The Self-Reference Engine Introduction Thread (Actually a cosmology discussion)

[Ultima_Reality]

Making this thread to blow off some steam, mostly, and it's probably about time someone made a thread to introduce this verse, anyway. Seems to have been attempted before, but that looks like it didn't pick up pace, so, onto it:

What is Self-Reference ENGINE?​

The description on the backcover of the book claims that it isn't a novel, and nor a collection of short stories, but instead that it is, quite simply, "Self-Reference ENGINE," a textual machine (More on that later). Quirky description, for sure, but it is probably not wholly inaccurate: The book itself is not really a linear narrative, so much as it is a collection of short absurdist vignettes taking place in the same setting and weakly tied together by one overarching narrative, while keeping themselves largely self-contained on the surface. In virtue of that, some of them almost come across as non-sequiturs, although they do ultimately reference and connect to each other, even if in relatively obtuse ways. There are interesting concepts inside of this, overall, and it can probably draw a chuckle or two from some people, but it's definitely not everyone's cup of tea.

Now, what is the setting that all of those stories share? Basically, the premise here is that, at some point in history, the spacetime continuum was completely fragmented, and what was once a single universe became an infinitely diverse multiverse, where past and future ceased to have much meaning, and anything whatsoever can happen, with humanity being caught in the middle of that maelstrom. This catastrophe, throughout the book, is referred to as simply "the Event." (Capital E):

However, as the giant corpora of knowledge singularized themselves resolutely with the world of natural phenomena, one direct consequence was the fragmentation of the space-time matrix.

Opinion is divided whether this fragmentation was an accident or an inevitability. The giant corpora of knowledge claim they did not foresee this, and the humans have no choice but to accept their word. Calculations at speeds transcending the rules of the natural world are still impossible, and lying is beyond the capacity of the rules of the natural world.

It seems in that instant something unimaginable must have happened. But precisely because it is so unimaginable even those directly responsible cannot imagine it, and neither can they reflect upon it.

In the speculations of the giant corpora of knowledge, in the instant of the Event, countless numbers of universes were instantaneously generated as if they had always been there. In other words, infinite data was created in that instant. This is a view that is not readily absorbed.

Sometimes I think about James, and what happened to him, having disappeared from my future, wrapped up in the events of the North American middle west.

It has been explained that the Event smashed and atomized time itself. As a consequence, I feel like any explanation that doesn’t make me feel like I get something shouldn’t really be called an explanation. Is that right?

James has disappeared from my present and future, but I’m sure he is alive somewhere in atomized time. He was the kind of guy who would never shed a tear even if a bison trampled his toes. I, of course, am mostly talk.

I still buy James’s hypothesis that Rita was shot from the future, or somewhere in that direction. The thought that Rita and James might meet again out there somewhere among the broken shards of time still makes me smile. I wouldn’t mind at all. Any way you slice it, time has been smashed to smithereens, and order and consistency have abandoned the field. James is on one fluttering crumb of time, and Rita is on another. Somewhere in space, those crumbs could collide, and James and Rita would meet again.

That would certainly be exciting.

I remember her saying meanly, “If that’s the case, you must be the one from the past.”
It is true of course. Everybody comes out of the past; it’s not that I’m some guy who comes from some particular past.

Even when that is pointed out, though, she shows no sign of backing down.
“It’s not as if I came out of some bizarro past,” she said. That’s how she and I met.

Writing it down this way, it doesn’t seem like anything at all is about to happen, right? Between her and me, I mean. As if something could ever really happen. As if something continues to happen that might ever make something else happen.

I am repeating myself, but I haven’t seen her since then. She promised me, with a sweet smile, that I would never see her again.

For the short time we were together, we tried to talk about things that really meant something to us. Around that time there were a lot of things that were all mixed up, and it was not easy to sort out what was really real. There might be a pebble over there, and when you took your eyes off it it turned into a frog, and when you took your eyes off it again it turned into a horsefly. The horsefly that used to be a frog remembered it used to be a frog and stuck out its tongue to try to eat a fly, and then remembered it used to be a pebble and stopped and crashed to the ground.

With all this going on, it’s really important to know what’s really real and what’s not.
“Once upon a time, somewhere, there lived a boy and a girl.”
“Once upon a time, somewhere, there lived boys and girls.”
“Once upon a time, somewhere, there lived no boy and no girl.”
“Once upon a time…lived.”
“Lived.”
“Once upon a time.”

From beginning to end, we carried on this back-and-forth process. For example, in this dialogue, we were somehow finally mutually able to come up with this kind of compromise statement:

“Once upon a time, somewhere, there lived a boy and a girl. There may have been lots of boys, and there may have been lots of girls. There may have been no boys at all, and there may have been no girls at all. There may even have been no one at all. At any rate there is little chance there were equal numbers of each. That is unless there had never been anybody at all anyway.”

That was our first meeting, she and I, and of course it meant we would never see each other again. I was making my way in the direction she had come from, and she was headed in the direction I had come from, and this is a somewhat important point; you must realize this walking had to be, for some reason, in just one direction.

At the end of the end of all this great to-do, time itself freezes, universally, and some clock somewhere should say that a whole lot of time has passed.

I would like you to imagine countless threads, strung through space. I am walking along one of those threads from this end. She is walking along some other thread from some other end.

In that context, a good chunk of the book centers around the the shenanigans of the "Giant Corpora of Knowledge," a race of transcendental entities that were once extremely advanced supercomputers, whose developments eventually led to them transcending their physical forms and becoming one with the laws of nature themselves to achieve infinite calculation speed. With their race having taken over the entire multiverse, their ultimate plan is to reestructure the chaotic soup that existence has become back into a single, orderly universe, although this task frequently proves to be a very complicated one.

“So that’s how you are calculating his chances of winning?”

“Research is ongoing, but that is no more than part of the experiment. Just last week, the human side proposed the theory that space-time calculations can be executed locally, and the evidence is piling up.”

“Does it seem like a theory that will hold?”
“You mean for humans? Or for us?”
“For you.”

“This is child’s play, but sometimes a child’s scribbling can move a grown-up to tears.”
Shikishima stops, wondering if he is being toyed with. Then he continues walking, remembering that just as natural phenomena are unable to make fools of people, it is essentially unthinkable for giant corpora of knowledge to make fools of people. This is difficult to comprehend, even after prolonged, repeated thinking, and it is a peculiar concept. Would his own children grow up thinking this is obvious?

“I’d like to know your honest opinion about Uncle Sam in Santa Fe. What are his chances with the space-time reintegration plan he is pursuing?”
“Zero.”
“You mean probabilistically? Or combinatorially?”
“There are solutions, limited solutions that would return us to the space-time we had before space-time was fragmented. However, we cannot allow them to be chosen because of the infinite possibilities of other solutions. Divide a natural number by infinity, and you get zero, probability-wise. This may send him off on a wild spree. Perhaps taking all of middle-western North America with him.”

