• This forum is strictly intended to be used by members of the VS Battles wiki. Please only register if you have an autoconfirmed account there, as otherwise your registration will be rejected. If you have already registered once, do not do so again, and contact Antvasima if you encounter any problems.

    For instructions regarding the exact procedure to sign up to this forum, please click here.
  • We need Patreon donations for this forum to have all of its running costs financially secured.

    Community members who help us out will receive badges that give them several different benefits, including the removal of all advertisements in this forum, but donations from non-members are also extremely appreciated.

    Please click here for further information, or here to directly visit our Patreon donations page.
  • Please click here for information about a large petition to help children in need.

Self-Reference ENGINE Tier 0 Downgrade

Status
Not open for further replies.

Ultima_Reality

?????????
VS Battles
Administrator
6,149
16,237
With these hands I give. With others I take.

...So, very straightforward, all-in-all:



These guys don't qualify for Tier 0 anymore, as can be plainly seen from the justifications. So, they should get the boot, I am afraid.

Now, as for what they'll be booted to... One might be tempted to send them down to 1-A, due to the following:

Laplace’s Demon is the idea that time is just one of the dimensions in a deterministic system. Everything that will occur in the future is already completely determined by things as they are now and cannot be changed. The demon knows all about the current state of existence, and for that reason the difference between the present and the future has become meaningless.
It is hard to say whether the aphorisms the staff members share among themselves are informed by knowledge or ignorance, whether they show the way to a revolutionary new idea or are mere clichés. It is also possible that at times like this they speak in aphorisms simply out of habit.

“We are capable of comprehending plans such as these. We think this is due to the work of the devil. Given the extent of our facility with calculations, we are closer to Laplace’s Demon than we are to any other person that existed in the past. It is because something like this transpired in the past that the devil ascended, moved up a step, and escaped to a place where we could not reach him. However, it is because of the devil’s closure, a trick of topology that thinks this stairway through to the end, that our plan was recognized. That is why we are able to think about it and to carry it out. That is our belief."

“In that sense, our plan is an attempt to reenact Laplace’s Demon. By reassembling the various fragments of the universe, we will recall the new demon. Our goal is to ensnare and take down the demon that has moved up a step on the logical hierarchy."

“And then we ourselves will be involved in the plan. We believe that will be further insurance of its success.”

What might bind space-time together once again is their own past selves, as viewed from the future. In that sense, they are doing it themselves. More is expected from this endeavor than the mere restoration of a stable space-time structure. Boiled down, that’s what Yggdrasil had said. The prodigal sons of Laplace have begun their wanderings, and now Yggdrasil is trying to grab them by the scruff of their necks and get them to listen to reason and return home. That’s what this attempt is all about.

“If we think we are being made to think we are being made to think of this as a sort of fixed-point theorem, then we can think about it,” Yggdrasil says. The staff members appear to have given up on answering back.

“Our thinking is that we are being made to think we are being made to think of space-time as probably some sort of reinforced, stable region. There is no escaping this line of argument. We have to work with this.”
James thinks this way of thinking is nothing more than the giant corpora of knowledge’s aspiration. They simply integrate too much leverage structure into their own thought processes.

Of course, James is just like a dream of Yggdrasil’s. But if that were true, then Yggdrasil is a dream of the demon’s, and the demon must be a dream of a higher-level demon. It is Yggdrasil’s contention she should be able to pierce through this endless hierarchy of demons and reestablish space-time as a coherent bundle of meaning. That is because, according to Yggdrasil’s line of thinking, this thought is the sole interpretation capable of penetrating an infinite number of layers.

As for the hypergiant corpora of knowledge, posited to be a level above the giant corpora of knowledge, there remained a bit of room for debate. Even the giant corpora of knowledge were unable to catch the heels of these strangely unknowable presences. If they were truly substitutes for anything, they could do anything. No problem.

To which the giant corpora of knowledge could only respond that they themselves were already able to do anything. “Anything” was an easy thing to say, but it is a word that should be used with caution. For example, the giant corpora of knowledge could boast of knowledge on a scale required to create a stone too heavy for even the giant corpora of knowledge to lift, and then lift it. The way an omnipotent god could. The giant corpora of knowledge were themselves omnipotent. But the extent of their omnipotence was limited at the point where they could do no more to understand why they were powerless to erase the fact that they were already extinct.

It may be that the hypergiant corpora of knowledge are truly, limitlessly omnipotent. But the giant corpora of knowledge asserted that was only within their own limited narrative sphere. They now believe the reason why a hypergiant corpus of knowledge reached out to humans at some point in the past was because the giant corpora of knowledge were already extinct at that time. They even proposed that humans might be better than they were at thinking about the situation that way.

So, to sum it up, Self-Reference ENGINE's "main" cosmology, so to speak, is organized in a hierarchy of knowledge, in which the greater aggregation of knowledge is more powerful than the lesser, and in this hierarchy, higher planes are described as seeing lower ones as "dreams."

Yeah, so, this isn't valid for this case. Notice what is stated in the first quote above: "Of course, James is just like a dream of Yggdrasil’s." Yggdrasil is one of the Giant Corpora of Knowledge, which occupy a higher plane in the hierarchy of knowledge than humans:

The giant corpora of knowledge did not neglect to add: of course this fiction was made by things that were made by humans. It has been passed along to humans due to the copyright issues it presents. As a logical conclusion, of course the narrative passed along to the giant corpora of knowledge is different.

