[ExI] [Extropolis] Irrational mechanics, draft Ch. 6. Creative evolution toward quality. Also, the 2nd test flight of Starship and the OpenAI drama.

[Giulio Prisco]

<John: paradoxes would be produced unless there was some sort of strict
censorship regarding the type of information that we are and not allowed to
transmit into the past.>

Some scientists e.g. Novikov and Forward think that things always work out
self-consistently. This is suggested by the example of billiard balls that
loop in time through wormholes, worked out by Thorne et. al. No censorship
is imposed, but the solutions are always self-consistent.

I prefer to think that the universe tries to keep everything
self-consistent in a given timeline, but introduces another timeline when
self-consistency is impossible in the original timeline.

<And it seems to me a vast, perhaps infinite, intellect (a.k.a. God) would
be required to figure out what information was safe to transport into the
past so as to avoid all paradoxes>

You don't have to call this entity God if you don't want to. You can call
it the cosmic operating system, or just the universe like more and more
people do.

On Sat, Dec 2, 2023 at 3:29 PM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Dec 2, 2023 at 3:28 AM 'Giulio Prisco' via extropolis <
> extropolis at googlegroups.com> wrote:
>
> *> "My whole point is that we are determined by the global whole of which
>> we are an irreducible part, but not by the *external* environment (the rest
>> of the world without us).**This sounds seriously retrocausal"*
>>
>
> Me plus the rest of the world is the entire world, and I find it as
> difficult to believe in retrocausality as others have in Many Worlds,
> especially when it's not needed and other explanations for the weird
> quantum realm exist.
>
> It's hard to believe that if I study hard enough now I can improve the D I
> got in a history exam when I was in the fourth grade. It's true that if you
> don't take quantum mechanics into account General Relativity allows for the
> existence of a closed timelike curve, but when you add in quantum mechanics
> such a time tunnel would **probably** collapse before it could be used.
> We can't be absolutely certain it's impossible until we have a better
> understanding of how gravity works at the quantum level, but I have a very
> strong hunch it's impossible because otherwise paradoxes would be produced
> unless there was some sort of strict censorship regarding the type of
> information that we are and  not allowed to transmit into the past. And it
> seems to me a vast, perhaps infinite, intellect (a.k.a. God) would be
> required to figure out what information was safe to transport into the past
> so as to avoid all paradoxes and what information is unsafe so that only
> information that was absolutely useless because it couldn't change anything
> would be allowed to be transmitted into the past. But it's not a good
> idea to conjure up God in scientific theories.
>
>
>> >  * "I guess it is better to avoid speaking of causality (which is not
>> a condition for science, as Bertrand Russell was one of the first to
>> realize)"*
>
>
> Yes, there is no law of logic that demands every event have a cause,  but
> if the thing behind the curtain of free will is just randomness then having
> "free will" is a pretty mundane thing.
>
> John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis
> <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis>
> pmt
>
> iau
>
>>
>>
>>
>> the minimal distance the salesman must travel is determined by the
>>>> relative position of the cities the salesman must travel through. Yes, that
>>>> is a hard computational problem but at least it is computational, not
>>>> everything is. A better example would be a computer running a short simple
>>>> program to find the first even number greater than 2 that is not the sum of
>>>> two prime numbers and then stop. Will it ever stop? Nobody knows even
>>>> though the computer is 100% deterministic. That's why you can be
>>>> deterministic but not predictable. Even you can't always predict what you
>>>> are going to do, there are even times where you are absolutely positively
>>>> 100% certain you know what you're going to do, but when the time actually
>>>> comes you end up doing something entirely different. So I don't think it's
>>>> necessary to invoke retrocausal influences to explain why we wouldn't feel
>>>> like a puppet with somebody else pulling the strings even if we were as
>>>> deterministic as a cuckoo clock.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
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