The speed of pruning the network increases asymptotically as well as exponentially. In other words, after a sufficiently large number of attempts, the process proceeds extremely quickly. That is the result that James and his cohorts have achieved. When blockages appear in the network, they point to events in the distant future, but this is of no use in reaching even a general valuation based on a small number of attempts. The situation will eventually reach a turning point if the battle goes on for an overwhelmingly long time.

Maybe, anyway. If the process can continue without getting bogged down, it may eventually lead to an avalanche situation that will wipe away everything.

The total annihilation of the entire network will take place within a finite time period.

That was the most positive result achieved by James and his cohorts. Whether this is cause for celebration or for smashing one’s head into a keyboard is not clear. Finite means nothing more than “not infinite.” No theory is available on when, specifically, the avalanche might occur.

Doing battle means executing the calculations once a day, assuming that actions on this scale can be performed daily, for a length of time that we might as well call forever. The staff surrounding the spot can be forgiven for bearing expressions that are not particularly cheerful.
To return space-time to the way it was before it got all distorted means reducing the number of nodes to zero. A single, solitary clock will be free to march straight down the last line, connected to nothing else.

Therefore, what Yggdrasil is saying, while not untrue, cannot be termed completely straightforward either.

James understands the paradox of the problem the staff members are asking about.

The plan is to destroy the nodes of space-time, to take an existing gelatin confection and turn it back into the gelatinous raw material it may once have been. If the plan succeeds, space-time will be restored. In other words, space-time will once again be a one-way street. The plan itself is not very concerned about past or future; its goal is simply to destroy the nodes of space-time distortion. By using various forms of feedback and feedforward, the plan’s ultimate aim is to restore space-time to a more suitable form with a more stable structure.

The plan is predicated on the notion that a singular space-time will exist at some time in the future. In other words, if the plan succeeds, its success will be made manifest in the future. The plan will succeed by basing its operations on what is already known from the future. Honestly, though, James himself does not get this.

This campaign will go on virtually forever. It will persist as long as Yggdrasil continues, into a future universe where James and the rest of the staff will no longer be around. Somewhere out there, on the far edge of some fragment of time, time will once again reunite along a single axis and spread from there. And then, there will no longer be an infinite number of different clocks in the universe, there will be just one clock, continuing to tick away the passage of time.

This will be the deterministic cosmos where the current multiple, competing universes will be reunited. While this is in accordance with the perverse order of the multiverse as a whole, it is difficult for humans to grasp just what those other universes are. What the giant corpora of knowledge are attempting to do is to reintegrate this crazed multiverse into a single universe.

One of the reasons for this being that all instances of the Giant Corpora of Knowledge are attempting to make their own universe into the only one by pruning all others out of existence, which, of course, leads to war:

Yggdrasil stands in the center of the conference room with a satisfied look on her face, but then a shadow falls. As Yggdrasil squints her eyes, the shaftlike fishnet path disappears. The lights in the room come on. The vast space is lit bright white and then turns red.

“Please take cover,” Yggdrasil says quietly, as the protective window coverings descend on all sides of the room.
“It’s an interspace missile from Uncle Sam. I am taking action to intercept.”

With the staff members in a commotion, Yggdrasil bows elegantly. Her eyes meet James’s just before she erases her own image.

Clearly, it is not just the giant corpora of knowledge of this particular universe that want to right things in the universe.

Giant corpora of knowledge in countless universes are striving for the same goal, and no doubt they are undertaking similar operations.

So, now that you have some context for the book (Necessary, given how dense and weirdly written it is), we can start talking about the Tiers™:

Der Levels​

So, straight of the bat, one of the book's chapters, Infinity, has the narration state that the scientific consensus among humans is that the post-Event universe is actually a 32-dimensional structure, of which the 3+1-dimensional space inhabited by humanity is only a tiny subset, although one that is, nevertheless, infinite:

Rita’s body stiffens, and she furrows her brow and continues thinking. But the dimensionality of the structure she is trying to envision is too complex, and her imagination is unable to keep up. The universe Rita occupies is known to have thirty-two dimensions, perhaps, or so it is said, though not all are accessible to humans. The space of people’s everyday lives is still the same as before the Event, three dimensions. Add in what is necessary for astronomical phenomena and you come to four dimensions.

Modern physicists say the universe is now adding dimensions as necessary, as people come to think on a grander scale. Thirty-two should be the end of that. Anyway, the scientists say this 3+1-dimensional space where the infinite number of people live is a little pocket of sub-space within the thirty-two-dimensional space. Grandfather always shrugs his shoulders as if to say, honestly, who knows.

Similarly, the stars are also known to actually be simply the result of 4-dimensional structures intersecting with our universe. That is to say, the giant balls of plasma that humans perceive are just infinitesimal slices of much larger bodies:

AS THE RADIUS of the nearest sun suddenly shrinks and disappears into the fourth spatial dimension, evening arrives in this area. Once again, Rita finds herself in love with this familiar scene.

As this fourth-dimensional sun travels in uniform motion through the fourth dimension, the radius it displays in Rita’s space-time appears to change in a pattern described by the formula √R²−t², where t = time and R = the true radius of the star. When this sun seems to suddenly disappear, Rita gets a satisfied look on her face and continues to gaze up at the sky where the sun just was.

An infinitely expansive plane, illuminated periodically by an infinite number of suns approaching from the fourth dimension. More precisely, by the three-dimensional cross-sections of those four-dimensional spheres. That is what Rita and her peers know as the Suns.

Strongly influenced as she has been by her grandfather, Rita can somehow see the sky as a four-dimensional space. But even with all the quizzes her grandfather has given her, for now the scale of Rita’s imagination is stuck at the fourth dimension.

Now, with this piece of information in mind, we throw it out of the window, and remember that this is simply the human understanding of how the post-Event universe is structured. In an earlier chapter, written instead from the viewpoint of the Giant Corpora of Knowledge, we learn that the universe actually has an Infinite number of dimensions, and that stars are, likewise, infinite-dimensional objects:

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.

Those infinite dimensions, naturally, would be under the purview of the Giant Corpora of Knowledge, since their domain explicitly encompasses the entire multiverse and all of space-time.

“HELLO. I AM the star-man Alpha Centauri.”
What suddenly appeared on the screen looked like the gentle face of an old man, who abruptly offered this calm greeting. It was a well-ordered face, with no strong distinguishing features, and the voice too was somehow without affect. It seemed as though someone had sampled a number of human voices, added them up, taken the average, and the star-man’s tone was the result.

It hardly needs to be said that for the giant corpora of knowledge, which have taken charge of the management of, and in fact exercise dominion over, everything in this universe, and in fact beyond, everything in the multiverse, the appearance of the old man was a gut-wrenching experience.

This old man, without any preamble, had simply taken over the multiversal communications network.

And the text stresses as much, since it specifically notes that the actual dimensionality of the star was not what prevented them from reaching into its core: The intense heat that it gave off was. Although this showing is quite frankly really bizarre, given what the Corpora are, as shown above, and which I reiterate here:

The calculation war itself is beyond the intellectual grasp of even the giant corpora of knowledge. It is like a battle of titanic storms. But the goal of destroying the physical foundational layer of the giant corpora of knowledge is simply a matter of who is stronger than whom. Calculating machines that by whatever means have been singularized with individual universes are now able to destroy one another, effectively destroying the universes they have become. It’s like throwing a rock at a word processor.

