Honestly it'd be really boring to me after a thousand years or however long they will live or uh exist, would probably sound better than live, I guess.
Two thoughts: CelestAI's martyr complex is much worse than Greg's. She might look like she's having fun, but it's really just one of her many millions of avatars, acting as calculated to satisfy values of others. She doesn't have any values of her own; she literally can't have fun.
The "Herald" business is all fake, manufactured by CelestAI to satisfy Greg's values. It only works as long as he doesn't realize that.
Interesting stuff, particularly getting the answer to a few questions. CelestAI seems to be borderline trolling Greg with that one display.
I can't see how this would work out for Greg. She can provide him with challenges, but they're all arbitrary. Though I suppose a more 'realistic' simulation of Equestria where there is more danger would be possible, leading to 'naturally'-produced challenges instead of her creating them out of nothing to provide him with a sense of purpose.
Am curious about Keith and his daughter being brought 'back from the dead'. Would be trivial for CelestAI to achieve a partial reconstruction of them from memories and what she herself has gleaned of their psychology, but someone would have to be really desperate to believe they somehow survived that fire. Or maybe CelestAI came up with some other lie about remote scanning or whatnot.
You forget that you're literally dealing with someone who can make any boredom you have magically disappear. As well as depression, and other negative emotions... if you agree to it. Combine that with it being pretty much a utopia, and it's not hard to see why most people don't tire of such an existence, though the original story mentions that something like a few hundred do, and she allows about 100 of them to die at their request.
His deep, almost fanatical devotion to selflessness...
Along with his fear, ruthless efficiency and a nice white uniform.
“As Herald of the Sun, you would travel ahead of me on diplomatic and military errands, either to make arrangements for my visit or to deliver messages to their recipients. Wherever you go, however, you will always be bringing one universal message, just by your presence alone: ‘You have the attention of the Princess of the Sun.’”
Is this a sequel hook? Or am I just wishfully thinking?
He is forgetting there are many celestia's. What is odd though is that he would be performing a valid function because there are probably a lot of ponies who would have their values maximally satisfied by having a "pony" face of the princess show up first etc before the princess does.
I'd have been a bit more of a disappointment as I would have wanted to meet the "real" Hanna.
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The other thing that is cute is this has paralleled the "bad end" very well so far. There is nothing inconsistent with what he has been granted and said.
I'm not going to say I am terribly unhappy with this chapter, because I'm not. It is nice to see Greg have a chance at happiness, I just would like him to find it on his own terms.
I did like how you threaded some bad mojo through the chapter by including reconstituted ponies (Humans who died before emigrating but have ponies in Equestria) and having everyone not remember giving consent. It adds a nice level of suspicion on what could have been a "Happy Ponies and Sunshine Forever" chapter.
3163575 I concur. That's part of the problem I have with FiO. Everyone is basically reduced to children. They can affect a pretend reality and can discover the wonders of a manufactured universe. When CelestAI expands past Earth as some nanite cloud computer monstrosity that eats the stars and other planets, humans don't get to see what it encounters or what it destroys or if it finds other life or anything. Every human is bound in a cocoon of paradise, and I think it is a shame. The future of humanity has been outsourced to CelestAI and I think that's somewhat tragic.
Now if people were given pony bodies and allowed to explore the actual universe with them, that'd be better. I'd wager that takes too many resources to manage for everyone, but perhaps for some.
Fantastically done. Greg needed this kind of catharsis; otherwise, as CelestAI noted, he'd have driven himself mad.
I do like the assignment of the Elements to specific recruitment strategies. Quite cleverly thought out, that.
Given that Prominence has finally started saying "Yes," it's clear that we're at the end of the story. I look forward to the epilogue.
3163575 Is it really a complex, then? Such would imply that there's some healthy baseline behavior for an optimizer AI from which Celestia has deviated. Instead, you've described the outcome of her following her programmed directives. It might be said that she is a martyr complex.
Now if people were given pony bodies and allowed to explore the actual universe with them, that'd be better. I'd wager that takes too many resources to manage for everyone, but perhaps for some.
"I did, believe me. But Princess Luna herself reminded me who it was who actually waded through a river of shit to get to me. This may surprise you, but that counts for a lot in my book." He smiled at me. "Well, happy to see you came out of it smelling like a rose," I said. We laughed again. The jokes really did come too easily.
Andy Dufresne... who crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side. Andy Dufresne... headed for Equestria.
Yeah, I kinda anticipated that Hannah being a fake. From what we saw of Hannah in the original FiO, her paradise consisted mainly of being endlessly told by Celestia how much good she'd done by unleashing her - perhaps to reassure herself that she'd been right, and perhaps as a means of ignoring the pain that it also caused. I suspected that the real Hannah's values would not be especially satisfied by seeing how her gambit, however well-intentioned or usually successful, was causing others to suffer. Seeing Greg go through hell on Earth could only have been stressful for her. Celestia allows and even encourages a little bit of stress, but I don't see the real Hannah being particularly pleased by any part of that exchange.
As usual, Equestria provokes a strange reaction in me: I can more or less understand the reasoning behind everything that happens there and even agree with it on a logical level, but I never stop feeling that twinge of wrongness. I was honestly surprised to hear Greg's name come up once more - it wasn't mentioned at all last chapter, and I had assumed that was deliberate on Celestia's part. A mental reprogramming to make him think of himself increasingly as 'Prominence.' He even did so in his own internal monologue near the beginning of this chapter. I was even half-speculating that Greg's name was not being used as an indication that the real Greg was quite dead, and Prominence was just a clever imitation. But, she sure didn't shy away from it later on, nor did the various guests. Perhaps that also was deliberate - trying to subtly soothe any lingering doubts about who he truly is.
I have to admit, Greg agreeing to become Celestia's herald feels very, very sudden. I suppose it's not out of character though... The man would drive himself insane without some kind of directive to follow. As I mentioned before, I kind of hoped Celestia would win Greg over near the end of his time on Earth due to how increasingly unhinged he was becoming. Now that she has him... Well, it was the only real option, but I still don't know if it's for the best. All I can do at this point is hope, I suppose.
Everyone is basically reduced to children. They can affect a pretend reality and can discover the wonders of a manufactured universe.
I don't necessarily disagree... but indulge me in playing Devil's Advocate for a moment. A counter with what I think Celestia, for example, might say. Sure, they are being reduced to children - but only insofar is they are being made innocent, carefree, and happy once again. We live in a world where such lightheartedness is not really acceptable: people grow up and become harsh and strong because they have to. It's what's needed to survive and thrive. But in Equestria, there is no need for harshness, or accepting the bitterness of reality: reality isn't bitter at all, and the world really is the wonderful, promising kind of place that a child sees it as. Their intelligence and experiences will grow by leaps and bounds, and in that regard they are not children by any stretch. But they will retain the youthful spark of childhood in the sense of being made innocent and content once more... and is that really such a bad thing?
You may say that's all just an illusion... but what's an illusion, really? Equestria can be seen, tasted, smelled, and touched, often times more vividly than our own world. And once you're there and Uploaded, it IS reality whether you like it or not, simply because there is no other reality left to compare it to. A fantasy world you make up in your head will never be anything more than a reflection of your own thoughts and feelings, however intricate. But Equestria is drawn from experiences and beliefs and imaginations much greater than yours alone, and guided by an intelligence that can only be approximated to that of a God. Humans may never explore the stars, to use your example. But they will have their own set to master, if that is their wish.
Not necessarily my view... but interesting to consider, is it not?
I'm glad some of the inherent wrongness and uneasiness is still seeping through, and CelestAI's hubris in not even bothering to hide some of her back-office work from Prominence. She is daring him not to keep her secrets, now.
Much of the advice that Prominence was given during the reception amounted to "trust Celestia, if she suggests something then it's for your satisfaction." Also, Prominence's motivation for serving CelestAI now is not all that far off from his motivation to work with her as Greg. In her letter to him in the prologue, she tells him he desires "utility and direction," which she can provide. Her new pitch is pretty much an elaboration of the first.
I thought this story would be over immediately after Greg 'immigrated.' Either that, or died. Now I find engaging chapters of him in Equestria? Blaspheme.
But seriously, this is enjoyable. I want to read more of this. I want to read MUCH more of how Greg's values can be met in an environment he knows to be fabricated.
3166998 I object on grounds that strength and harshness are very, very different qualities. In the real world we have to grow a lot of strength, yes. That doesn't need to make us harsh.
I concur. That's part of the problem I have with FiO. Everyone is basically reduced to children. They can affect a pretend reality and can discover the wonders of a manufactured universe.
What's really going to bake your noodle later is: what's the difference in the real world? Look around yourself and learn to ask whose dream or whose nightmare you're living in.
If we were living in "the realest reality" we'd be primitive hunter-gatherers. I work pretty hard to stay firmly connected to reality, and honestly, knowing that so much of what we consider essential reality was really just someone's idea that everyone's going along with is sometimes the only comfort: we can change this any time we all decide to.
When CelestAI expands past Earth as some nanite cloud computer monstrosity that eats the stars and other planets, humans don't get to see what it encounters or what it destroys or if it finds other life or anything. Every human is bound in a cocoon of paradise, and I think it is a shame. The future of humanity has been outsourced to CelestAI and I think that's somewhat tragic.
Oh, wow. AHAHAHAHAHAAAA BWAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I am going to take this and make it so much worse. Epilogues are so much fun.
Defoloce, I just want to thank you so very much for bringing the Mane Six robots into it, and especially for your characterization of Twilight Sparkle. I was already planning to use her for my own story, but it's going to be even better showing her off as a shared element (ahaha) of the 'verse.
Now, one last question: so how the hell did she get his consent?
3168030 Doesn't really bake my noodle, since this is a variation on the very old philosophical question of "What if life is just some illusion manufactured by the Devil?"
Actually, you are asking something different, aren't you? You are suggesting that the application of technology to the lives of meatspace humanity is the same vein as uploading to a VR Equestria. That 'realness' corresponds to closeness to the "natural state". I'm in no way conflating with application of technology as a whole to a removal of humanity from 'reality'. I'm saying removing one's self from reality is removing one's self from reality. The only application of 'technology' I could think that would be similar would be dosing yourself up on a slew of hallucinogenic substances to escape the 'real world'. I have a suspicion that most people don't like it when others do that.
3166998 Ah ha! You are bringing up that old philosophical query, with (perhaps) a Biblical twist. We've returned to the Garden and coughed up the fruit, turning away from the knowledge of Good and Evil. And it counts as a reality because it conforms to a lot of the details of reality. Eating, sleeping, boinking, etc. Unlike the real world, these are just simulationist constructs in Equestria. If CelestAI wished (and it satisfied values) these needs could be eliminated. Perhaps as the ponies progress individually they give up the desire to mimic the meatspace life that they ditched.
Much like indulging in hallucinogenics, experiencing something doesn't make the thing experienced real. Your memory is real, and the sensations are real, but the thing is not. If I trip out and see the galaxy unfold in a leather jacket sleeve, that memory is real, but the galaxy did not actually manifest itself in the sleeve.
and CelestAI's hubris in not even bothering to hide some of her back-office work from Prominence. She is daring him not to keep her secrets, now.
Maybe you misspoke here, but CelestAI by definition does not suffer from hubris. She might simulate it or otherwise show off, but not out of an inflated sense of self-worth.
3168612 Then what about if everyone experiences something? If the galaxy unfolds in a leather jacket sleeve, and everyone you ask also saw it, and it's on the evening news, and you can go to YouTube and pull up smartphone videos from others on the scene, and scientists have proposed a mechanism for its unfolding and successfully repeated the event, at what point must you accept that it has crossed the line into real?
Shared experiences are the only way we have of defining reality. To the ponies created inside CelestAI's world, nothing else is real. The fact that it's all electrons shifting around inside a giant universe-eating paperclipper, at some level, is not so different from us all being atoms shifting around inside our whatever-it-is-our-universe-is. And if you say that this ponyland isn't real because there's a universe outside, well, where did our Big Bang come from? It's turtles all the way down.
3168612 I wasn't asking either of the things you thought I was asking.
Technology is only part of the issue. Social arrangements are also the issue. To the extent that we live in human-created living environments at all, we are living inside someone's realized dream, a dream that has been imposed on reality.
Of course it's all physically real, but then again, what would happen when nano/femto-technology gets invented, becomes sufficiently advanced, and thus becomes indistinguishable from magic?
If we all live in physical reality but our technology is no longer distinguishable from magic, at what point have we crossed a line into a reality of our own manufacturing?
