A while ago, I wrote about how I was considering killing myself. People responded to that post. I had started writing a response to their responses, answering the questions that were raised and all that... but I never finished writing that response. My reply was too long, and I didn't have the energy to write it all down. I probably still have that unfinished reply stored somewhere on this computer. I feel a bit guilty about having never posted my response, because it felt like I was just ignoring all the people who bothered to write to me.

To save my energy, rather than respond to every raised issue and question, I'll address the one that people were probably wondering about the most, which is why: why did I want to kill myself? The short answer is that I was scared. Terrified. But what was I scared of? This is the part, I think, which will take me a very long time to explain.

One of the (many) things I've learned from Yudkowsky, my intellectual idol, is that you don't have to write it all in one blog post. Yudkowsky can easily spend dozens of posts explaining just one concept, such as quantum physics, because it's a pre-requisite to understanding the concept of causality, which is itself a pre-requisite to understanding morality in a deterministic universe, which is itself a pre-requisite to understanding the development of friendly artificial intelligence.

The topic of my suicide and my fears is not nearly so complex, and so I hope to be able to do it in only a dozen (singular) posts, and hopefully cover it within a couple of months. My goal is to finish by Halloween. And so this is a new series of posts on the topic of fear and scary stuff.

There's this computer game called “FEAR”, released in 2005. You play the role of this military/SWAT type guy who's sent somewhere to kill some people. Sorry about the vagueness, but I really don't know much about the backstory. Anyway, so you and your partner go into this building, and your partner is telling you to follow him, and heads through this doorway. You follow him in, and you see him walking across the room towards the next doorway, and as he does so, he sort of just gracefully evaporates into soot. And then you're alone. In what presumably is a haunted building. And your partner just evaporated. I stopped playing a few seconds after that.

I usually don't like scary games (or scary movies for that matter), but I can usually deal with them. I can deal with games like Doom 3, Resident Evil, or movies like Aliens or whatever, because my mind still has predictive powers within the (fictional) universe being portrayed.

In Doom 3, you're a space marine who's sent to the moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos, because some scientists were playing around with portals, and it made evil creatures appear in our solar system. The game is intentionally vague on whether these creatures are demons from hell, or just evil aliens. When your allies die, it's because they get impaled by a steel bar, or a monster bites their head off, or they are launched out of an airlock into space. Stuff like that. You have a gun, and when you pull the trigger, the gun fires. You have a flashlight, but in this fictional universe, you can't use your flashlight at the same time as your gun, so you can either see the enemies coming, or shoot blindly into the darkness, but you can't simultaneous see the enemy and shoot them. So it's a bit scary, Doom 3, but I understand the laws of this universe, and I can make plans. I can walk from one room to another. I can try to open doors. I can pull triggers and expect my gun to shoot.

In Resident Evil, you're a special agent of some sort, and there are zombie-like monsters around. You got a gun and limited ammo. When you find ammo, you can pick it up, and you can put it in your gun. You have a knife. Sometimes, there are zombie-dogs, and they'll run towards you and try to bite you. Again, I understand the laws of this universe, and I can make plans.

In the movie Aliens, there are these aliens which can crawl on walls and bite you. When you shoot them, they bleed acid, which can hurt you. The aliens are also pretty smart. You got guns and motion sensors, but the motion sensors are semi-useless, because they detect anything moving at all, such as the moving parts of the space ship you're on. Once again, I understand the laws of this universe, and thus my mind is able to model it and make predictions about what the outcome of certain actions are, and thus make plans.

There's this other game called Eternal Darkness, and that one was much more difficult for me to handle. In this game, you frequently have hallucinations. In other words, the game shows you things which aren't actually real nor happening. As you walk around in the old mansion your grandfather was mysteriously murdered in, you may see the walls themselves bleeding. You will hear footsteps as if someone were following you. The marble bust/statue thing will turn its head to look at you as you walk by. When you walk into the bathroom, you see your own corpse in the bathtub, which itself is filled and overflowing with blood.

