- 15,211
- 13,149
Referring to this section of the Tiering System page, and any parts of other pages to a similar effect
I'd hold it as valid for drawings, as those can typically be read as the literal drawings on the screen, without an actual world beyond that. But for the other cases, involving data, I think they're a lot more similar to books.
Take "a character approaches a rock".
As a bonus, I think we already realise that this would be a kinda silly way to treat things when looking in the other direction; we don't downgrade verses to 3-A because reality is seen as a simulation by higher beings, under the view that such would imply their transcendental beings are only finitely more powerful than the electrons in the simulation. We do this since we realise that the data is a representation, and if they can affect a part of that as large as a timeline in the world being represented, that we should index that, not a comparison to the underlying data structure.
I think this argument is partially valid, but mostly flawed.
I'd hold it as valid for drawings, as those can typically be read as the literal drawings on the screen, without an actual world beyond that. But for the other cases, involving data, I think they're a lot more similar to books.
Take "a character approaches a rock".
- In a drawing, the character and the rock occupy distinct locations in our reality, the representation maps to the actual content in a pretty one-to-one way. When the character gets closer to the rock, the representation of those two objects necessarily get closer together. If the rock got bigger, it would have to get bigger by a similar factor in our reality too.
- In a book, this sort of link is entirely broken. With sentences such as "I was far from the rock" and "I made my way closer to the rock", while the world being represented has the character and the rock get closer in the second sentence, the actual representation of that in our reality (i.e. those words) actually get further apart. I think this goes to show that the representation of their world isn't their literal world. If the rock got bigger, that would only require some words describing that change in our world.
- From this, I think we can see that data lands is more similar to a book. For a character to get closer to a rock, some data would change, but those electrons representing each wouldn't necessarily get closer to each other in our physical world. If the rock got bigger, that would involve changing some data, but it wouldn't require a corresponding change in the size/amount of electrons representing it.
As a bonus, I think we already realise that this would be a kinda silly way to treat things when looking in the other direction; we don't downgrade verses to 3-A because reality is seen as a simulation by higher beings, under the view that such would imply their transcendental beings are only finitely more powerful than the electrons in the simulation. We do this since we realise that the data is a representation, and if they can affect a part of that as large as a timeline in the world being represented, that we should index that, not a comparison to the underlying data structure.
Last edited:
