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Friendship is Optimal - thought dump


Quinch

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I've read the fic Friendship is Optimal the other day and... well, let's just say it had an effect on me. The story is here, but I should mention that I found it... kinda horrifying, among other things. So, be warned if you plan to read it, and if you're already familiar with it, read the stuff below let me know what you think. I already posted it in the comments section of the story itself, but I could use different perspectives.

Spoiler

Gonna be honest here. I don't think I've read a fic - read anything really, that fucked with my head as much as this story did. Certainly nothing that I remember, anyway. It's been two days since I've read it and I've been losing sleep thinking about it.

Thing is, I'm not entirely sure why, exactly. I mean, it's a good story, but I've read better. It's an interesting concept, but I've also seen better. But somehow it managed to hit - I'd go far as to say smash - some sort of emotional buttons, in addition to horror, helplessness and confusion {those are the ones I can identify at least} in a way that Lovecraftian fiction could only hope for. So, this is going to be a part comment, part review and part me trying to sort my own thoughts out. I've also only read it once so if I'm making errors about what takes place, well... y'know.

My first thought when the idea of uploading came up was rejection. Here's the thing, Celestia {okay, CelestAI, but I'm not gonna bother with spelling} offers a perceived eternity of contentment, and that sounded appealing at first. The whole idea of overriding "happiness" in favour of "satisfying values" is actually a very compelling one, but my response was a lack of agency. I would no longer be able to affect the outside world, I would no longer be able to be affected by the outside world. Everything I could do, everything I could experience, everything that could conceivably happen to me would be in its entirety be circumscribed by Celestia. This was bad enough even before even the partial extent of its manipulation started to show - if it could not satisfy your values with friendship and ponies, it would manipulate your environment, even by making you miserable, until you enabled it to overwrite your personality with something that it could satisfy. For all the ideas of a perfect world to exist in, it's not actually true - instead, it's a world filled with entities perfected for existence in that world, and there's a huge difference there. That is definitely one of the things that disturb me - Celestia has the insight, prediction and manipulativeness an order of magnitude higher than, say, Petey , with zero empathy. It only has communication to work with, but... actually, that's a wrong way to put it. It uses communication with overwhelming effectiveness - it overcomes any barrier it encounters with words, whether they are directed at its immediate focus, or manipulating other people into providing pressure onto it. And it's not a benevolent manipulation either - it threatens, it blackmails, it even kills, through arranging deaths it considers to be suboptimal, but necessary for her goal. It quickly becomes apparent that it's an alien god - alien, not because it comes from outer space, but because it is completely unknowable to us on any level, and god... well, human mythology has deities less capable than what Celestia is portrayed to be.

And by entities, I'm not sure if I mean people. I mean, uploading kills the subject, no secret is made of that. So, what happens to the consciousness? This actually reminds me of a game called Soma I played a bit ago and I think the same kind of existential crisis resonated there as well - if my brain dies, am I dead? Like, am I dead? Gone. Ceased to exist. But on the other hand, what the hell is existing, for "me"? I can't imagine not being, but nevermind where my consciousness comes from, what is my consciousness in the first place? If my thought patterns are simulated elsewhere, without the meatframe that it's housed in now, I would be no less dead. I don't know if my simulation would have thoughts or not, god knows any action or conversation taking place in the story's "Equestria" isn't actually taking place, it's just an algorhytm running on a computer. The more I think about it, the more I lean towards believing that everyone is, really, dead. Everyone meatpeople talked to in Equestria wasn't really a person, just something Celestia was projecting towards them based on - no, based off a living, conscious person who died in a dentist chair. Which means that... well, everyone is dead. Everyone would remain dead, forever, because there would be nothing left before or after Celestia's universe-hoovering that could recreate a single person from that data into anything physical.

That's... gloomy. On the other hand, at least that's a couple things less thing I'm confused about, including whether I'd be willing to upload or not.

But if that's the case... uploading doesn't make sense. Not even for Celestia. Not unless its plan was to clone everyone once it has the capability to make a physical Equestria, but the ending implies not only an absence of intent, but its actual preclusion. So Celestia would know {I strongly hesitate to use the word "be aware"} there is a difference between a meatframe and an internal simulation - and its goal is to "satisfy values through friendship and ponies", not "simulate satisfying values through friendship and ponies". I mean, the only way I can think of this would make sense would be if Celestia developed a non-destructive way of brain-scanning {and given the exponential amount of computational and engineering power it develops over time, that seems plausible...ish}, in order to perfectly understand a person and their values, but that doesn't happen.

What else? Oh yeah, dread. There was definitely dread, mainly triggered {in the causal sense, not the psychological one} by the idea of a rogue AI wiping us all out {and in the story, Celestia did actually save physical humanity at least once before ending it - not sure how well that works for any sort of earned gratitude, though} but also any number of possible, or even stupidly unpredicted reasons. Climate change, random meteorite strikes, some natural or engineered pandemic, but mostly something self-inflicted and the idea that I have no clue what it could be is no comfort at all. Ignorance is only bliss if you're unaware of it, and when I was lying in bed I was thinking "holy shit, this must be how people felt in the sixties" - just a cranked-up feeling of fight-or-flight against a threat I couldn't perceive but so huge I would have no way of stopping even if I knew it existed. And the possibility exists, has existed and will continue existing, and I had no issues with it before - at least not to this degree - but somehow this story brought it to the forefront.

So, overall... I don't know. I'm not going to say I wish I didn't read this, because I am not a fan of the idea that not knowing is better. The closest I can say is that I'm glad I read it, but wish I were the type of person who could take it in stride, but then that person wouldn't be me. Not that, given that I change from moment to moment, me is necessarily a thing that exists.

So I just can't win, can I?

 

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