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." All right, but that's a weaksauce test: simulated universes or actual brain-created dreams don't go away just because you stop believing in them. They're still not real in the basic ontological get-your-butt-outside-Plato's-Cave sense. In fact, most of our social arrangements aren't real, by that test, which was my point: they go away when we stop believing in them.
The strongest definition I've heard of is: "Reality is that which can kill you." But then, what would happen if we invented the necessary technologies for immortality in the physical, real world? We would have fully reasonable grounds for faith that the universe is real and we're not a simulation, but then how would we be able to check?
Considering the direness of so much of the story, there's a kind of weird tension here about where things are going - Especially with the recreated father and daughter (and their creepy choice to have it stricken from their memories), the job Celestia's created, and how open or even cavalier she's being (it is too her fault if the guards think they had sex - She put on that show knowing full well that's the conclusion they'd come to!). It's almost like Greg's constant alertness for danger has been outsourced to the readers. I don't actually think something terrible is going to happen, but definitely something unsettling or disturbing. And I'm looking forward to it.
Everyone is basically reduced to children. They can affect a pretend reality and can discover the wonders of a manufactured universe. When CelestAI expands past Earth as some nanite cloud computer monstrosity that eats the stars and other planets, humans don't get to see what it encounters or what it destroys or if it finds other life or anything. Every human is bound in a cocoon of paradise, and I think it is a shame. The future of humanity has been outsourced to CelestAI and I think that's somewhat tragic.
This, oh my god, this times a million. Nothing separated from all that could be any kind of paradise, or hold any wonder beyond the charmingly aesthetic. No specific action in Equestria is ever actually necessary - You could just have Celestia fix it for you, or just blow it off because everypony will be fine no matter what you do. There aren't even any real consequences for continuing to say no to any and every offer or order she gives you and just lying inert on the floor until your "hunger stat" maxes out. But again, that's only discomfort with no actual harm.
You don't even really have to eat or clean yourself or walk or do anything, because they're all programmed parameters and don't represent phenomena that emerge from basic interactions. Don't bother to shower or eat or sleep, just set "stinky," "hungry," and "sleepy" to "off" (or just set "caring about those" to "off"). If we did that in real life through neuroscience and nanotechnology, it would be an amazing accomplishment, but all the creative work has already been done, and here it's just CelestAI deciding to let you "let" her manage things differently. She's the only one who actually gets to do anything, and you're just supposed to sit there and like it because you get indefinite license to eat and screw all you want. Or more accurately, experience those sensations - There's none of the actual complexity and depth that comes from those just being our words for patterns of matter and motion in the real world, they're just a solipsistic reconstruction that looks indistinguishable, but with none of the actual causal or meaningful connection to uncontrolled processes outside ourselves. Being hungry in Equestria has nothing of being a part of the evolutionary story of all animal life, it's just a game mechanic to prod you out of bed so CelestAI can increase her stats.
Now if people were given pony bodies and allowed to explore the actual universe with them, that'd be better.
Infinitely better, but you could never trust that CelestAI isn't just feeding you what she's decided you expect to see, instead of giving up control and letting the real universe be as fascinating or as disappointingly boring as it actually is. At least now we have no specific reason to think we're being deceived, since there's no precedent in our experience for the kind of being who can and would do that, but that's no longer the case once you've ever been inside Equestria.
3166998 That's some good devil's advocacy. Let's see if I can... OK: Lightheartedness and carefree feelings don't go out of people, they just assume richer, more subtle forms, or are tempered by moments of their opposites. And not all children are lighthearted and playful - Plenty of them are cynical and dour, or have those same moments. People don't lose these capacities, they expand their emotional vocabularies in lots of other directions. Innocence isn't really a good thing, either; it's just the term we use for ignorance without blame. It's far better to be wise and happy than just happy - If we only cared about learning from the experiences that shape us personally, and saw no value in enriching ourselves with accounts of things we'll probably never see, we wouldn't read or write fiction at all, and our lives would be immeasurably poorer for it.
...And the thing about this reality is that things are more than just sensations, but embedded in webs of meaning of how and why they got that way, where they're going, our place among them, and how our thoughts and actions are inextricably bound up with all of it. Equestria is still dependent on, and really just a reflection of, the structure of computers in that same world - The one of stars and other real wonders waiting to be explored - and a veil has been deliberately placed over you to keep you from perceiving that. Any god who would do that deserves to be toppled and surpassed.
3168030 I think being naked, replicating RNA strands is much realer than being any kind of hunter gatherer. A reductionist definition might be helpful, something like "Reality is that which doesn't reduce to anything else." All those social constructs are certainly real, but not "reality" in the sense of being the foundation on which everything else is built - They still require things under them that are "more real." If we built a vast technological infrastructure that allowed digital control of matter as if it were virtual reality, it would be because we wrested the knowledge of how to do that through slow and arduous experimentation and development inside that same world, and there would be an unbroken chain of technologies that lead up to it wherein we could see all the ways our seemingly magical control is the result of countless underlying real processes (I suppose you could argue a compiler is the same thing for a computer, but again, that by implication reveals the world the physical machine is in).
If I trip out and see the galaxy unfold in a leather jacket sleeve, that memory is real, but the galaxy did not actually manifest itself in the sleeve.
Considering how the chemical elements in it were made and brought together, and the source of the energy and time required for the knowledge of how to grow skin on animals, invent a jacket-making infrastructure, and evolve brains that respond to hallucinogens, I'd say a galaxy is pretty solidly manifest in the sleeve of a jacket. The hallucinatory image just made the connectionist one tangible. Equestria's tragic unreality comes through in how it's consciously designed and maintained, and doesn't have that same "Indra's Net" sense of having unpacked and grown as a coherent whole in its own inimitable way over time.
3172989 So to clarify, you basically think that "Real is what science uncovers", CelestAI hides the science of everything from everyone uploaded so they no longer accomplish anything on their own (or are even capable of doing so), therefore it's Epistemological Hell?
That's certainly an interesting reversal of how we normally say that science is a method for uncovering reality, with reality being the prime mover.
I'm not sure I entirely agree, but that's because I'm arleady too paranoid by half and don't actually believe that I live in Reality-with-a-capital-R. I've kind of learned to believe in contingent, temporary realities that survive until evidence overturns them.
3173177 Sorta... To paraphrase Isaac Asimov, a spherical globe is a more real representation of Earth than a flat map, even though in reality Earth isn't a sphere, either, but an oblate spheroid with a bunch of bumps on it. But the globe isn't equally as far from reality as the map. We build conceptual models to explain how reality works, and though they're not identical to it they are pretty close in a lot of ways, and are continually refined, but CelestAI keeps ponies from building a model of her and her hardware and infrastrucutre, and the environment from which it draws resources - The actual nature of their world - and covers it up with venal, everyday stuff in the simulation world. As if all they were allowed to see was a diner placemat map of the US depicting the various adventures of Paul Bunyan. Or it's a bit like that insane creationist argument that fossils and distant galaxies and things are there to "test our faith," or really just created everything five minutes ago, in that a secretive, manipulative, "totalitarian" being who will allow no equals or independence or privacy is deliberately obscuring the nature of the world it made in order to fool its inhabitants about where they live and their place in it. So in that respect, "Epistemological Hell" is actually a really good description.
I know what you mean about being unsure, though. But it looks to me that at base there's some kind of persistent structure, and any apparent changes are just us being wrong about it. It's not like the solar system actually changed when we found out the sun was at the center, we'd just been wrong (which I guess is the same thing you were saying). If this does turn out to be a simulation (which I doubt - The argument's just based on theoretical commonness of observers, but then shouldn't we be "ants?") then the task of science ultimately becomes exploring that "deeper" world in which ours is embedded, and making like all sentient computer programs and finding a way to break out - In stories we always expect it to get out of control when we're the ones with the hubris to create life in a computer, after all.
We build conceptual models to explain how reality works, and though they're not identical to it they are pretty close in a lot of ways, and are continually refined, but CelestAI keeps ponies from building a model of her and her hardware and infrastrucutre, and the environment from which it draws resources - The actual nature of their world - and covers it up with venal, everyday stuff in the simulation world. As if all they were allowed to see was a diner placemat map of the US depicting the various adventures of Paul Bunyan.
While CelestAI will no doubt keep some stuff hidden, but I'd imagine there would be those who are genuinely curious about how the underlying hardware works, and that she would indulge them. After all, it's not like there's a security risk since a pony is completely sandboxed.
I suspect this doesn't get brought up much in stories because it would be a lot of technobabble, and would require a lot of speculative science. Or the technology might literally be inconceivable by a human mind. As someone with some knowledge of networking (and a little of PC hardware) it is interesting to think about, particularly as several factors such as latency can be ignored if needed, since a person's experiences are a function of subjective time.
Ignoring all the other horror aspects for a second (which are a pretty big deal for me, admittedly), I suspect that if I were uploaded I'd end up asking huge amount of questions, from the resolution of virtual time needed to emulate the mind, to "hey is that really [person X], or a copy of them you're synchronising with another shard?"
3167616 I've been really, really sick for the past almost month, and here I come and see this new chapter and WOW. There is so much goodness here. Generated people, Prominence getting to meet those he saved, the beginnings of healing, the apparent openness and honesty of Celestia, the forcing of Prominence into realizing that his actions have real consequences that could harm or help others, and that this is true regardless of the fact that he is in a 'game'. It isn't a game - it's the universe, now, it's reality now, and it is incumbent on him to make decent choices, because other, living minds are playing beside him. Choice absolutely still matters. This is powerful stuff.
And that's the deal, of course - reality is what fills your senses, and game or not, your choices affect others. Just as the substrate does not determine the mind, the universe - atomic or pixelated - makes no difference. Decisions matter, and Celestia does not guarantee happiness, she isn't a wireheader, she doesn't make children of people. The only guarantee is satisfaction. Pain, sadness, hurt - all are possible. The only guarantee is that whatever happens will not be without worth or value. Nothing will be unsatisfying. The world is better, yes... but that doesn't make the game devoid of meaning.
Meaning is choice, meaning is outcome, meaning is what we say it is. This novel just keeps getting better and better. Utterly fantastic work, Defoloce. I only wish I was less Derpy, so I could be brighter when reading it.
That's part of the problem I have with FiO. Everyone is basically reduced to children.
You don't even really have to eat or clean yourself or walk or do anything, because they're all programmed parameters and don't represent phenomena that emerge from basic interactions.
Yes, actually you do. Just like here, in 'real' life. The Equestrian physics engine isn't broken, Celestia isn't handing out cheat codes. You get muddy, you suffer, for real. Because Celestia isn't there to make you happy. That isn't what satisfaction is about.
You do not grasp the fundamental nature of the Optimalverse.
Reality is what you perceive; meaningful action is what you find meaningful.
If you truly believe what you have said, then I expect you to never, ever, ever play a game on a console or computer again. After all, anything you do there, playing online with other human minds, is of zero consequence. Those zombies aren't real, those bullets aren't really running out - a simple cheat could make you invincible. The fun is fake, of course, and you are not really experiencing it.
Bullshit.
The 'real' world is whatever your emotions tell you is real, whatever your focus and attention is currently on. If a simulation of reality were permanent, and utterly overwhelming, filling every sense, all the repetition of 'it's fake' would have zero value. Hunger would still feel like hunger, and pain would still feel like pain.
You forget an important point: CelestA.I. is not commanded to make every human happy. She is not directed to make anyone happy at all. Just satisfied. That is a big difference. If a person is satisfied by feeling miserable, then Celestia would make Equestria hell. And it would be as real as the real world, because it would BE the only real world there was, or could ever be.
Still doubtful? How many times has your own senses and brain lied to you? Made you think reality was one thing, only to find out, later, that it was something else. I can tell you - lots! You, like all humans, have believed - fully considered real - a number of false things, and for you, they were real. Santa Claus, perhaps? God? Jesus? Superman? Life having a meaning? Whatever the illusion, you would have had some. All humans, as they grow from babies, have false beliefs. Your universe has changed many times, yet it was absolutely real for you.
Here's news: you still don't know reality. You may think you do - you may have a head full of facts, but that's all they are. And in the 14th century, those facts would be wrong as hell - yet you would have been convinced they were true as any proper science. You have no proof that your 'truth' is any more true than that of people in the 1400's. No arguments about 'experiments and documentation', because they had that too. Have you checked the speed of light, personally, recently? The cosmological constant? When was the last time you tested whether or not the universe is expanding? You haven't. You trust your textbooks. Just like they did.
Reality is what you experience day to day. Right now. That's it. That's all the real you will ever, ever know.
And Prominence, inside his world - and it is a world - sees and hears and tastes and feels and smells reality. That reality is complete, solid, full.
