/** * file: karbytes_08_january_2024.txt * type: plain-text * date: 07_JANUARY_2024 * author: karbytes * license: PUBLIC_DOMAIN */ This is a continuation of the journal entry which karbytes wrote yesterday about NPCs (i.e. Non Playable Characters) which has a corresponding public karbytes-created web page named karbytes_07_january_2024 on the public karbytes-created website named Karbytes For Life Blog dot WordPress dot Com. Given that I do not believe in the existence of free will (due to the fact that I identify as being a hard determinist more so than as a compatibilist), it seems rational for me to also not believe in the existence of actual playable characters and, instead, posit that the only information processing agents which could exist as finite allocations of time, space, matter, and energy within the confines of a deterministic universe are non playable characters. For some reason, I appear to have been consciously inhabiting exactly one unique humanoid individual for the past thirty four consecutive years instead of consciously inhabiting any other information processing agent. Perhaps it would be useful for me to refer to what I previously referred to as non playable characters as phenomenal shells which each appear to physically house exactly one uniquely corresponding conscious information processing agent from my point of view while I lack the means to conclusively verify (irregardless of how much empirical data I gather about what appears to be my encompassing physical environment) whether or not any one of those humanoid-resembling phenomenal shells actually renders its own uniquely corresponding space-time continuum from exactly one localized frame of reference. As a corollary, it might also be useful for me to replace the term "playable character" with "individually experienced space-time continuum" (which is rendered for exactly one "person" as being fundamentally more like watching a movie than playing a video game). I have some familiarity with massively multi-player online games (MMOs) such as World of Warcraft and think that they provide an excellent metaphor for reality as I have experienced it from the localized and deterministically limited frame of reference referred to by me as karbytes. In order for a computer simulated environment to be inhabited with multiple rather than just one "playable character" (which is "controlled" by exactly one (presumably humanoid) player through exactly one terminal computer (which has exactly one uniquely corresponding Internet Protocol (IP) address) interfacing with the World Wide Web), each player's "real time" vantage into an MMO's simulated environment is both unique unto that player (i.e. not qualitatively identical to any other player's vantage at that time of gameplay) and, paradoxically, congruent with what all the other players of that game at that time are observing of that game's shared environment (unless there are technological glitches such as slow or impeded Internet connectivity or hacking which cause distortions in what is "supposed to be" each player always experiencing a casually seamless shared "universe" (or, perhaps more accurately, a causally seamless multiverse) while logged onto that game). For example, while playing World of Warcraft, I chose to interface with the shared virtual environment named Azeroth using a playable character avatar whose species was Night Elf and which could run around, jump, ride other animals, and project green plasma-like balls out of its body as a means of weakening NPCs (by lowering the target avatar's "health points") and the avatars of other players in a Darwinian Natural Selection battle for control over necessarily scarce in-game resources such as loot, money, raw materials for crafting weapons and potions, and even opportunities to glean additional "experience points" which are applied to exactly one logged-on avatar in order to enable that avatar to increase how much damage its attacks wield, decrease how much damage it takes in response to being attacked, and increase access to other in-game benefits. What made it possible for in-game resources to be fairly allocated, for "collision detection" with other players to be implemented (such that avatars are unable to occupy the same location coordinates in time and space (within the context of some runtime instance of Azeroth), and for me to be able to detect and interact with other players in that environment was the fact that (presumably) each player's own unique "solipsistic" rendering of that shared environment was synchronized with every other of such "solipsistic" rendering of that environment. In order to avoid having the progress I am intending to always be making towards my personal goals (as karbytes) get thwarted by what appear to me to be humanoid individuals inhabiting the same "baseline physical" environment as I am, I generally strive to uphold the assumption that each of those humanoid shells I see and have referred to as NPCs is approximately equal to me in terms of its degree of sentience and its susceptibility to being controlled by its entire encompassing physical universe from the outside-in such that the origination of such subjective awareness and apparent volition is not consciously known by the respective information processing agent. To be succinct, I do not appear to have any control over what my consciously known personal preferences, memories, and immediate perceptual throughputs are (but it does seem helpful for me to savor my present moment experience as much as I can even while some of my "real-time" emotions, physiological states, and cognitive processes are (at least initially) interpreted by me as being personally unpleasant or unsatisfying in some non-trivial way. If I have no control over which qualia I experience, for the sake of minimizing my suffering, I will "try to" contextualize my experiences in ways which imbue my experiences of reality with as much satisfaction as possible. If I appear to be unsatisfied sufficiently frequently and sufficiently profoundly, perhaps I can notice (and not necessarily generate) a sense of satisfaction about the fact that, happy or not, I am beholding conscious experiences at all. What I mean to imply by the previous sentence is that it may be possible for the conscious "locus" of some information processing agent like me to experience a non-trivial degree of worthwhileness just from being able to consciously exist and to notice any phenomena at all (which means that it may be possible for me to be unconditionally happy). (To be clear, I define "free will" as a hypothetical property which some information processing agents have which enable those information processing agents to make decisions which have no causal relationship with how the information processing agent's encompassing universe appears to that information processing agent to be rendered at the time that agent implements some conscious decision making process such as choosing to go through the right door instead of the left door of some wall at some time. What is implied is that, if some information processing agent has "free will", then there is no "pre-programmed" bias in that information processing agent's decision making processes (which means that it is impossible to determine which door that information processing agent will select to go through because that decision making process occurs outside the limiting scope of deterministic and presumably unconditional laws of physics (at least within that particular universe and not necessarily ubiquitously throughout some all-encompassing multiverse referred to by karbytes as nature)).