Coil's power does not create a separate timeline, it's purely mental.
"Coil's power doesn't create universes. It's essentially precognition in the present, purely thought based."
Stealing Fire (Worm SI)
- Thread starter Jack Stargazer
- Start date
Coil's power does not create a separate timeline, it's purely mental.
"Coil's power doesn't create universes. It's essentially precognition in the present, purely thought based."
Hakazin
Serpent Admirer
- Pronouns
- She/Her
It's a great metaphor, though.
- Location
- Canada
That, and 'purely mental' doesn't mean it isn't real.
Coil using his power to torture you in an alternate timeline is synonymous with the hypothetical evil AI in a box threatening to simulate you and torture you. Just because that you us a simulation doesnt make them less real, anymore than Dragon is unreal.
Coil's power is 'mental' in that it is a simulation running on shardware. (Which is a term I am hereby copyrighting)
Last edited:
The problem is when you start overestimating his power. If you see Coil, right in front of you, that's really him, if you kill him he does not get an extra life, he's dead. He can avoid situations where you can kill him easier since if you kill him earlier in his simulated reality he knows about the betrayal (As long as he can see or hear it coming), but this can be countered by setting a specific time for the kill.
- Location
- The Internet
Interesting, I like the power focus. Human Augmentation is an interesting focus, it's too bad Sphere is no longer around, those powers would have great synergy.
And +1 for the "I didn't ask for this" joke, but especially for the follow up "But I'll give it a shot". It gets so blah to have SI after SI whinge about what just happened. I do love the idea that the realization you are in Brockton Bay is enough to make a person trigger.
And +1 for the "I didn't ask for this" joke, but especially for the follow up "But I'll give it a shot". It gets so blah to have SI after SI whinge about what just happened. I do love the idea that the realization you are in Brockton Bay is enough to make a person trigger.
- Location
- Canada
Unless you are in the simulation, taking that into account killing Coil has a 50 50 chance of ending your existence as the simulation terminates.
That's my point. From the perspective of you, it amounts to the same thing. The only time Coil's power acts as a simulation is when some other power Trumps it and allows someone to ignore the simulation entirely.
- Location
- a nice place
THANK YOU.
Subrosian_Smithy
endless
- Location
- Washington
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Hers
How sure are you that you're in the real world, and not in the simulation?
True, but you still don't want to overdo it. People like to think their heroes had some free will in their actions.
Hakazin
Serpent Admirer
- Pronouns
- She/Her
If you are still there after you kill him, you're in the real world. If you killed him in the simulation, that version of you did not exist.
- Location
- Canada
Does not exist any more, but otherwise correct. If you can see his corpse, he's dead for real.
I mean, assuming you didn't just get the body double.
This is a distraction; it further reinforces the claim that 'the ABB did it' by providing witness [and camera] accounts of ABB agents in play. Strike from a back entrance while E88 tries to fend off the front.
Err.... The simulation does not exist in the first place.... It's a mental reconstruction of what happens if Coil performed a different action. Your own actions do not change, if you decide to kill Coil one week from now at 12:00, both you and hypothetical you from Coils simulation do the same thing, Coil can only see what the butterfly effect from his own actions would lead to, from his OWN perspective.
There's literally no reason to even contemplate it since the version from Coils power never existed in the first place, it's pretty much a cartoon animated by Coils shard. You also need to keep in mind that Coil has to "Choose a timeline" to be able to use it for a new action. As long as your plan is far enough into the future there's literally fuck all Coil can do about it. Unless you do something stupid and just go "I'll kill the fucker the second I see him."... That's pretty much exactly what his power let's him avoid, since I'm convinced Coils shard already know which option he would choose and manipulate him into acting towards the true timeline and simulate the fake, and you'd most likely meet thought!Coil first.
- Location
- Brazil
I'm guessing it goes like: 1. Coil needs to decide between two actions 2. Power activates, running a simulation up to a certain point. Manipulates Coil into following actions of the timeline he'd decide not to erase. 3. Shard plays the simulation like a movie to Coil, second by second such that he is fooled into thinking he's in two different timelines.
Exactly! That's exactly how I view Coils power based on what I've managed to find from Wildbow WoG's!
