Join the new world

Is it time for "Phoenix Quinn" to be the first eRepublik character to invade real life?



First known sighting of the "Phoenix Quinn" entity


Like, start up a blog from the perspective of an avatar who has escaped from this "New World" and is now "at large" in the "real world" (of the internet). What do you think? Does he stand a chance?

Hmm, it might be mildly amusing. Unlike, umm, this game... sigh...


But let's leave that for another time. Time will tell. And time heals all wounds. Or wounds all heels. Or something like that.


Anyway... That's not what this article is about.





But...

Speaking of that permeable membrane between virtual worlds,

none of which may actually be real in any real sense, what follows are a few of my favorite quips harvested from various places over there. I thought it might be interesting, in a useless and banal sort of way, to see if they had any resonance over here.

By "useless and banal", I mean that I don't expect this philosophical check-up to produce any results or particular interesting insights. It's pretty much an article about nothing. Or it's like reading a few scientific axioms as if divining the e-Tarot. Or it's about nothingness. I'm not sure...



"The Fool", by Salvador Dali



Anyway, let's see what "happens"...






"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
-- Einstein

Perhaps the corollary is Steve Jobs: "The secret to simplicity is being willing to dive deeply into the complexity." Or something like that. Don't have the exact quote handy.

My encounter with this New World -- pretty much since Day One of my little adventure -- has been characterized by the question: "How can I have fun with this when I know it's a game based on a completely BS social and political model?"

And I've been through all the phases.

You know them well, I'm sure...

* "It's all about the community."
* "Maybe it'll be different in another e-country."
* "Screw it, I'm just gonna do my own thing."
* "Well, maybe if I get more engaged with (fill in the blank... politics, government, writing, war games, economics) then I'll find my niche."
* "I just can't quit you."

My latest, perhap last gasp, approach is to "dive into the complexity" by trying to gather up tons of data and see if I can't detect some patterns that are interesting in their own right. Take a look at the e-phenomena aside from and apart from the official-ish goals of the game. To wit: getting money out of your pocket and into the Dealer's coffers, right?

But then either the API broke (again) or something went wonky with my network access. Not sure which. Who knows? Maybe I got API-banned for a while. But it was enough of a blip to make me question how interested I really was in that too.

I find myself -- once again -- just not caring too much one way or the other.

So I asked myself, "Self, what do I enjoy?" Gut reaction answer: "Pew-pew!: Yeah, in a hypnotic kinda way. And handing out play-bucks to my fellow co-op members once a week. That's sorta fun 'cause it makes me feel like maybe I've "occupied" a little corner of this crazy capitalist con-game. Yeah, right on! Power to the e-people!

Perhaps, within the matrix of the e-Deal, "as simple as posible, but not simpler" just means -- having explored all the avenues and having found them mostly unlit, dreary and lacking any good nightspots, just sticking with the wee click-clicks that I enjoy the most and forgetting about anything else is all that "as simple as possible" means here?...

Well. That was pretty banal.




Let's try another one...




"Predicting outcomes must always take the observer into account."
--Heisenberg

Yeah, that kind of evokes the whole "what does it mean to 'win' eRepublik" thing, doesn't it?

Pondering this question is a popular meta-game. Players try to divine what "improvements" will be implemented that will make the game "better" for the Dealer. Meaning, increase the house's take. And what improvements should be implemented that would make the game better for the players. Meaning, increase our fun.

Leaving that aside, there's also an aspect of getting inside the head of players from different countries, or of those who have various perspectives on 'winning'.

For example, not to slag off too much on my Slavic buddies, but Heisenberg's little aphorism makes me ponder the whole "e-Serbia" business. By chance, in real life I live in a (somewhat demoted nowadays) superpower where a "kindler, gentler" kind of sense of world domination is fed to us every day in a thousand ways. A domination that has not been so "kind and gentle" if you happen to be on the receiving end in many cases. It's "normal", and I do mean that ironically, for a USAnian to have a sort of overblown perspective of their country's role in the real world.

And the same is true of many blood-and-bones countries, innit? It just gets a bit more, umm, emphasized in particular directions depending on the national narrative you happen to have been plonked into at birth, or adopted for one reason or another.

So I'm never surprised at the alternatingly lackadasical and pompous attitudes expressed by my fellow e-USAers. The former reflects our "Ho-hum, what's the thrill in e-world domination when we already have real world domination?" prejudice. And the latter reflects, well, much the same underlying narrative, but expressed in the sense of "Well, 'naturally' and 'obviously', we are the strongest, best, most wonderful place in the e-World. Murica! Fuck yeah! Hoo-rah!".

Then there is e-Serbia. Which, along with Poland, really is the strongest e-country, not only in eRepublik, but in similar and knock-off versions too. I have a fairly good sense of what feeds into the sense of Serbian national pride in real life. And I am starting to get the Serbian sense of humor too. And I don't intend to make any judgements about any of that here.

Where I think it intersects with the Uncertainty Principle is how I perceive that people perceive this somewhat ironic situation of a country that is, let's be honest, not all that powerful in real life, being a superpower in the virtual life of these eRep-style games and of course eRep itself. I can imagine that for a Serb this is not only a wonderful catharsis, but also a good bit of fun to see players from the standard-model neo-imperialist powers squirm. Whereas for (many) Muricans, it either takes the fun out of the game ("Murica's not on top! How is that possible!?"), or it just confirms their already cynical attitude towards a game that, after all, isn't nearly as nifty as stuff you can do on one of those Army-inspired Xbox games, or see on one of those "the CIA is so cool" TV shows, or whatever.

