'Digital Afterlife' story idea

[Brian]

Spawned from: http://www.soulriders.net/forum/index.php/topic,101858.0.html

Which in turn was spawned by a bunch of other discussion threads.  Ah, history.

I believe that entire idea completely disregards the Bekenstein bound, though.  (Unless we're saying that this collapse causes the speed of light or the reduced plank constant itself to change.)  Simplified (at the level I can understand it:) there's just a maximum amount of data that can be recorded in space -- regardless of the density of matter within that space.  There's a lot of debate about the information of things entering black holes being lost in such a way.  I find it quite interesting....

That's more my actual area of interest, though we're veering way away from the topic.

Anyway.  I've probably managed to get something incredibly wrong there.

I was thinking more of a not-quite-so-mind-wrenching civilization that shuffles the latest backups (or working copies, if people live to their 'limit') of all citizens within it off to the infinite/magical computer simulation, and the value of life in a universe where 'the afterlife' is just a really just the biggest part of the internet.

Still ... I can't recall the last time I was inspired to write something original. >_>;

Bringing this back in line, I think it might be interesting to explore such a society.  I worry that depending on delivery it would be a big Take That! to the fic in question, but if it's original and involves none of the Haruhi cast, then I don't have to be bothered by that aspect.  Hmm.  I'm seriously considering writing this....

[thepanda]

Hm. What happens when AI begin spontaneously generating in the afterlife?

[Brian]

You mean when digital beings have progeny?  Poor second-class digital citizens, never blessed with the knowledge of a first, organic life....

Er.  Gonna split this off into a new thread, since we're totally derailing Arakawa's review, but I'm interested in pursuing this idea. >_>;;

There we go.

Hmm, I can't imagine why AI would begin 'spontaneously generating.'  It'd have some motive force behind it, and it seems to be veering away from the social concepts I was somewhat more interested in exploring.  Within the confines of this story, the computer is infinite, so it's not like extra intelligences are going to be problematic.  I think you're suggesting a different, but also interesting story idea. :)

[Arakawa]

Er.  Gonna split this off into a new thread, since we're totally derailing Arakawa's review, but I'm interested in pursuing this idea. >_>;;

Well, the review was finished, so I don't see how you could've derailed it in any form by adding genuinely interesting discussion to the end, of whatever sort :-)

Still, considering that you're making an entire separate thread for this, I guess you're hoping for this discussion to get pretty involved...

Hmm, I can't imagine why AI would begin 'spontaneously generating.'  It'd have some motive force behind it, and it seems to be veering away from the social concepts I was somewhat more interested in exploring.  Within the confines of this story, the computer is infinite, so it's not like extra intelligences are going to be problematic.  I think you're suggesting a different, but also interesting story idea. :)

Do you have just a vague idea of where you're going now, or an actual story in mind? I'm wondering specifically whether you have a detailed afterlife design in your head, or just a collection of

Here's my excessively detailed afterlife design, which specifically attempts (maybe unsuccessfully) to avoid most of the annoying cliches of Singularity fiction. You'll probably be interested in it more because I might have considered questions you haven't considered, not because of the specific details.

Basic Technology

Spoiler: ShowHide

Assume a small cabal of Admins have built a Substrate, a nigh-undetectable, intangible blob of nanotechnological pixie dust which they cause to replicate and permeate the Earth and the space immediately surrounding it. Nobody notices this, and the Substrate is now a huge computer which they can use to scan any portion of the Earth. The Admins then upload themselves to the Substrate (gradually, using the Ship of Achilles principle) and proceed to design and run a program which involuntarily uploads every intelligent mind on Earth into a digital afterlife upon physical death.

Ship of Achilles uploading: the Substrate mirrors the contents of any mind that enters it, and establishes two-way feedback between the mind-as-simulated and the physical mind, so that both can be regarded as one indivisible unit. When the physical mind dies, the mind-as-simulated remains behind, so this is at worst equivalent to minor brain damage and at best completely seamless.

This is the best they could manage in terms of avoiding that nasty 'are uploaded people merely clones of the originals' question. There are of course endless edge cases to work out in terms of dementia, retardation, &c &c but the upshot is that dead people seamlessly end up in the Substrate. Where a cute magical girl in a pink dress greets them and explains the basic ground rules of their new existence.

