RE: Extra Terrestrials
James Higgo wrote: ... All that exists of 'you' is this very current thought. Whle 'the measure of some objective George Levy' is meaningless, 'the measure of this thought' is a vaild concept; I'm not sure what you can do to increase or decrease that. An interesting area is the categorisation of, then distribution of classes of, thoughts. I agree completely. With the hypothesis that we are emulable by digital machine (COMP) it is possible to say more, though. Indeed, you can attach 'this thought' to (an equivalence class) of relative computationnal states (see http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal). Survival to Quantum Suicide is then a particular case of survival COMP suicide (and as I explain before physics became a branch of psychology/computer science). Bruno
RE: Extra Terrestrials
Doesn't your very current thought refer to your posting of 14 Aug in which you said you don't believe in time? Don't such references between existing thoughts partially order them? Do you 'believe in' this order - in your very current thought? Please excuse any reference to your 'past' which I may have fanatsized :-) Brent Meeker On Mon, 14 Aug 2000, Higgo James wrote: My approach may be barren, but yours is yelding imaginary, but rewarding, diversity of phantasms. 'death' is an event in time. So you have to believe in time to believe in death. I don't. All that exists of 'you' is this very current thought. Whle 'the measure of some objective George Levy' is meaningless, 'the measure of this thought' is a vaild concept; I'm not sure what you can do to increase or decrease that. An interesting area is the categorisation of, then distribution of classes of, thoughts. James -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Sunday, 13 August, 2000 4:35 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject:Re: Extra Terrestrials In a message dated 08/08/2000 2:36:59 AM Pacific Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: There is no objective relationship between 'your present observer moment' and any other, let alone 'us' and 'our descendants'. James James, you may be fundamentally right, but such relationships are emergent properties which we perceive and give meaning to our lives. In fact it is likely that our whole world is emergent from the plenitude which is itself void of information because it precisely has all potentialites. So our world does have information and meaning while the plenitude has exactly zero. Your approach is as barren as the plenitude. If we were to take it as a basis for discussion we wouldn't get very far. A very important question is whether measure decreases or remains constant upon death. How would you solve this problem? George Levy
Re: Extra Terrestrials
In a message dated 08/12/2000 11:12:43 PM Pacific Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: I guess I still don't see a problem here - unless it is the peculiarity that ' his universe' is defined retrospectively from his death. I don't see that the large number of other branches which have split from 'his universe' have any bearing on anything. OK. You are in good company here. I guess you share Jacques Mallah's opinion. Also, I see no reason to believe there are infinitely many - though of course the number must be extremely large. If one postulates a computational model of the multiverse, as is often done these discussions, then the fact that only countably many numbers are computable would seem to imply only a finite number of branches within a finite time. The plenitude is a philosophical concept that seems to find an echo in physics, (and in Murphy's law :-)) Any assumption about the plenitude would decrease its size and introduce information. Any assumption could also be matched with the opposite assumption. Since the plenitude is all that is possible, assuming that it could be modeled by a discrete machine could be countered that this is only part of it and that the other part would have to be continuous, even at the infinitesimal level. Hence the plenitude is infinite in every respect. The branching is infinite. So while our world seems to be discrete, (Quantum Theory - in fact discreteness may be an essential requirement for the evolution of consciousness), the variations ACROSS worlds does not seem to be similarly constrained. George Levy
Re: Extra Terrestrials
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I just want to be more explicit in my characterization of the guardian angels, the fatalisitic slobs and the narcissistic gods. George, I don't know how you justify dividing the ETs into such neat categories, based on the MWI and the feasability of QS. That is not clear to me at all from your posts so far. Why couldn't an ET who understands MWI and QS (and, assuming that QS *is* feasable) still behave like one of the ones that SETI is searching for? I.e. broadcast their presence and interact with other civilizations? -- Chris Maloney http://www.chrismaloney.com Let us recommend ourselves to Providence. -- Candide (Voltaire)
