RE: LANL Abstract: The Ultimate Fate of Life in an Accelerating Universe

From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Wed May 22 2002 - 05:07:50 MDT


Hal writes

> It would be as though you were granted a form of resurrection which
> consisted of reliving each day of your life in random order, without
> any awareness that you weren't living the day for the first time.
>
> If you think of the universe as a four-dimensional space-time
> structure, in a sense every moment that we live is embedded "forever"
> in the vast space-time block that is the universe and its history.
> Each moment existed/exists/will exist in a timeless sense. Being able
> to re-experience moments at random does not seem to me to represent a
> true expansion of life.

Of course, you realize that in this case this may not be the first time
around for you. Suppose that we prove the general ergodic theorem,
and that each point in phase space really is visited infinitely often.
I doubt if this would really affect what you or anyone else on this
list does very much. Life would be life, tragedies still tragedies,
and joys still joys.

My explanation (as you know, sorry) is that for the most part, value
is additive, and that objectively algorithms benefit twice as much
(those, that is that are capable of benefitting at all) from being
run twice as often.

Lee



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