From: Eric Watt Forste (arkuat@pobox.com)
Date: Thu Sep 04 1997 - 18:17:38 MDT
Hal Finney writes:
> From that perspective, the loss of Alexandria or the loss of the United
> States would both be no more important in practice than the loss of
> structure when a bird plucks a worm from your lawn.
Yes, but we are not yet in that perspective. We can imagine
being in that place, but we are not physically there.
Also, there is plenty of information about my history that is unknown
to me, and the value (to me) of which is unknown. My past light cone
includes the whole planet's history, so any information from that
part of my past light cone is potentially valuable to me. *That*
information, once lost, cannot be reconstructed in any reasonable
amount of time or with any reasonable expenditure of resources; even
if it could be reconstructed, the search costs of extracting that
little needle of ER from the haystack of cosmic computational goo
would be very high. The importance of information is not that
it exists off somewhere... the importance of it is whether I
can get it into my head and use it.
Gaia is something in which I am embedded, whether I like it or not,
and as yet I have no guarantee of escape. As long as this is the
case, I shy away from the the perspective that views Gaia as a worm,
and I feel no need to apologize for doing so.
-- Eric Watt Forste ++ arkuat@pigdog.org ++ expectation foils perception -pcd
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