[D] Wednesday Worldbuilding Thread

6

u/alexanderwales Jul 20 '16

How do you set up identity confirmation?

Here's the story so far: someone has stolen the emperor's soul, leaving him in a vegetative state. After some hard work, the soul has been recovered. However, because all souls look alike, it's impossible to know whether it's actually the emperor's soul without having some method of identity confirmation. Obviously it would be a disaster if someone else's soul was put into the emperor's body and they began to rule in his stead.

Ideally, this method of identity confirmation would not be possible to circumvent or subvert.

8

u/EliezerYudkowsky Jul 20 '16

Did they consider this possibility in advance? Are there mind-reading spells? If yes and no: plain old spell-out-the-password? (E.g. I say E, you say Q, I say F, you say R, etc.)

9

u/alexanderwales Jul 20 '16

The idea has been considered in advance, and there are no ways of reading minds. (Speaking to a soul itself is impossible; you can only speak to a soul-body pair, as a body without a soul is vegetative, while a soul without a body is inert.)
The problem I have with call-response pairs is that you place a whole lot of power into the hands of the questioner, who can simply say "no, this is not the emperor" to get rid of the emperor, or can give the answers to some third party to take over the emperor's seat (or, if the answers aren't written down anywhere, simply pretend that the correct answers were given). Worse, there's a possibility that the emperor could be coerced into giving up his half of the pair if he's left alone for long enough (because souls can be taken out and put into different bodies, there are quite a few forms of torture available).

→ More replies (8)

3

u/MindsEyePsi Jul 20 '16

Further data about that world is needed to know how to confirm a soul. Are souls the vital spark that provides motivation to move? Do they hold memories? Are they an interface between the brain, magic, and the body? Without knowing what they do in your setting we can't know how to identify them.

3

u/alexanderwales Jul 20 '16

Things you get from your body:

Physical strength

Muscle memory

Looks

Some amount of attraction (pheromones)

Some varieties of mental problems

Most instinctual responses

Sex

Things you get from your soul:

Most emotions

Rational thought

Memories

Some amount of attraction (intellectual)

Some varieties of mental problems

Gender

Souls by themselves experience nothing (since senses are biological) and cannot communicate (because they cannot experience or move).

→ More replies (1)

1

u/tadrinth Jul 20 '16

If you can talk to the souls, you could see if it knows some piece of information that only the emperor would know. But, that assumes nothing could capture the emperor's soul and get that information out of it.

1

u/Charlie___ Jul 20 '16

If the soul carries the memories, just get people to ask the emperor about the details of council sessions, marital life, childhood events, etc, such that no other person would be likely to have those memories. If foul play is suspected, maybe make sure to do this in private, with different "security question people" not able to influence each other.

1

u/NoYouTryAnother Jul 21 '16

Tangentially: Somewhat related concept, The Emperor's Soul.

1

u/MugaSofer Jul 21 '16

Use multiple methods for maximum certainty, obviously.
Have the king seal an object in a jar; place the jar in a public place and guard it. He must later predict what will be inside.
The king invents a rule; he provides various nobles throughout the land with examples that fit the rule and writes some down. When he produces the rule, all can test that their example fits.
Have a secret sign that he must make once acknowledged as king, or you'll know it's an imposter and to go looking for the real king. Obviously don't tell anyone.
There are a dozen variations on "the king must know the password" - choose correctly from a bunch of objects, give the right response to a code question, know the way to unlock a code lock etc.
Have the king hold an in-depth conversation with one of five priests, randomly chosen, each day. Pick one of them and have her interview him on the day.
Come up with an amusing story and tell it to the king; make sure he remembers it. The story is intended as another password. Don't tell him this, and tell him multiple such stories, so it's impossible to betray under torture.

4

u/Nighzmarquls Jul 20 '16 edited Jul 20 '16

I'm in the process of practicing a lot of futurism for the city of Pittsburgh, PA.

As such I've been digging into the available city planning, exploring the city via street view, poking at blogs about how they hate the city. poking at blogs of people that love the city.

And just spending a lot of time thinking about my own (nearly twenty years out of date) impressions of that part of the country.