The Admins are the ones who run the show. The afterlife is not a democracy. They didn't ask you whether you want to be preserved, they sure as hell don't feel the need to oblige you by listening to your ideas on how you want them to run things.

Well, unless they like your ideas, of course.

Planes of Existence in the Afterlife

Spoiler: ShowHide

The Admins have watched way too many Studio Ghibli movies, and so regard typical ideas of how to have fun in the Singularity as nothing more than a high-tech variation on a night of boozing in Cardiff: to be avoided at all costs.

(This is what a night of boozing in Cardiff looks like: http://www.inmalafide.com/blog/2011/09/23/great-britain-the-land-of-a-thousand-frowns/

Warning, that gallery is basically majorly depressing prole bashing posted up on some right-wing blog.)

Also, they're very stingy with their compute times. Thus they have an idea of how you're allowed to have fun, and they're going to enforce it (as discussed in the 'Your Head Gets Messed With' section).

Two optimizations are employed to save compute time. First of all, the Admins don't bother to run uploaded minds as a physical simulation of a neural network. They're way too smart for that, they just reduce your psyche to a pile of high-level associations and archetypes, which are easier to store, simulate, and modify. The simulation works with over 99% fidelity, so there's no point in bothering with trying to store a huge, brittle bath of simulated neurons.

Similarly, whatever simulated reality you end up in, they're not going to bother doing a 100% realistic physics simulation. Instead , with a bit of fudging inside your mind to get you to accept what you see as real, everything gets rendered in a simplified, lightweight art style. (You might get some leeway in terms of which 2D/3D art style you'd prefer to see things in, or you might be in a simulated reality which is required by the author to be seen as a Ghibli movie or whatever.)

One clever optimization they employed involves saving the bother of simulating detailed physics, by detecting when you've unconsciously internalized a certain pattern in the real world (e.g. a vase that falls down is likely to shatter), and just pulling the expected behaviour out of your mind. Now, with great difficulty, it means that you're able to 'cheat' a physics simulation by teaching your mind to ignore some physical principle. Guess how they deal with that?

The simulations also keep track of high-level stats, which describe at a very high level what is supposed to be possible and impossible in your reality. If you've cheated physics to such an extent that your stats are in a state that's highly unlikely to occur, the simulated universe gets to compensate by forcefully adjusting attributes and causing coincidences to return the stats within acceptable parameters. If you've been cheating a lot in a short period of time, the results can be fairly spectacular...

Many simulations have it as a condition that your memories/awareness of existing in an afterlife are partially or completely locked away, in order to enable a greater variety and intensity of simulated experience. (You can't properly relive the daily life of a ten-year old child if you're aware the whole time that one week ago you were a fifty-year old alcoholic, can you?)

Your Head Gets Messed With, a Lot

Spoiler: ShowHide

A number of constraints and modifications are made upon death, to make a number of tediously stupid Singularitarian fornications utterly impossible. The Admins have spent more time thinking about this than I have, so I'll just detail one fairly benign intervention.

The moment you die, your knowledge of popular culture gets gently but thoroughly scrambled. This prevents you from spending the rest of eternity cosplaying your favourite anime. The Admins think that's icky for some reason. You still have access to the archetypes which make up whatever it is you used to be a fan of, but if you want to relive them you'll have to find your own story to fit them into. Which might end up following all the genre conventions of an anime if you so want, but it won't be any anime that exists on Earth.

Since the Substrate can record most of the circumstances of a person's life and death, the Admins have developed a system to assess the severity of a person's sins and assign penances accordingly. This isn't so much an attempt to deal out cosmic karma, as it is just a way to keep the newly dead from being bored, or from going giddy at too many possibilities and no problem to deal with. Almost everyone has some sin, don't they? Therefore almost everyone gets to be punished, and have fun doing so! Some penances are vaguely humorous, some are immediate, some can be deferred almost indefinitely (and are thus more like 'cool things you might want to try' suggestions). Some are fairly drastic and involuntary, like being forced into a completely different exterior personality, or ending up in a world subject to some embarrassing comedic archetype. Some are serious, like having to confront and reconcile yourself with a realistic simulation of someone you've hurt during your physical life.

