From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@www.aeiveos.com)
Date: Wed Oct 20 1999 - 13:23:35 MDT
On 20 Oct 1999, Anders Sandberg wrote:
> hal@finney.org writes:
>
> > Frank Tipler and David Deutsch both take an aggressive and (to me)
> > puzzling approach to these issues. They claim on philosophical grounds
> > that the universe MUST be such that life can exist (and grow) forever.
> [snip]
>
> I find their approach puzzling, essentially they are putting the horse
> behind the cart. It is almost like one of those medieval proofs of
> God's existence.
Well, if you go back through Dyson's arguments about how "rigged"
some of the physical constants are it is easy to see how Tipler
would start thinking to make the evolution of the fit a non-random
design. It would be very interesting to explore the range of
values for these variables and determine the relative probability
for universes that are essentially similar to ours but have "slightly"
variant properties to determine if ours is "optimal" among the
variants.
I find it just too convenient that big stars like to spit out
lots of carbon and carbon just "happens" to be both good for
building wet nanotech *and* dry nanotech. Why isn't the
hardest material "boron" or something that is *really* scarce?
One could argue that common universes could be structured
to allow the evolution of wet nanotech but dry nanotech
would be very resource limited! Instead we have a playing
field that seems optimal for both random and directed
evolution of complexity.
Robert
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