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Perplexed comments on Building Weirdtopia - Less Wrong
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Technological/Cognitive Weirdtopia: Everyone runs on computronium, in a simulation that starts out rather like normal, but everybody has an undo button: at your option you can undo everything except progress made in your own mind, up to any point in your life since the simulation began. There are safeguards in place to prevent two people from doing this at the exact same time, but otherwise there are no limitations on use; you can redo a second or a century, once or a thousand times. It takes a lot of "real" time for the simulation to progress to everyone's satisfaction beyond the first five minutes.
So, you can undo progress made in other people's minds, just not your own? Or does everyone remember what they learned in those alternative realities.
I don't know about you, but most of the time when I find myself wishing I had an "undo button", it is other people's memories of my mistakes that I really want to erase.
Yes, including other people's memories. And if you rewind to before some younger person's conception, you can prevent their existence outright should you take the relevant actions.
So in a world with only two people, both determined to win at paper, stone, scissors, you risk an infinite cycle and may never get to 5 minutes of simulated time.
Well, yes, that could happen.
Perhaps you only have a set number of tries before you just have to accept what happens. This might actually be an improvement, since while it would definitely be nice to redo my worst mistakes and to experiment before trying something difficult, life might get a bit meaningless if there were never any permanent consequences to anything.
In that sense, it would be a world where sufficient willpower (in the sense of boredom-resistance) really can achieve nearly anything.
Or if not achieve something, at least prevent the other guy from achieving anything.
However, in this scenario, it doesn't take much willpower. Every time someone pushes 'reset', (s)he thinks it is the first time the button has been pushed.
So it requires determinism, not determination, to keep on doing what you did before. ;)
Only if each reset went back further than the other player's last reset, which obviously isn't a stable equilibrium.