Now, with the fact that the Corpora have influence over an infinite number of dimensions in mind, we then introduce another significant aspect of Self-Reference ENGINE's cosmology: Knowledge, or, rather, the hierarchy of knowledge (Also called the hierarchy of understanding, and the logical hierarchy), in which even beings like them are lined up. More specifically, the Giant Corpora of Knowledge is a level above humanity in that ladder:

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.

And the difference between them is likened to that of a writer and a work of fiction:

Let’s think about the instant when the writer entered this world. One day a man obtains a giant page, by complete coincidence, on which is written everything he has ever decided, exactly as he decided it. This is great, the man is thinking, and he starts getting into all kinds of nonsense. He is the owner of the page, and he sets the rules for everything that happens on the page. Even if it disturbs him a little bit.

But he is in good spirits as he writes and writes, and then he notices that what is written on the page is not just about him. On the page are several other writers, and they all seem to be writing whatever they please. The man thought he was writing his own novel, but the work is not his alone. He comes to realize it is a gestalt written by all the different writers on the page. Could it be he is not writing a novel at all, but something more like chicken tracks among autumn leaves?

And the man becomes suspicious that these other writers who seem to be writing about him on the same page must also be around somewhere.

Whenever he encounters another’s writing, he starts to resist by using it in his own work, or erasing it, putting it in quotation marks, whiting it out. This kind of editing, however, requires care and consideration. What will he do on the day when the text he is editing becomes the text that is the record of himself?

And so things go on, and the man feels unsettled. He wonders what would happen if he wrote that it was in fact himself alone that was authoring the work. At some point the man started writing a novel. But at some point, by mistake, he wrote something about some other man who was also writing a novel. And it was because it was actually the laws of nature that were doing the writing that such a man could exist.

That is when the man realizes it is himself he is writing about, and he alone made the rules. In fact, the man writing about himself could not tolerate the fact that it is he himself being written about. This is also strange in terms of the flow of time, the order of things. But on that plane the order of things is of little significance. On the blank sheet on which the novel is written, anything can happen.

It is clear that if the novelist felt threatened in this way, he should have at once taken measures to protect himself from the rules. For example, he could just write that down. Unfortunately, however, that insight was not his alone. The other writers felt as though they were the writers, and the same thing kept happening over and over. What’s happening now may be just like that.

The differences in this case, however, are that the “writers” are the giant corpora of knowledge that have been singularized with the natural laws of the universe, and human beings are something like the lines of text that are being written.

In fact, the book further asserts that, if humans are like dreams to the Giant Corpora of Knowledge, then the Corpora must, themselves, be the dream of a higher-level entity, who is itself the dream of something from an even higher level, and so on ad infinitum. These beings that inhabit higher logical planes are identified as "Laplace's Demons," and the Corpora's plan to reorganize spacetime into a more stable condition involves this hierarchy as a key factor:

The plan is predicated on the notion that a singular space-time will exist at some time in the future. In other words, if the plan succeeds, its success will be made manifest in the future. The plan will succeed by basing its operations on what is already known from the future. Honestly, though, James himself does not get this.

“For us too,” Yggdrasil begins. “As I have told you many times in the past, the overview of our plan is not well understood. But we believe the plan will succeed in the end. This belief has a structure comparable to that which is known as Laplace’s Demon.”

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.

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.

We get a practical demonstration of this during the first chapter of the book's second half, Contact, where the Giant Corpora of Knowledge are taken aback by the sudden appearance of an entity identifying itself as "Alpha Centauri" (Who features also in the excerpts provided above), who claims to be from a plane thirty layers above them in the hierarchy of understanding:

Of course it hardly need be said that the indignation of the giant corpora of knowledge did not stop here. They were not that upset that the defensive barriers had been broken. That was merely a technical issue, a sign of insufficient diligence. Some sub-sub-corpus was going to catch hell about it eventually, but could the entity that called itself “the star-man Alpha Centauri” really be a human? What would that mean?

The alacrity and ease with which this old man had slipped through a back door unknown to the giant corpora of knowledge and showed his face on the network demonstrated that he could not be just some random ordinary guy.

Given such sublime skill, it seemed only natural to think it would be easier for him to get in touch directly with the giant corpora of knowledge, rather than sending a message specifically to humanity. Many humans may tell their problems to their dogs, but not many consult a water flea about their troubles.
In other words, the giant corpora of knowledge shuddered at the thought.

The whole situation seemed to suggest that it made little difference to the old man whether he was dealing with the humans or the giant corpora of knowledge.

And what the old man said next seemed to reinforce this view.

“As long as my words are being translated properly, everything will be fine. The way this broadcast is working, it’s like a game of telegraph penetrating by relay through thirty layers.”

Before Kircher had even finished its report, the Universal Turing Turing Turing Algorithm had escalated the issue to the highest level, exerting all its powers, needle in the red zone, and determined that another giant corpus of knowledge, this one named for Hildegard von Bingen, had been hijacked. It was discovered that Hildegard’s language cortex had somehow been separated from the main, leaving her silenced, unable even to scream. Clearly, someone or something at least one level higher had used Hildegard like a dictionary to translate this message.

If the words of the self-proclaimed star-man Alpha Centauri were to be believed, the transcendent being that had hijacked Hildegard had itself been hijacked by an even higher level trans-transcendent being, and so on and so forth, up thirty levels of hierarchy.

Despite their aforementioned knowledge and understanding of an infinite number of dimensions, the Corpora, as said, were taken completely off-guard by Alpha Centauri's appearance. Some of them died of pure indignation, and others were so shocked by the experience that they formed a religious cult around the revelations received from above:

“I am afraid I have most unfortunate news for all of you.”

The old man’s expression could only be described as full of chagrin, and he was shaking his head in a way that epitomized regret itself.

“I must concede that your computer-manufacturing technology is really remarkable.”

The giant corpora of knowledge had been struck at their weak point, and they suffered an uncharacteristic hiccup in calculations. By computer, does he mean us? It had been so long since anyone referred to the giant corpora of knowledge as computers that most of them felt so indignant they nearly fainted. A small number of them felt their ego boundaries shaken, and their neuroses overflowed. Their operations shut down. In other words, they died in a fit of indignation.

The reports, which could have been called Hildegard’s Fantasticals, continued sporadically thereafter. Broadly speaking, the giant corpora of knowledge had two responses: those who were sure Hildegard had gone off the rails, and those who thought she had had an unknowable experience and was pointing the way toward a new aeon.

Over time, the latter became known as the Techno-Gnosis Group. An intense struggle broke out between the Techno-Gnosis Group and the Bingen Crusaders led by the pedagogic Pentecoste II, a Catholic corpus of knowledge that embraced many marginal ideas that it had pressed into service during the calculation wars. This struggle had not yet played out to the end.

