From: Amara Graps (amara@amara.com)
Date: Sun Sep 17 2000 - 10:46:45 MDT
From: Barbara Lamar <shabrika@juno.com>,
>Psychological questions: Assuming that the the re-assembly instructions
>include preserving the memories of the original entity, what would it be
>like to regain consciousness within a body completely different from the
>original one?
This happens several times to the main character in Charles Sheffield's
_Tomrrow and Tomorrow_. Nice story. He also has a 30 pg appendix describing
(accurately! yahoo!) the physics behind the story.
I found the most intriguing part of the story to be when the main character
sends out about a million copies of himself to perform a large task. After
his copies succeeded, and each had a million experiences different from each
other, the main character assimilated those million copies-with-new-experiences
back into himself. The description of the process of reintegrating
"himselves" was fascinating. The end result was truly a god-like creature.
>If your goal is to exist in a distant place as some form of living
>consciousness not necessarily the same as your original form, there may
>be some inspiration at the UT Austin website for the Center for Nonlinear
>Dynamics at http://chaos.ph.utexas.edu/ , in particular their pages on
>Biologically Inspired Physics, neural networks, and pattern formation (I
>find the pattern formation stuff espeically interesting)--includes pics
>from *Nature* article on self-replicating chemical spots.
I didn't look at your utexas URL yet, but I'll guess that it's closely
tied to Ilya Progogine's work. Prigogine works for 2 months out of every
year at UT, and his group's interests are far more diverse than those in
the Santa Fe Institute. Prigogine's work focuses on nonlinear
dynamics but they study: ants, chemical reactions, economics,
statistical mechanics, thermodynamics, quantum dynamics, etc.
Prigogine discovered the chemical Belousov-Zhabotininskii reaction,
which is the oxidation of citric acid by potassium bromate catalyzed by the
ceric-cerous ion couple. It's a kind of chemical clock. He won a Nobel
Prize some years ago for his work. Progogine's book: _From Being to
Becoming_ should give some background information of some of his
group's research.
Amara
*****************************************************************
Amara Graps | Max-Planck-Institut fuer Kernphysik
Interplanetary Dust Group | Saupfercheckweg 1
+49-6221-516-543 | 69117 Heidelberg, GERMANY
Amara.Graps@mpi-hd.mpg.de * http://galileo.mpi-hd.mpg.de/~graps
*****************************************************************
"Never fight an inanimate object." - P. J. O'Rourke
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