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Comment by excalibur | Hacker News Reader

Seriously, this article brings to mind the classic short story about a simulated universe: https://qntm.org/responsibility

And also the wildly speculative conjecture that our universe will be retroactively created by a super intelligent AI in the precise manner necessary to facilitate its own existence, from which it follows that we exist for the express purpose of creating it. (If anybody knows the source I might have stolen this one from please let me know.)

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There is a dark version of this (with some pascal's wager thrown in) called Roko's basilisk. Maybe that's what you're thinking of?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk

There's also a Stephen Baxter novel, where a splinter group of humanity called "Wigner's Friends", believes something like this to be the case. I forget which one it is, but it's part of the Xeelee Sequence.

Roko's basilisk isn't retrocausal, maybe you're thinking of some Nick Land thing? But even there it's hard to tell how literal he is being with the Terminator analogies (if you haven't seen the movie it has time travel in it), the sanewashed version of his thesis revolves around thermodynamics, chaos theory, and strange attractors.

For a detailed discussion of retrocausality in Nick Land's work, check out the https://retrochronic.com/ introduction. There's even a dedicated Terminator section.

Nick Land interprets Roko's Basilisk as "retrochronic AI infiltration".

Yes, well. At this point I'm mostly convinced by multiple high quality arguments that Roko's Basilisk is non-functional against any reasonable theory of rationality.

There is zero chance this is what you meant, but I wrote a short story with that concept in 2013: https://www.3delement.com/?p=309

Did you end up finding what you were referring to? None of the other comments actually match that

Stanislaw Lem, The Star Diaries, where Tichy at the same time apologizes and brags about how he retroactively tried to create/fix the world and how he failed.

Maybe "the last question"? https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html

Funny, one of my first thoughts upon seeing this article was that the protagonist of the story "There Is No Antimimetics Division" (by the same author) is named "Marion Wheeler" and I wondered if there was an intentional connection.

https://qntm.org/scp

Maybe you're thinking of some strange version of the Omega Point idea?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Point

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