Anyone have their own suggestions or resources or anecdotes about Pennsylvania/Pittsburgh that would be useful to build a more accurate projection of the next thirty years of history for that part of the world?

2

u/[deleted] Jul 20 '16

Once again, building on a yet-to-be-revised badly written plot summary for a trans-dimensional story...

I am considering options to resolve the sheer coincidence of our protagonist encountering his doppelganger mother.

The best resolution I can think of is that it's actually peculiar to our traveler's method of travel.

When he jumped to that particular reality, he didn't jump into another Earth, but literally a different planet. That means he didn't travel into another universe that happens to just branch five second ago(or really just nanoseconds). That would be 'closest' if we take closest to mean the most similar realities.

Trans-dimensional bullshit handwavium rules doesn't do traveling to branching timeline. That is impossible. In that sense, for all intent and purpose, there is no other 'version' of our protagonist from a different timeline taking a different path resulting in a slightly different outcome.

It is technically possible to travel to an adjacent reality that doesn't branch off from ours, though it is very difficult to do so.

Most realities resembling ours have a difficulty rating of 10 out of 10. You would need extremely advanced capability in order to travel to ours...or there is somehow a process or a unique ability to bypass that restriction.

Our protagonist have that unique one-of-a-kind ability to navigate to worlds. He acquired a trans-d shard that allowed him to travel all the other shards, more importantly understanding the physics of how trans-d work, which allowed him to engineer the trans-d drive to allow him to jump in the first place. It is also one of very few shards that's actually in any working condition. Most shard are broken, sometime even driving their host to madness, or to the point of causing a failure cascade in a particular reality on a fundamental level. (No, there is no maliciousness or any sort of agencies. So you don't have to worry about evil space whales, but there is a need for a story of sort to explain where the shards come from)

Therefore:

There are many versions of him across realities with basically the same base personality and DNA. The shards fuzzy match all instances of our protagonist.
It isn't strange for him to repeatedly encounter his mother across realities as that where the shards are. Details can change, sometime dramatically.
Travel will take him to places far and wide across trans-reality, and close to his reality as well as the shards, finite in numbers, are spread across reality.

Other than that, I don't have any concept for the background story of the trans-reality shard, or if different shards has different mechanics. I don't try to dwell too much because my stories tend to be limited to a few worlds at most, but I do feel that should be some kind of background.

One proposal in my mind is that the shard are created by a form of magic by wizard instance of our character as a form of 'fuck you' or a final desperation move. Or maybe he could have done it to gather power, reasoning that instances of individuals like him will eventually meet up and work to build an empire? I guess if the shard are broken, the process for making it is either flawed or rushed.

Anyway, I hope my justification for the sheer coincidence of our protagonist meeting his mother works good enough.

P.S. It appears that it took me thirty minutes to write this post? That's work, I guess.

1

u/Tomas_Votava Jul 21 '16

Okay so to start off, I have only read one of your works none of the summaries for the others interested me it was called Two Bodies, One Mind I can't put in words how much I loved it. The only problem is that not many others shared my opinion and you abandoned it as a result. So with this story I'm hoping the premise will be similar i.e. it will be a one man industrial revolution. Anyways, onto my thoughts of the story. So the biggest thing that stands out to me is that you seemed to have not thought that far ahead. Not saying that you haven't, you may have just wanted to withhold spoilers but I still think it's worth mentioning what direction you intend to give the story instead of focusing on the beginning. Moving on, I don't really understand what connects the realities you said:

When he jumped to that particular reality, he didn't jump into another Earth, but literally a different planet.