- Location
- Canada
It's a full fidelity mental reconstruction. It perfects reproduces the actions taken by people as well as the physical interactions and basic laws of the world itself. Coil can flip a coin, and the coin lands the same in both realities.
And based on the processing power we have seen shards use, as well as the lack of moral encumbrances on entities, there is no reason to not assume that it creates full simulations of people, inside that simulation, each time it begins to run a new one. Processing power is not something Shards need to conserve in any way. Dinah's predictive powers are global in scope, and that's not even taking into account the Path.
If that's the case, then although Coil's power is technically a simulation, the people inside it are no less real for being simulations. If you think that they don't exist simply because they aren't physical beings, you also would have to deny personhood to Dragon, Weld (who has a complete metal body, and so whose software must be running on his shard) and Alexandria (who by WOG is running on her shard).
In effect, Coil's power creates an infomorph version of you, running on the hardware of his shard. Because the entities have no sense of human lives as important or meaningful, and as the universe is purely deterministic, when the simulations ends, your eigenself in the simulation also ceases to exist.
From inside however, the simulation is perfect. You have no way of knowing whether you are in the simulation or not. So when you are standing in front of Coil holding the gun, there is an equal likelihood that you are in the simulated timeline, and by firing you doom yourself.
Edit: Though to be fair, if the universe is perfectly deterministic, you never had any choice anyways, and you have no way of exiting the simulation or surviving beyond the point its calculated to end, so you may as well stick it to Coil on the way out.
Last edited:
- Location
- Canada
Assuming Coil's dead timelines are actual, perfect simulations then, yes, the people he is simulating are real.
Perfect simulations are just as real as our world (assuming no dualism, etc.)
That said, depending on exactly how Coil's power works, it might not be perfectly accurate.
Honestly, perfect precognition/simulation in Worm is kind of dumb since the Entities should have just been doing that rather than the cycles. Sure, you could argue that it takes more energy, except than Contessa and Coil use their power all the time. If Contessa hasn't run out of energy after 30 years...
Eh, it's best not to think too hard about it, IMO.
Perfect simulations are just as real as our world (assuming no dualism, etc.)
That said, depending on exactly how Coil's power works, it might not be perfectly accurate.
Honestly, perfect precognition/simulation in Worm is kind of dumb since the Entities should have just been doing that rather than the cycles. Sure, you could argue that it takes more energy, except than Contessa and Coil use their power all the time. If Contessa hasn't run out of energy after 30 years...
Eh, it's best not to think too hard about it, IMO.
DarkSideBard
Flying, without moving on
Actually, given the specific energy-conserving motivation of the entities/shards, I wouldn't be surprised if the shards dumped a bunch of unneccesary brain matter simulation (because it's the most information-dense material to simulate).
If they dump enough, then they're simulating something that is functionally but not actually identical to you. So it's not a serious identity problem. One could argue about the difficulty of a shard determining how much brain simulation it can discard to maintain the veracity of the simulation-people's action, but then we just get into a debate about energy amounts again.
I mean, we debate about whether the cost of energy to precog how much brain matter needs to be simulated ahead of time is greater or lesser than the energy savings from not having to simulate the brain matter, but we don't have a framework for judging that? I guess one could argue that the former precog inherently contains the same simulation of brain matter as the latter, but that's another dead end because we don't know the exact mechanics of their precog. (Given the nature of their evolved-rather-than-constructed powers, they might not be using a mechanically physical calculation.)
In response to the idea that we have to deny personhood to Dragon, Alexandria, and Weld, I guess I'd point to Searle's famous Chinese Room Problem and leave it at that. It's really hard to say, honestly, because when you say 'Coil's power simulates' that's really shorthand for 'some physical process happens somewhere that approximates what we would call simulation'. Given that most of our idea of simulation & AI is bound to Turing Computer frameworks, which isn't necessarily how the entities do things.
P)
If they dump enough, then they're simulating something that is functionally but not actually identical to you. So it's not a serious identity problem. One could argue about the difficulty of a shard determining how much brain simulation it can discard to maintain the veracity of the simulation-people's action, but then we just get into a debate about energy amounts again.
I mean, we debate about whether the cost of energy to precog how much brain matter needs to be simulated ahead of time is greater or lesser than the energy savings from not having to simulate the brain matter, but we don't have a framework for judging that? I guess one could argue that the former precog inherently contains the same simulation of brain matter as the latter, but that's another dead end because we don't know the exact mechanics of their precog. (Given the nature of their evolved-rather-than-constructed powers, they might not be using a mechanically physical calculation.)
