Here’s another idea I just came up with, that doesn’t harness dark energy
itself so much as the Hawking radiation of the de Sitter horizon.
A civilization could build a sphere around a cold black hole (I.e., a rotating
or charged black hole whose Hawking temperature is lower than that of the
Uh oh, looks like the “giant atom” idea might not work either. I had been under
the assumption that dark energy would cause two orbiting bodies to spiral
apart. But on second thought, it seems like what would actually happen is that
an orbit affected by dark energy would still be stable, it
Actually now that I’m thinking about the spring idea some more, it seems like
you might be right about it not working. Dark energy will change the shape of
the potential energy/displacement curve for sure, making the spring strongly
anharmonic. However it doesn’t look like it will result in
> That would indeed be like a giant atom, so we would have to have a quantum
> theory of gravity to know if that would work, and we don't have such a
> theory. Quantum theory tells us those orbiting changes could not be in just
> any old orbit but can only be in discrete quantized orbits, and
I saw a discussion on Physics Forums about an idea similar to yours (involving
spools of string steadily unrolling due to dark energy. One poster asked what
would happen once the string ran out, the other person said you could just
create more length of string with the energy you generated.
probably qualify as Type IV.
With infinite energy it’d be possible to do an endless variety of things: run a
universal dovetailer, or resurrect the dead (simply by resurrecting every
person who COULD have ever existed, a set that obviously includes every person
who DID actually exist), etc.
-Mason
Solomonoff’s method of induction seems like a good fit for a mechanist view of
things. For instance, it could be used to assign a relative probability to the
universe being generated by a universal dovetailer: 2^(-K) * m, where K is the
Kolmogorov complexity of the universal dovetailer and m is
David Deutsch suggested something like this I (that individual universes are
discrete, but the multiverse as a whole is continuous).
“within each universe all observable quantities are discrete, but the
multiverse as a whole is a continuum. When the equations of quantum theory
describe a
So I thought of an interesting problem in decision theory and/or ethics. Maybe
someone’s thought along these lines before, but if so I haven’t encountered it.
Suppose you have to make a decision between two options, A and B. Your credence
that option A is the more ethical one is 60%, and your
Hi, I’m wondering if any of you have read this paper and if so, what do you
think about it. The author says he’s discovered a new kind of mathematics that
could give rise to machine consciousness. A few other publications picked it up
but it got surprisingly little fanfare, for such a bold
Leonard Susskind thinks there may be a link between the size of a black hole’s
interior (which grows with time) and its computational complexity (which does
likewise).
At the end of the article there’s even a suggestion that the expansion of the
universe might likewise have a computational
To go into further detail, creatures who perceived time that way would not be
able to maintain a sense of personal continuity or selfhood for very long,
since they have many future “selves” and past “selves”. So instead, they prefer
to think of their future and past “selves” as other people
Ah, yes, multiple histories. Given only what we know now about the universe
(and not what we “remember from before”, since our memories are actually just
patterns encoded in our brain at the present moment), what’s to stop us from
thinking that entropy was higher in the past and things just
Here’s a recent editorial I found in the magazine arguing against Many-Worlds
on the grounds that it denies the reality of experience or the self.
(https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-the-many-worlds-interpretation-of-quantum-mechanics-has-many-problems-20181018/)
Well, if we don’t want
There’s a new article in Quanta Magazine
(https://www.quantamagazine.org/frauchiger-renner-paradox-clarifies-where-our-views-of-reality-go-wrong-20181203/)
about a thought experiment that poses trouble for certain interpretations of
quantum mechanics.
Specifically it implies that either 1.
Hi everyone,
I found an interesting blog post that attempts to refute the Doomsday Argument.
It suggests that different worlds ought to be weighted by the number of people
in them, so that you should be more likely to find yourself in a world where
there will be many humans, as opposed to just
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