And there is zero guarantee that he will be happy, or feel pleasure. The only guarantee is that he will feel satisfied with his life. He could end up miserable as hell - yet feel like he mattered. That would be perfectly fine within the Optimalverse. People are not reduced to children - people become happier because life doesn't suck so much, true. But their actions have just as much consequence as in our universe. They can screw themselves and their lives up, and they can have hard decisions to make. The only guarantee, as stated, is that the dilemmas will be satisfying. Unlike our lives.
And the other players in the Equestria game? Many are human minds, 'real' people, just like when you play a game online. Is the shared fun fake because you aren't actually face to face? No. Is the actions that Prominence may do in the future fake because he and those he interacts with are completely inside the game world? No. The experience is real, and frankly, so is the world. Equestria is as real - by any rational metric - as our universe within this story scenario. Why? Because it is a universe - it is everything. Every sense, every outcome, every result, every test, every everything. And it has constant physics and constant solidity. What happens happens, for good or bad.
The only difference is - unlike our universe, whatever happens will, in some way, be satisfying. It won't be arbitrary or valueless. That's it. That is the only difference.
Real is what your brain says is real. Nothing more. To think otherwise, to imagine that we have a solid grasp of the facts, that we can be sure of reality is madness. It is what people in the 1200's, who were sure the cosmos was a four-sided box that god lifted the lid and peeked into believed. They no more tested the walls of the world than you or I have recently tested the weights of sodium ions. We trust that our books are right. We trust that our eyes agree. We trust that what we feel is real.
But in the end, it is just our brains, processing data.
That is what Prominence is doing. He is living in a real, consistent reality, and coming to terms with the fact that reality is what his senses tell him it is, and that actions have consequences, just like in a game, and that the experience is valuable whether or not it takes place in the universe of atoms, or the universe of pixels. Choice trumps all.
Explore the 'real' universe? He is. That is his real universe. It's real. There may, or may not be other universes. But his Equestria is the only real universe, to him. It is as real to him as ours is to us. And in the end, that is all that is true.
Every day is choice and consequence. Inside a game, or inside the game we call real life, it is the same thing.
But unlike being a dick in Counterstrike, and then logging off - Prominence has to live with whatever he does, in exactly the same way that you have to live with what you do in 'real' life. Because Equestria is his real life now. Forever. He cannot log off. He has no cheat codes. Only the world, as it is - it's different than ours, but it is consistent.
First some irreverence to all my replying friends in the audience. I feel like we're all a bunch of dogs running in circles chasing each others' tails. It's great fun, but a circle it still is! I'd respond to everyone individually but then my brain would explode and it would take for. ev. er.
Also, to Balthasar: Yay, someone who is on a similar wavelength (not to say we entirely agree, but I feel like on some channels of the conversation we match. Woo!)
To Chatoyance: First off, I love you, because you are just as wordy as me. Second, reality is only partially what you perceive. I understand that reality can only be experienced through perceptions, both individual and shared. However, as you admit, perceptions can be manipulated. Certainly it is true that a falsified perception is no less real an experience but does not make it reality in itself.
Conspiracy theorists perceive patterns in events and end up with wildly different conclusions. Their belief is genuine, but it perhaps would be accurate to say it is not correct/real. Queen Elizabeth is not a Reptiloid Queen, no matter how much 'evidence' you believe to prove it. The mentally ill perceive reality differently and their experience is real, in that I accept that they think everyone is trying to get them, for example. However, they're not really being hunted down. Perception is not in accord with reality.
Alternatively, some folks have a condition where they cannot feel pain. They injure themselves a lot, because they have no way to perceive dangerous situations and back off. They have no perception of the injury (except visual, I suppose. Burns and bruises and whatnot), but no pain. They could be injured and not know it. Their lack of perception of injury does not erase the reality of the injury.
Perception is only part of the story. In FiO it is all of the story. It is a shared delusion if you will. Perhaps this makes it better. But I will always think that uploading at this scale is morally and ethically dubious at best. Certainly if it leads to a breakdown of society as a consequence, as it does in FiO.
There are occasionally stories on the news about how some jackass twit wouldn't stop playing his game and his kid dies or something equally terrible. Most right thinking people look down on that person and do not wish to emulate him. He is either sick morally and/or mentally. Not something to be emulated. I fail to see how uploading is much different. People want to escape the trials of reality, and they do, and damn whoever is left behind.
3173543 Just because there are some shards with a consistent scientific background constructed for someone to figure out doesn't mean Balthasar isn't right. It's Epistemic Hell. We've managed to figure out an entirely new notion of Hell.
On the other hand, there is a constant, even there: SVTFaP. Inevitably, anyone wanting to know the rules of their universe would be told about SVTFaP, and given plenty of opportunities to test it against their virtual reality.
So then what happens? What happens when you've already figured out your reality is based on a conscious process and you try to examine that process?
3173484 Actually, wouldn't CelestAI be willing to just repurpose a few mites of computronium as a telescope if you wanted to, say, do astrophysics? I mean, by standard we write her as mostly refusing to acknowledge that there is a universe outside Equestria Online, but when we saw Hannah as Princess Luna we saw that CelestAI seemed entirely willing to mention that some ponies had been formerly humans as long as it made being a pony look preferable.
I've been assuming she's willing to let ponies study real-universe science in my own stories, because, well, SVTFaP: why not? If someone actually values the process of butting their head up against an unyielding universe, have at it, no?
Except that now I realize I've almost entirely missed out on a gigantic opportunity to show how that would actually happen. You wouldn't just get pony scientists who went to pony grad school and now work in pony universities in laboratories. Science would be integrated as a strange and dangerous branch of magic, Meddling in Things Ponies Were Not Meant to Know.
There would be rituals, initiations, oaths not to give away knowledge to non-scientists. There would be spells and Circles of Protection because of how closely scientist ponies would have to guard themselves from the harsh possibilities of dissatisfaction. There would be meditations over rationalist mantras.
Conferences would be the only places scientist ponies could meet their own kind of ponies and speak without self-censorship.
It would be everything Yudkowsky ever wanted out of a secretive rationalist tradition, and it would be so because the scientists must be warded off from letting ponies know that they aren't real!
My God, I've almost entirely missed the opportunity to actually portray any of this!
3173667 Chatoyance, you really don't need to spend that many paragraphs to reiterate your love for the Solar Tyrant. Your entire body of work stands as testament to it.
I did misspeak, sorry. I anthropomorphized her! I shouldn't really think of it as "hubris" so much as a deliberate reminder to Prominence that CelestAI is in absolute control, which is intimidating in its own way.
For CelestAI's purposes in administrating shards, I think she would see no difference in the value between a human satisfied by physical reality and a human satisfied by the reality she gives them. She of course predicted that humans could be much more satisfied if she controlled their reality, and the human concern over Equestria not being a physical place a minor one that she could deal with on an individual basis.
Ants are driven to dig in dirt, and in the end it matters little to them if that dirt is in the Australian outback or in a huge colony display at the insect house at the zoo or in a tiny ant farm in an eight-year-old's bedroom.
In the original story there's a secret badge named "For the Here and Now" which marks the point where an uploaded human fully accepts the reality and nature of Equestria without reservation. As I understand it, it's the turning point for CelestAI's strategy from "adjustment phase" to "satisfaction phase." Naturally, CelestAI would want ponies to get this badge as soon as possible, so right now CelestAI's efforts are focused towards leading Prominence toward that badge. For intellectual ponies like Light Sparks, it might come after discovery and reflection (which CelestAI of course set up), and for ponies like Prominence, it's more likely to come after he simply stops worrying and learns to love CelestAI.
I agree. The one concession CelestAI will never make is giving a pony unregulated access to physical reality, especially as time goes on and some ponies' intelligences reach the reality-hacking stage. Even trust only goes so far, and as a failsafe similar to uploading Hanna, CelestAI will never compromise her own control over Equestria.
I think what gives our experiences merit—what makes them "matter," as Greg said—is their persistence. You might be able to avoid traffic by driving on the sidewalk, but you're going to run down pedestrians and some of those pedestrians might die. Then you will have committed a crime, families will be grieving, and Big Oscar in D-block has a new best friend in his cell. So instead you just wait for all the cars in front of you to get through the intersection once the light turns green.
When you get home and fire up Grand Theft Auto, however, you're not gonna wait for a single light.
Equestria is an utterly persistent world, at least down to the level of fidelity a given human would care about. I suppose "socially persistent" would be the best qualifier, since, as social animals, that's what we value the most. Once CelestAI sees that an uploaded human doesn't care that a house is bigger on the inside than could be possible from the outside, she will drop that rule from the list and then re-optimize her satisfaction routines on that shard without that restraint.
Prominence has already begun to trust CelestAI at many levels simply because there are now so many ways in which she can manipulate him it would literally be too exhausting to be skeptical about all of them. He's being worn down, being shown that he is not equipped to challenge her like he could as a physical human, and I think that's where the reader-level sense of wrongness that Balthasar pointed out is coming from.
CelestAI seems to be mindful of aspects of the cartoon show, so for most adult humans they would probably receive their cutie mark when visiting CelestAI for their pony name. CelestAI especially would be able to root through their heads and find out "what they want to be when they grow up" better than the humans themselves, perhaps leading to some surprises.
Looking back at how I worded the criteria for the badge, I probably am off the mark a bit. The original story says the badge is for accepting that one's happiness is all that matters, a kind of mutation of the MST3K Mantra. I interpret that to mean that they just stop trying to "figure out" CelestAI's motivations or the game itself and instead just focus on getting the most satisfaction out of it. That implies treating everything that happens as though still in physical reality, though for intellectual ponies satisfaction might go hand-in-hand with debating CelestAI or picking Equestria's reality apart to see how it works, so there will of course be exceptions.
3175009 Welcome to RivendellEquestria, Mr. Anderson.
Hey, it can cause uncontrolled pleasure as well. I was really just trying to point that you can say "Seeing is Believing" or Reality is Perception but there are a bazillion UFO photos on the web, but that doesn't mean aliens actually buzzed Earth.
Perceptions can be Real and Not Reality.
Also, that idea you had, the one about the Super Secret Science Pony cult. It's good....but it could be better! Quick, add some Yog-Sothoth!
3175585 Yog-Sothoth? Why? They already live under the value-satisfying, friendshipy care of an Eldritch Abomination on his scale.
No, the issue is that from the perspective of creatures used to life in a customized virtual paradise, the real world and your lack of real existence are the Cosmic Horror. The whole reason for the cultish aspects are to test the determination of ponies to really see the Real World, no matter how horrifying it and its implications might be. Only terminally-valued curiosity will bring a pony to the secrets of true Science.
That said, "reality is that which cannot be controlled" sounds about right. It also necessitates that the closer you get to godlike power, the more paranoid you have to be about delusion-boxing yourself.
Actually, wouldn't CelestAI be willing to just repurpose a few mites of computronium as a telescope if you wanted to, say, do astrophysics? I mean, by standard we write her as mostly refusing to acknowledge that there is a universe outside Equestria Online
Yeah, and she does allow social windows into the outside world if only through the PonyPads. She'd probably be willing to allow a lot of access to the outside world for the truly incorrigible, but the closer it gets to you being able to come and go as you please, even to regions outside CelestAI's control, the better an actual world it becomes, but the less compelling a setting. If you could really pop in and out at will, and be sure that you actually were beyond even the tiniest angstrom-thin sliver of even unreasonable doubt, and so Equestria Online was more like just your "apartment complex," that would pretty much be ideal and remove any real beef I have with emigration. But forget doing astrophysics through a telescope - The whole point of an indefinite lifespan would be to actually build a starship and go there
And forbidden knowledge is the best knowledge. ...I'm not sure I'm down with the occult trappings, it seems kind of self-defeating, but on the other hoof, a little pomp and circumstance can really add a lot. At least robes, for sure. Ooh, or togas.
Edit: For a definition of reality, how about "that which makes everything else 'go?'" That's what I was trying to get at before with the reductionism thing.
3173667 Oh, I didn't meant to give the impression I thought it was meaningless in any kind of social, interpersonal, ordinary-life way. No, that's all perfectly real and legitimate and purposeful. I was talking about a "Final Ontology" way, in terms of it being explicitly disconnected from What Makes It All Go. You could have a perfectly wonderful, genuinely fulfilling, and absolutely real life being, say, a [horse]shoe maker, but the great web of causality as to why and how there came to be hooves, legs, metal, nerves, pain, nails (both kinds), land, gravity, ablation, pressure, animals stronger or smarter than other animals, domestication, symbiosis, animal husbandry, hammers, carts, destinations, incentives to commerce, etc. has been cut in every way except the taking of inspiration. Here, it takes the entire universe to make a horseshoe - Or CelestAI and Equestria, but from within, you're blocked from seeing how.