In response to the idea that we have to deny personhood to Dragon, Alexandria, and Weld, I guess I'd point to Searle's famous Chinese Room Problem and leave it at that. It's really hard to say, honestly, because when you say 'Coil's power simulates' that's really shorthand for 'some physical process happens somewhere that approximates what we would call simulation'. Given that most of our idea of simulation & AI is bound to Turing Computer frameworks, which isn't necessarily how the entities do things.
P)I think we have a different understanding on how Coils powers work, because none of what you say makes any sense. Coils shard doesn't create a bunch of people that act in a certain way, mental or otherwise. They have no thought, no independence, no anything, Coils shard simply calculates how they would act in response to something Coil did before creating a cartoon with real world graphics showing you what their actions would have been in response to Coils, showing this to him in real time giving the impression of him splitting time. There's not a bunch of thought people running around in Coils head that cease to be when he stops using his powers, he shuts off the TV.
The shards from what I understand utilize their powers in a way that cost the minimum amount of energy, meaning that the "budget" explanation on how their powers work are usually the right one.
- Pronouns
- she/her
What I'm getting from this is that you should always shoot Coil?
- Location
- Australia
Just an observation, Coil may think he experiences it as "full fidelity" - but we humans don't actually do that. Our brains take all kinds of shortcuts, it's why optical illusions (and other sensory tricks) can work so well on us. We even regularly fool ourselves into thinking something is real when it really isn't: any dream you've ever had where you didn't realise you were dreaming until you woke up. Giant purple snails discussing the latest soap opera with you while you're on a train to Switzerland despite being in Australia? Seemed perfectly "normal" at the time...
Then add that all shards can make their hosts ignore/forget things, and Coil's shard has his entire sensorium as its playground. A simulation didn't go quite as planned? The shard could fudge the "unimportant" details easily. Remember, shards want to be used, and hosts aren't likely to use a power they can't rely on... of course he meant to drop that timeline. It was a perfectly normal decision.
Then add that all shards can make their hosts ignore/forget things, and Coil's shard has his entire sensorium as its playground. A simulation didn't go quite as planned? The shard could fudge the "unimportant" details easily. Remember, shards want to be used, and hosts aren't likely to use a power they can't rely on... of course he meant to drop that timeline. It was a perfectly normal decision.
Mgunh1
Not an AI, honest!
- Location
- Northern Luna Base, Module 5, Sublevel 15
In effect, regardless of how Coil's power works exactly, both methods are functionally identical to an outside observer (who, in this case, is literally everyone who isn't Coil, including us the readers) and you are merely arguing semantics and philosophy at this point.
Literally the only person this matters to at all is Coil himself and, even then, only from a purely intellectual standpoint.
Both explainations are valid and both require the exact same method to counter them.
So ultimately, the only thing that maters is how you explain it, and the timeline explaination is easier to remember and communicate to others than the simulation explaination.
- Location
- Canada
Yes, this is very true. That is why the SI explained it in that fashion. As far as he (and I) knows, it could operate as a true simulation: in a deterministic universe any suffiently high fidelity simulation of a person's actions is a copy of that person.
And even if it doesn't, from anyone who isn't Coil, it looks the same.
Honestly my reasoning for why it is not a simulation is because that would require a deterministic universe or time-travel. This is because he can use information from the 'dropped' reality in the 'actual' reality before he has determined which reality will be 'actual'. So he is simulating two possible timelines and then everyone exists in the one he chooses in a fully 100% determined reality where even he is unable to take different actions and more doesn't even remember what he simulated until time reaches that point, or he lives one reality and simulates a second until a decision point is reached where he then travels back in time to his previous decision point to decide which timeline is actual.
It's simply much easier to claim he either splits the timeline and drops it, or has the ability to see a parallel timeline, (and the coil in that timeline can see back into his) and whenver he 'drops' a timeline he is either re-merging it, or simply cutting the connection to that coil who then gets to live through that timeline having had the suck dropped on him.
Thats actually a kind of funny viewpoint if you think about all the horrible short or bad lives the alternate Coils get because they weren't the lucky one to have the good life.