There's a specific civilization-destroying infohazard about quantum foundations which would make *fantastic* sci-fi, which I haven't seen done anywhere.
I really want to describe it, but if it's true, doing so could have ∞ cost. Its absence from sci-fi is ominously conspicuous.
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Ooh, that's a good one!
More like: Imagine a malleable process that instantly finds its own fixed points. Incredibly useful; could probably solve NP hard things.
The information that emerges is, in a sense, perfectly optimized for the circumstances in which it manifests. /
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And infinitely stable; unperturbable by those same circumstances.
If the process permits (say) Darwinian evolution, even accidentally, then the maximally-fit information structure will emerge, for which the environment could not have any defenses or counter-adaptations. /
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And the maximally-fit information structure is prone to be one that successfully coerces itself to manifest physically— to be encoded as DNA, or constructed as a piece of technology, or behavior to be carried out as malware in the human nervous system. /
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Maybe the search parameters are directly aimed at solving a physical problem (the DNA sequence for a virus which targets only cancer, e.g.). The most fit structure could be the real solution, or perhaps just as easily a sham that is convincing enough to escape. /
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Imagine a thing which is trying to involve you in its reproduction process, and which has had uncountable trillions of years to perfectly adapt to you as you are in this exact moment— your behavior, your intuitions, your immune system, etc.
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This all requires that the environment is "pulled into" the optimization process, rather than confined to (say) a chip. Could happen subtly (decoherence?), unexpectedly (responses to output somehow become input), or on purpose (not knowing better, trying to optimize the env).
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You could spontaneously create Incomprehensibly Grabby Aliens just by asking a very powerful computation-solver the wrong question.
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The term I like for any such kind of "bad / unwanted fixed point" is "eigenmonster".
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I wouldn’t say this kind of thing isn’t in SF. The Q continuum in Star Trek seems to be almost this in a way. Perfect information time-space optimized actions with omniscience. The cash it out as ‘capriciously playful gods’ rather than eigenmonsters though.
Yep, there's definitely a lot of Scary Powerful Entity ideas in SF which are adjacent, but I haven't yet seen the realization that causal loops imply instant eldritch horror.
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But this is because it is hard to write something that infallibly gets what it is optimizing for. The Cthaeh in Wise Man's Fear, Prometheus in slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/27/a-m or God in unsongbook.com may be examples.
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