07-20-2016, 11:52 AM
He walked from the Consulate across the park to the Palace. He could hear the protests from here. What a mess. He tried running through all the possible advantages to the announcement and kept coming up blank. Yes these Atharim- and he was going to find out as much about them as possible, now. The history alone fascinated him. And of course there was the little matter of them wanting him and men like him dead- were now made public. There was that advantage, he supposed.
But the trade off was now their secret was out. People feared what they didn't understand. They behaved irrationally, unpredictable. As long as the government took no official position, there were always those who could deny, could explain, could minimize. Now, there was only one public course. Still, not everything was lost. With society thrown into an uproar, perhaps it could be nudged in a specific direction. How could they do that?
He was oblivious to his surroundings, now, his mind calculating the possibilities, the potential futures. But they rapidly branched out into infinities almost immediately, a truly chaotic system with an unknowable number of variables and feedback loops.
An unexpectedly sharp cold wind cut into him and drew him out of his reverie. Weather. Another chaotic system. Models using differential calculus of the highest order were still only the crudest approximations. Prediction still could only boast a week or two- at most- of accuracy before the possibilities became truly unknowable.
It was the wrong angle to look at things. The models needed to work backwards first, to predict what had happened before they could work in the other direction. And there was something else too. Chaotic systems sometimes developed into emergent systems, displaying, at times, the appearance of intelligence or order.
And there was his clue. Because history was another such system, concomitant with its own variables and differentials and feedback loops. And there were definite historical trends that sometimes appeared almost intelligent. And if existence was all a single mathematical program running inside some universal computer, as Tegmark- and he believed, then that only served to make this more true.
So what was his goal? Why had he latched onto Ascendancy, if not for the fact they they shared a goal? True order. An end to the chaos. So....let's look at it from the other end. We have a goal, the program has an end state. The elimination of chaos. Work backward. How does today's announcement help us to that goal? What are the intermediate steps? As he thought, he began to smile as he walked through the guarded entrance of the palace.
He wore a latee colored thick wool suit, forest green shirt, iridescent indigo tie, and purple Sigma pin on his lapel. His questions quickly sent him in the proper direction until he at last approached the windowed hall Ascendancy was in. The man was with one of his aides.
Marcus inclined his head in respect but waited for the man to finish with his aide and begin.
But the trade off was now their secret was out. People feared what they didn't understand. They behaved irrationally, unpredictable. As long as the government took no official position, there were always those who could deny, could explain, could minimize. Now, there was only one public course. Still, not everything was lost. With society thrown into an uproar, perhaps it could be nudged in a specific direction. How could they do that?
He was oblivious to his surroundings, now, his mind calculating the possibilities, the potential futures. But they rapidly branched out into infinities almost immediately, a truly chaotic system with an unknowable number of variables and feedback loops.
An unexpectedly sharp cold wind cut into him and drew him out of his reverie. Weather. Another chaotic system. Models using differential calculus of the highest order were still only the crudest approximations. Prediction still could only boast a week or two- at most- of accuracy before the possibilities became truly unknowable.
It was the wrong angle to look at things. The models needed to work backwards first, to predict what had happened before they could work in the other direction. And there was something else too. Chaotic systems sometimes developed into emergent systems, displaying, at times, the appearance of intelligence or order.
And there was his clue. Because history was another such system, concomitant with its own variables and differentials and feedback loops. And there were definite historical trends that sometimes appeared almost intelligent. And if existence was all a single mathematical program running inside some universal computer, as Tegmark- and he believed, then that only served to make this more true.
So what was his goal? Why had he latched onto Ascendancy, if not for the fact they they shared a goal? True order. An end to the chaos. So....let's look at it from the other end. We have a goal, the program has an end state. The elimination of chaos. Work backward. How does today's announcement help us to that goal? What are the intermediate steps? As he thought, he began to smile as he walked through the guarded entrance of the palace.
He wore a latee colored thick wool suit, forest green shirt, iridescent indigo tie, and purple Sigma pin on his lapel. His questions quickly sent him in the proper direction until he at last approached the windowed hall Ascendancy was in. The man was with one of his aides.
Marcus inclined his head in respect but waited for the man to finish with his aide and begin.