From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Tue May 21 2002 - 17:37:45 MDT
Robert Bradbury writes:
> I can live without infinite memory. The lack of CPU cycles is
> an entirely different matter however.
It's not clear that you can "really" live without infinite memory.
(To clarify, "memory" here does not mean memories of the past, but rather
hardware that can take on various states, like computer memory chips.)
With finite memory you will eventually go into a Poincare recursion;
in prosaic terms, an infinite loop. Are you really alive if you are
repeating the same thoughts over and over, unto infinity? What is the
difference between living your life once and living it an infinite number
of times? You can't tell any difference.
There is a variant of the Big Bang theory that says that the Big Bang
repeats endlessly. In some of these, the universe is exactly the same
every time. So we would live our lives over and over again, each time
the universe repeats. This would not be a source of comfort for me.
For life truly to exist forever, it must be possible to explore an
infinite number of states. And unfortunately, that requires infinite
memory.
Hal
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:14:15 MST