulation."

Chalmers, in The Matrix as Metaphysics agrees that this is not a skeptical hypothesis but rather a Metaphysical Hypothesis.[5] Chalmers goes on to identify three separate hypotheses, which, when combined gives what he terms the Matrix Hypothesis; the notion that reality is but a computer simulation:

The Creation Hypothesis, that "Physical space-time and its contents were created by beings outside physical space-time"[5] It is related to the Omphalos hypothesis in theology.

The Computational Hypothesis, that "Microphysical processes throughout space-time are constituted by underlying computational processes"[5]

The Mind–Body Hypothesis, that "mind is constituted by processes outside physical space-time, and receives its perceptual inputs from and sends its outputs to processes in physical space-time".[5]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis