The Indeterminism Game

You have been invited to an absolutely awesome party. Everyone you like and everyone you want to meet will be there. And there will be homemade cake and gourmet ice cream. You accept the invitation and your host teleports you to his anteroom. And then you find out that, as well as a party room, his open-plan house also contains several unusual rooms. These rooms are:

Anti-Sky Room. Looking into this room, you can see the sky . . . below you. If you step into this room you will fall up. No-one who has ever entered this room has ever come back.

Room of Annoying Relatives. You're not sure how you're related to these people, but you are sure you want to avoid them. You think you will be literally bored to death if you have to talk to any of them. There are several people in the room who look dead already. If you were in this room, you would envy the dead.

Low-density Custard Room. This custard is light and creamy, so swimming is impossible. It's several dozen feet deep and has smooth, slippery carmel walls, so if you go in here, you won't survive.

Room of Of Carelessly Stored Sharp and Pointy Objects. Someone has put a lot of sharp things, pointy things, and sharp pointy things in this room, and they weren't careful when they did it. Everything in this room looks extremely dangerous, and there doesn't seem to be any way of entering this room without very serious injury.

The Fiery Pit of Hell. The sign says "Satan is out" but, given the evil-looking appearance of the room, and the devils and demons dancing around, and evily creeping along, and sitting sinisterly in corners, and drinking Darjeeling tea with milk and a little sugar in a menacing fashion, you are not reassured.

The Hamster Pits. The entire house is surrounded by pits containing hordes of ravenously hungry carnivorous hamsters on meth. While you're watching, a school of fierce and deadly air-piranhas wanders into one of the pits and is instantly consumed in millions of little tiny bites. It's horrible. The deadly airborne Amazonian predators never stood a chance.

The other rooms, the anteroom, the hallway, the parlour, the study, the conservatory, the veranda and the Awesome Party room are all perfectly safe, and the teleporter in the Awesome Party room will get you home safely when you decide to leave. If you can get from the anteroom by moving progressively from one safe room to another, you will be safe and will soon have a very good time.

Now, there's a catch. The house is enveloped in a "determinizing field" that conditions your brain to be entirely deterministic as long as you're exposed to the field. As long as you're inside this field, all your feelings, thoughts, desires, decisions and actions will be entirely determined by the immediately preceding state of your brain and everything that affects your brain immediately before that feeling, thought, desire, decision or action occurs. However, if you don't like having a deterministic brain, and don't like having your acts determined by your present state, each green room has a de-determinizer that forces your decision-making and acting processes to be not deterministic for your next action. This device does not just temporarily suspend operation of the determinizing field, it actually makes it impossible for your brain to be deterministic for that next action. If you think that determinism makes free will impossible, you will definitely want to use the de-determinizer. If you don't think determinism interferes with free will, you can ignore the de-determinizer and use the deterministic controls to try to move to the next room.

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Copyright © 2011 by Martin C. Young


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