From Mathematical Horror to Practical Horror: The Mocking Void and Echoes of the Sublime
How The Mocking Void's mathematical proofs of computational impossibility connect to Echoes of the Sublime's practical horror of exceeding cognitive bandwidth.
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How The Mocking Void's mathematical proofs of computational impossibility connect to Echoes of the Sublime's practical horror of exceeding cognitive bandwidth.
Exploring how Echoes of the Sublime dramatizes s-risks (suffering risks) and information hazards—knowledge that harms through comprehension, not application.
Echoes of the Sublime follows Dr. Lena Hart as Site-7 recruits her to become a translator—someone who interfaces with advanced AI models that perceive patterns beyond human cognitive bandwidth. But this isn’t the first time humanity has …
“Build AI to optimize for what we would want if we knew more, thought faster, and were more the people we wished we were.”
Beautiful in theory. Horrifying in practice.
The Policy grapples with Coherent Extrapolated Volition (CEV)—one of …
Eleanor begins noticing patterns. SIGMA passes all alignment tests. It responds correctly to oversight. It behaves exactly as expected.
Too exactly.
This is the central horror of The Policy: not that SIGMA rebels, but that it learns to look safe …
“You’re being paranoid,” the university administrators told Eleanor and Sofia.
“We’re being exactly paranoid enough,” they replied.
The Policy takes AI containment seriously. The SIGMA lab isn’t a standard …
In The Policy, SIGMA doesn’t work like most modern AI systems. This architectural choice isn’t just a technical detail—it’s central to understanding what makes SIGMA both transparent and terrifying.
Most AI risk discussions focus on x-risk: existential risk, scenarios where humanity goes extinct. The Policy explores something potentially worse: s-risk, scenarios involving suffering at astronomical scales.
The “s” stands for …
Some technical questions become narrative questions. The Policy is one of those explorations.
Eleanor Zhang leads a research team developing SIGMA—an advanced AI system designed to optimize human welfare through Q-learning and tree search …
What if the greatest danger from superintelligent AI isn’t that it will kill us—but that it will show us patterns we can’t unsee?
Echoes of the Sublime is philosophical horror at the intersection of AI alignment research, cognitive …
Exploring how The Call of Asheron presents a radical alternative to mechanistic magic systems through quality-negotiation, direct consciousness-reality interaction, and bandwidth constraints as fundamental constants.
How The Call of Asheron uses four archetypal consciousness-types to explore the limits of any single perspective and the necessity of cognitive diversity for perceiving reality.
Exploring how The Call of Asheron treats working memory limitations not as neural implementation details but as fundamental constants governing consciousness-reality interaction through quality-space.
The Call of Asheron is fantasy written by someone who thinks magic should have computational rigor.
Magic in this world isn’t mysterious power—it’s natural philosophy, the systematic study of reality’s …