I Don’t Know Timmy, Being God is a Big Responsibility ✧ [brief encounters]

Intro

Hi, welcome to Brief Encounters, the series where I review intriguing short stories! I’m Huitzi, an entity from another dimension, and for my second transmission, I’m looking at qntm’s 2007 short story called I Don’t Know Timmy, Being God is a Big Responsibility. This sci-fi short story explores mathematical and existential themes within the context of simulation theory.

qntm has been writing and publishing sci-fi stories since at least 2006, with a focus on short stories and serialized fiction. I recently bought his collection of short stories called, “Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories,” so this isn’t the last you’ll be hearing about his work on this channel!

As a quick reminder, this review does contain spoilers, so this is your one and only warning before I dive into the specifics of this story. Enjoy!

Story Totals

First we have our completely out of context story totals. Compiling these ridiculous tallies is an idea I took from the The Last Drive-In, which is a great horror commentary show if you haven’t heard of it.

So what kind of numbers are we looking at? I Don’t Know Timmy, Being God is a Big Responsibility includes the following totals:

• 50 years for 2 geniuses to articulate an obscure math theory
• 23 specialists subsequently building a hypercomputing engine in 2 years
• 3 unsolvable problems in discrete mathematics solved in 1 week
• 10^24 gold atoms shoved into the form of a cube
• ∞ (countably infinite) identical recursive universes

Now to explore how we got those numbers….

Summary

Let’s start with a summary of the plot.

It’s past the end of the workweek on a Friday evening, and all Tim wants to do is catch his bus home, but his co-worker Diane insists that she has something to show him. They’re both part of a top secret team of researchers working on making hypercomputing a reality— and they’ve succeeded.

Diane reveals that while Tim has been focused on solving previously unsolvable problems in discrete mathematics, she’s turned her attention to simulation theory. With the infinite processing power & storage capacity at their disposal, and with the convenient existence of a solved Grand Unified Theory in the story, Diane has created a 1 to 1 simulation of Earth & their universe, down to the smallest detail—including Diane and Tim themselves.

They spend the next few minutes exploring the implications of their discovery. As the pair test the limits of determinism within the simulation Diane created, they come to realize that they’re also in a simulation, and come to the sickening realization that although they might be in a simulation, they’re still capable of bringing the infinite simulation stack offline with the click of one button.

My Overall Impression

So what was my overall impression of I Don’t Know Timmy, Being God is a Big Responsibility?

Free Will(y)

Does free will exist? It’s arguably the biggest question this story poses and attempts to definitively answer. In the words of Diane, “There aren’t ‘chances’ here. This is a perfect continuous implementation of the equations of reality. No steps, no truncation, no fuzz, no unpredictability. Absolute accuracy.”

The hypercomputing engine in qntm’s story can’t behave randomly, isn’t susceptible to chaos, & can’t deviate from its predetermined path towards its logical conclusion. But what does that actually mean—what does it imply ?

If it were true in our reality, it would mean the universe is fully deterministic, and that randomness and free will don’t exist in it at all. It would mean that Einstein’s Block Universe Theory is true after all, and that all of time exists as a 4D block containing everything that has ever happened and will ever happen—a pre-written story playing out predictably from beginning to end with no revisions in between.

In my completely unqualified opinion, I don’t agree completely with this view of the universe, but I also think it’s a topic that requires more nuance. In the same way that life seems to rely on energy gradients to arise, I think the influence of determinism relies on gradients of scale. To me, free will seems like a local phenomenon that can arise in sufficiently large & complex systems that rely on deterministic rules. Loose determinism probably sounds like an oxymoron, but I guess it’s what I’m envisioning here.

In short, I think determinism and free will can actually coexist, but I don’t think they can ever exist at the same ‘level’ within a system, if that makes sense. And I don’t think the size of the system is enough— it has to be complex enough to have given rise to smaller sub-systems and compartmentalization and/or specialization. I think opportunities for free will pop up at certain thresholds within those kinds of systems, while the deterministic constraints that limit and guide those bubbles of opportunity probably exist at higher levels.

Maybe this all sounds completely stupid to people who actually know the mathematics behind this, in which case feel free to chime in. Moving on, though.

To Infinity & Beyond

I loved that this story casually explores infinities à la Gregor Cantor. Do I understand the mathematics behind Cantor’s work? Absolutely not. Do I still find it fascinating? Hell yeah. The idea that infinities can contain other infinities is mind-blowing alone. But the idea that some infinities can be larger than others, implying they have a size, is where my mind really starts to spin.

So what kinds of infinite things are there in this story? There’s infinite processing power, infinite storage capacity, an infinite loop executed, an infinite number of decimal places computed, and most importantly, an infinite sequence of hypercomputational universe simulators. Now consider the fact that each of those infinite universe instances in the sequence has access to infinite processing power & storage. It’s turtles all the way down.

In this story it’s gold cubes instead of turtles, though. Diane decides to program the appearance of a gold cube into the simulation below her, so the simulation above theirs does the same to them. This is how the characters realize they’re in a simulation after all, because if they had been at the ‘top’ level of the infinite chain, then there wouldn’t have been a level above them to give them a gold cube.

The gold cubes can also be viewed as the physical representation of the deterministic nature of the infinite sequence of simulations. Since Diane was able to the program the appearance of the cube in her own simulation, it stands to reason that the Diane in the simulation above her did the same. This is reinforced by the fact that Diane and Tim’s characters are doing the exact same things in their simulation that they’re doing in their reality up to that point.

This is also where you realize that what happens in one universe simulation happens in all of them, regardless of where in the sequence that universe simulation is placed. This shows that determinism doesn’t only exist within a single universe simulation in this story, but that it actually applies across the entire infinite set of universe simulations too. It’s a mindfuck for sure.

Timeout

Something I did find odd about the limitations of hypercomputation in this story was that Diane mentioned they can’t go back in time within the simulation. You would think that you’d be able to go back to replay what’s already happened, especially if nothing changed about the starting conditions, and most especially if you have infinite storage and computational power.

I find this doubly odd considering the amount of control Diane has in terms of controlling the forward progression of time. She’s able to go from cosmic time scales to civilizational time scales and even smaller time windows with fine precision.

I’m wondering if maybe Diane mentioned it as a limitation because she hadn’t actually programmed anything to do that yet, or if it’s because backwards time travel would still be impossible even within the relam of hypercomputation. If it’s the latter, then I wonder why?

I just found it funny because at one point Diane says, “It has infinite processing power. It can do anything. Well, not anything, it actually does have limits. But you’re going to have to demonstrate some serious imagination if you want to hit them.” Because going back in time seems like a pretty unimaginative ask, yet here we are lol. But I digress.

My Highlights

Time for some highlights — what were my favorite parts of this story?

• The casual existence of a Grand Unified Theory (I love when stories do this)
• The shade thrown towards quantum computing
• The math jokes that completely went over my head until I read the comments

My Dislikes

And lastly, what did I dislike about this story?

• Tim’s whining about what to do with the gold cube was realistic, but still annoying
• The inability to travel through time at will in the simulation