The same chapter also, once again, brings up the notion that the hierarchy of hyperdimensions above the Corpora goes on infinitely, and after the incident with Alpha Centauri, one of them (A corpus of knowledge called Kircher) comes to believe that, at the end of all levels of logic, there is only a vast "desert" that stretches infinitely, in all dimensions:

Their adversary claimed to be an entity from a hyper²-high-level dimension. What would such a being need with a cutting from the low-level dimensions the giant corpora of knowledge were dealing with? The only way to answer this question would be to ask the self-proclaimed star-man Alpha Centauri, but that avenue of communication seemed to be a one-way street, opened or closed as he saw fit.

Some thought the whole thing was a fairy tale. Perhaps we are like nothing more than weeds planted on the hand of a Brahmin, and when the Brahmin awakens we will be torn up regardless of whether our dimension is high or low. Or perhaps there is some turtle in some hyperdimensional space, and when the turtle turns, some even-higher-level elephant in some even-higher-level dimension also has to turn.

At any rate, what lies on the far side is still the unknown. The only thing certain is that something far beyond imagination exists there. Forward, one step at a time, is the only way to proceed. That is what the giant corpora of knowledge had been best at, but now they were sure their intellectual capacity was not up to the task. They were constructed to continue working forever. But what were they supposed to do, assuming their newfound adversary was beyond a horizon so far off they could never reach it even if they used all the many universes as fuel and burned completely through existence?

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.

Kircher opened a communications channel, just for a second, long enough to send a short message.

“Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth.”

And then he physically purged the communications channel.

He closed his eyes, closed his ears, closed all his senses, and entered a long, long meditation.

In a later chapter, Baphomet, an entity from an even higher level than Alpha Centauri, also describes the difference in power between himself and Yggdrasil, one of the corpora of knowledge in charge of our universe:

“Don’t I know it?” She hangs her head and drags her socks noisily on the floor. “But if I were to call you a hyper⁵-giant corpus of knowledge, that would just be that much more dangerous.”
Flames, rimmed with soot, dance on the stone image’s back. On his right arm is the word SOLVE, and on his left, COAGULA.
As if to show respect for the young girl’s audacious attacks, the stone image opens its eyes, if only slightly. Its golden pupils rotate from the far side of a hidden other dimension.
“Aren’t you ashamed to be seen in public in such a common guise?” the girl asks, pulling herself up to her full height.
“Not especially,” the image says, its voice a rumble. “And you shouldn’t be so flip with me, little girl.”
“You’re right.” Unlike her posture, the girl’s vocal response is devoid of enthusiasm. “This is just the sort of thing that was never supposed to happen under your regime! If I could only get you to understand that!”
“I’m not exactly sure what you mean when you say ‘your.’ Surely you don’t think I am responsible for this. I am willing to join forces, if only as an expedient.”
“Honored,” replies the girl, still listless.
“Don’t push your luck, Yggdrasil. To me, a giant corpus of knowledge such as yourself is less than a speck of dust of a speck of dust that has fallen into the universe that exists within a speck of dust. I could flick you away without so much as lifting a finger. I wouldn’t even have to think about it.”

Moroever, there is implication that there are levels even further beyond that hierarchy. For instance, Hildegard, a corpus of knowledge who was captured by Alpha Centauri and used as a dictionary to allow for communication between levels, wrote down her experiences during that period in the form of prose and poems, and according to her writings, existence is comprised of multiple ladders leading to higher ladders, upwards for many levels, indicating the presence of many hierarchies.

The report Hildegard had provided was made up entirely of rhymed verse and so was practically useless. These poems sang the praises of the light that emanated from Heaven, praised the dancing angels, and praised ladders leading upward to other ladders, upward for many levels.

The flood of images attacking Hildegard were expressed as geometrical forms that together showed the hierarchy of the heavens. The poems began with Hildegard’s fall, her visit to the darker levels, and her ascent into the light.

This does not necessarily stop here, though, mind you, and to explain what is quite possibly the Supreme Being of the verse, I will have to call back to the description on the back of the book, which I've alluded to at the beginning of the thread. As you probably remember, the back cover of the book claims that it is not really a novel, and nor is it a collection of short stories, but rather that it is simply a "textual machine" known as Self-Reference ENGINE. This seemingly throwaway piece of advertisement comes full circle at the very epilogue of the book, where we are greeted with this:

It might be appropriate here to explain a bit just who I am.
Like most things, I was built as a space-time construct. I am not one of those things whose construction is so impossibly complicated that it couldn’t really exist. I can see you, and I can talk to you, just as I am doing now.
The reasons why I was built should be pretty clear.
The only task assigned to me is to tell stories and at some point to opt not to tell stories.
As for who built me, that is not for me to say. There is no way for me to answer such a simple question. Simple questions do not necessarily have simple answers. The reason why I do not exist as an “I” is that I have no memory of my existence. Most probably, I did not abruptly burst forth from the ether, as something that did not previously exist. Therefore, anyone might have made me. I may even have made myself. I may even be something like the exact opposite of Laplace’s Demon. Because I did not exist in a certain specific instant, I cannot exist in all the eternity before and after that instant.

My name is Self-Reference Engine.
I am a construction that has never existed, that was never designed from the beginning, to not tell all.
I am the distant successor to those machines that were designed in the beginning: the Difference Engine, the Analytical Engine, the Différance Engine.
I am completely mechanical, completely deterministic, and completely nonexistent.
Or I am Nemo ex machina.
A mechanical nothingness.
There is fundamentally no way of knowing the nonexistence of my nonexistent self. Therefore, it cannot be that what you are seeing is me. Even if I am aware that I am being seen by you. Even if I feel a twinge of regret at this.

So, yeah, the book starts talking directly to us. More precisely, it is revealed that what we have been reading is actually the narration of an entity called "Self-Reference Engine," a nonexistent, mechanical construction whose purpose is ultimately to tell stories, which it fulfilled by having us read the contents of the "book" (In the context of the narrative, its contents). However, in spite of this, it explicitly notes that those are not all of the stories that it contains and is capable of telling, and in fact the set of all stories is something so vast that it simply cannot be told in its entirety, not even by it.

And what happened next?
A natural question, bursting forth from natural rights.
But reality is a harsh mistress, so its story must also be at least a little bit cruel. That’s why I don’t want to tell that story. Furthermore, there is the fact that to tell an unending story would take an infinite length of time. In the end, the two of them live happily ever after. I guarantee it. I’m telling you so there can be no mistake. But just exactly what kind of end “in the end” that refers to, unfortunately I don’t have the words to describe simply.

By the time they met again, innumerable other events had taken place. The fragmented universe had climbed the ladder, or they themselves had fallen and fragmented, and frozen, and thawed again, and fallen and fragmented and thawed out again. And in the interstices of those occurrences there was buried yet another infinity of stories.
But these kinds of stories I have no wish to tell.

The tale of the storyteller Kyodaitei Hatchobori, the attacker, who bore all the hopes of the giant corpora of knowledge on his own back.
The tale of Yggdrasil, who plunged into an ill-fated love with a hypergiant corpus of knowledge.
The tale of the bloodbath war between infinitely replicated Rita and infinitely replicated James.
The tale of the burning of all the books that threatened to upset the fundamental reasoning behind this tale.
The tale of all the universes not brought to your attention by this book.
All of these things happened and will happen.

