[ExI] How to survive forever

[Anders Sandberg]

On 16/06/2012 19:09, Natasha Vita-More wrote:
> Lloyd's  "[m]erely by existing, all physical systems register information"
> links to Lynn Margulis understanding of living matter and also to
> cybernetics.

It is part of the big stream of ideas in 20th-21st science based on 
seeing information as fundamental.

>    Re information theory: does the physical capacity of the
> universe reduce/shrink the more we know about it?
>

No, not that I know. Knowing about a system is a kind of physical power: 
one can demonstrate that knowing information about the state of a system 
allows you to temporarily break the laws of thermodynamics for it: each 
bit is like a ticket for one small operation that can reverse entropy - 
but the price is that you spend your bits.

Understanding in the sense of knowing physical laws doesn't have this 
effect, but it allows us to coax the world into unusual states that are 
useful to us. In a sense our knowledge adds new options to the universe: 
thanks to it there are now Bose-Einstein condensates, brainbow mice and 
computers.


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