Some penances are fairly involved in a different sense. The question of what kind of therapeutic/growth experiences you would need to put a psychopath through to turn them into a complete person, for instance, is quite interesting, and your penance if you've been a complete psycho is to go through an endless variety of these sorts of experiences while dead psychologists take notes on you.

Once you've finished with your penances, you just get to choose a simulated reality (again, they have all sorts of gameplay conditions, from temporary memory loss, to details of physics, to the basic question of what you're supposed to 'do' in there) play it with a bunch of other people, choose another, play again. This is extremely simplified, but it's basically what you get to do.

In the end, the Admins reserve the right to save, duplicate, arbitrarily re-edit, combine, revert, or even erase minds (if they feel they've screwed the situation up completely), but use these privileges extremely rarely if at all.

Other Issues

Spoiler: ShowHide

I think I'll stop now. Other points might deal with allocation of compute time (somewhat more tedious), the Admins' infiltration of the physical world using agents whose minds they've been editing from infancy (completely different story), how various 'magic systems' in the simulated reality are actually used to put spare creative capacity to solving scientific problems (chopping the problem into bite-size chunks and dressing it up for people who'd otherwise be bored thinking about it), how there's a small elite centering on the Admins who actually worry about real-world maintenance of the Substrate, how and when the Admins delegate universe design / assigning punishments to ordinary humans, when and under what circumstances the Admins consider it proper for dead relatives to meet one another, questions of whether or not the Substrate will survive heat death of the universe or Big Crunch, &c &c

Things we're not worrying about: the whole 'friendly AI / super intelligence / malevolent genie' thing. The Substrate is populated and run by human-shaped, human-sized entities, who have the option of running themselves faster than ordinary Earth life, but that's pretty much it. Bit roles in simulations can be played by nonhuman NPCs, who are much more limited than ordinary humans in their capabilities. (Although they might be permitted to 'grow up' into human-sized entities under some circumstances.)

I guess the biggest hidden divergence from Brian's idea is that here, the afterlife is mostly kept secret from people back in physical reality.

In terms of feedback, I'm curious to see if this setting has any fridge horrors that I'm not quite seeing...

[Brian]

An interesting idea.

My outline was more....  Everyone knows about the digital afterlife, because it was originally pioneered for the wealthy and privileged to cheat death.  As computing resources increased, the cost of access dropped.  More and more people are allowed in, until eventually everyone is given access and it becomes standard (because computing resources have negligible costs at that point).  Instead of using the Substrate as the medium, Substrate (where it exists) is just a medium of access; the digital afterlife/dataverse exists in parallel, yet infinite space.

The dataverse was originally created when mechanical/medical technology hadn't advanced to the point of providing alternate means of immortality.  Once those became available, since the number of citizens in existence only increases, they would need to impose artificial limits on lifespans (say, 150 years or whatever).

Once the emulated population exceeds the living population, the emulated folks naturally get less rights and ability to vote governing the 'real' world.  This is also why even though there's technology to (say) fabricate a brand new body and download from the dataverse into the waiting host, it's not done.


Okay.  So ... this is kind of vague and leaves a lot of things to flesh out (even contrasted against your more well-considered take).  Hmm.  I was thinking it would be more about the culture of people who live in a real world, but no longer really have questions of faith; they know there's an afterlife, they know they'll go there, and if they want, they can visit their friends who are already there.

Um ... I'm really just rehashing the concept of the Martians from Stranger in a Strange Land, aren't I? >_<

[Arakawa]

As a thought experiment, here's how I'd handle the "people who are aware that there's going to be an afterlife" notion in my setting. The Admins, see, need to have some agents in physical reality to monitor things that you need a physical body to monitor.

So what they do is just grab some random infant and use the Substrate to image their mind with appropriate notions from birth. So they know about the digital afterlife and they have a number of basic impulses hammered into them.