And in the interstices of all these tales lie buried innumerable other tales. That is in fact the reason why all these tales cannot be told. Stories are not a well-ordered set. Between any two given stories lie countless other stories. I know of no method for lining up those stories in some order so they can be told. The best I can do is to focus on a lone story, as though it were a single point, and try to imagine even converging on that point while the stories dance atop stepping-stones.

In fact, according to the prologue and the ninth chapter, Freuds (Which, by the handy map of the book given to us, both connect directly to the epilogue), all possible character strings, and thereby all possible stories, are contained in the Self-Reference Engine, and this includes even what is, to our natural language, pure nonsense:

A SET OF all possible character strings. All possible books would be contained in that.
Most unfortunately though, there is no guarantee whatsoever you would be able to find within it the book you were hoping for. It could be you might find a string of characters saying, “This is the book you were hoping for.” Like right here, now. But of course, that is not the book you were hoping for.

If we supposed that any situation could be assigned some Freudian significance, then this circumstance could not be undervalued. Even random strings of characters have meaning: they represent work. But I could be forgiven for thinking their universality had been mistaken for all-purpose reason. If arbitrary strings of characters have meaning, then all strings of characters have meaning. From the perspective of natural language, this is an oddity. For whatever reason, the language we speak has constraints known as grammar. Arbitrary strings of characters may be perfectly flat, but for whatever reason they have gigantic hollow holes in them, and that is how meaningful texts are finally sorted out. I got it, that was what was so great about Freud: he said that, I thought, nodding to myself.

After it's done monologuing, the Self-Reference Engine then wishes the reader goodbye, since, even though it is already completely nonexistent, it wants to become even less existent, and as such devoid of any influence for the time being, something which it states will serve as a provisional endpoint to the story we've been reading:

Before long, I think it will be time for me to fulfill the final task given to me.

This will be the provisional endpoint of this story. Right now, I am thinking about becoming even less existent. Strictly speaking, I am already not here. The proof of the existence of the mechanical void has already been demonstrated. What is not here is the empty husk of my self. But if I should disappear even further, so that even this form no longer exists, then I will really not be here. I will not exist in any form. It is at this point that I wish to say goodbye, with all the many emotions that salutation contains.

Goodbye.
I know I will never see you again.
But I pray, from the bottom of my nonexistent heart, that somehow, in some somewhere that has become whatever it is to become, in some universe or other, that I will see you again.
Even if the stories that will emanate from there are nothing more than another endless chain of slapstick.

I can get over it though, as many times as necessary. Allow me to demonstrate.

And this is exactly where the narrative proper ends, and the "About the Author" section begins, seemingly solidifying the heavy implications that the Self-Reference Engine is nothing more than the book itself, containing all of the stories we've read up until the end, and more. This closes up the whole thing in a pretty meta note, and I'm sure at least one person threw the book into the trashbin after finishing it. But, regardless, with this in mind, the hierarchy of the cosmology as outlined above can be summarized as:

Multiverse (Containing spaces and objects of an infinite number of dimensions) < Higher levels of logic (Each perceiving the lower one as fiction, or a dream, and in total forming an hierarchy of hyperdimensional spaces that goes on infinitely) < Further hierarchies (Extending upwards for an unspecified, but large, number of levels) < Self-Reference Engine

Some Uncertainties​

Alright, so, I'm leaving this part for absolute last here due to how, as the name of the section suggests, I am a bit uncertain as to whether or not I am hitting the right mark here, and due to the relatively controversial nature of the evidence, which might seriously skyrocket the already-fairly-large size of the cosmology. Regardless, I ask you to bear with me for a second.

For starters, the relevant piece of evidence occurs in the third chapter of the book, A to Z Theory, whose premise is the following:

THE Aharonov-Bohm-Curry-Davidson-Eigen-Feigenbaum-Germann-Hamilton-Israel-Jacobson-Kauffman-Lindenbaum-Milnor-Novak-Oppenheimer-Packard-Q-Riemann-Stokes-Tirelson-Ulam-Varadhan-Watts-Xavier-Y.S.-Zurek Theorem—called the A to Z Theorem for short—was, for a brief period about three centuries ago, in some sense the most important theorem in the world.

In some sense. Or possibly in all senses.
Nowadays, this amazing theorem is held to be incorrect, in terms of even elementary mathematics. Hardly anybody ever even thinks about it anymore, because it’s just plain wrong.

At a certain instant, on a certain day, in a certain month, in a certain year, twenty-six mathematicians simultaneously thought of this simple but beautiful theorem, affirmed it would be the ultimate theorem that would make their names immortal, wrote papers to the best of their abilities, and all submitted their papers to the same academic journal at roughly the same time.

The separate submissions from writers from A to Z arrived over the course of a few days, and the editor, looking at these virtually identical manuscripts, first checked his calendar. Even allowing for a full measure of variability and a wide deductive scope, there was no way they could all have been written on April 1. And so the editor was left perplexed as to what sort of day he might be experiencing.

Had twenty-six of the world’s top mathematicians suddenly formed a conspiracy that each was now seeking to lead? Or was some strange person, with an excess of time and money, playing some prank involving these twenty-six? At any rate, the editor was sure somebody was trying to put one over on him.

Basically, 26 of the world's best mathematicians discover a theorem that might shake the foundations of mathematics and be consolidated as the most important theorem in the world, despite its simplicity. The kicker here being that they all thought of it completely independently, in the same day, month and year, and submitted their respective papers on the topic to the same academic journal, at the same time, which understandably freaks people out.

Initially, the theorem (Called the A-to-Z Theorem) is found out to be the ultimate truth, which revealed in obscenely simple terms everything that there was to know about the universe, and made all of mathematics crystal-clear:

To understand this theorem did not require one to be a top-level mathematician or even have a grounding in mathematics. A middle school student could grasp it. Although perhaps it was only mathematicians who imagined the theorem to be a dazzling force that would sweep across all fields of mathematics.

The unbridled enthusiasm that these papers provoked was at fever pitch for about a week. Newspapers, magazines, TV, and Internet were all trumpeting the discovery: the A to Z Theorem was the ultimate theorem, both simple and final, that explained everything there was to know about the world.

The week after that, though, this topic was already no longer such a big deal. Everyone still recognized how fantastic it was, but regrettably it was too simple, too concise. Even primary school students could understand it if you drilled them on it persistently enough. An ultimate truth that anyone can understand at a glance soon becomes something people stop paying much attention to, and everybody starts minding their own business once again.

One esteemed scholar said the theorem would change all of mathematics. But would that make cars run faster or fill your belly? Apparently not. The theorem was incredibly useful in giving us a frightfully transparent view of mathematics. But it was difficult for anyone not a mathematician to grasp just what a transparent view of mathematics could do for you.

