From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sat Aug 18 2001 - 20:06:51 MDT
At 09:47 AM 8/18/01 -0700, Lee wrote:
>... "If the
>Moon were made of computronium... [it might wake up just] due to
>self-organization of any noise in the circuitry" is a very strong
>statement of the thesis that intelligent activity is an attractor.
>Stephen J. Gould is the great opponent of such contentions, practically
>saying that progress is impossible, while Kauffman (and others, like
>you) conten[d] that it's practically inevitable. Isn't the same reasoning
>that you are employing here also going to imply that galaxies wake up
>sooner or later too?
It does imply (as I argued in `The Very Fast Evolution Machine') that maybe
the entire condensed cosmos near the Big Bang woke up very, very quickly.
The question is how usefully sub-partitioned its Ur-state was and remained,
and whether the requisite state stability could have persisted long enough
in all that shrieking heat and shock to build a self-bootstrapping god thing.
Damien Broderick
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