<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif">On Fri, Oct 19, 2018 at 5:49 AM Giulio Prisco <<a href="mailto:giulio@gmail.com">giulio@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</span></div><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font size="4">Hi Giulio</font></div></div><div dir="ltr"><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><i>
<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">></span>According to Tipler, future intelligent life will be able to reverse<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> </span>the expansion and trigger a collapse by purposefully annihilating<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> </span>baryonic matter.<br></i></blockquote><div><br></div><div><div class="gmail_default" style=""><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"><font size="4">That's not what he said in his book, maybe Tipler is saying that now I don't know, but I do know that after he wrote his book he became a fundamentalist Christian and went a bit nuts. Tipler now thinks </font></font><font size="4"><span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif">we should look for divine DNA on the Shroud of Turin and check for radiation around the tomb of the Blessed Virgin Mary that was caused by an intense beam of</span><span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"> </span><span class="gmail-il" style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif">neutrinos</span><span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"> </span><span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif">that must have shot out of the bottom of her feet as she ascended into heaven.</span> But nevermind, when he wrote his book he still seemed sane and thought the universe would collapse on its own and intelligent life would manage that collapse to obtain infitre work that can be used to perform a infinite number of calculations in a finite time and thus achieve subjective immortality. I thought his theory was unusual but not crackpot because it was falsifiable, be made quite a few predictions and gave very specific numbers and said said every one of those numbers must be correct or the entire theory falls apart, and today after more that 20 years we can see that nearly all his numbers turned out to be wrong. And the most glaring fault of all was that he didn't predict the existence of Dark Energy and the acceleration of the universal expansion that was discovered just a few years after his book was published. </font></div></div><div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">></span> <font size="4">I don't understand the Many Minds bit. If mind is what brains do and there are many minds then there must be many brains, but there is only one John Clark brain around here so those other brains must be in other worlds.</font></blockquote>
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<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">></span>In Many Minds, there aren't parallel worlds but parallel mental<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> </span>streams. When you (the multiversal super-you) observe a binary quantum<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> </span>event, you develop some kind of quantum multiple personality disorder<br>
and split into two minds unaware of each other, and each aware only of<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> </span>one of the two outcomes of the quantum event.</i></blockquote><div><br></div><div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font size="4">If that was true then mind must be independent of matter, but all the evidence is that is not true. A change in the brain state is always correlated with a change in the mind state and a change in the mind state is always correlated with a change in the brain state. And all those different brain states need a world to live in.</font></div></div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><i> <span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">></span>I have the impression<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> </span><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"></span>that Everett had something like this in mind.</i></blockquote><div><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style=""><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"></font><font size="4">I think that's what John Wheeler, Everett's thesis advisor, had in mind. Wheeler made Everett cut out about half the stuff in his original 137 page thesis and tone down the language so it didn't sound like he thought all those other universes were equally real when in fact he did. For example, Wheeler didn't like the word "split" and was especially uncomfortable with talk of conscious observers splitting, most seriously he made him remove the entire chapter on information and probability which today many consider the best part of the work. Originally Everett wrote that when a observer splits it is meaningless to ask "which of the final observers corresponds to the initial one since each possess the total memory of the first" he says it is as foolish as asking which amoeba is the original after it splits into two. Wheeler made him remove all such talk of splits and amebas from his published much shortened thesis.</font></div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
><span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">></span> <font size="4">That's true for any sort of determinism, but superdeterminism says much more than that, it says that initial conditions were hyper precisely arranged 13.8 billion years ago so that now we always make exactly the wrong choice when we set up our experiments and we always end up getting fooled. That's a lot to swallow. I'm comfortable with the universe being indifferent about our welfare but if superdeterminism is true it's downright sadistic.</font></blockquote>
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<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">> </span><i>This is not part of the definition of superdeterminism, but a<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> </span>(tautologically trivial) consequence of superdeterminism.</i></blockquote><div><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font size="4">Call it a definition or call it a consequence I don't care, the point is with determinism there are an infinite number of initial conditions the universe could have started out in, but with superdeterminism there was only one, so the 2 things are not the same.</font></div><div><font size="4"> </font></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> <span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">> </span><i>If the past<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> </span>of the universe determines the choices that you make now, then of<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> </span>course the past of the universe must have been such that it<span class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> </span>predetermines the choices that you actually make.</i><br></blockquote><div><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style=""><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif"></font><font size="4">Both determinism and superdeterminism say that, but only superdeterminism specifies exactly what the state of that past universe was, it was the one state that, after 13.8 billion years of cosmic evolution, results in us always making decisions when we set up experiments that will make it look like the universe is not local and deterministic when it really is. And that is the reason superdeterminism strikes me as being somewhere between astronomically unlikely and impossible. It reminds me of the argument that when God created the Earth in 4004 BC he put fake dinosaur bones and fake radioactive decay products in the ground to make the Earth look far older than it really is. Or maybe I and the entire universe is only 10 minutes old and all the memories I have including being in the first grade don't correspond to anything real and were also created by God just 10 minutes ago. I can't prover these ideas are wrong but I don't think they are very likely.</font></div><div class="gmail_default" style=""><font size="4"><br></font></div><div class="gmail_default" style=""><font size="4">John K Clark</font></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><br>
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