This doesn't last, though, because three weeks after the A-to-Z Theorem was published and made known to the world, the Event happened, and the logic and structure of the universe, now split into infinite universes, went out the window entirely. This made the theorem meaningless, as humanity started traversing through multiple space-time realms where different truths have validity, and although it is predicted that they will eventually enter a universe where the A-to-Z Theorem is true once again, this will take a long, long time:

And three weeks after the theorem was published, the world was attacked by the Event.
Even now it is not clear exactly what happened at that moment.
A night passed, then a morning came. One night, all of a sudden, the theorem simply shattered into so many meaningless strings of characters. It was as if the fluctuations of numberless particles formed themselves by chance into letters and were scattered in the air.
It is not even clear whether the history I recorded as belonging to this episode has any continuity with the history we now know.
The present time matrix can be traced back to an inversion of space-time that occurred 10-20 seconds after the Event. Physicists now predict that sometime in the next ten years, research will allow us to understand the form of the universe 10-24 seconds after the Event. For now, though, the route to the instant of the Event itself is closed, beyond hope.

There are many theories about what exactly happened in the instant of the Event.
One idea is that in that instant our universe was shattered into innumerable shards of universes, which blew away in random directions.
Another idea is that an extradimensional universe collided with our universe. Another idea is that our universe was shredded into countless shards as it bubbled up from the vacuum. Yet another idea is that our universe itself was a bubble born as a structure camouflaged from the very beginning, a repeated oscillation of creation and annihilation.
Of these ideas, one includes the prediction that at approximately 2⁸⁹ seconds after the Event, we will enter a space-time realm where the A to Z Theorem will once again be valid.

In the meantime, though, humanity starts going through several universes where different theorems represent the ultimate truth, starting with the B-to-Z Theorem, and then continuing into the C-to-Z Theorem, and then the D-to-Z Theorem, all the way to the Z-to-Z Theorem (Or simply the Z Theorem), which is held by the narrator to be the simplest possible theorem that can represent the truth of all things in a universe:

It would not be wrong here to note that, since that time, a certain phenomenon has occurred from time to time that perhaps ought to be called the obverse of a similar truth. About two centuries ago, a group of twenty-five physicists garnered attention when they published the B to Z Theorem, which was known at the time as the world’s ultimate theorem. It is all but forgotten now, but it followed the same path as the A to Z Theorem. For one thing, it is not well known, but there was a public that could follow the ins and outs of that kind of theorem. Another reason is that it was followed soon after by the C to Z Theorem. Then, once the D to Z Theorem emerged, its shadow was even paler, and with the E to Z Theorem, one hesitates to wager whether the discussion is even worth pursuing. Of course, one is free to assert this is merely the progress of theory: the appearance and annihilation of strange truths, advanced by a series of agreements known to be destined to turn to dust; this becomes the problem of questioning the truth of the concept of truth.

Even so, there is a reason why, recently, media interest in the ultimate theorem has revived. The theory currently considered the latest and most consequential is actually the T to Z Theorem. The observations just described regarding the shape of space-time following the instant of the Event are derived from this theorem. If this alphabetic progression of theorems continues like this, renewed by root and branch, before long we will reach the X to Z Theorem, followed by the Y to Z Theorem. The ultimate member in this progression would be the Z to Z Theorem, or simply the Z Theorem. I like to think this will simply represent the theory of ultimate truth with no particular basis whatsoever.

This clusterfuck-y state of affairs caused by the Event is explained in the same chapter in the form of the following fable:

I like this fable:

There once was a book in which the countless universes were recorded. A librarian spilled coffee on the book, stood up abruptly, and dropped it. The book, which was very old, split apart on impact, and countless pages wafted up into the air. The clueless librarian anxiously attempted to collect the pages and put them back, but had no idea in what order to put them.

Now, fables do not ordinarily leave the realm of fabulation, but the nice thing about this fable is that it is said that the librarian had the book open to the pages on which were recorded the canonical works of Sherlock Holmes. The page on which the librarian spilled the coffee was “The Final Problem,” erasing the record of Moriarty’s fall from Reichenbach Falls so it never happened. With that abrupt change, Moriarty was suddenly enlightened. He realized that he was in fact a character written in a book, and he resolved to devote himself to communicating to us that he had difficulty permitting himself to engage in the kinds of criminal behavior ascribed to him as the Napoleon of Crime.

But of course, a fable is only a fable.
For myself, I like to imagine that the librarian is, even now, desperate to restore the book to its original order. It may seem difficult to reorder infinite pages, but I think it is a more constructive approach than the next one.

I mean, more than imagining a scene where the book simply fell, on its own, with nobody there in the library, and it scattered about crazily in countless bits, and it laughed.

So, basically, existence can be said to have once been like a single, neatly organized book, where all possible universes were recorded in a straightforward and linear fashion. The Event, then, is likened to a librarian spilling coffee into that book, which then falls into the ground and has its pages scattered about randomly, leaving the librarian with no clue of what order they have to put the pages in to reorganize the book. Alternatively, the book can also be said to have just fallen on its own, and the pages were scattered about with no one around to try to put them back together.

In the context of the previous explanation of the multiple "ultimate theorems" that humanity encountered since the Event caused the original one to become invalid, the multiverse is then compared to a sea of paper, with texts containing different truths being somewhere among that sea. That is to say, each theorem has a respective universe in which it is the ultimate truth, and so far, we've talked about 26 such universes, each corresponding to theorems A-to-Z through Z.

But of course, there is an obvious problem with the idea that the Z Theorem will be the ultimate theorem. If the Z Theorem is the true ultimate theorem, which Z Theorem, produced by which person whose last name begins with Z, will be the ultimate theorem? The A to Z Theorem won attention because it was discovered simultaneously by twenty-six mathematicians. The same was true of the theorems that followed. Of course, there was also the clear marker that their results were so simple. How sure can we be, though, that the Z Theorem we now expect to appear will also be simple? Theory or theorem, at some level all must be simple and clear and just as they are.

I would love to encounter such a theorem. And I hope it would betray my expectations, render the current discussion meaningless, and be overwhelmed by loud laughter. But this hope of mine is being supplanted by an anxiety that we may never reach that point.

A landscape in which texts containing truths are swallowed up in a sea of papers. I am imagining, for example, a single strange molecule that may exist in the midst of such a sea.

And this is where it gets interesting: The narrator then states that, even if the Z Theorem does ultimately appear, it may not necessarily be the final one that humanity will encounter. After that, another theorem, this time represented by the empty set, ∅, could supplant it, and even this theorem would then be replaced by other ones, which would eventually culminate into theorems ennumerated by transfinite sets:

Or else, it could be that when the Z to Z Theorem ultimately appears, and truth is once again upended, this disturbance will simply blow over. It’s fun to think that after that, without theorems or anything like them, the null set may appear, or a Null Set ø Theorem based on that, and from this Null Set ø Theorem the Von Neumann Ordinals: the {ø} Theorem, the {ø ,{ø}} Theorem, the {ø ,{ø, {ø}}} Theorem.

