From: Spudboy100@aol.com
Date: Thu Aug 31 2000 - 13:18:42 MDT
First of all my response here is a 'quick take', rather then an astute
analysis of your hypothesis. My first observation inspires me to remember
Eugene Wigner's lecture in 1961 regarding the Extrodinary Accuracy of
Mathematics. (I am para-phrasing!)
You approach seems to be along the lines of theorists such as Max Tegmark,
James Higo, Jacque Mallah, and others on Wei Dai's Everything list. Nick
Bostrom has his version of your hypothesis (he did it for a Phd. thesis at
Oxford just this year) These theories have several flavors, and for the most
part I have considerable trouble understanding them, conceptually, so bear
with me.
Observer -oriented theories are the hot properties nowadays, simply because
they simply a lot of physics, however-falsifiabliity, is one of their
weaknesses. Both Stapp and in his own fashion Moravec seem to see
counsciousness, from a purely physical point of view as being akin to an
electron collapsing to a ground state.
Quantum mysticism asside, theories such as these are useful, primarilly, in
the long term and answering some of the Big Questions. Accelerating the
quality of life and the length of existence itself , might be a different
genre' altogether. Why? Because people looking at the ultimate state of the
universe, the restoration of life, may disdain such projects as cryogenics
and uploading. (the parting on the left is now parting on the right?) I for
one am a big, fat, pragamtist, who says freeze, cure, upload, whatever we
have to do to save lives and make it better for all.
My final concern, and maybe this is one you ought not to try to answer is;
what do you see as the physical mechanism for mind and its post-mortem
preservation? Will we have to bulid hyper-netowrks capable of soul-cathching,
or is there a physical process already in place, existing in the universe,
and what might that be? Possible joke responses (I can hear them already)
1.DVD 2. 8-Track 3. 1600 BPI analog
-Mitch
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