From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sun Jan 03 1999 - 00:00:36 MST
Hal Finney wrote:
>
> This would seem to indicate that the early universe, despite being
> exceedingly hot and dense by our standards, was not a good environment
> for evolution.
> Without energy differences there is no way for life to exist.
I don't believe this is true. Our kind of life requires energy
differences, yes. But the laws of thermodynamics aren't really laws;
they're statistical guidelines. There is no physical reason why you
can't take tap water and produce electricity and ice cubes; it's just
very very improbable. The laws of physics are time-symmetrical (except
for state-vector reduction); if the atoms are in the right places with
the right velocities, a glass of water can leap from the floor and unshatter.
Energy differentials are a human convention for encoding computations
into large ordered groups of particles. But I am ignorant of a reason
why computations can't be encoded into single particles bouncing around
in a system of uniform temperature. The thermodynamic (as opposed to
statistical) definition of entropy is not "complete disorder"; it means
"not 'ordered' in the sense of 'having different average temperatures in
different places'". In fact, information is directly proportional to
entropy. The more information it takes to encode a system, the more
mathematically random ("normal") that system is, the more entropy that
system has. Ergo, maximally efficient information-processing takes
place at uniform temperature.
The question we have to ask is not, "Are there visible computations?",
but "Are there computations?" How much computing power would it take to
accurately and precisely simulate the Big Bang? If the answer is
"infinity", then any computation which has a finite chance of taking
place ought to occur. Actually, there are some caveats to that, since
there has to be an infinite number of interactions between particles;
moreover, there has to be an infinitely long linear sequence of
interactions, with each interaction affecting the next interaction.
Anyway, the question isn't whether there are macroscopic computations
(of the sort we're used to) taking place, but whether arbitrary
computations can be encoded in the physical process of the Big Bang.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/AI_design.temp.html
http://pobox.com/~sentience/sing_analysis.html
Disclaimer: Unless otherwise specified, I'm not telling you
everything I think I know.
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