[ExI] Intelligence inside a black hole

Anders Sandberg anders at aleph.se
Sun Jun 17 00:37:46 UTC 2012


On 16/06/2012 17:58, Kelly Anderson wrote:
> I recently learned that if the rotational energy of a black hole is
> large enough, that the center of the black hole isn't a point, but
> rather a doughnut shaped spinning mass of extremely densely packed
> neutrons (and I suppose other matter). I wonder if it is theoretically
> possible to configure such matter into computronium of some sort.

You are thinking of the extremal Kerr solution to the GR equations. It 
doesn't describe a doughnut of matter, but a naked singularity. Nearby 
matter would still be sucked in and flung around, eventually sucked up 
by the singularity. However, there is no event horizon, so if there were 
some super-dense stable matter state it might actually resist collapse. 
Unfortunately there is nothing I know of in the standard model that 
could do this, and there are issues of the stability of the singularity too.


>   The
> advantage of such an environment would be that since the speed of
> light limits computational speed in normal matter, with the smaller
> spaces between elements inside a black hole, the computation could
> theoretically be billions of times faster.

There is gravitational time dilation. Even fast operations are going to 
produce slow messages to the outside.


The real thing to try if you have a Kerr hole like this is to use closed 
timelike curves to send information to the past, and hence use acausal 
computation. That will likely beat most forms of computronium, since you 
can do hypercomputation.

-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University




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