What the giant corpora of knowledge produce are nothing more than sequences of letters. Humans believe they are reading a story written by the giant corpora of knowledge, but in truth what the giant corpora of knowledge wrote may have had nothing to do with that story. After all, humans and the giant corpora of knowledge occupy different planes in the hierarchy of knowledge.

Yet, the Giant Corpora's superiority over their lesser is very much characterized in terms of dimensionality. To wit, they are literally incapable of retrieving an object hidden inside a star, because stars are actually infinite-dimensional cylinders, and the sheer heat radiated by them is too much for the Corpora to safely interact with:

Nothing was known about what happened to the self-proclaimed star-man Alpha Centauri after his first appearance. In fact, in this case it would be stranger if something were known. Giant corpora of knowledge were sent to the Alpha Centauri system and found traces of a past civilization in the primary star itself.

The objects were discovered as hyperdimensional structures measuring about two thousand kilometers. There was a lump of unknown stuff, its surfaces all cut into trapezohedrons, changing shape depending on the angle of view, clearly indicating this object existed in more than just the present three dimensions. If that was all there was, there would be nothing more to say, but the problem was that the object was buried in the core of the star.

The giant corpora of knowledge, having transitioned from a different dimension, didn’t really care where the thing was buried. All they had to do was reach out a hand from a different dimension and scoop it up. But even they had to pause at the idea of the heat of a star. A star, which we think of as a three-dimensional sphere, but which is actually a space-time cylinder with an unlimited number of dimensions and pumping out an enormous amount of heat, stood square in the path of the giant corpora of knowledge.

Clearly this was a gift left by the self-proclaimed star-man Alpha Centauri, but all their attempts to investigate dimensional phenomena in the vicinity of Alpha Centauri ended in failure. This futility of reaching the object was reminiscent of the impossibility of reaching out to the self-proclaimed star-man Alpha Centauri. All that was left, for both humanity and the giant corpora of knowledge, was a material that embodied a bizarre sense of materiality, in a place they could never reach.

And even Alpha Centauri isn't portrayed very differently. The only difference with the Hypergiant Corpora of Knowledge of which he is a part is that they're stated to be "made of" dimensions, in the same way ordinary lifeforms are made of cells and atoms:

“To express this in your language, dimensions are our constituent elements…”

The giant corpora of knowledge were left to wonder what it would mean to be made up of dimensions, rather than to live in dimensions.
A general review of past theories of dimensional calculation was conducted, and responses considered.

“In other words, we are not entities such as those you are familiar with, made up of molecules. We are living things whose constituent elements are dimensions.”
Several giant corpora of knowledge responsible for spatial theory drafted a report about this statement. An overwhelming majority recognized the logic of the statement, and work began immediately on theories of how to construct a device from dimensions rather than from matter.

And then, to cap it all off, the hierarchy of knowledge (Here referred to as the "levels of logic") is explicitly described as being simply based on degrees of freedom:

The giant corpora of knowledge were ignorant of the word despair.

Even so, thought Kircher, who after the incident had decided to remain a silent onlooker. The giant corpora of knowledge themselves dispersed and continued to explore varied possibilities, thinking they might return to something indistinguishable from zero among the infinite dimensions, at the very end of infinite time. They reached a point where they thought they might have been given a slightly more approachable god.

This was distinct from the fear engendered by the notion of the inevitable heat death of the universe. Things like that can’t be considered major problems. More like just fear of attenuation.

“The pressure of knowledge,” Kircher said, just as the words sprang to his mind. “They believe, naively, that they are advancing under their own steam. Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say, though, that they are just going with the flow? Through something akin to the power generated at the interstices, between the levels of logic. Between the small degree of freedom and the large degree of freedom, in contact with the hyle of the universe, an entropic force is generated. In the direction of the large degree of freedom.”

In Kircher’s imagination, at the very end of the levels of logic there is a vast desert, stretching endlessly in all dimensions.

They are all now moving determinedly toward that desert, while continuing to disperse, physically. Whatever power they might have to resist that vastness is terribly feeble.

So, yeah. What I suggest is, really:

  • Giant Corpora = High 1-B individually. Low 1-A collectively
  • Alpha Centauri = Higher into Low 1-A (Due to being larger than the Corpora's multiverse and all their capabilities)

And that should be all, for now.
 
Last edited:
You need to put it in queue in Tier 1/0 revisions hub.

Seems straightforward. Although, wouldn’t Nemo’s manifestation key be downgraded too? If yes, might as well do it here.
 
What about the SRE itself?

 
What about the SRE itself?

Uh, "Nemo" is the SRE, and he already addressed he'd deal with Nemo later
 
I agree with the changes. However, the Giant Corpora Of Knolwedge should still retain their extra key due to ascending higher into the HoK and interacting with the "external world". As for the tiering of the Key, it would be Far Higher to Unknown due to the vagueness of of what exactly the "external world" was.
 
Well, I have a small question about SRE about its lack of knowledge about its creator's identity and whether its creation would be a problem in qualifying for Tier 0. (But he already said he'd deal with it later so forget about it) However, this downgrade seems fair.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top