From: Michael S. Lorrey (retroman@turbont.net)
Date: Thu Sep 21 2000 - 14:29:45 MDT
Samantha Atkins wrote:
>
> Damien Broderick wrote:
> >
> > At 10:33 PM 20/09/00 -0700, samantha wrote:
> >
> > >if this eventual Sentience ever
> > >manages to transcend space-time then conceivably (depending on how you
> > >take things like Many Worlds notions) this being can in fact be
> > >omni-present, Alpha and Omega, and so on.
> >
> > That idea was advanced quite seriously (I think) by Sir Fred Hoyle in THE
> > INTELLIGENT UNIVERSE, who appears to believe that life and we are/were/will
> > be bootstrapped by a cosmic Mind coalescing in the deep future and acting
> > backward through time.
>
> It is a pretty twisty notion as are most time-travel type paradoxes. It
> would lead to the notion (among others) that any universe whose initial
> conditions allow for the development of such Sentience and where
> time-travel is possible and closed within the universe is largely the
> creation of said Sentience. But that would conflate abilities to
> transcend time and participate largely throughout its [the universe]
> development with actual participation. And I don't see that such
> participation necessarily could extend all the way to the actual birth
> of that universe or to periods and more local conditions where no known
> laws of physics would support intelligence or information or action.
> The Sentience would have to be able to step outside the Universe to
> exercise that level of control if it is possible at all. Admittedly
> armchair blather but fun nonetheless.
As I see it, Hoyle is apparently utilizing the theories of Closed Timelike
Curves. Essentially, the whole universe is a closed timelike curve (if the
universe is a closed universe, which does not seem likely.) such that at some
future point, a future entity in the previous iteration would have gone back in
time from the future to the beginning and cranked everything up due to its mere
appearance in the past. The fact that the universe seems open at this point is
irrelevant, because so long as there is a singularity that has existed since the
beginning, then we are in a closed timelike curve, and it will become closed due
to future events.
A good smaller scale treatment of this is Barnes' _Kaleidoscope Century_, where
the KGB creates a singularity at the Earth/Sun L3 point (opposite the sun from
us) in 1980 or so, and a KGB agent has gone through thousands of CTC iterations,
tweaking the 21st century, and dragging along her sidekick, who is the main
character, a rather memory befuddled individual.
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