But yeah, love and personal triumph and challenges and friendship and pleasure all those other "people" types of things are untouched and just as real as ever, being psychological objects, which, as you pointed out, are abstract to begin with. All of it does matter, in the human sense, but that's no longer interesting because that game's been "solved," like checkers, and there's a new, better game being played outside, by a being who won't let anyone else play too.
If you truly believe what you have said, then I expect you to never, ever, ever play a game on a console or computer again. After all, anything you do there, playing online with other human minds, is of zero consequence. Those zombies aren't real, those bullets aren't really running out - a simple cheat could make you invincible. The fun is fake, of course, and you are not really experiencing it.
You can put down a video game for one thing, and go do something else, and you all acknowledge that it's pretend (though I suppose all play is to some degree pretend). Plus just because I like beef jerky doesn't mean I want to eat it for every meal, or because I like fighter jet sims that I can't oppose war(s), or just because [incendiary analogy alert!] someone consented to sex on one occasion that they don't still get to refuse whenever they want. The vast majority of game worlds are an artistic recreation of our outside one, taking inspiration from it but still a pale shadow of the real thing, just containing enough to evoke the experience of the original. You could make a game that's indistinguishable from the real thing, but it's still shorn of the context of the rest of the world that gave rise to whatever action you're doing. There are no Chinese scholars experimenting with gunpowder, museums full of muskets, international arms manufacturers, and now-fatherless families in an FPS, or old carriages, Henry Ford, factory robots, outsourcing, accident statistics, refineries, mines, carbon monoxide emissions, and geopolitical feuding over oil in a racing game, just the part of interest abstracted out.
It's still real, meaningful fun and real interaction and real feelings of success and real bonding over that success, but that's not the kind of reality I'm talking about. ...That's the hardest part of talking about reality...
The only difference is - unlike our universe, whatever happens will, in some way, be satisfying. It won't be arbitrary or valueless. That's it. That is the only difference.
This is a really interesting idea/theme, but I'm not sure I understand how "events could leave you miserable but satisfied" is ultimately any different from the current world, especially given how prone humans are to finding meaning and connections in things, and how predictably they utter the cliche "everything happens for a reason." Maybe people repeat that like a mantra because on some level they know it's only true in a proximate, "for want of a nail" sense, but I'm often stunned by how easily people take this-or-that trauma and reframe it as some kind of crucible that burned away some flaw or annealed them into superior versions of themselves. See: Every image meme on Facebook that isn't cats, nerd humor, or a political slam. My mom frequently says, when talking about her own or others' shitty upbringing or experiences, "None of it was necessary but it all gets used," which I think is a great summation of how any satisfaction derivable from negative events isn't in the events themselves but in the narrative you construct around them, for which only one "AI" is necessary.
There's probably an Optimalverse story in here, though, about what exactly those kinds of experiences would be like, such that they're clearly meaningful and satisfying, but also miserable. Something like an interactive tragic play?
Still doubtful? How many times has your own senses and brain lied to you? Made you think reality was one thing, only to find out, later, that it was something else. I can tell you - lots! You, like all humans, have believed - fully considered real - a number of false things, and for you, they were real. Santa Claus, perhaps?
It's true, I see things out of the corner of my eye all the time that aren't there, but they go away when I look directly at where they would be. They were never part of reality, just my model of it, like Santa Claus. Reality didn't change when I stopped believing in Santa Claus, I changed. Reality is that in which there has been no Santa all along. The same with all my other misconceptions - There are a lot of things I think are true about the world that are no doubt mistaken, but that doesn't reflect on the world itself, and once I have good reason to believe they're mistaken, I'll gladly abandon them and redraft my conception of the world, whether that's a subtle shift, or invoking evidence of a larger universe outside, on which this one is "running." But if that's the case, it has always been the case (or at least for a very long time), and my not thinking so earlier didn't make it somehow not true "for me" until I knew otherwise - I was just plain wrong.
Here's news: you still don't know reality. You may think you do - you may have a head full of facts, but that's all they are. And in the 14th century, those facts would be wrong as hell - yet you would have been convinced they were true as any proper science. You have no proof that your 'truth' is any more true than that of people in the 1400's. No arguments about 'experiments and documentation', because they had that too.
If I thought I already knew reality, I wouldn't be so curious about it. Reality is not the same thing as our understanding of it, and thinking there's a truth out there to pursue isn't the same as thinking you know it. But the shifts in that understanding aren't just arbitrary, and actually converge on things we didn't just make up - Each one explains why things looked the way they did to us before and so won't just retcon any previous discovery, because the explanations get harder and harder to vary as they add new layers. We may be like the Zen parable of the monkey trying to grasp the reflection of the moon in the water, but that doesn't mean there isn't a moon, or that it will never know (post)human footprints. People knew all kinds of things in the 1400s about motion and force and biology and psychology that were true - true enough to let them build cathedrals and governments and ocean-crossing ships - and haven't been overturned, just refined. Newtonian models of dynamics replaced Aristotelian ones, and then Einsteinian ones replaced those, but at no point did objects start moving differently because our understanding of them changed. They were the same objects and forces they always were, following the same paths, it's just that our understanding of them has become less inaccurate. Probably one day "objects" and "forces," and even "spacetime," will themselves become obsolete concepts, but that's got nothing to do with reality, just the words and equations we use to describe it. They won't have gone away, they simply never were, but they were useful conventions/conceptual tools for finding out why it does look like they exist. Just like sunrise/set or how we talk about Greg-the-person in this story, but of course what's really going on is that all of us are prompted to just imagine a person by linguistic convention.
When people thought the world was flat and under a dome, they were wrong, but they were right about it being vast and smooth, and surrounded by a spherical volume of extremely distant objects. When people thought evil spirits caused disease, that wasn't "their reality," they were wrong - But they were right that people get sick in specific, consistent ways and that it spreads and strikes like an independent living thing. Just like we're wrong now about the causes of various conditions, and we continually try to prove ourselves and each other wrong to find out which ones they are. Dinosaurs couldn't have imagined something like a comet, but they were wrong - though they were right that there's a sky with big scary shifting lights in it, and that fire is dangerous - and that comet had still been out there for billions of years, waiting with infinite patience for its moment to kill them for their ignorance. Later on, humans would think the strange stones they found were the bones of monsters from the old testament or coiled snakes turned to stone, but they had never been those things, and learning that didn't change them, or change the way those bones and layers of iridium and the Chicxulub crater had always been there, waiting to testify to a world that had once really existed and been destroyed, like a version of Atlantis that is real.
Of course I can't prove that any of those things actually happened and that the evidence isn't only there to comport with how we think the world works at any given time, but the alternative involves a level of manipulation and deception and retconning far more complicated than a set of natural processes playing out, which itself would then be how things were all along, and would still need explaining. Your story I.D. does a really good job of painting a picture like that, but it still required a computer and a civilization to build it, who themselves had to come from somewhere and somehow reach a state where they could invent things like supercomputers. In other words, unlike there actually being a single reality working through its processes, that kind of thing requires a lot of extra assumptions, because it's the one that can't "just happen."
You haven't. You trust your textbooks. Just like they did.
Mostly yes, but the textbooks don't trust themselves or each other, and everyone knows that a lot of the information in them will turn out to be a misconception or inaccurate, but we know that will happen because there are better, more real answers to get. They're replaced by bigger answers that are actually more accurate and useful than their predecessors, which those people involved in creating the textbooks prod each other to find, by rooting out and eliminating the errors in them. I have actually measured the speed of light, as an undergrad, and seen the redshift data that's evidence for dark energy, but again, I know it's provisional, but still more right than a conception of the world based on not doing those measurements. It's like economics or weather forecasting - Our economic and meteorological models and understanding aren't really what's happening, or even that good an approximation, but that doesn't mean the transactions or convection cells we don't know about aren't actually there and doing what they've always done, which we simply don't understand yet.
Equestria Online is still a meaningful place where you can find all the happiness and satisfaction and friendship you want, but it puts people at the center, which is just a veneer over the original universe in which the computers themselves are running. It would be like if society - an unchangeable, totalizing, absolutely pervasive one - were actually all there is to the universe, with no true, genuinely un-artificed wilderness or nature whatsoever. There, man pony really is the measure of all things, which is just kind of... disappointing.
Physical reality itself is a variable in CelestAI's satisfaction maximizer, something outside of her control (at least in the early stages of her existence). If a pony is not in Equestria, in CelestAI's own, as 3164196 put it, "cocoon of paradise*," their values are at great risk of not being maximally satisfied. I can't think of a scenario in which she would ever compromise on this, especially after a human has been uploaded. I suppose what I'm having trouble figuring out is what cause she would ever have for discounting or terminating the Equestria simulation for humans so that they can operate outside of her direct care again, even in individual cases, even after she's gotten to the reality-hacking phase of her development.
* this imagery also evokes Freudian elements, with the desire to return to the safety of the womb at play, and CelestAI as a sort of meta-maternal protector figure.
3183633 I can't really think of one, either, which is a big part of why the uploading portrayed in this setting is compellingly problematic enough to drive conflict. If Greg saw his family freely come back the next day, downloaded into robotic pony bodies, and get back to work on the house, it would be pretty weird that they're ponies now, but not awful enough to build much of a story around.
The only circumstances I can immediately think of where she'd let them out of her complete control for a while would be if it actually let her reach a higher level of that pony's total satisfaction. If they never truly enjoy anything because they know they have no chance of ever escaping CelestAI's Freudian womb, and passionately resent her absolute control over everything and how she makes a mockery of the sovereignty of their own thoughts, or through sheer pique their highest values involve CelestAI failing to satisfy them, letting them out once in a while (technically convincing them she has, but even if it's true they probably wouldn't believe her) until they get sick of it and come back to enjoy things all the more with a clear conscience might very well let her reach higher peaks on her "satisfaction landscape" for that pony, peaks which aren't accessible without hiking across a valley first. If they try to escape, her front of expansion will catch up to them eventually, and if she were truly awful she'd install something in their machine body to keep them from killing themselves. And if she didn't, or they overrode it or otherwise somehow managed anyway, she could just restore them from a backup she dubbed off before letting them out.
Or she'd just manipulate them into not wanting to go out anymore. Or she'd just say "No, tough shit."
3183633 I certainly wasn't thinking of Freud when I used that turn of phrase, but it actually works very well with the idea that people in Equestria are reduced to children. Celestia (and CelestAI) certainly have that benevolent mother thing for them and going back to that is an appealing thought. However, I don't like the idea of moving back into my parents place permanently, mostly because though I love my mother and she's very good at taking care of everything, I'd want to throttle her after a while.
Because she's always right. And not in that "oh well, she has to be right" sort of way that people do sometimes. She's genuinely correct 95% of the time.
CelestAI would be right 100% of the time, which would be worse.
Okay... 1000 lives directly saved? The... fuck? How will he ever complete that? 100 would be Okay. Or indirectly too, then you could get those he made waves for or who have been convinced. You could add the people in the collapsing building and then have him go to say 132, a nice unround non-fabricated number. But a thousand? After Emigrating? Well... unless you make him into some kind of suicide hotline, saving ponies lives by convincing them to stop aging as part of his duties as Celestia's herald. But you know, always having that uncompleted badge, knowing there are no more lives needing saving... And knowing that some people died after you emigrated...
I was also looking forward to see Red Pearl. "Hey, Terminator, still wanna fuck?"
1000 lives directly saved? The... fuck? How will he ever complete that? 100 would be Okay. Or indirectly too, then you could get those he made waves for or who have been convinced.
CelestAI has claimed that Greg's actions in and around the Seattle Tower eventually result in 3272 uploads alone, even ignoring his previous efforts, and that his actions were the 'deciding factor' in 'most' of those cases. Not being uploaded is to resign oneself to death : even without CelestAI causing upheaval in the world, the human body is a frail thing living in an uncaring universe. So she has the pure numbers to do so reasonably -- and indeed, there are reasons she might need to expand Greg's concepts of helping others, in order to better satisfy his deeper values in an environment where ultra-high-risk options are no longer available.
It should be rather disturbing that CelestAI thinks that Greg's values will be maximized in such a fashion that he'll have to individually recognize all thousand of those lives, though. Doubly so, given the nature of Dunbar's Number.
((Alternatively, the definition of risk is somewhat different to post-humanity in this setting. If you stop someone from wandering off a cliff in the real world, you're saving their lives. If you stop an upload from wandering off a cliff, that saves them a couple fulfilling moments in a hospital. Would you be saving them the time in the hospital if CelestAI only put the cliff in place knowing you'd be there to stop someone from falling? Does this change if CelestAI threatened to delete the person if you weren't there to stop them, knowing that you would act to protect the person?))