Hmm. Well. That was pretty much much ado about nothing.





What does the next card say?...




"An axiomatic proof of infinite totalities is impossible. Mathematics requires finitary intuition."
-- Hilbert and Gödel

I love this observation because, while on the one hand it is a precise and true observation that pokes a hole in many of our most cherished illusions, it also reminds us that in order to solve certain complex mathematical problems like much of calculus on the simpler side, and the Riemann Hypothesis on the tougher side, we have to completely ignore this truth and act as if infinity or division by zero were not irrational.

Hilbert's axiom is a like a really good Zen koan. Bam! It is both obviously true, yet unsettlingly questions our preconceived notions of what we think we know. And I love that phrase "finitary intuition". What?!? Mathematics requires intuition?

Haha. Of course it does. And much of what we think we know about it is bald idealism, or to put it more crudely, sheer fantasy. Take, for example, Euclidean geometry. In actual fact, meaning, in real physics, there is no such thing as a point, a line, a flat plane or a perfect sphere.

You don't have to be physicist to realize that. Just work with a good 3D drawing program like Blender for a little while. (It's free and open source, dudes!) Bucky Fuller got it right. On a conceptual, intuitive level, the core building block of geometry can more accurately be viewed a a tetrahedron, which can be extracted in our understanding as consisting of a set of 4 joined triangles. But even that is an illusion because none of those surfaces can exist without the other. And they are never still, but always moving, changing, interacting, and popping in and out of existence.

What can we divine about the New World based on this observation?

I am tempted to make some kind of analogy to military strategy a la Sun Tzu or George S. Patton along the lines of "the best laid plans of mice and men...". In other words, a plan is fine thing, but soldiers win battles, or, "a king who cannot feed his own people has already lost the war", etc, etc.

Or perhaps something more crude like ol' Mao Zedong's military maxims on themes like "Only confront the enemy head-to-head when you have overwhelming force."

Or perhaps in a more oracular tone, "Don't count your chickens before they're hatched".

Hmm. Well, that degenerated from the sublime to the banal pretty quickly.




OK. Moving on...




"Complexity and herd behavior, especially irrational exuberance regarding probabilities, drives market behavior more than rational expectations do."
-- Talib and Thaler

This is kind of the psychological and economic flip-side of Hilbert's axiom. (And, incidentally, a giant slap in the face to much of the so-called Austrian School.) Like, "Yeah, it's true that inifinite totalities don't exist, but you can count on the fact that most people act as if they do."

In other words, it is just as likely -- perhaps more so -- that economic actors will act irrationally as it is that they wiil act rationally.

The tie-in to the Deal is fairly obvious. It goes like this: "Of course this click-click life sucks. And it most likely always will. But if I just stick with it a few more weeks, I'll get to the next Level and that will be much more exciting than achieving the previous Levels. Besides, if I don't stick it out, that no-good Joe Avatar character will get there before I do and I just can't let that happen. Besides, I have to help 'save' 'my country' from those barbarian Serbian hordes."

At the bottom of the pile, when all the cards have been played, it is essentially no different from: "I know I can't afford this mortgage, but that nice banker is so convincing about it and everybody knows that house values just go up and up and up forever. What could possibly go wrong?"

LOL.




And finally...


Spaceships (?) emerging from Rule 110


"Rule 110 is Turing complete. The Universe is a computer."
-- Cook and Wolfram

"Rule 110" refers to a particular axiom regarding cellular automata. It means that a particular sequence of steps in the game of cellular automation (that is, various versions of "The Game of Life" computer program) produce a result that is capable of universal computation ("is Turing complete").

This has astounding implications for how the universe works. As Wolfram eleganty summarized it: "The Universe is a computer." This implies that computation -- and therefore what we typically think of a "intelligence" -- does not require a von Neumann machine, that is, computation does not necessarily require a artithmetic and computation unit and an IO buffer, but can arise "naturally" through the course of long-term cellular development, replication and interaction.

The behavior of rule 110 is neither completely chaotic nor completely stable. It echoes, in a very elegant way, Fuller's conjectures about the (real) nature of non-Euclidean geometry in Synergetics. Rule 110 is a simple enough system to suggest that naturally occurring physical systems may also be capable of universality - meaning that many of their properties will be undecidable, and not amenable to closed-form mathematical solutions.

It implies very strongly that neither infinity nor design are the organizing principles of a complete computational system, but rather that complexity resulting from the massive repetition of simple pattens -- of the type you see in fractal patterns, for example -- is the underlying principle.

The function of the universal machine in Rule 110 requires an infinite number of localized patterns to be embedded within an infinitely repeating background pattern. You clever readers are no doubt sniffing with some disdain now that you know that infinite totalities are impossible.

Perhaps the Zen trick here is to understand that complexity is real, but it is a snapshot of infinity.

And what is a fractional part of infinity?


It is the Moon reflected in the still water of a pond.



I will leave interpreting the occult e-World correspondence of this final card in my deck up to the reader to grapple with.