• Don't do anything that might cause the existence of Substrate to be discovered
• Perform on-the-ground troubleshooting e.g. once in a while there might be a fluke and someone's mind isn't being recognized by the Substrate as intelligent and needing preservation, so they need to find and identify what the problem is and fix it
• Identify and deal with any possible threats to the Substrate (e.g. another group of scientists trying to build their own Substrate from scratch would definitely conflict; humanity blowing itself up is a threat, since it destroys their only source of new souls; some technology might get invented that inadvertently damages the Substrate)

Otherwise, they get to grow up and have as ordinary a life as possible. As the Admins' agents are aware of it anyways, they get privileges to detach their minds and play around in the afterlife, e.g. when they're asleep.

The agents are also given limited privileges to use Substrate to e.g. create a Someone Else's Problem field to infiltrate military research programs, or whatever.

This is all a bit iffy, because the question is raised just to what degree Substrate can affect the physical world (if it permeates the Earth to such an extent that it can edit an infant's mind and create a Someone Else's Problem field, can the Admins use it as a directed energy weapon?), but we'll assume the Admins have a strictly honourable policy of "don't interfere except when absolutely necessary" and "don't do anything stupid and flashy that might draw attention".

I was thinking these people would be fairly lonely and have difficulty relating to ordinary people who are worried about death and stuff... it might even work well if you have the two kinds of people (aware and unaware) side by side in the same setting.

In terms of literary precedent, that might have more to do with the notion of fairy changelings or (vaguely Madoka-type) magical girls than with Martians...

EDIT: actually, the most relevant analogue would be some variants of shinigami.

As for where my setting came from, I remembered reading a review um, I think of "Whisper of the Heart", which opened with some remark along the lines of "man, I wish Studio Ghibli had a hand in designing the afterlife".

Which sort of led to the question, okay, most Singularity stories, after upload you just get to do whatever. What would a sensible plan for eternity look like, though, if you assumed generous handholding? (If Studio Ghibli suddenly agreed to design an afterlife, they'd be highly opinionated about what people should do with it.) That question needs a bit more work perhaps.

I guess my Admins are informed by a perhaps not entirely inaccurate notion that most people, if given the opportunity to simulate whatever experiences they want for the rest eternity, will likely not pick the experiences that will lead them to spend a happy eternity, so it's best to set up a rigid framework for them to operate in. (Again, for evidence in favour of the view, see the link about boozing in Cardiff.)

[sarsaparilla]

The first thing that came to my mind from the description is A.C. Clarke's The City and the Stars, which explores a somewhat similar concept.

Concerning resource management, the holographic principle (which is related to the Bekenstein bound, isn't wiki a great thing!) suggests that it is only possible to increase the total amount of available resources in polynomial time (specifically, as in time squared) but any self-similar growth requires new resources in exponential time, leading to an inevitable scarcity unless one postulates some rather interesting new physics.

Disregarding such 'unfortunate' implications, on the level of individuals there are many interesting questions that can be studied. Actually, Ghost in the Shell (both manga and anime) does a pretty good job with these if one is willing to endure the blatant fanservice (especially in the manga >_>).

[Brian]

Hmm, the holographic principle....  Right, I recall running across this because of its relation to the black hole information paradox.  Hmm, I'm really, really bad at math, so I don't ... understand quite the specifics of what you said there concerning ... time compression?  I thought it might be related to the 'area of an event horizon as opposed to the volume' bit, but, erm.

Sorry, I'm not quite able to figure that out. >_<

I do get the scarcity factor, at least.

Of course, for the purposes of the story I was thinking of, they've got access to infinite storage and processing power (in a series of convenient parallel dimensions or something).  This is, admittedly, probably not realistic, but then again ... probably, neither is the rest of the story.  My goal was more to look at how this might change people, instead of the feasibility of actually accomplishing it. >_>;;

I ... wait, the manga is even more fanservicey?  Is that even possible?  Wow.

Erm.  Anyway, GitS touches on a lot of interesting stuff on Augmented Reality, which is effectively almost identical to what the digital afterlife/dataverse is -- except it's more Alternate instead of Augmented.  Normal people get AuR, and the people in the dataverse get AlR, but they can overlap in places anyway.  Through, brain-hacking is creepy. ._.

I was thinking that the people who are in the simulation regard the first stage of 'life' (the organic one) as some place where everyone starts out, and eventually people graduate/evolve beyond their physical bodies at the end of their lifespan and return their matter to the universe (while still continuing to exist in emulated form).  Hmm. I'll need to think about that some more.

