From: Charles Hixson (charleshixsn@earthlink.net)
Date: Tue Aug 20 2002 - 12:30:40 MDT
Damien Broderick wrote:
>At 09:02 PM 8/18/02 -0700, Lee wrote:
>
>
>
>>I wasn't aware that it's generally accepted that only nothing
>>existed before 10^-43.
>>
>>
>
>No, but what was there prior to the start of force decoupling--and
>obviously 10^-43 seconds is just a somewhat handwaving label for this
>epoch)--was presumably a vastly compressed ball of indistinguishable Xons
>(to coin a term for the unified-force particles). I suspect this wouldn't
>give much traction for variation and selection.
>
>Damien Broderick
>
>
What is really accepted is that we don't know anything about anything that could operate in that kind of time interval. Indistinguisable Xons (a reasonable name) basically means that we couldn't distinguish them. But presumably there was a whole universe worth of energy to play with in there, so particles and effects that have no appearance today could have been common. We don't know.
I think your excerpt earlier about the fossilized angels was equally as plausible as assuming that everything was indistinguishable. There's no reason to believe that things worked that way, but is there any reason to believe that they didn't? I don't know of any.
Then there's the question of whether or not we are living in a simulation. Another intrinsically undecidable question, but which has echos here. If we were living in a simulation, then the boot process would provide a time zero ... but probably a dispersed time zero, with some effects being initialized slightly before others. (But how detailed would the simulation be, and how similar to the external reality? Video games tend to be quite different from the lives of the gamers.)
Still, assuming that everything that's appearantly real really is simulated, a cut-off time would limit the amount of detail that needed to be handled. It seems like a truly extravagant amount of detail to us, but we don't know the nature of the external (containing) reality. In this case, the Xons really would be undifferentiated, because they were a device to limit the amount of detail that needed simulating. (One may guess that a consistent physical model might be sufficiently easier to compute that it would justify not only simulating the rooms that the players were currently occupying. But if this isn't true, then we get back to the old problem of how long ago you were created. Can you prove that it wasn't two seconds ago? That would really limit the need for computational resources.)
Still, with all of these possibilities, the only really reasonable choice is to take the universe at face value, and assume that it's as real as it appears to be. If it's a game, then that's the point. If it isn't a simulation, then you'll be right. I suppose that there are some variations where this isn't the optimal choice, but I, personally, rate the one's I've thought of as low probability. In which case, the indistinguishable nature of the Xons can't be decided from what I know.
-- -- Charles Hixson Gnu software that is free, The best is yet to be.
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