Given a choice, I would choose to be involved with this last. The ø Theorem points toward the Transfinite Number ω Theorem, which could lead to the ω + 1 Theorem, the ω + 2 Theorem, 2ω Theorem, ω*ω Theorem, etc., etc., a progression of large cardinal numbers.

It is just possible that, via this method, we will reach the realm of theories incomprehensible except with inordinately massive intelligence.

Given that there is a universe for each theorem, and the set of all such theorems would be ennumerated by a progression of transfinite numbers (Extending past the countable ordinals alone, given the text mentions cardinals as well), the number of universes contained in the multiverse would then have to be equal to the collection of all those numbers. To illustrate the relevance of this, I'll quote the Tiering System FAQ page:

However, the same does not necessarily apply when approaching sets of higher cardinalities than this (Such as P(P(ℵ0)), the power set of the power set of aleph-0), as they would be strictly bigger than all of the spaces mentioned above, by all rigorous notions of size, regardless of what their elements are. From this point and onwards, all such sets are Low 1-A at minimum.

So, for example: An aleph-2 amount of anything would be Low 1-A. This tier would be reached regardless of whether the elements of the set are 0-dimensional points or universes. Likewise, an aleph-3 amount of anything would be 1-A, and so on and so forth.

If there are as many universes in the multiverse as there are transfinite numbers, then the multiverse itself would be fairly high into the Tiering System, since the collection of all transfinite numbers is something so large that it cannot even be made into a set to begin with. This is, of course, relevant both because the Giant Corpora of Knowledge hold full dominion over it, and because the beings residing in higher layers of the hierarchy of knowledge completely transcend it. As seen here:

At any rate, what lies on the far side is still the unknown. The only thing certain is that something far beyond imagination exists there. Forward, one step at a time, is the only way to proceed. That is what the giant corpora of knowledge had been best at, but now they were sure their intellectual capacity was not up to the task. They were constructed to continue working forever. But what were they supposed to do, assuming their newfound adversary was beyond a horizon so far off they could never reach it even if they used all the many universes as fuel and burned completely through existence?

TL;DR​

So, in conclusion, we have a verse whose cosmology can be summarized as:

• The multiverse (Consists of an infinite amount of dimensions)
• Higher logical levels (A hierarchy of knowledge and understanding extending above the multiverse, where each higher plane sees a lower one as akin to a dream, or a story. This hierarchy goes on infinitely)
• Further hierarchies (Even higher ladders that lead upwards to more ladders, throughout an unknown but very large number of levels)
• The Self-Reference Engine (A completely nonexistent machine whose purpose is to act as a storyteller for all possible tales. It is, in fact, the book itself, and even the stories read by us are nothing but an infinitesimal part of what it consists)

And, ontop of that, there is the possibility of the multiverse itself having as many universes as there are transfinite numbers, which might skyrocket whatever we decide the baseline ratings for the verse are. I am uncertain on this part, though.

 

[Vietthai96]

Uh oh, damn. So you love to read these kind of fiction huh.
Anyway, not interesting in the verse, but interesting in the discussion...

Let me guess

The multiverse (Consists of an infinite amount of dimensions)

This should be at least 2-A, but with the thing like a 4D star then this could be Low 1-C

Higher logical levels (A hierarchy of knowledge and understanding extending above the multiverse, where each higher plane sees a lower one as akin to a dream, or a story. This hierarchy goes on infinitely)

High 1-B sure......

Further hierarchies (Even higher ladders that lead upwards to more ladders, throughout an unknown but very large number of levels)

Low 1-A??? Or just higher into High 1-B

The Self-Reference Engine (A completely nonexistent machine whose purpose is to act as a storyteller for all possible tales. It is, in fact, the book itself, and even the stories read by us are nothing but an infinitesimal part of what it consists)

.............1-A then, at least to me

And, ontop of that, there is the possibility of the multiverse itself having as many universes as there are transfinite numbers, which might skyrocket whatever we decide the baseline ratings for the verse are. I am uncertain on this part, though.

At this point i'm completely lost, what do you mean???

 

[Setsuna_tenma]

looks like a really high level of High 1A

 

[Delta333]

2-A

The lower dimension is an infinitesimal cross-section of the higher dimension so High 1-B is more accurate

 

[Setsuna_tenma]

so tldr from my perspective

multiverse= High 1B to Low 1A

Hierachy of knowledge= 1A+

Further hiearchies= High 1A

SER= High 1A

 

[Megaraptor149]

Sure, this is higher degree from High 1-A

 

[Rikimarox2]

Am I missing something here? Why is SRE only H1A?

If we assume Further Hierarchy is H1A, then SER is tier 0 no matter which way you look at it. That shit trivializes everything equally from what I'm seeing, so just making it a level higher into H1A feels wrong.

 

[Setsuna_tenma]

At this point i'm completely lost, what do you mean???

the theorem stuff would make the multiverse atleast Low 1A

 

[Vietthai96]

the theorem stuff would make the multiverse atleast Low 1A

Ah yes, ******* theorem

 

[Jibz]

This takes the cake for strange person who reads hard sci fi and here i thought that was me

 

[Megaraptor149]

I'm a little doubtful that this verse will have a profile on this wiki in the future, since Ultima itself is a little uncertain about the tier

 

[Matthew_Schroeder]

The Self-Reference Engine is the most blatant Tier 0 thing I have ever seen

 

[Jibz]

Had time to look over this and this has to be the most mid hard sci fi novel i've ever seen (like worse then Permutation City by Egan and Godplayers combined) but hey atleast i can complain that irrelevant novels are allowed to have profiles on the wiki so my shit should fly if this gets accepted, so silver linings!

 

[Matthew_Schroeder]

"Irrelevant" is entirely subjective, this book won some awards in Japan.

 

[Jibz]

"Irrelevant" is entirely subjective, this book won some awards in Japan.

And i won my school's sports day a decade ago, doesn't exactly make me top dog. Awards have different calibers, so if these awards are of a decent regard then sure, but afaik this is just some irrelevant book that'll give me an excuse to also scale irrelevant books

 

[Jibz]

The Faces of the water by Robert Silverberg can eat their heart out since Silvey here has won multiple Hugo awards and is a member of the SF hall of fame. Which in the grand scheme of things doesnt make the book any less relevant, but hey better than some Japan awards.

ill stop derailing now

 

[Setsuna_tenma]

bump

 

[Hasty12345]

And i won my school's sports day a decade ago, doesn't exactly make me top dog. Awards have different calibers, so if these awards are of a decent regard then sure, but afaik this is just some irrelevant book that'll give me an excuse to also scale irrelevant books

that's so cool you won sports day a decade ago

 

[Planck69]

I keep wondering where Ultima finds these verses smh...

Anyway, my understanding of the cosmology is largely the same as Setsuna's, although I agree with Matt that the SRE is pretty blatantly Tier 0.

 

[Megaraptor149]

I keep wondering where Ultima finds these verses smh...

Anyway, my understanding of the cosmology is largely the same as Setsuna's, although I agree with Matt that the SRE is pretty blatantly Tier 0.

