From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sat Jun 01 2002 - 19:48:18 MDT
Phil writes
> I have often wondered how it is that people get so
> upset over some catastrophe today - like the 25% rate
> of AIDS infection in Zimbabwe - but not if it happened
> ten years or a hundred years ago. Like 9/11 vs. the
> destruction of the great library of Alexandria.
Speculation: our feelings are not divorced from
our motives and hence from our capacity to deal
with some problem. So we are wired to react to
9/11 using the full computing power of our brains,
which involves our emotions. Moreover, how we react
to some present day situation can enormously affect
our future (hence entire) well being. (In other
words, we wish to minimize the recurrence of the
incident).
> If
> you could choose to prevent one or the other, which
> one would you choose? 9/11 has certainly had an
> impact, mostly negative, on the vast majority of us
> who were not actual direct victims, but if you take
> the Singularity - the desirability of getting there -
> as your measure, then 9/11 may have cost us a few days
> extra passage time, while Alexandria likely cost us
> many years, very possibly many centuries, considering
> its impact on the Dark Ages, etc.
I agree with you that if it had to be my decision
and I had to weigh betraying classical civilization
and its children on the one hand, or betraying 3000
people on the other, I'd be strongly tempted to
follow your lead.
>> Don't you [Dr. S.] find a logical conflict between your
>> approval of certain physical events, e.g. run time for
>> Rafal S., taking place at one spacetime location, and
>> your nonchalance whether or not they take place at
>> another? It boils down to physics, after all. How do
>> you resolve that?"
The lesson that I learn from your post is that the latter
thought-experiment has some similarities to your former
9/11 vs. Alexandria one. Evolution has rightly programmed
us to worry more about what we can affect than that which
we cannot.
> Ah, now we are getting into some interesting areas.
> Perhaps someone will resolve this and explain "times
> arrow"???
I read Huw Price's great book "Time's Arrow", and got
somewhat clearer about all that, but can't claim to
really have a handle on it. Into your question I read
a concern we might have for our future lives at the
time of the big crunch. Suppose (as Price and many
others do) that the big crunch happens only after an
unbelievably long time, a time so long that a Boltzmann
fluctuation occurs, and we all live our lives backwards.
On the one hand, we're still literally programmed to
"anticipate" the future, fluctuation or no, but on the
other hand must rationally understand that its total
symmetry with this right now makes all such discussion
moot.
Lee
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