My mind cannot construct and effective predictive model of this world. I did not foresee the possibility of my walking into a room and seeing my own corpse there. And there were no other clues elsewhere in this fictional universe (that I could see) that would have allowed me to foresee that. But this game wasn't so bad, because of all these unpredictable events were merely aesthetics. The bust would not leap out and bite you. Your corpse would not rise out of the bathtub and try to drown you. These hallucinations could spook you, but they could not hurt you. You were not in any danger from them. (The danger in the game came from the zombie-like monsters walking around the mansion). So Eternal Darkness was a lot scarier than Doom 3 or Resident Evil or Aliens, but again, I could handle it.

FEAR, however... My partner just evaporated. I couldn't handle that. This is something which I could not predict, and which was directly harming me. I have no idea what happened to that guy. Is he dead? Will I just see him in the next room? If I do see him in the next room, is it really him, or some sort of impostor? Have we split into parallel universes with him witnessing me evaporate too?

In a universe where my mind cannot construct a predictive model of that universe, I can no longer make plans. I cannot decide what the next course of action should be, because I cannot predict the outcome of those actions. Perhaps if I take another step forward, I too will evaporate into soot. If I pull the trigger on my gun, perhaps it (the gun) will come alive and bite my arm off. If I decide to just stand still in this room, perhaps the flesh on my arms will come alive, peel itself from my bones, twist itself into a sharp blade and stab me in the eye. Perhaps my heart will come alive and decide to rip my lungs apart. Perhaps the air itself will come alive and strangle me. Perhaps the biology of my body will change such that I find oxygen to be poisonous. Perhaps just thinking about all these possibilities will cause the blood around my brain to boil, my skull to split open, and for me to crumble to my knees in excruciating pain. How can I know whether any of these things will or will not happen?

I “know” that none of these things could happen in real life, which is why I'm not in some catatonic state of pure terror. I “know” that none of these things could happen in the universe of Doom 3, Resident Evil or Aliens, which is why those games and movies are not so scary. (More accurately, I'm not 100% certain that the above are impossible, both in reality and in those games, but their probability seems to be so low as to be negligible and not worth considering). In Eternal Darkness, because of the hallucinations, I can see that the creator of this universe actually has a sick enough mind to consider these ideas, but this creator seems to have constructed the laws of the universe in such a way so that if any of those things happen, they would merely be hallucinations and thus would not actually damage me in any way (other than to scare me). So I'm “strongly skeptical” that my skin would try to kill me, but not as skeptical as I would be in real life.

In FEAR, I had no such reassurance. Anything could happen at all. I hit the escape key to bring up the main menu, and chose to quit the game. If they were cruel, they could have programmed it so that the game would not allow me to quit, thus forcing me to pull the plug on my computer. If they were really cruel, they could have modified the OS such that as soon as the computer is turned back on, it immediately boots back into the game. If they were really, really cruel, they could have taken a screen shot of my desktop, and then when I chose to quit, present this screen shot, so that I am under the illusion that I have quit the game, only to shatter this illusion by having some scary happen at my desktop.

FEAR was a scary game, but I was not driven to suicide from playing it, because there existed “meta-actions”, actions which existed outside of the game, for which I had predictive possibilities. I could predict that when I went to the main menu, the game would pause. I could predict that if I selected “quit” from the main menu, the game would quit. I could predict that if uninstalled the game, I would never need to see it again.

One of the reasons I was immediately driven to quit FEAR was that I saw an event which clearly showed me that my mind had zero predictive powers within that universe. Another reason is the meta-knowledge that FEAR is a “scary game”, and so there would be more, similar, events if I decided to keep playing.

When I started quitting life itself, it was because I had seen an event which showed me that my mind may have zero predictive powers in real life. The reason I did not immediately quit, choosing instead to ponder as to whether or not I should kill myself over a couple of months, is because I did not have the meta-knowledge that life was a “scary game”. I was not sure whether I would see more terrifying events like that first one I saw, or whether it was an abnormality. It took me months of non-events, of boring, plain old normal life, to allow me to convince myself that it was an abnormality and that I should not kill myself (at least not yet).