From: Hal Finney (hal@rain.org)
Date: Thu Sep 04 1997 - 22:11:20 MDT
Eric Watt Forste writes:
> Also, there is plenty of information about my history that is unknown
> to me, and the value (to me) of which is unknown. My past light cone
> includes the whole planet's history, so any information from that
> part of my past light cone is potentially valuable to me. *That*
> information, once lost, cannot be reconstructed in any reasonable
> amount of time or with any reasonable expenditure of resources; even
> if it could be reconstructed, the search costs of extracting that
> little needle of ER from the haystack of cosmic computational goo
> would be very high. The importance of information is not that
> it exists off somewhere... the importance of it is whether I
> can get it into my head and use it.
The question remains, is this kind of information really likely to
be important? I can't imagine a plausible situation in which an entity
with the kinds of powers that nanotech confers is going to find itself
needing access to information from its biological past. This may be
a failure of imagination on my part though. What kinds of things could
you see happening where it would need this information?
Hal
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