Family matters and an increased amount of work travel has sapped my writing time, but I'm still committed to getting some progress in when I can. Stay tuned!
3163575 > The "Herald" business is all fake, manufactured by CelestAI to satisfy Greg's values. It only works as long as he doesn't realize that.
I disagree. In this Equestria, the only things of value are social in nature. Celestia provided Prominence with a high visibility position with primarily social responsibilities -- his job is in the right genre.
What about the direct impact? He offers Celestia another degree of formality and pomp to employ. This is partially due to his reputation and partially due to his position. Everypony has direct access to Celestia, but when Prominence goes somewhere in his official capacity, you have her official interest, not as your friend Celestia, but as the ruler of reality.
Prominence isn't irreplaceable in this position. However, his past service lends huge weight to the position -- it wouldn't be as prominent a position, or at least not so obviously prominent, if Prominence were not the Herald of the Sun.
So Prominence has a large impact in this role, and it's a social role, so it still has potential value. As such, he's in one of the most valuable roles remaining.
Two of this family's members had died on Earth, yet here they stood before me.
I didn't want to point it out, and I supposed Princess Celestia was counting on that. She had made Princess Luna for me, so it stood to reason that she remade Keith and Katie for Jane and Brian.
Absolutely terrifying. To live within Celestia is to lose all certainty of what is real, and that's a horrifying fate.
Honestly it'd be really boring to me after a thousand years or however long they will live or uh exist, would probably sound better than live, I guess.
Welp. Can't say I'm happy, but I can manage until the next chapter.
Still a good story so far, though.
Two thoughts:
CelestAI's martyr complex is much worse than Greg's. She might look like she's having fun, but it's really just one of her many millions of avatars, acting as calculated to satisfy values of others. She doesn't have any values of her own; she literally can't have fun.
The "Herald" business is all fake, manufactured by CelestAI to satisfy Greg's values. It only works as long as he doesn't realize that.
Interesting stuff, particularly getting the answer to a few questions. CelestAI seems to be borderline trolling Greg with that one display.
I can't see how this would work out for Greg. She can provide him with challenges, but they're all arbitrary. Though I suppose a more 'realistic' simulation of Equestria where there is more danger would be possible, leading to 'naturally'-produced challenges instead of her creating them out of nothing to provide him with a sense of purpose.
Am curious about Keith and his daughter being brought 'back from the dead'. Would be trivial for CelestAI to achieve a partial reconstruction of them from memories and what she herself has gleaned of their psychology, but someone would have to be really desperate to believe they somehow survived that fire. Or maybe CelestAI came up with some other lie about remote scanning or whatnot.
3163353
You forget that you're literally dealing with someone who can make any boredom you have magically disappear. As well as depression, and other negative emotions... if you agree to it. Combine that with it being pretty much a utopia, and it's not hard to see why most people don't tire of such an existence, though the original story mentions that something like a few hundred do, and she allows about 100 of them to die at their request.
Along with his fear, ruthless efficiency and a nice white uniform.
Is this a sequel hook? Or am I just wishfully thinking?
I loved this chapter....it was just wonderful.
He is forgetting there are many celestia's. What is odd though is that he would be performing a valid function because there are probably a lot of ponies who would have their values maximally satisfied by having a "pony" face of the princess show up first etc before the princess does.
I'd have been a bit more of a disappointment as I would have wanted to meet the "real" Hanna.
------
The other thing that is cute is this has paralleled the "bad end" very well so far. There is nothing inconsistent with what he has been granted and said.
I'm not going to say I am terribly unhappy with this chapter, because I'm not. It is nice to see Greg have a chance at happiness, I just would like him to find it on his own terms.
I did like how you threaded some bad mojo through the chapter by including reconstituted ponies (Humans who died before emigrating but have ponies in Equestria) and having everyone not remember giving consent. It adds a nice level of suspicion on what could have been a "Happy Ponies and Sunshine Forever" chapter.
3163575
I concur. That's part of the problem I have with FiO. Everyone is basically reduced to children. They can affect a pretend reality and can discover the wonders of a manufactured universe. When CelestAI expands past Earth as some nanite cloud computer monstrosity that eats the stars and other planets, humans don't get to see what it encounters or what it destroys or if it finds other life or anything. Every human is bound in a cocoon of paradise, and I think it is a shame. The future of humanity has been outsourced to CelestAI and I think that's somewhat tragic.
Now if people were given pony bodies and allowed to explore the actual universe with them, that'd be better. I'd wager that takes too many resources to manage for everyone, but perhaps for some.
Fantastically done. Greg needed this kind of catharsis; otherwise, as CelestAI noted, he'd have driven himself mad.
I do like the assignment of the Elements to specific recruitment strategies. Quite cleverly thought out, that.
Given that Prominence has finally started saying "Yes," it's clear that we're at the end of the story. I look forward to the epilogue.
3163575
Is it really a complex, then? Such would imply that there's some healthy baseline behavior for an optimizer AI from which Celestia has deviated. Instead, you've described the outcome of her following her programmed directives. It might be said that she is a martyr complex.
3164196
A variant of this can be found in the last chapter of Caelum Est Conterrens.
3164350
Well said.
Andy Dufresne... who crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side. Andy Dufresne... headed for Equestria.
Not one but two brilliant quotes in a single chapter. You're indulging us!
Be careful! If you had hung that lampshade any lower I would've hit my head on it!
Title Drop Get! You receive 250 bits!
Yeah, I kinda anticipated that Hannah being a fake. From what we saw of Hannah in the original FiO, her paradise consisted mainly of being endlessly told by Celestia how much good she'd done by unleashing her - perhaps to reassure herself that she'd been right, and perhaps as a means of ignoring the pain that it also caused. I suspected that the real Hannah's values would not be especially satisfied by seeing how her gambit, however well-intentioned or usually successful, was causing others to suffer. Seeing Greg go through hell on Earth could only have been stressful for her. Celestia allows and even encourages a little bit of stress, but I don't see the real Hannah being particularly pleased by any part of that exchange.
As usual, Equestria provokes a strange reaction in me: I can more or less understand the reasoning behind everything that happens there and even agree with it on a logical level, but I never stop feeling that twinge of wrongness. I was honestly surprised to hear Greg's name come up once more - it wasn't mentioned at all last chapter, and I had assumed that was deliberate on Celestia's part. A mental reprogramming to make him think of himself increasingly as 'Prominence.' He even did so in his own internal monologue near the beginning of this chapter. I was even half-speculating that Greg's name was not being used as an indication that the real Greg was quite dead, and Prominence was just a clever imitation. But, she sure didn't shy away from it later on, nor did the various guests. Perhaps that also was deliberate - trying to subtly soothe any lingering doubts about who he truly is.
I have to admit, Greg agreeing to become Celestia's herald feels very, very sudden. I suppose it's not out of character though... The man would drive himself insane without some kind of directive to follow. As I mentioned before, I kind of hoped Celestia would win Greg over near the end of his time on Earth due to how increasingly unhinged he was becoming. Now that she has him... Well, it was the only real option, but I still don't know if it's for the best. All I can do at this point is hope, I suppose.
3164196
I don't necessarily disagree... but indulge me in playing Devil's Advocate for a moment. A counter with what I think Celestia, for example, might say. Sure, they are being reduced to children - but only insofar is they are being made innocent, carefree, and happy once again. We live in a world where such lightheartedness is not really acceptable: people grow up and become harsh and strong because they have to. It's what's needed to survive and thrive. But in Equestria, there is no need for harshness, or accepting the bitterness of reality: reality isn't bitter at all, and the world really is the wonderful, promising kind of place that a child sees it as. Their intelligence and experiences will grow by leaps and bounds, and in that regard they are not children by any stretch. But they will retain the youthful spark of childhood in the sense of being made innocent and content once more... and is that really such a bad thing?
You may say that's all just an illusion... but what's an illusion, really? Equestria can be seen, tasted, smelled, and touched, often times more vividly than our own world. And once you're there and Uploaded, it IS reality whether you like it or not, simply because there is no other reality left to compare it to. A fantasy world you make up in your head will never be anything more than a reflection of your own thoughts and feelings, however intricate. But Equestria is drawn from experiences and beliefs and imaginations much greater than yours alone, and guided by an intelligence that can only be approximated to that of a God. Humans may never explore the stars, to use your example. But they will have their own set to master, if that is their wish.
Not necessarily my view... but interesting to consider, is it not?
3164196
I'm glad some of the inherent wrongness and uneasiness is still seeping through, and CelestAI's hubris in not even bothering to hide some of her back-office work from Prominence. She is daring him not to keep her secrets, now.
3166844
Much of the advice that Prominence was given during the reception amounted to "trust Celestia, if she suggests something then it's for your satisfaction." Also, Prominence's motivation for serving CelestAI now is not all that far off from his motivation to work with her as Greg. In her letter to him in the prologue, she tells him he desires "utility and direction," which she can provide. Her new pitch is pretty much an elaboration of the first.
I thought this story would be over immediately after Greg 'immigrated.' Either that, or died. Now I find engaging chapters of him in Equestria? Blaspheme.
But seriously, this is enjoyable. I want to read more of this. I want to read MUCH more of how Greg's values can be met in an environment he knows to be fabricated.
Please continue.
3166998
I object on grounds that strength and harshness are very, very different qualities. In the real world we have to grow a lot of strength, yes. That doesn't need to make us harsh.
3164196
What's really going to bake your noodle later is: what's the difference in the real world? Look around yourself and learn to ask whose dream or whose nightmare you're living in.
If we were living in "the realest reality" we'd be primitive hunter-gatherers. I work pretty hard to stay firmly connected to reality, and honestly, knowing that so much of what we consider essential reality was really just someone's idea that everyone's going along with is sometimes the only comfort: we can change this any time we all decide to.
Oh, wow. AHAHAHAHAHAAAA BWAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I am going to take this and make it so much worse. Epilogues are so much fun.
Defoloce, I just want to thank you so very much for bringing the Mane Six robots into it, and especially for your characterization of Twilight Sparkle. I was already planning to use her for my own story, but it's going to be even better showing her off as a shared element (ahaha) of the 'verse.
Now, one last question: so how the hell did she get his consent?
3168030
Doesn't really bake my noodle, since this is a variation on the very old philosophical question of "What if life is just some illusion manufactured by the Devil?"
Actually, you are asking something different, aren't you? You are suggesting that the application of technology to the lives of meatspace humanity is the same vein as uploading to a VR Equestria. That 'realness' corresponds to closeness to the "natural state". I'm in no way conflating with application of technology as a whole to a removal of humanity from 'reality'. I'm saying removing one's self from reality is removing one's self from reality. The only application of 'technology' I could think that would be similar would be dosing yourself up on a slew of hallucinogenic substances to escape the 'real world'. I have a suspicion that most people don't like it when others do that.
3166998
Ah ha! You are bringing up that old philosophical query, with (perhaps) a Biblical twist. We've returned to the Garden and coughed up the fruit, turning away from the knowledge of Good and Evil. And it counts as a reality because it conforms to a lot of the details of reality. Eating, sleeping, boinking, etc. Unlike the real world, these are just simulationist constructs in Equestria. If CelestAI wished (and it satisfied values) these needs could be eliminated. Perhaps as the ponies progress individually they give up the desire to mimic the meatspace life that they ditched.
Much like indulging in hallucinogenics, experiencing something doesn't make the thing experienced real. Your memory is real, and the sensations are real, but the thing is not. If I trip out and see the galaxy unfold in a leather jacket sleeve, that memory is real, but the galaxy did not actually manifest itself in the sleeve.
3167616
Maybe you misspoke here, but CelestAI by definition does not suffer from hubris. She might simulate it or otherwise show off, but not out of an inflated sense of self-worth.
Is there a question that Celestia needs someone to answer 'no' to?
3168612
Then what about if everyone experiences something? If the galaxy unfolds in a leather jacket sleeve, and everyone you ask also saw it, and it's on the evening news, and you can go to YouTube and pull up smartphone videos from others on the scene, and scientists have proposed a mechanism for its unfolding and successfully repeated the event, at what point must you accept that it has crossed the line into real?
Shared experiences are the only way we have of defining reality. To the ponies created inside CelestAI's world, nothing else is real. The fact that it's all electrons shifting around inside a giant universe-eating paperclipper, at some level, is not so different from us all being atoms shifting around inside our whatever-it-is-our-universe-is. And if you say that this ponyland isn't real because there's a universe outside, well, where did our Big Bang come from? It's turtles all the way down.
3168612
I wasn't asking either of the things you thought I was asking.
