Arcanaville

I think the biggest misconception about Carl Sagan, and in particular the series Cosmos for those who didn't actually watch it, was that the show was a science show. It actually wasn't: not like Nova or a science documentary would be. It was more of a science appreciation show: a show designed to give something of a glimpse of how many scientists view Science, as a source of wonder and appreciation, and not as a cold collection of facts. Its sometimes referred to as Sagan's "love letter to the universe." Sagan believed that knowing the universe through Science didn't make the universe mundane, it enhanced one's appreciation of its complexity and its scale.

Pale Blue Dot re-emphasizes that fact that Sagan was a bit of a romantic when it came to Science. It was he who requested the family portrait series of pictures including the pale blue dot image be taken, even though there was some resistance to the idea since they have extremely limited scientific research value. Sagan wanted the pictures for their contextual meaning: he wanted to be able to point to those pictures and say "here we are: this is it." To Sagan, the immense scale of the universe didn't trivialize our planet and humanity, it made them all the more precious for being such a rare part of a very large cosmos.

I3. I3 is when Regen had the choice of both toggle instant healing or perma MoG, and MoG had the 90s cycle. Also, at no time could Regen tank Hamidon and more than one yellow mito at the same time, in or out of MoG and in or out of Instant Healing.

The three most powerful personal defensive combinations in the history of the game were perma-unstoppable with broken invincibility, perma-elude with aid self, and Regens that could go toggle IH with recon and perma-DP or perma-MoG on a whim. Even Granite tankers would have trouble keeping up with those three, under pre-I7 mechanics.

I get the point. I believe it to be false.

Well if that was what I was talking about then there should be no problem at all. The next time someone feels they are being made redundant in content, just tell them to increase their difficulty slider.

There is a distinct difference between what created the universe and how the universe operates. Its entirely possible that the process that created the universe can't operate *within* the universe.

One thing to note when thinking about things far outside our common sense experience is that our common sense tends to be no good outside our common experience. Stephen Hawking likes to describe the creation of the universe (presuming a closed manifold geometry) like this: the beginning of the universe is the South Pole of the earth, and the end of the universe is the North Pole. The equator is our universe today. As we get closer to the beginning, closer to the South Pole, the universe shrinks, until finally its a single point at the south pole. Asking what happened before the beginning of the universe is like asking what exists one mile south of the south pole. It is in some respects a meaningless question, because all our language and common sense and science currently deal strictly with events within the universe. We have no concept for "south of the south pole" and unless we do, the question is a meaningless string of words.

There are theories of creation that embed the universe in some larger structure that science can theoretically describe: membrane collision for example, where two large multidimensional membranes wandering a hyperspace collide, and the point of impact delivers a huge amount of energy to that one spot: that becomes the energy of a Big Bang. But that presupposes structure that predates the Big Bang, which then creates a smaller structure within it that happens to be the universe we see. It pushes the creation question further outward to what created the branes, which again may have no answer not because Science is incapable of answering it, but because the question may be genuinely meaningless.

We often assume if we can construct the question, it must have an answer. Not true. What number is greater than 3 and less than 2? There is no such number which fits that description. Is 1.7 odd or even? That's a meaningless question, because odd and even are only defined for whole numbers. What caused the Big Bang can be interpreted as asking "what event created the space for events to happen and the time for events to occur in?" Or more directly "what event happened before events could happen?" It may be unsatisfactory, but it may ultimately be the final answer to the final question.

How can you tell if the bottom half of a player is unconscious?




On second thought, nevermind.





I said nevermind. Nevermind nevermind nevermind lalalalalalala I can't hear you.

Unconscious players *and* half of one player would be at least 1.5 players, and that probably qualifies as forced teaming.

We had *nothing* and we added *a little*. Most games had *a lot* and are dialing downward, not just in terms of raid content but making their non-raid content more PUG-friendly and more soloable.

There's no mystery there: we were already there, they weren't, and they are heading towards us. But again: this is yet another example of people assuming that making things more solo and/or casual friendly is a sign people are starting to believe that it should *all* be that way. That's the only way you could come to the conclusion that the game that had no raid content at all putting in some is somehow bucking the trend of everyone else that had a lot moving to have a bit less.

The only way we could have followed the trend of making content that required less hardcore play and less numbers of players was for the developers to start making content that could be played by unconscious players and half of one player.

The difficulty slider has absolutely nothing to do with what I'm talking about.

More like the ultimate in lazy. Consider the case of a hypothetical weatherman a million years from now with almost limitless computer power at his disposal. He could try to construct a very limited simulation of just the weather on Earth that would give him reasonable forecast information. But that requires a lot of work, and a lot of understanding of what he can safely remove and what he must keep, and at what resolution. So instead, he downloads a copy of Earth from Google Earth version 1,000,003.1. And then he loads that into a computer capable of simulating the entire Earth to an atomic level of resolution. Safer, and requires less work on his part.

Now suppose he lets that run for a simulated week, a simulated month, a simulated year. Suppose he falls asleep one day and forgets he has the simulation running at maximum speed. Suppose a billion years passes in simulation. Now what.

