From: hal@finney.org
Date: Fri Jun 11 1999 - 09:55:36 MDT
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, <sentience@pobox.com>, writes:
> I
> keep telling you guys, if even human intelligence can bump up the
> apparent limits of physics by a few orders of magnitude every couple of
> years, do you really think They are ever going to hit the ceiling? I
> don't think there *is* a ceiling.)
This is far from clear. You can argue that as our scientific knowledge
has increased, we have found more limits, rather than fewer. Who would
have suspected a speed of light limitation prior to this century?
Who would have suspected the uncertainty principle prior to this century?
Everyone seems to be ignoring Anders' post of a proof that wormholes can't
exist. The current state of play is that there ain't no such animals.
You can't use the discovery of the wormhole concept as evidence for
breaking through limitations, if wormholes are impossible.
All the universe guarantees us is that life and intelligence is possible.
That must be true or we would not be here. There are no guarantees
beyond that. The universe may be friendly or unfriendly, malleable or
difficult to manipulate. We only know what we have learned, and there
is no basis for guessing that future discoveries will fall into one
category or the other.
Hal
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