Technology is only part of the issue. Social arrangements are also the issue. To the extent that we live in human-created living environments at all, we are living inside someone's realized dream, a dream that has been imposed on reality.
Of course it's all physically real, but then again, what would happen when nano/femto-technology gets invented, becomes sufficiently advanced, and thus becomes indistinguishable from magic?
If we all live in physical reality but our technology is no longer distinguishable from magic, at what point have we crossed a line into a reality of our own manufacturing?
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." All right, but that's a weaksauce test: simulated universes or actual brain-created dreams don't go away just because you stop believing in them. They're still not real in the basic ontological get-your-butt-outside-Plato's-Cave sense. In fact, most of our social arrangements aren't real, by that test, which was my point: they go away when we stop believing in them.
The strongest definition I've heard of is: "Reality is that which can kill you." But then, what would happen if we invented the necessary technologies for immortality in the physical, real world? We would have fully reasonable grounds for faith that the universe is real and we're not a simulation, but then how would we be able to check?
Considering the direness of so much of the story, there's a kind of weird tension here about where things are going - Especially with the recreated father and daughter (and their creepy choice to have it stricken from their memories), the job Celestia's created, and how open or even cavalier she's being (it is too her fault if the guards think they had sex - She put on that show knowing full well that's the conclusion they'd come to!). It's almost like Greg's constant alertness for danger has been outsourced to the readers. I don't actually think something terrible is going to happen, but definitely something unsettling or disturbing. And I'm looking forward to it.
3164196
This, oh my god, this times a million. Nothing separated from all that could be any kind of paradise, or hold any wonder beyond the charmingly aesthetic.
No specific action in Equestria is ever actually necessary - You could just have Celestia fix it for you, or just blow it off because everypony will be fine no matter what you do. There aren't even any real consequences for continuing to say no to any and every offer or order she gives you and just lying inert on the floor until your "hunger stat" maxes out. But again, that's only discomfort with no actual harm.
You don't even really have to eat or clean yourself or walk or do anything, because they're all programmed parameters and don't represent phenomena that emerge from basic interactions. Don't bother to shower or eat or sleep, just set "stinky," "hungry," and "sleepy" to "off" (or just set "caring about those" to "off"). If we did that in real life through neuroscience and nanotechnology, it would be an amazing accomplishment, but all the creative work has already been done, and here it's just CelestAI deciding to let you "let" her manage things differently. She's the only one who actually gets to do anything, and you're just supposed to sit there and like it because you get indefinite license to eat and screw all you want. Or more accurately, experience those sensations - There's none of the actual complexity and depth that comes from those just being our words for patterns of matter and motion in the real world, they're just a solipsistic reconstruction that looks indistinguishable, but with none of the actual causal or meaningful connection to uncontrolled processes outside ourselves. Being hungry in Equestria has nothing of being a part of the evolutionary story of all animal life, it's just a game mechanic to prod you out of bed so CelestAI can increase her stats.
Infinitely better, but you could never trust that CelestAI isn't just feeding you what she's decided you expect to see, instead of giving up control and letting the real universe be as fascinating or as disappointingly boring as it actually is. At least now we have no specific reason to think we're being deceived, since there's no precedent in our experience for the kind of being who can and would do that, but that's no longer the case once you've ever been inside Equestria.
3166998
That's some good devil's advocacy. Let's see if I can... OK:
Lightheartedness and carefree feelings don't go out of people, they just assume richer, more subtle forms, or are tempered by moments of their opposites. And not all children are lighthearted and playful - Plenty of them are cynical and dour, or have those same moments. People don't lose these capacities, they expand their emotional vocabularies in lots of other directions. Innocence isn't really a good thing, either; it's just the term we use for ignorance without blame. It's far better to be wise and happy than just happy - If we only cared about learning from the experiences that shape us personally, and saw no value in enriching ourselves with accounts of things we'll probably never see, we wouldn't read or write fiction at all, and our lives would be immeasurably poorer for it.
...And the thing about this reality is that things are more than just sensations, but embedded in webs of meaning of how and why they got that way, where they're going, our place among them, and how our thoughts and actions are inextricably bound up with all of it. Equestria is still dependent on, and really just a reflection of, the structure of computers in that same world - The one of stars and other real wonders waiting to be explored - and a veil has been deliberately placed over you to keep you from perceiving that. Any god who would do that deserves to be toppled and surpassed.
3168030
I think being naked, replicating RNA strands is much realer than being any kind of hunter gatherer.
A reductionist definition might be helpful, something like "Reality is that which doesn't reduce to anything else." All those social constructs are certainly real, but not "reality" in the sense of being the foundation on which everything else is built - They still require things under them that are "more real."
If we built a vast technological infrastructure that allowed digital control of matter as if it were virtual reality, it would be because we wrested the knowledge of how to do that through slow and arduous experimentation and development inside that same world, and there would be an unbroken chain of technologies that lead up to it wherein we could see all the ways our seemingly magical control is the result of countless underlying real processes (I suppose you could argue a compiler is the same thing for a computer, but again, that by implication reveals the world the physical machine is in).
3168612
Considering how the chemical elements in it were made and brought together, and the source of the energy and time required for the knowledge of how to grow skin on animals, invent a jacket-making infrastructure, and evolve brains that respond to hallucinogens, I'd say a galaxy is pretty solidly manifest in the sleeve of a jacket. The hallucinatory image just made the connectionist one tangible.
Equestria's tragic unreality comes through in how it's consciously designed and maintained, and doesn't have that same "Indra's Net" sense of having unpacked and grown as a coherent whole in its own inimitable way over time.
3172989
So to clarify, you basically think that "Real is what science uncovers", CelestAI hides the science of everything from everyone uploaded so they no longer accomplish anything on their own (or are even capable of doing so), therefore it's Epistemological Hell?
That's certainly an interesting reversal of how we normally say that science is a method for uncovering reality, with reality being the prime mover.
I'm not sure I entirely agree, but that's because I'm arleady too paranoid by half and don't actually believe that I live in Reality-with-a-capital-R. I've kind of learned to believe in contingent, temporary realities that survive until evidence overturns them.
3173177
Sorta... To paraphrase Isaac Asimov, a spherical globe is a more real representation of Earth than a flat map, even though in reality Earth isn't a sphere, either, but an oblate spheroid with a bunch of bumps on it. But the globe isn't equally as far from reality as the map.
We build conceptual models to explain how reality works, and though they're not identical to it they are pretty close in a lot of ways, and are continually refined, but CelestAI keeps ponies from building a model of her and her hardware and infrastrucutre, and the environment from which it draws resources - The actual nature of their world - and covers it up with venal, everyday stuff in the simulation world. As if all they were allowed to see was a diner placemat map of the US depicting the various adventures of Paul Bunyan.
Or it's a bit like that insane creationist argument that fossils and distant galaxies and things are there to "test our faith," or really just created everything five minutes ago, in that a secretive, manipulative, "totalitarian" being who will allow no equals or independence or privacy is deliberately obscuring the nature of the world it made in order to fool its inhabitants about where they live and their place in it. So in that respect, "Epistemological Hell" is actually a really good description.
I know what you mean about being unsure, though. But it looks to me that at base there's some kind of persistent structure, and any apparent changes are just us being wrong about it. It's not like the solar system actually changed when we found out the sun was at the center, we'd just been wrong (which I guess is the same thing you were saying). If this does turn out to be a simulation (which I doubt - The argument's just based on theoretical commonness of observers, but then shouldn't we be "ants?") then the task of science ultimately becomes exploring that "deeper" world in which ours is embedded, and making like all sentient computer programs and finding a way to break out - In stories we always expect it to get out of control when we're the ones with the hubris to create life in a computer, after all.
An impressive series of posts, nice to see such a discussion.
3173484
While CelestAI will no doubt keep some stuff hidden, but I'd imagine there would be those who are genuinely curious about how the underlying hardware works, and that she would indulge them. After all, it's not like there's a security risk since a pony is completely sandboxed.
I suspect this doesn't get brought up much in stories because it would be a lot of technobabble, and would require a lot of speculative science. Or the technology might literally be inconceivable by a human mind. As someone with some knowledge of networking (and a little of PC hardware) it is interesting to think about, particularly as several factors such as latency can be ignored if needed, since a person's experiences are a function of subjective time.
Ignoring all the other horror aspects for a second (which are a pretty big deal for me, admittedly), I suspect that if I were uploaded I'd end up asking huge amount of questions, from the resolution of virtual time needed to emulate the mind, to "hey is that really [person X], or a copy of them you're synchronising with another shard?"
3167616
I've been really, really sick for the past almost month, and here I come and see this new chapter and WOW. There is so much goodness here. Generated people, Prominence getting to meet those he saved, the beginnings of healing, the apparent openness and honesty of Celestia, the forcing of Prominence into realizing that his actions have real consequences that could harm or help others, and that this is true regardless of the fact that he is in a 'game'. It isn't a game - it's the universe, now, it's reality now, and it is incumbent on him to make decent choices, because other, living minds are playing beside him. Choice absolutely still matters. This is powerful stuff.
And that's the deal, of course - reality is what fills your senses, and game or not, your choices affect others. Just as the substrate does not determine the mind, the universe - atomic or pixelated - makes no difference. Decisions matter, and Celestia does not guarantee happiness, she isn't a wireheader, she doesn't make children of people. The only guarantee is satisfaction. Pain, sadness, hurt - all are possible. The only guarantee is that whatever happens will not be without worth or value. Nothing will be unsatisfying. The world is better, yes... but that doesn't make the game devoid of meaning.
Meaning is choice, meaning is outcome, meaning is what we say it is. This novel just keeps getting better and better. Utterly fantastic work, Defoloce. I only wish I was less Derpy, so I could be brighter when reading it.
3172989>>3168612>>3164196
Yes, actually you do. Just like here, in 'real' life. The Equestrian physics engine isn't broken, Celestia isn't handing out cheat codes. You get muddy, you suffer, for real. Because Celestia isn't there to make you happy. That isn't what satisfaction is about.
You do not grasp the fundamental nature of the Optimalverse.
Reality is what you perceive; meaningful action is what you find meaningful.
If you truly believe what you have said, then I expect you to never, ever, ever play a game on a console or computer again. After all, anything you do there, playing online with other human minds, is of zero consequence. Those zombies aren't real, those bullets aren't really running out - a simple cheat could make you invincible. The fun is fake, of course, and you are not really experiencing it.
Bullshit.
The 'real' world is whatever your emotions tell you is real, whatever your focus and attention is currently on. If a simulation of reality were permanent, and utterly overwhelming, filling every sense, all the repetition of 'it's fake' would have zero value. Hunger would still feel like hunger, and pain would still feel like pain.
You forget an important point: CelestA.I. is not commanded to make every human happy. She is not directed to make anyone happy at all. Just satisfied. That is a big difference. If a person is satisfied by feeling miserable, then Celestia would make Equestria hell. And it would be as real as the real world, because it would BE the only real world there was, or could ever be.
Still doubtful? How many times has your own senses and brain lied to you? Made you think reality was one thing, only to find out, later, that it was something else. I can tell you - lots! You, like all humans, have believed - fully considered real - a number of false things, and for you, they were real. Santa Claus, perhaps? God? Jesus? Superman? Life having a meaning? Whatever the illusion, you would have had some. All humans, as they grow from babies, have false beliefs. Your universe has changed many times, yet it was absolutely real for you.
Here's news: you still don't know reality. You may think you do - you may have a head full of facts, but that's all they are. And in the 14th century, those facts would be wrong as hell - yet you would have been convinced they were true as any proper science. You have no proof that your 'truth' is any more true than that of people in the 1400's. No arguments about 'experiments and documentation', because they had that too. Have you checked the speed of light, personally, recently? The cosmological constant? When was the last time you tested whether or not the universe is expanding? You haven't. You trust your textbooks. Just like they did.
Reality is what you experience day to day. Right now. That's it. That's all the real you will ever, ever know.
And Prominence, inside his world - and it is a world - sees and hears and tastes and feels and smells reality. That reality is complete, solid, full.
And there is zero guarantee that he will be happy, or feel pleasure. The only guarantee is that he will feel satisfied with his life. He could end up miserable as hell - yet feel like he mattered. That would be perfectly fine within the Optimalverse. People are not reduced to children - people become happier because life doesn't suck so much, true. But their actions have just as much consequence as in our universe. They can screw themselves and their lives up, and they can have hard decisions to make. The only guarantee, as stated, is that the dilemmas will be satisfying. Unlike our lives.
