Obligatory Post :)

I kind've froze up and babbled during my presentation so If anything about it sounded interesting I have long thought out meaty paragraphs on my project blog explaining stuff [4llm1x3dup.blogspot.com], which this post is taken from. I didn't include the images here because I've been having issues trying to resize images to fit in the blog nicely. Anyway here's some of my thoughts.

Over the summer a friend of mine kept mentioning the fact that within 50 years or so we will have computers capable of running realistic simulations of reality complete with artifical consciousnesses. I tid-bit I forgot about until We started talkign about the multiplication jars.

The jar has a whole world inside of it and within that world more jars exist with more worlds and so on... Christopher Nolan probably read this book as a child because that shoulds kinda like 'Inception' only instead of worlds within jars, its dreams within dreams.

Now as every critic and haughty hipster I know pointed out: Inception is kinda like 'The Matrix', which is kinda like 'Dark City', which is a totally ripped off from Plato's 'Allegory Of The Cave.' In any case I thought about what if I combined all three of these movies premises into one.

Simulated 'realities' like The Matrix, Layers of 'reality' like 'Inception' and 'Aliens studying us by manipulating 'realities'. So I arrived at the idea that If we build a simulation to study people and the people in that simulation build a simulation, what happens?

I started researching the theory Shane had mentioned in the summer and found out about 'Simulism'. Essentially the argument is: If it is possible to build reality simulators with autonomous intelligent digital beings inside one of these three things must be true.

1. Species are wiped out before reaching the level of intelligence and technology to build such simulations.

2. Species with the capacity to build such simulations don't choose to build them.

3. We're probably living in a computer simulation.

So once again I decided to pursue 'All of the above'. Option two could never be true on its own because of the whole Pandora's box argument. Option one is too absolute to occur naturally, so there would have to be some consciousness causing that to occur.

So I decided that the situation would be:

Simulation B is running Simulation A, and is actively trying to prevent Simulation A from creating a Simulation A'. Thus fulfilling rule 2. But somewhere up the hierarchy of simulations, lets call this layer X, a rule was made that effected all subsequent simulations: If a simulation runs a simulation of itself both worlds would be destroyed.

From there I plugged in my story. The strange Zolo being was to be some kind of avatar for the beings running Simulation A to interact with it and thus change things.

Other things I considered was the connection between the computer/machine running the simulation and the simulation itself. Such as what if the program glitched how would this effect the simulation? If too many simulations were run at once would there be problems, would the realities warp together briefly? Ultimately I decided this distance would be expressed two ways: Anachronisms/out of place objects resulting as a glitch would appear in scenes, and that Zolo could only appear in simulation A and not A' because it would be too difficult to invade one simulation and then invade another within it.