Talking Big

First, it’s determinism embraced by some. Then determinism pursued by all. Next, it’s many worlds embraced by some then pursued by all, but, finally, it’s a simulation. Many worlds simulated? This seems like a confusion of at least two theories.

In episode 7, Lily comes to the Devs lab and asks Stewart the cave fire gold temple gatekeeper: “What’s inside?” He says “Everything is inside.” It’s not clear which mode of quantum explanation he believes in. He says at one point they’ve made the machine work perfectly. The machine is shown to be a perfect simulation generator. So, here it seems the map-territory joke has come a long way from its early days. Note the word perfection.

Here is Borges’ 1946 micro story “On Exactitude in Science” (Hurley translation)

… In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
Suárez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lérida, 1658

The mile to the mile scale. A Lewis Carroll joke and of course older than that. The Devs simulator is not a 2D map. It’s massively more complex in every possible way. The worlds in many worlds are non-communicating. At least, DK Lewis says so. Science fiction has gotten around this in a couple of major ways. One is to ignore that and have gates or portals between the similar but not perfectly identical worlds. That’s what I’ve done to bring together 400 Yoshis in my novel. The other is the Matrix-y idea that the world is actually a simulation and any world could be simulated if you put in the data. Devs seems to conflate the two. It’s a weird out.

Borges has more fun with these ideas in Partial Enchantments of the Quixote.

The inventions of philosophy are no less fantastic than those of art: Josiah Royce, in the first volume of his work The World and the Individual (1899), has formulated the following: ‘Let us imagine that a portion of the soil of England has been levelled off perfectly and that on it a cartographer traces a map of England. The job is perfect; there is no detail of the soil of England, no matter how minute, that is not registered on the map; everything has there its correspondence. This map, in such a case, should contain a map of the map, which should contain a map of the map of the map, and so on to infinity.’ Why does it disturb us that the map be included in the map and the thousand and one nights in the book of the Thousand and One Nights? Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the reason: these inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictions.

He and Royce get closer there to the idea of the massive amount of detail needed in a simulation. Minute details of the soil. With my little mind, I can’t quite imagine a machine that could reproduce the entire universe or translate it into/from data or whatever the language is here. Call it a limit of representation. Call it anti-inversion. Call me Plato w/ his head cut off.