[ExI] Public draft of my book "Tales of the Turing Church"

[John Clark]

On Wed, Oct 17, 2018 at 2:26 PM Giulio Prisco <giulio at gmail.com> wrote:


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> *> As I say in the book I am a big fan of Tipler's spirit, but I
> don'talways agree with the details of his ideas and theories. However,
> re"We don't live in the sort of universe that Tipler thought we did,"Tipler
> is persuaded that we can MAKE the universe into the sort ofuniverse where
> an Omega Point scenario happens (purposefulannihilation of baryons and all
> that). Remaking the universe with anew design is, I believe, the most
> extropic goal.*


Sure its extropic and sure it would have been great if Tipler was right but
wishing does not make it so. Tipler thought the universe would stop
expanding and collapse and we could manage that collapse and extract a
infinite about of work out of it and thus perform a infinite number of
calculations and achieve subjective immortality, which could be defined as
never having a last thought. But we now know the universe is not heading
for a collapse and the specific predictions he made that he said must be
true for his idea to work turned out not to be true. Perhaps there is some
other way to perform a infinite number of calculations, but if so it's not
Tipler's wa


> >> If mind is what brains do then Many Minds and Many Worlds are the same
>> interpretation because brains are made of matter.
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> * >I think MW and MM are strongly interrelated interpretations, but not
> really the same interpretation. In MW the collapse happens objectively out
> there, in MM it happens subjectively in the mind.*


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.


> > *Superdeterminism says that the past determines the future not only for
> inert matter, but also for thinking observers. **Your choice to measure a
> spin in one or another direction couldn't have been different,*

*because it was predetermined.*

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.


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> *> So superdeterminism is a way out of quantum paradoxes. But determinism
> and superdeterminism are the same only if we make the assumption that mind
> is matter. I don't understand your point on initial conditions.*


I don't think mind has anything to do with it. Both claim the laws of
physics are deterministic and evolved from initial conditions, with regular
determinism any initial condition will work fine, but out of the infinite
number of initial conditions the universe could have been in 13.8 billion
years ago superdeterminism could only work if it was in one of them, the
one that would always fool us, so to my thinking it has one chance in
infinity of being right.

Well OK, I don't know for a fact the early universe could have started out
in a infinite number of states, but at the very least it must be a
astronomical number to the power of a astronomical number of states.

John K Clark
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