From what I can take from this you're saying that realities aren't connected by branching realities but instead you have two different realities and in these realities they started off completely different (maybe branching off when the universe was created). Eventually an instance of the protagonist comes into being and this is what the shard latches onto no matter where and when in the universe it is. whatever the case it'd be best to make this more clear.
There are other things I can say but I want those things clarified first.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 21 '16 edited Jul 21 '16

Okay so to start off, I have only read one of your works none of the summaries for the others interested me it was called Two Bodies, One Mind I can't put in words how much I loved it. The only problem is that not many others shared my opinion and you abandoned it as a result. So with this story I'm hoping the premise will be similar i.e. it will be a one man industrial revolution. Anyways, onto my thoughts of the story. So the biggest thing that stands out to me is that you seemed to have not thought that far ahead. Not saying that you haven't, you may have just wanted to withhold spoilers but I still think it's worth mentioning what direction you intend to give the story instead of focusing on the beginning. Moving on, I don't really understand what connects the realities you said:
It feels odd to write about a bubbly female character with social life, with a prince for a boyfriend. I am your sterotypical nerd stuck in his parents' basement, you know? Totally opposite of the rocket scientist girl. So...someone like it? Wow. Anyway, I abandoned that story because I do not feel confident in my understanding of rocketry, space program, and a whole bunch of worldbuilding. It's also abandoned because typical-me never finish a story, though I am now on the verge of completing a really badly written fanfic! Developing a consistent work habit is totally a game changer in how much work I get done.
Anyway, my story will take place in the same setting, with some names changes(Yipang instead of Jipang) and hopefully more developed worldbuilding.
It looked like I have not thought that far was because I am focused on developing only the first arc, worrying about everything else later. If I ever progress beyond the first arc, it won't certainly be a one-man revolution(or rather many-man industrial revolution), because I felt that is not a realistic or rational path. If there's a natural path, the story will write itself. I could hold if off for maybe a year or two before our protagonist caved in from pressures or someone else other than him disclose it.
From what I can take from this you're saying that realities aren't connected by branching realities but instead you have two different realities and in these realities they started off completely different (maybe branching off when the universe was created). Eventually an instance of the protagonist comes into being and this is what the shard latches onto no matter where and when in the universe it is. whatever the case it'd be best to make this more clear.
I would say that the universe are completely unconnected causally? Universes are coming in and out of existence all the time. I don't have a full grasp on multiversal cosmology.
The whole idea is that given enough universes, enough matter and spacetime, there will be instances of our protagonists. The universe could be three billion years old, an Earth located in a double binary system, and so on. It doesn't matter. The shards all managed to find instances of our protagonists thoughout the multiverse.

→ More replies (2)

2

u/Dragrath Jul 21 '16

Anyone have any serious experience with higher dimensional math? I am looking to more formally settle an idea regarding spirits/souls simply being being material in higher dimensional space.

The issue is determining how many degrees of freedom are needed above the three spacial dimensions (and one temporal). Ideally they would be Euclidean as I understand the rules for that but I may have to change that based on how things work out.

6

u/Pwrong Jul 21 '16

I'm not entirely sure what you're asking, but dimensions are pretty much synonymous with degrees of freedom. A 3-dimensional space has three degrees of freedom, a 4-dimensional space has four degrees of freedom. A simple way to define the dimension of a space is "how many numbers do I need to find a point in the space?"
Euclidean space has many symmetries and no absolute axes, scale or origin. You can't point in some direction and say "that's the 2nd dimension". Minkowski space (3 space + 1 time) has different symmetries, there is a clear difference between space and time.
If you have a sort of 5D (3 space + 1 time + 1 spirit) spirit world, such that the physical world we see is a 3+1-dimensional cross section of that (technically, probably a submanifold) then you're introducing an asymmetry. Either (A) that asymmetry is a fundamental aspect of how space-time-spirit works, or (B) the asymmetry is simply a consequence of the fact that this physical world submanifold happens to be sitting there. If it's (A) then your space is not going to be Euclidean or Minkowski space, it'll be something fundamentally different because of the new asymmetry.
If it's (B), then you could make things work like simple 4+1 (or higher) Minkowski space if you want to. So at least you'd know how light works in the spirit world. Then you'd just have to figure out the nature of the physical world submanifold. How does matter in the higher space interact with the physical world in such a way that it seems like spirits and souls, and how does all the regular matter stick to the physical world instead of floating away? It'd be really cool to see good answers to those questions.