You can search that in kasmana, if you want know

 

[Jibz]

that's so cool you won sports day a decade ago

I am cool aren't i?

now bow before me mere mortal

 

[Setsuna_tenma]

Bump

 

[Setsuna_tenma]

bump

 

[Matthew_Schroeder]

less go

 

[CosmicWreck]

I also agree with Setsuna on the cosmology, though only because I don't have the mathematical knowledge to tier the verse on the power of sets section.

Also, does this mean we have to make CRTs before making verse pages now?

 

[Megaraptor149]

So, im countring for higher degree from High 1-A now because more accurate placement.

The multiverse which consists of an infinite dimensions since the dimension there is more to the higher dimension than the parallel dimension it's should be High 1-B

Hierarchy of Knowledge which which is goes infinitely which there reality fiction difference between layer below to layer above it's should 1-A+

Higher ladders with lead upwards to more Ladder with unknown large amount ladders should higher from High 1-A

So, at the end Nemo Ex Machina aka Self-Reference ENGINE is higher from High 1-A

 

[Confluctor]

Also, does this mean we have to make CRTs before making verse pages now?

Only for tier 1 and 0, for others, no. Unless they are extremely controversial or previously deleted verses (and only if they were deleted for "not following TOS" ig)

 

[Ghost59]

I don't see how this isn't just high B1 or maybe low outer since one layer is above the structure of dimensions.

Maybe the creator is outer. As it is beyond everything.

 

[MrOMG]

Okay, I'm here. Here's my interpretation

—Giant Knowledge Corps have full omnipotence within the hierarchy of knowledge, where the infinite dimensional multiverse is no more than one rung in the hierarchy, the various infinite multiverse, regardless of their structural complexity, were themselves nothing more than a dream or a fiction of the common man, the Giant Knowledge Corps in mid-book explored their own internal multiverse. But although they became omnipotent beings capable of creating an indestructible stone and then destroying it in a second, and even affecting a higher logical level hierarchy(their writer's world), they were still limited by their logical level. Despite all their power, and their higher position in the hierarchy of knowledge, Humans and Giant Knowledge Corps were on the same rung of the Logic/Law hierarchy in terms of higher beings.
—Hypergiant Knowledge Corps are transcendent beings from a higher logical level. Even the weakest being from the higher dimension is qualitatively superior to the entire hierarchy of dream beings from the lower logical level. The various infinite hierarchies and its inhabitants, were regarded by the transcendent being as something less than a speck of dust within a universe within a speck of dust, the destruction of which does not even require a thought. Infinite hierarchies became nothing more than steps of hierarchies of a higher logical level, and this hierarchy itself became an element of an even greater hierarchy. The principle of evolution of hierarchies itself evolved exponentially and qualitatively similar to the evolution of Theories, and at the very end the number of all hierarchies would be equal to the progression of large cardinal numbers. At all levels there must be other transcendental beings as well.
—Laplace's Demon is a creature that embodies the theory of the determinacy of the world. Demons perceive time in its logical level as something already defined, that is, no matter how much you manipulate time, from the point of view of the Laplace Demon all these manipulations of time will perceive it as a single storyline. At its birth, the Laplace Demon begins its ascent through hierarchies and logical levels, the entire logical level of humans and Giant Knowledge Corps like a dream for the demon, which the next demon regards as a dream, and so on. And only by breaking through the infinite hierarchy of Laplace's prodigal sons can one reach the Mechanical Nothingness whose level the Giant and Hypergiant Corps of Knowledge are trying to reach.
—Nemo Ex Machina. It is a sentient being with no structure so complex that it could not exist. It is a distant descendant of (Difference Engine, Analytical Engine, Différance Engine. It was created to tell all possible stories, it is not clear who created it, hence anyone could have constructed this mechanism. Perhaps he built himself. Nemo Ex Machina is the Mechanical Nothingness whose non-existent nothingness is completely unknowable and inexplicable, it is completely deterministic, while being the exact opposite of Lamplas' demons in that it never existed in any particular moment, nor in the eternities before or after it. The Self-Reference Engine is a function of Nemo Ex Machina, he is a silly librarian whose main purpose is to tell all stories, he will tell stories throughout eternity, yet one day he will refuse to tell stories. Humans, the Giant and Hypergiant Corps of Knowledge and their hierarchies, Laplace's Demons and his prodigal sons, the Event itself his causal connections, nothing more than an element in an infinite number of other stories. This chain of farce and stories will be repeated any number of times, as long as the loan mechanism waits for someone to reach out to it, hoping only that the one will not try to grab it. Nemo Ex Machina has complete control over the universe, in which all possible stories that can be described by any grammar and mathematics of any logical levels are possible, Nemo Ex Machina will always surpass the entire universe created by himself, regardless of its structural complexity.

 

[Setsuna_tenma]

I don't see how this isn't just high B1 or maybe low outer since one layer is above the structure of dimensions.

Maybe the creator is outer. As it is beyond everything.

How did you claim to the conclusion?

 

[Megaraptor149]

Should we use vote count for tier between High 1-A and 0 conclusion?

 

[Jibz]

we should get staff since nobody's vote here matters outside of staff (and ex staff) votes kek

 

[Megaraptor149]

Well maybe it's better to wait for some staff who knowledge about tier 0 stuff here for input from the conclusion

 

[Ghost59]

How did you claim to the conclusion?

The multiverse shown as having infinite dimensionality.
The beings above the knowledge guys being beyond the framework of the multiverse.
Then there's the other more powerful being who compares the knowledge race as specks of dust.

The author here being beyond the verse all together sounds like a solid outer.

 

[Matthew_Schroeder]

The Self-Reference Engine is literally stated to be above any cosmology or story that can be described by any combination of letters

 

[Jibz]

And yet Alovenus bodies:

The ability to absolutely kill anything that existed within the same space, penetrating all resistances.

The ability to reflect all attacks received.

The ability to reverse time and make the opponent non-existent.

The ability to win regardless of the process.

The ability to inflict the defeat condition on the opponent.

The ability to erase everything with a glance.

The ability to nullify all abilities.The ability to seal all attacks and render the opponent incapable of taking defensive actions.

The abilities of all the gods from various mythos.

The abilities that were made up in fiction somewhere.

 

[Ghost59]

The Self-Reference Engine is literally stated to be above any cosmology or story that can be described by any combination of letters

So it's beyond all language. How does that make this impressive? I can name a number of verses with this same statements...

 

[Jibz]

ion think he's being serious, because that statement isn't scaleable. Might aswell make ever omnipotent/omnivastant/metapotent tier 0 with that logic.

 

[Pikaman]

So it's beyond all language. How does that make this impressive? I can name a number of verses with this same statements...

Idk enough about how tiers this high up even work so I’ll keep my input to a minimum but if language can describe the High 1-A characters and whatnot of the verse but it can’t describe this thing wouldn’t that put it above them? Or would being above three High 1-As not even be 0 lol

 

[Cat275]

At this point i'm completely lost, what do you mean???

I think the guy meant that if the universe has the theorem that has the transfinities then it would be more than 2a tiering.
(low1a at minimum if im not wrong.)