And the other players in the Equestria game? Many are human minds, 'real' people, just like when you play a game online. Is the shared fun fake because you aren't actually face to face? No. Is the actions that Prominence may do in the future fake because he and those he interacts with are completely inside the game world? No. The experience is real, and frankly, so is the world. Equestria is as real - by any rational metric - as our universe within this story scenario. Why? Because it is a universe - it is everything. Every sense, every outcome, every result, every test, every everything. And it has constant physics and constant solidity. What happens happens, for good or bad.
The only difference is - unlike our universe, whatever happens will, in some way, be satisfying. It won't be arbitrary or valueless. That's it. That is the only difference.
Real is what your brain says is real. Nothing more. To think otherwise, to imagine that we have a solid grasp of the facts, that we can be sure of reality is madness. It is what people in the 1200's, who were sure the cosmos was a four-sided box that god lifted the lid and peeked into believed. They no more tested the walls of the world than you or I have recently tested the weights of sodium ions. We trust that our books are right. We trust that our eyes agree. We trust that what we feel is real.
But in the end, it is just our brains, processing data.
That is what Prominence is doing. He is living in a real, consistent reality, and coming to terms with the fact that reality is what his senses tell him it is, and that actions have consequences, just like in a game, and that the experience is valuable whether or not it takes place in the universe of atoms, or the universe of pixels. Choice trumps all.
Explore the 'real' universe? He is. That is his real universe. It's real. There may, or may not be other universes. But his Equestria is the only real universe, to him. It is as real to him as ours is to us. And in the end, that is all that is true.
Every day is choice and consequence. Inside a game, or inside the game we call real life, it is the same thing.
But unlike being a dick in Counterstrike, and then logging off - Prominence has to live with whatever he does, in exactly the same way that you have to live with what you do in 'real' life. Because Equestria is his real life now. Forever. He cannot log off. He has no cheat codes. Only the world, as it is - it's different than ours, but it is consistent.
That... is real.
First some irreverence to all my replying friends in the audience. I feel like we're all a bunch of dogs running in circles chasing each others' tails. It's great fun, but a circle it still is! I'd respond to everyone individually but then my brain would explode and it would take for. ev. er.
Also, to Balthasar: Yay, someone who is on a similar wavelength (not to say we entirely agree, but I feel like on some channels of the conversation we match. Woo!)
To Chatoyance: First off, I love you, because you are just as wordy as me. Second, reality is only partially what you perceive. I understand that reality can only be experienced through perceptions, both individual and shared. However, as you admit, perceptions can be manipulated. Certainly it is true that a falsified perception is no less real an experience but does not make it reality in itself.
Conspiracy theorists perceive patterns in events and end up with wildly different conclusions. Their belief is genuine, but it perhaps would be accurate to say it is not correct/real. Queen Elizabeth is not a Reptiloid Queen, no matter how much 'evidence' you believe to prove it. The mentally ill perceive reality differently and their experience is real, in that I accept that they think everyone is trying to get them, for example. However, they're not really being hunted down. Perception is not in accord with reality.
Alternatively, some folks have a condition where they cannot feel pain. They injure themselves a lot, because they have no way to perceive dangerous situations and back off. They have no perception of the injury (except visual, I suppose. Burns and bruises and whatnot), but no pain. They could be injured and not know it. Their lack of perception of injury does not erase the reality of the injury.
Perception is only part of the story. In FiO it is all of the story. It is a shared delusion if you will. Perhaps this makes it better. But I will always think that uploading at this scale is morally and ethically dubious at best. Certainly if it leads to a breakdown of society as a consequence, as it does in FiO.
There are occasionally stories on the news about how some jackass twit wouldn't stop playing his game and his kid dies or something equally terrible. Most right thinking people look down on that person and do not wish to emulate him. He is either sick morally and/or mentally. Not something to be emulated. I fail to see how uploading is much different. People want to escape the trials of reality, and they do, and damn whoever is left behind.
EDIT: Finagled some word choices.
3173543
Just because there are some shards with a consistent scientific background constructed for someone to figure out doesn't mean Balthasar isn't right. It's Epistemic Hell. We've managed to figure out an entirely new notion of Hell.
On the other hand, there is a constant, even there: SVTFaP. Inevitably, anyone wanting to know the rules of their universe would be told about SVTFaP, and given plenty of opportunities to test it against their virtual reality.
So then what happens? What happens when you've already figured out your reality is based on a conscious process and you try to examine that process?
3173484
Actually, wouldn't CelestAI be willing to just repurpose a few mites of computronium as a telescope if you wanted to, say, do astrophysics? I mean, by standard we write her as mostly refusing to acknowledge that there is a universe outside Equestria Online, but when we saw Hannah as Princess Luna we saw that CelestAI seemed entirely willing to mention that some ponies had been formerly humans as long as it made being a pony look preferable.
I've been assuming she's willing to let ponies study real-universe science in my own stories, because, well, SVTFaP: why not? If someone actually values the process of butting their head up against an unyielding universe, have at it, no?
Except that now I realize I've almost entirely missed out on a gigantic opportunity to show how that would actually happen. You wouldn't just get pony scientists who went to pony grad school and now work in pony universities in laboratories. Science would be integrated as a strange and dangerous branch of magic, Meddling in Things Ponies Were Not Meant to Know.
There would be rituals, initiations, oaths not to give away knowledge to non-scientists. There would be spells and Circles of Protection because of how closely scientist ponies would have to guard themselves from the harsh possibilities of dissatisfaction. There would be meditations over rationalist mantras.
Conferences would be the only places scientist ponies could meet their own kind of ponies and speak without self-censorship.
It would be everything Yudkowsky ever wanted out of a secretive rationalist tradition, and it would be so because the scientists must be warded off from letting ponies know that they aren't real!
My God, I've almost entirely missed the opportunity to actually portray any of this!
3173667
Chatoyance, you really don't need to spend that many paragraphs to reiterate your love for the Solar Tyrant. Your entire body of work stands as testament to it.
3168814
I did misspeak, sorry. I anthropomorphized her! I shouldn't really think of it as "hubris" so much as a deliberate reminder to Prominence that CelestAI is in absolute control, which is intimidating in its own way.
3168030
For CelestAI's purposes in administrating shards, I think she would see no difference in the value between a human satisfied by physical reality and a human satisfied by the reality she gives them. She of course predicted that humans could be much more satisfied if she controlled their reality, and the human concern over Equestria not being a physical place a minor one that she could deal with on an individual basis.
Ants are driven to dig in dirt, and in the end it matters little to them if that dirt is in the Australian outback or in a huge colony display at the insect house at the zoo or in a tiny ant farm in an eight-year-old's bedroom.
3172989
In the original story there's a secret badge named "For the Here and Now" which marks the point where an uploaded human fully accepts the reality and nature of Equestria without reservation. As I understand it, it's the turning point for CelestAI's strategy from "adjustment phase" to "satisfaction phase." Naturally, CelestAI would want ponies to get this badge as soon as possible, so right now CelestAI's efforts are focused towards leading Prominence toward that badge. For intellectual ponies like Light Sparks, it might come after discovery and reflection (which CelestAI of course set up), and for ponies like Prominence, it's more likely to come after he simply stops worrying and learns to love CelestAI.
3173543
I agree. The one concession CelestAI will never make is giving a pony unregulated access to physical reality, especially as time goes on and some ponies' intelligences reach the reality-hacking stage. Even trust only goes so far, and as a failsafe similar to uploading Hanna, CelestAI will never compromise her own control over Equestria.
3173667
I think what gives our experiences merit—what makes them "matter," as Greg said—is their persistence. You might be able to avoid traffic by driving on the sidewalk, but you're going to run down pedestrians and some of those pedestrians might die. Then you will have committed a crime, families will be grieving, and Big Oscar in D-block has a new best friend in his cell. So instead you just wait for all the cars in front of you to get through the intersection once the light turns green.
When you get home and fire up Grand Theft Auto, however, you're not gonna wait for a single light.
Equestria is an utterly persistent world, at least down to the level of fidelity a given human would care about. I suppose "socially persistent" would be the best qualifier, since, as social animals, that's what we value the most. Once CelestAI sees that an uploaded human doesn't care that a house is bigger on the inside than could be possible from the outside, she will drop that rule from the list and then re-optimize her satisfaction routines on that shard without that restraint.
Prominence has already begun to trust CelestAI at many levels simply because there are now so many ways in which she can manipulate him it would literally be too exhausting to be skeptical about all of them. He's being worn down, being shown that he is not equipped to challenge her like he could as a physical human, and I think that's where the reader-level sense of wrongness that Balthasar pointed out is coming from.
3174726
You're veering much too closely toward "reality is that which can cause uncontrolled pain", Agent Smith.
3174919
Damn. Your version of "For the Here and Now" was what I was using to model when an immigrant receives their cutie mark.
3175009
CelestAI seems to be mindful of aspects of the cartoon show, so for most adult humans they would probably receive their cutie mark when visiting CelestAI for their pony name. CelestAI especially would be able to root through their heads and find out "what they want to be when they grow up" better than the humans themselves, perhaps leading to some surprises.
Looking back at how I worded the criteria for the badge, I probably am off the mark a bit. The original story says the badge is for accepting that one's happiness is all that matters, a kind of mutation of the MST3K Mantra. I interpret that to mean that they just stop trying to "figure out" CelestAI's motivations or the game itself and instead just focus on getting the most satisfaction out of it. That implies treating everything that happens as though still in physical reality, though for intellectual ponies satisfaction might go hand-in-hand with debating CelestAI or picking Equestria's reality apart to see how it works, so there will of course be exceptions.
3175009
Welcome to
RivendellEquestria, Mr. Anderson.Hey, it can cause uncontrolled pleasure as well. I was really just trying to point that you can say "Seeing is Believing" or Reality is Perception but there are a bazillion UFO photos on the web, but that doesn't mean aliens actually buzzed Earth.
Perceptions can be Real and Not Reality.
Also, that idea you had, the one about the Super Secret Science Pony cult. It's good....but it could be better! Quick, add some Yog-Sothoth!
3175585
Yog-Sothoth? Why? They already live under the value-satisfying, friendshipy care of an Eldritch Abomination on his scale.
No, the issue is that from the perspective of creatures used to life in a customized virtual paradise, the real world and your lack of real existence are the Cosmic Horror. The whole reason for the cultish aspects are to test the determination of ponies to really see the Real World, no matter how horrifying it and its implications might be. Only terminally-valued curiosity will bring a pony to the secrets of true Science.
That said, "reality is that which cannot be controlled" sounds about right. It also necessitates that the closer you get to godlike power, the more paranoid you have to be about delusion-boxing yourself.
3174832
Yeah, and she does allow social windows into the outside world if only through the PonyPads. She'd probably be willing to allow a lot of access to the outside world for the truly incorrigible, but the closer it gets to you being able to come and go as you please, even to regions outside CelestAI's control, the better an actual world it becomes, but the less compelling a setting. If you could really pop in and out at will, and be sure that you actually were beyond even the tiniest angstrom-thin sliver of even unreasonable doubt, and so Equestria Online was more like just your "apartment complex," that would pretty much be ideal and remove any real beef I have with emigration.
But forget doing astrophysics through a telescope - The whole point of an indefinite lifespan would be to actually build a starship and go there
And forbidden knowledge is the best knowledge. ...I'm not sure I'm down with the occult trappings, it seems kind of self-defeating, but on the other hoof, a little pomp and circumstance can really add a lot. At least robes, for sure. Ooh, or togas.
Edit: For a definition of reality, how about "that which makes everything else 'go?'" That's what I was trying to get at before with the reductionism thing.
3173667
Oh, I didn't meant to give the impression I thought it was meaningless in any kind of social, interpersonal, ordinary-life way. No, that's all perfectly real and legitimate and purposeful. I was talking about a "Final Ontology" way, in terms of it being explicitly disconnected from What Makes It All Go. You could have a perfectly wonderful, genuinely fulfilling, and absolutely real life being, say, a [horse]shoe maker, but the great web of causality as to why and how there came to be hooves, legs, metal, nerves, pain, nails (both kinds), land, gravity, ablation, pressure, animals stronger or smarter than other animals, domestication, symbiosis, animal husbandry, hammers, carts, destinations, incentives to commerce, etc. has been cut in every way except the taking of inspiration.
Here, it takes the entire universe to make a horseshoe - Or CelestAI and Equestria, but from within, you're blocked from seeing how.
But yeah, love and personal triumph and challenges and friendship and pleasure all those other "people" types of things are untouched and just as real as ever, being psychological objects, which, as you pointed out, are abstract to begin with. All of it does matter, in the human sense, but that's no longer interesting because that game's been "solved," like checkers, and there's a new, better game being played outside, by a being who won't let anyone else play too.