[thepanda]

I think he's referring to the lesbian three way sex scene with the major and two of her friends (doped up on drugs and bangin' in cyberspace).

[Brian]

...right.  It is at this point that I remember that quite a bit of Shiro Masamune's work is pornography.

[sarsaparilla]

I think he's referring to the lesbian three way sex scene with the major and two of her friends (doped up on drugs and bangin' in cyberspace).

Um ... there isn't such a thing in the copy I've seen, at least, but I think that I read it somewhere that the exported version was censored. Actually, my comment was mostly directed at the second volume (Man-machine Interface) which explores the concepts of virtual life much more extensively than the first one. The debated issues are philosophically interesting but the delivery is really egregious on the visual side, and while reading I kept saying to myself "I can't believe that I'm reading this stuff! What's wrong with the artist?" c.c

Brian: Concerning the relation between holographic principle and maximal resource efficiency, if the capacity of a volume of space depends on the surface area of the volume, then the theoretically most efficient method of acquiring resources will consist of an expanding sphere within which all the resources are taken into use. For a constant speed of expansion (probably the speed of light but it doesn't really matter what it is), the area and thus the amount of resources increases as in time squared. For a higher-dimensional (or multiply connected) space the order of the polynomial may be higher, but it's still a polynomial, and an exponential grows (eventually) faster than any polynomial. Hence, the only way to avoid scarcity is to have access to infinite-dimensional, or infinitely many times connected space. Or at least that's what I think, this is not really one of my strong points (I can do the basic math but I may have misunderstood the physics as explained in the wiki, the ideas are pretty ... unusual).

[Brian]

"I can't believe that I'm reading this stuff! What's wrong with the artist?" c.c

Er.  Well, you may prefer Appleseed more. >_>;

Aaaah.  Okay, it seems I was mostly right in my guess, but that clarified it.

The principle there I thought was about how the surface of an event horizon contains the data of everything that is inside.  And ... right.  Okay.  An event horizon is just another discrete object in this context.

So the relevant bit: "The holographic principle states that the entropy of ordinary mass (not just black holes) is also proportional to surface area and not volume; that volume itself is illusory and the universe is really a hologram which is isomorphic to the information "inscribed" on the surface of its boundary."

Hum.  I thought it was more about how much entropy was contained in the surface of an object, as opposed to the space that the object occupies.  It seems that surface area is more critical to determine entropy than volume in this context, but as I understand it, that amount of data is always going to be below (or at most -- at) the Bekenstein bound anyway.  >_>

I may have this wrong.

But, yes, they must cheat in order to have pretty much 'infinite' of anything. :p

[Arakawa]

Yeeah, this is pretty much why I don't feel drawn to the idea of 'hard sci-fi'. Instead of possible character implications of a digital afterlife, we end up contemplating some string theory whatsit about whether data can be said to exist on the surface of a volume or inside that volume. I don't feel qualified to deliver an opinion on that question, so in the end I can only aspire to do three things:

1. Fake science that doesn't fail the laugh test for inconsistency with reality (e.g. no Hollywood hacking)
2. Fake science whose internal logic is nontrivial, self-consistent, and interesting to explore
3. Fake science whose implications are such that it becomes interesting on a human level

(By those criteria Death Note counts as science fiction, so I must surely be wrong somewhere.)

Anything becomes a discussion of the actual theoretical feasibility of building Substrate, which is surely fascinating but all a bit too complicated for me to grasp.

[Brian]

Mm.  I'm a huge fan of armchair physics, but I also know not to take it too seriously when I write.  I know what I want to write about is impossible as we currently understand things (or at best, conjecture), but, meh, that's not where the story I want to tell is. :p

I could give you some science and physics to tell you how much the Substrate could accomplish, but not any bit of it is relevant beyond having total control of people's perceptions.  If the Substrate can make them think they're experiencing something (and accurately simulate it), then it's kind of moot.  Even if it takes the Substrate some non-trivial span of time to accomplish something real/mechanical, if people perceive it as instant, well....

That's more into augmented reality, though.  If the Substrate doesn't touch people (except to observe their memories/thoughts for later upload), then, well, up to you. :)