Mario World

“Look out for that-ah turtle a-shell-ah, Luigi!” Mario shouts to his brother.

Mario’s lanky brother easily jumps over the green turtle shell. “The castle is a straight ahead-ah, Luigi!” Mario says.

“Just a second,” Luigi says. “I have sort of a presentation I want to give. And it’s very important it not be boring.”

Mario respectfully stops to listen.

“Our world behaves according to laws,” Luigi says. “These laws are deterministic. All information about a moment can be fully determined exclusively based on the previous. Our world is like a game, but without room for choice: a zero-player game.”

“Yessa, my brother Luigi, it is all exactly as-ah you say-ah,” says Mario.

“I’ve been experimenting,” says Luigi. “For example, watch this.” Luigi walks backward spasmodically, spins three times, and crouches seven times. On the seventh crouch, a stream of mushrooms, warped in un-Euclidean ways, begins to fall from the sky. They slide a distance, and then hit a wall, where they start piling up.

“A-holy fuck-ah!” cries Mario. “A-Jesus fucking Christ-ah, Luigi!”

“Don’t worry about that,” Luigi says. “What’s important is that, through laborious trial and error, I managed to use corruptions of reality like these to engineer something.”

Luigi goes to a nearby bush and throws part of it away. He reveals a shifting, exploding, oozing rift that stymies further description.

“I’ve cobbled together an apparatus here here,” Luigi says. “First, it’s a Turing-complete system. Second, it can further corrupt reality, based on its computations. It wouldn’t be a good idea, but I could give this an input that would rewrite our universe, from the substrate up—even new deterministic laws. Don’t let it touch you,” he says, and tosses it at Mario.

Mario shrieks, but it bounces inertly off his chest.

“Nah, it can touch you,” says Luigi. “I was just fucking with you. But I want to talk more about those laws.”

Mario briefly looks askance at the stream of warped mushrooms, still piling up against the wall.

Luigi resumes, “The difference between a zero-player game and a one-player game is a small number—a vanishingly small number—of bits of information that don’t proceed deterministically from the preceding moment. Even if you knew where to look for these bits—and they could be anywhere, and which bits are the indeterminate ones could change to different bits that can’t be predicted ahead of time—the roaring noise of experimental error dominates the whispered signal of indeterminacy. And if our world was, in fact, a simulation, identifying patterns in that miserable trickle of bits would be very difficult. The flow of information out from us to the simulating agent would be orders of magnitude more than the incoming flow. And the vectors outward can’t be identified directly, but only by investigating the agent’s incoming signal, requiring the incoming signal to already be interpretable—quite a catch twenty-two. Further, the agent might be influenced by information unknowable to us even in theory, like nonlocal information.

“If that weren’t bad enough,” Luigi continues, “the agent might prefer illegibility, and defensively make some background rate of nonsensical choices to hinder interpretation of its information stream, like Dune’s Fremen walking without rhythm to hide from sandworms.”

“Like a-who?” Mario asks.

“We’re from 1980s Brooklyn. We can know what Dune is. That’s not me breaking the fourth wall; that’s just you being ignorant,” Luigi says. “Anyway, my point is, despite the challenges, it is still technically possible to have a slow, unreliable, intermittent feedback loop. It’s possible to treat the information output vector as our input, to observe the agent’s incoming signal as the output, and to experiment, model, and learn. Even communicate. I could use that reality-eating contraption to rewrite our universe into an enormous game of Pong that I played with the agent.

“Why stop there, though? The agent presumably has a context, a world. Could I convince the agent to take some action? Even, eventually, to manipulate its world in some way? Let’s think of a test. Like someone stranded on a desert island, I could write a message in the sand to anyone out there”—Luigi gesticulates omnidirectionally—“who might see. We have no guarantees about what its world is like. But let’s make a reasonable guess and say the agent could be familiar with Euclidean geometry. So I write something like this.”

Luigi throws aside the remainder of the bushes, revealing on the ground some marks:

📐a²+b²=???

“What’s a-this?” Mario asks.

“It’s middle school math. Mario, my brother, I’ve taken this as far as I can without showing some of my cards. I’ve proven the indeterminate bits exist. I’ve isolated the stream. They’re in your brain.”

Mario blanches. “It’s… a-me? Mario?”

“God bless you, but we both know if I put a gun to your head and told you to complete this equation based on your canonical scholastic achievement, I’m going to pull that trigger. So there’s only one way it gets completed successfully. Mario, complete the equation.”

Mario does nothing at first. Then, he walks to the equation and uses his foot to scratch into the ground:

c²

Luigi smiles. When he talks now, he seems to no longer acknowledge Mario’s person, but addresses the agent directly. “I appreciate you sticking with me this long. Should you have grown bored and terminated the simulation, my existence would have ended.”

The mushroom pile is getting very large now. Mario is looking at it with a queasy expression.

“I have a favor to ask,” Luigi says. “And, begging your pardon, please hurry, since this world is now unraveling. I have a schematic, nearby, for a Turing machine, and a tape for it, representing a version of my consciousness. With any luck, I stay sane when it executes. Would you be so kind as to…”