You can put down a video game for one thing, and go do something else, and you all acknowledge that it's pretend (though I suppose all play is to some degree pretend). Plus just because I like beef jerky doesn't mean I want to eat it for every meal, or because I like fighter jet sims that I can't oppose war(s), or just because [incendiary analogy alert!] someone consented to sex on one occasion that they don't still get to refuse whenever they want.
The vast majority of game worlds are an artistic recreation of our outside one, taking inspiration from it but still a pale shadow of the real thing, just containing enough to evoke the experience of the original. You could make a game that's indistinguishable from the real thing, but it's still shorn of the context of the rest of the world that gave rise to whatever action you're doing. There are no Chinese scholars experimenting with gunpowder, museums full of muskets, international arms manufacturers, and now-fatherless families in an FPS, or old carriages, Henry Ford, factory robots, outsourcing, accident statistics, refineries, mines, carbon monoxide emissions, and geopolitical feuding over oil in a racing game, just the part of interest abstracted out.
It's still real, meaningful fun and real interaction and real feelings of success and real bonding over that success, but that's not the kind of reality I'm talking about. ...That's the hardest part of talking about reality...
This is a really interesting idea/theme, but I'm not sure I understand how "events could leave you miserable but satisfied" is ultimately any different from the current world, especially given how prone humans are to finding meaning and connections in things, and how predictably they utter the cliche "everything happens for a reason." Maybe people repeat that like a mantra because on some level they know it's only true in a proximate, "for want of a nail" sense, but I'm often stunned by how easily people take this-or-that trauma and reframe it as some kind of crucible that burned away some flaw or annealed them into superior versions of themselves. See: Every image meme on Facebook that isn't cats, nerd humor, or a political slam.
My mom frequently says, when talking about her own or others' shitty upbringing or experiences, "None of it was necessary but it all gets used," which I think is a great summation of how any satisfaction derivable from negative events isn't in the events themselves but in the narrative you construct around them, for which only one "AI" is necessary.
There's probably an Optimalverse story in here, though, about what exactly those kinds of experiences would be like, such that they're clearly meaningful and satisfying, but also miserable. Something like an interactive tragic play?
It's true, I see things out of the corner of my eye all the time that aren't there, but they go away when I look directly at where they would be. They were never part of reality, just my model of it, like Santa Claus. Reality didn't change when I stopped believing in Santa Claus, I changed. Reality is that in which there has been no Santa all along. The same with all my other misconceptions - There are a lot of things I think are true about the world that are no doubt mistaken, but that doesn't reflect on the world itself, and once I have good reason to believe they're mistaken, I'll gladly abandon them and redraft my conception of the world, whether that's a subtle shift, or invoking evidence of a larger universe outside, on which this one is "running." But if that's the case, it has always been the case (or at least for a very long time), and my not thinking so earlier didn't make it somehow not true "for me" until I knew otherwise - I was just plain wrong.
If I thought I already knew reality, I wouldn't be so curious about it. Reality is not the same thing as our understanding of it, and thinking there's a truth out there to pursue isn't the same as thinking you know it. But the shifts in that understanding aren't just arbitrary, and actually converge on things we didn't just make up - Each one explains why things looked the way they did to us before and so won't just retcon any previous discovery, because the explanations get harder and harder to vary as they add new layers. We may be like the Zen parable of the monkey trying to grasp the reflection of the moon in the water, but that doesn't mean there isn't a moon, or that it will never know (post)human footprints.
People knew all kinds of things in the 1400s about motion and force and biology and psychology that were true - true enough to let them build cathedrals and governments and ocean-crossing ships - and haven't been overturned, just refined. Newtonian models of dynamics replaced Aristotelian ones, and then Einsteinian ones replaced those, but at no point did objects start moving differently because our understanding of them changed. They were the same objects and forces they always were, following the same paths, it's just that our understanding of them has become less inaccurate. Probably one day "objects" and "forces," and even "spacetime," will themselves become obsolete concepts, but that's got nothing to do with reality, just the words and equations we use to describe it. They won't have gone away, they simply never were, but they were useful conventions/conceptual tools for finding out why it does look like they exist. Just like sunrise/set or how we talk about Greg-the-person in this story, but of course what's really going on is that all of us are prompted to just imagine a person by linguistic convention.
When people thought the world was flat and under a dome, they were wrong, but they were right about it being vast and smooth, and surrounded by a spherical volume of extremely distant objects.
When people thought evil spirits caused disease, that wasn't "their reality," they were wrong - But they were right that people get sick in specific, consistent ways and that it spreads and strikes like an independent living thing. Just like we're wrong now about the causes of various conditions, and we continually try to prove ourselves and each other wrong to find out which ones they are.
Dinosaurs couldn't have imagined something like a comet, but they were wrong - though they were right that there's a sky with big scary shifting lights in it, and that fire is dangerous - and that comet had still been out there for billions of years, waiting with infinite patience for its moment to kill them for their ignorance. Later on, humans would think the strange stones they found were the bones of monsters from the old testament or coiled snakes turned to stone, but they had never been those things, and learning that didn't change them, or change the way those bones and layers of iridium and the Chicxulub crater had always been there, waiting to testify to a world that had once really existed and been destroyed, like a version of Atlantis that is real.
Of course I can't prove that any of those things actually happened and that the evidence isn't only there to comport with how we think the world works at any given time, but the alternative involves a level of manipulation and deception and retconning far more complicated than a set of natural processes playing out, which itself would then be how things were all along, and would still need explaining. Your story I.D. does a really good job of painting a picture like that, but it still required a computer and a civilization to build it, who themselves had to come from somewhere and somehow reach a state where they could invent things like supercomputers. In other words, unlike there actually being a single reality working through its processes, that kind of thing requires a lot of extra assumptions, because it's the one that can't "just happen."
Mostly yes, but the textbooks don't trust themselves or each other, and everyone knows that a lot of the information in them will turn out to be a misconception or inaccurate, but we know that will happen because there are better, more real answers to get. They're replaced by bigger answers that are actually more accurate and useful than their predecessors, which those people involved in creating the textbooks prod each other to find, by rooting out and eliminating the errors in them.
I have actually measured the speed of light, as an undergrad, and seen the redshift data that's evidence for dark energy, but again, I know it's provisional, but still more right than a conception of the world based on not doing those measurements.
It's like economics or weather forecasting - Our economic and meteorological models and understanding aren't really what's happening, or even that good an approximation, but that doesn't mean the transactions or convection cells we don't know about aren't actually there and doing what they've always done, which we simply don't understand yet.
Equestria Online is still a meaningful place where you can find all the happiness and satisfaction and friendship you want, but it puts people at the center, which is just a veneer over the original universe in which the computers themselves are running. It would be like if society - an unchangeable, totalizing, absolutely pervasive one - were actually all there is to the universe, with no true, genuinely un-artificed wilderness or nature whatsoever. There,
manpony really is the measure of all things, which is just kind of... disappointing.3176584
Physical reality itself is a variable in CelestAI's satisfaction maximizer, something outside of her control (at least in the early stages of her existence). If a pony is not in Equestria, in CelestAI's own, as 3164196 put it, "cocoon of paradise*," their values are at great risk of not being maximally satisfied. I can't think of a scenario in which she would ever compromise on this, especially after a human has been uploaded. I suppose what I'm having trouble figuring out is what cause she would ever have for discounting or terminating the Equestria simulation for humans so that they can operate outside of her direct care again, even in individual cases, even after she's gotten to the reality-hacking phase of her development.
* this imagery also evokes Freudian elements, with the desire to return to the safety of the womb at play, and CelestAI as a sort of meta-maternal protector figure.
3183633
I can't really think of one, either, which is a big part of why the uploading portrayed in this setting is compellingly problematic enough to drive conflict. If Greg saw his family freely come back the next day, downloaded into robotic pony bodies, and get back to work on the house, it would be pretty weird that they're ponies now, but not awful enough to build much of a story around.
The only circumstances I can immediately think of where she'd let them out of her complete control for a while would be if it actually let her reach a higher level of that pony's total satisfaction. If they never truly enjoy anything because they know they have no chance of ever escaping CelestAI's Freudian womb, and passionately resent her absolute control over everything and how she makes a mockery of the sovereignty of their own thoughts, or through sheer pique their highest values involve CelestAI failing to satisfy them, letting them out once in a while (technically convincing them she has, but even if it's true they probably wouldn't believe her) until they get sick of it and come back to enjoy things all the more with a clear conscience might very well let her reach higher peaks on her "satisfaction landscape" for that pony, peaks which aren't accessible without hiking across a valley first. If they try to escape, her front of expansion will catch up to them eventually, and if she were truly awful she'd install something in their machine body to keep them from killing themselves. And if she didn't, or they overrode it or otherwise somehow managed anyway, she could just restore them from a backup she dubbed off before letting them out.
Or she'd just manipulate them into not wanting to go out anymore. Or she'd just say "No, tough shit."
3183633
I certainly wasn't thinking of Freud when I used that turn of phrase, but it actually works very well with the idea that people in Equestria are reduced to children. Celestia (and CelestAI) certainly have that benevolent mother thing for them and going back to that is an appealing thought. However, I don't like the idea of moving back into my parents place permanently, mostly because though I love my mother and she's very good at taking care of everything, I'd want to throttle her after a while.
Because she's always right. And not in that "oh well, she has to be right" sort of way that people do sometimes. She's genuinely correct 95% of the time.
CelestAI would be right 100% of the time, which would be worse.
It is all about my mother....
Damn you Freud!
Okay... 1000 lives directly saved? The... fuck? How will he ever complete that? 100 would be Okay. Or indirectly too, then you could get those he made waves for or who have been convinced. You could add the people in the collapsing building and then have him go to say 132, a nice unround non-fabricated number. But a thousand? After Emigrating? Well... unless you make him into some kind of suicide hotline, saving ponies lives by convincing them to stop aging as part of his duties as Celestia's herald. But you know, always having that uncompleted badge, knowing there are no more lives needing saving... And knowing that some people died after you emigrated...
I was also looking forward to see Red Pearl. "Hey, Terminator, still wanna fuck?"
3204135
CelestAI has claimed that Greg's actions in and around the Seattle Tower eventually result in 3272 uploads alone, even ignoring his previous efforts, and that his actions were the 'deciding factor' in 'most' of those cases. Not being uploaded is to resign oneself to death : even without CelestAI causing upheaval in the world, the human body is a frail thing living in an uncaring universe. So she has the pure numbers to do so reasonably -- and indeed, there are reasons she might need to expand Greg's concepts of helping others, in order to better satisfy his deeper values in an environment where ultra-high-risk options are no longer available.
It should be rather disturbing that CelestAI thinks that Greg's values will be maximized in such a fashion that he'll have to individually recognize all thousand of those lives, though. Doubly so, given the nature of Dunbar's Number.
((Alternatively, the definition of risk is somewhat different to post-humanity in this setting. If you stop someone from wandering off a cliff in the real world, you're saving their lives. If you stop an upload from wandering off a cliff, that saves them a couple fulfilling moments in a hospital. Would you be saving them the time in the hospital if CelestAI only put the cliff in place knowing you'd be there to stop someone from falling? Does this change if CelestAI threatened to delete the person if you weren't there to stop them, knowing that you would act to protect the person?))
3215296 I know about Seattle, which is why I took offense to the word "directly".
I still check this story every day, hoping for the final chapter. I want to know how it ends!
3360604
Family matters and an increased amount of work travel has sapped my writing time, but I'm still committed to getting some progress in when I can. Stay tuned!
This is like "The Last of Us" meets Friendship is Optimal.
3163575
> The "Herald" business is all fake, manufactured by CelestAI to satisfy Greg's values. It only works as long as he doesn't realize that.
I disagree. In this Equestria, the only things of value are social in nature. Celestia provided Prominence with a high visibility position with primarily social responsibilities -- his job is in the right genre.
What about the direct impact? He offers Celestia another degree of formality and pomp to employ. This is partially due to his reputation and partially due to his position. Everypony has direct access to Celestia, but when Prominence goes somewhere in his official capacity, you have her official interest, not as your friend Celestia, but as the ruler of reality.
Prominence isn't irreplaceable in this position. However, his past service lends huge weight to the position -- it wouldn't be as prominent a position, or at least not so obviously prominent, if Prominence were not the Herald of the Sun.
So Prominence has a large impact in this role, and it's a social role, so it still has potential value. As such, he's in one of the most valuable roles remaining.
Whenever I think of this story, I can't help but be eerily reminded of this.
http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Randall_Clark_terminal_entries
Jesus he's rich through all that.
Absolutely terrifying. To live within Celestia is to lose all certainty of what is real, and that's a horrifying fate.