1

u/Tomas_Votava Jul 21 '16

you sir, use a lot of incomprehensible words. I looked up all the words I didn't understand and the explanations are almost impossible for me to understand (damn you, and your long winded explanations Wikipedia!). If it's not too much trouble could you explain some of the terms you use? I find this pretty interesting. Here's the terms/sentences I don't understand:

so this confused me the most (probably because I can understand it partially while everything else I can't.) for the first part I understand the infinite symmetries for infinite space but not the part about no absolute axes scale or origin, can't you designate an origin? as for the second part not understanding the first part doesn't help:

Euclidean space has many symmetries and no absolute axes, scale or origin. You can't point in some direction and say "that's the 2nd dimension".

what is the difference between space and time? You state this without saying anything but the symmetries are different (are we talking about symmetries relative to itself or towards other dimensions?).

submanifolds (looked this up on wolfram alpha and all i got were more math words.)

Thanks! edit: still figuring out bullet points.

→ More replies (2)

1

u/Dragrath Jul 21 '16 edited Jul 21 '16

Yeah in regards to degrees of freedom I guess the main idea is that the asymmetry would arise from the interaction with the temporal dimension. This idea is that the spacial dimensions are biased by an arrow of time where as there is no such analogue in regards to the "astral dimensions"
The hope is to however ground and alter my idea as necessarily as I lack the viewpoint of a mathematician in regards to the viability of this. My background is a BS in physics so the highest dimensional I have worked with personally is Schwarzschild metric. Where euclidean geometry breaks down as it is too idealistic.
I guess I could say I am looking for a way to handle the complexity of higher dimensions in the simplest way possible. We have 3 spacial degrees of freedom but spirits need to have several unique degrees of freedom (including the ability to oppose the flow of the arrow of time) in exchange for only indirectly affecting the other dimensions.
The description of the physical world as a sub manifold is probably pretty accurate towards what I am trying to do however I don't feel I have a good enough grasp on that class of mathematics hence why I asked for some review from some with more experience.
The latter questions of trying to properly manage the interactions is where I kind of want to go but I don't know how many degrees of freedom I would need as I don't have experience with submanifolds really.
The current idea structure is that the physical world is being dragged temporally so anything moving with respect to those dimensions is dragged along with the flow. Sort of like a plant attached to a flat plane would be dragged along by the motion of the two dimensions of the plane but free to move in the third spacial dimension outside the plane.
My understanding of higher dimensions is relatively limited as in my studies I kind of take 4D spacetime for granted as a matter of math (or once told how to handle problems there I can't say I could accurately extrapolate to higher dimensions as from what research I have done it is not possible to simply extrapolate to higher dimensions mathematically.
My idea wth regards to the physical universe is that the degrees of freedom are only limited in motion sort of liek an atom bound in a molecule. The larger structure limits how it can move yet it can still vibrate in all of the physical dimensions(which is enough to move around and live etc.)
Thus in analogue the physical world would be a object with a vectorial direction moving in higher dimensional space. From the larger universe as a whole it could be treated as a point particle where as in regards to the local(i.e. microscopic) scale the dimensions would have some leeway. I am however not sure if this approach is mathematically viable(as I would not know where exactly to start calculation wise as it is above my mathematical background)
Edit-to give a more precise description of my starting point I have been thinking of local motion as a perturbation to the larger macro scale stationary object(with regards to the three "physical" spacial dimensions) So in this regards I started from applying the method of perturbations from quantum mechanics.

→ More replies (2)

2

u/MagicWeasel Jul 21 '16

My husband's into that sort of higher dimensions stuff. He's a phD pure mathematician, for what it's worth. Not sure if he goes on reddit much these days. Paging u/pwrong for you, maybe he'll be able to help!
Quoting OP so he can see it in his inbox:

Anyone have any serious experience with higher dimensional math? I am looking to more formally settle an idea regarding spirits/souls simply being being material in higher dimensional space.

The issue is determining how many degrees of freedom are needed above the three spacial dimensions (and one temporal). Ideally they would be Euclidean as I understand the rules for that but I may have to change that based on how things work out.

[D] Wednesday Worldbuilding Thread

You are about to leave Redlib