# Simulacra Are Things
## Metadata
- Author: [[janus]]
- Full Title: Simulacra Are Things
- Category: #articles
- Summary: insert summary
- My notes:
- Summary: This is a note I wrote about a year ago. It's fairly self-contained, so I decided to make a post out of it after Vladimir_Nesov's comment caused me t…
- URL: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3BDqZMNSJDBg2oyvW/simulacra-are-things
## LLM Chats
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## LLM Audio
## Highlights
> Essentially, simulacra are to a simulator as “things” are to physics in the real world. “Things” are a superposable type – the entire universe is a thing, a person is a thing, a component of a person is a thing, and two people are a thing. And likewise, “simulacra” are superposable in the simulator, Things are made of things. Technically, a random collection of atoms sampled randomly from the universe is a thing, but there’s usually no reason to pay attention to such a collection over any other. Some things (like a person) are meaningful partitions of the world (e.g. in the sense of having explanatory/predictive power as an object in an ontology). We assign names to meaningful partitions (individuals and categories). ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jz8wmarher5a7n9rzp4j5hcz))
> Like things, simulacra are probabilistically generated by the laws of physics (the simulator), but have properties that are arbitrary with respect to it, contingent on the initial prompt and random sampling (splitting of the timeline). They are not necessary but contingent truths; they are particular realizations of the potential of the simulator, a branch of the implicit multiverse. In a GPT simulation and in reality, the fact that there are three (and not four or two) people in a room at time is not necessitated by the laws of physics, but contingent on the probabilistic evolution of the previous state that is contingent on (…) an initial seed(prompt) generated by an unknown source that may itself have arbitrary properties. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jz8y0gpv92h0ag2k9rzsc2p9))