From: Damien Broderick (damien@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sun Aug 17 1997 - 19:59:57 MDT
At 08:06 PM 8/16/97 -0400, Steve Witham wrote:
>Then there's the opportunity of "mutual information". Not only do
>different people keep literal copies of the same things, but different
>chunks of information can be similar in the sense that you can save space
>by compressing the combination rather than compressing each separately.
>This means that the storage services could save space by only storing
>once what more than one person wants stored.
Precisely - and we have a word for this species of solution. It's
`culture' - all those extro-bytes. Admittedly, current rudimentary means
of implementing it tend to involve a deplorable amount of redundancy
anyway. I had this method in mind when I suggested (in my 1980 novel THE
DREAMING DRAGONS) that humans and their intelligent saurian
parallel/predecessors are ceaselessly archived in compressed and shared
form inside what amounts to a single neutronium crystal - it's buried under
Ayers Rock, if you'd like to look for it - so that yes, Virginia, there
*is* a collective unconscious. :)
Damien Broderick
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 14:44:44 MST