Perhaps the computing power to do this simply cannot exist. But that's being judged within our own universe. If our universe is a simulation, the presumption that has to be made is that the "real" universe doesn't have to be identical in physical laws to our own. We might even be a highly simplified and reduced simulation of their world: we could even be a "flatland" to hyperdimensional beings. Such beings might find it as easy to simulate a three dimensional world as we do making Ms Pacman.

It may also not occur to such beings that three-dimensional beings can be sentient. There's a short story out there that poses a similar question within our own universe.

You're looking at it wrong. Its entirely possible that given a sufficiently advanced technology, someone would decide to simply simulate the temporal evolution of every atom on a planet for a billion years just because its simpler than making a reduced simulation. Even if there's no reason to place sentient beings in the simulation, they may end up there anyway.

I will remind you again you are talking about something scientists currently do on a smaller scale. And I have no idea what artificial intelligence specifically has to do with it.

Virtual realities are attempts to emulate the *appearance* of the real world. Simulations are attempts to model or replicate the mechanical functioning of the real world.

I can't guess what you might mean by a simulated reality, but the term refers to things we already do. More importantly, what the rest of the thread was talking about in terms of simulated realities are extremely advanced versions of what we already do. The difference between simulating galactic evolution, say, and simulating all of reality is a question of resolution.

In any case, my point was not that MMOs are simulations, but rather that its strange anyone who plays MMOs would believe that *no one* would create a simulated reality simply because there would be no scientific value to doing so. Even if that were conceded, and its a ludicrous point to concede because we use scientific simulations already, there's no reason to believe scientific motivation would be the only reason to do it. There's every reason to believe if the technology became available to do it people would do it for entertainment value, or to prove it could be done, or simply because they could.

Actually, many of them just keep running until they run into another spawn that looks just like them, and then say "free beer" and point back over their shoulder.

We already do make simulated realities. We just don't populate them with conscious beings. Yet.

This is true, and I only tossed that in there so you could see what it looked like. It would be easy to replace them back with commons, mostly the build makes that six-slotted Spring Attack you were looking for. If you're not comfortable with deslotting attacks, you should be able to fire up that build and swap some slots out of combat jump and put them back into the attacks. Easier to put them back then figure out how to unslot them.

Just out of curiosity, what happens to the ones that decide to stay?

What I'm saying is that you said:

It never did that. It used to increase the 5% crits to 6%, the 10% crits to 12% and the 15% crits to 17%. It now increases the crit chance according to Synapse from 5% to 7% and 10% to 14% (talking about the standard versions). Its unclear what the 15% is intended to go to now, but it never did just add a flat percentage. Its doing now what it did before, just with double the values. It scaled from the low to the medium crit chance, it just didn't continue to scale upward for the high chance for the special attacks with that crit percentage.

To be fair, every version of Office since Office 97 has been written to be less efficient than the previous version and missing features, so that might not be a Mac issue per se.

When I actually remember to pop those lucks before trying to pull with my Blaster, my success rate soars upward.

True, but Science isn't about Absolute Truth because it doesn't presuppose that exists. It looks for truths that are useful enough that knowing about a finite amount of the universe allows us to comfortably predict what's going on in the rest of it. The orbit and rotation of the Earth around the Sun doesn't really affect me directly all that much, except it does allow me to predict the Sun is rising tomorrow, and at what time. Universal gravitation allows me to predict things will fall down. What if it is actually invisible fairies that just happen to arrange things to look like Newton and Einstein are being obeyed? Well, in that case we assume they'll continue to do so consistently and move on: all our predictions of how the universe behaves will be the same.

There is no way to *prove* our universe is not a simulation, given that we're not constraining what a "simulation" is or what the hypothetical limits of computer power would be outside our own universe. But if we are a simulation, its possible we might one day discover physical phenomena which are best explained as simulation glitches. If a theory one day emerges that presupposes our universe is a simulation in some hyperpowerful computer of some specific design, and that theory makes predictions about events we haven't observed yet which violate our current laws of physics, and then those observations are confirmed, with enough repeated trials of this we could claim that we have discovered our universe is a simulation to within scientific certainty. The certainty that says that theory explains everything we see, accurately predicts things we haven't seen yet and couldn't have known about, and is the simplest and best theory which is capable of doing so.

Some people say that for every question, there is just another question lurking behind it: that you can just keep asking "why" trying to uncover "deeper" truths. But that fails to recognize that Science isn't about finding those deeper truths. Science only cares about deeper truth when that deeper truth is also more useful to describe the universe. There is a limit on how deep we can ask "why" because human beings are finite and limited: our knowledge and observations of the universe are also limited. Beyond a certain point, we would be asking questions to try to distinguish between competing theories of the world that themselves do not make any predictions that are different. Theories that make identical predictions are identical theories in Science. For the question "which one is the deeper truth" to make sense, we would have to be capable of making observations which could distinguish between the two. And while we can keep getting better at it, there is a finite limit.


Edit: in other words, it is theoretically within the limits of Science to ask "is the best possible explanation of existence that our universe is a simulation in some extremely powerful computer?" It is beyond the limits of Science to ask "and what color is the case?"