[ExI] Meat v. Machine

[Eugen Leitl]

On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 02:02:53AM -0400, Darren Greer wrote:

> John's first possibility. It seems crazy to think you may be at the top of
> the class, but so far, no-one is producing any superior report card.

A detector designed to detect its own presence will always detect
it's own presence, whether it's the only instance, or a near-infinite
numbers of them. There's no way to tell in which branch you are
as long as you only observer yourself (and other causally entangled
entities to the emergence event, this planet if full of them)

Which is why we cannot compute the probability for the emergence
of life as long as we don't have access to causally unentangled
data points.

Such could be potentially found in this solar system, but my
hunch we'll have to look beyond locations where matter transport
is sufficiently vigorous to allow crosscontamination.

We should know soon enough.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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