Comments | zenmasterw: Hard Determinist Apocalypse

zenmasterw

Hard Determinist Apocalypse

Aug 08, 2008 15:40

I don’t really do this much anymore. Oh well.

I was kicking it on the internet today and I found this really old (ancient in internet years) thing about the end of humanity that was sort of novel ( Read more... )

Comments 8

hxcpunkchick August 8 2008, 20:03:49 UTC

Wasn't that machine in Hitchhiker's??
It took AGES to compute.

syntaxic August 9 2008, 04:24:12 UTC

zenmasterw August 9 2008, 19:28:54 UTC

See, I think that Deep Thought is a good piece of this concept, but Deep Thought was only asked to answer one single question. Sure, it was the be all end all question, but I'm talking about a machine that answers that question plus every single other question that there is. At the same time.

hxcpunkchick August 9 2008, 20:03:50 UTC

Good luck with that... *grins*

I guess I'll actually put a real reply here... syntaxic August 10 2008, 01:41:49 UTC

I can kind of see his point. If you know that the girl at the bar is going to end up going home with you, why bother to put out all the effort you would have put out if you didn't know the out come? I'm not saying that this would stop someone from asking said girl back home, but it just seems that if it's all ready a forgone conclusion, there's no point in fighting it.

Now, does that mean people wouldn't do things? No, I don't think so, but I do feel there would be the lack of surprise that makes life so random.

And, yes, I was too lazy (or rather exhausted) to bother looking up the material for reference, so this all may be off.

Also, fuck going to work on the weekends.

Re: I guess I'll actually put a real reply here... zenmasterw August 10 2008, 17:36:47 UTC

Yeah, lack of surprise would be a thing. But I can just see people moving past surprise. When that doesn't exist, we'll just value something I else I guess. People are funny like that.

But anyway, in the linked article, he's positing that we would give up on everything. So not just accepting forgone conclusions, but never doing anything ever because of this. And that just seems silly.

However, if I knew ahead of time that I was going to have to work on weekends all the time, I would probably also learn ahead of time that I was going to be quitting my job and living on the streets and dying of exposure or something, because eff that for real.

clayse August 11 2008, 20:25:16 UTC

blurgh! Broken link!

Well, I think theoretically you could have a machine with the power to contemplate the universe except for that pesky heisenberg uncertainty principle. That really mucks things up for the smaller bits, which would have to be simualted. And if they're simulated then there are going to be discrepancies that will exponentially grow until the machine is about as inaccurate as need be to disprove this guy's argument. I hope.

That is, of course, accepting that there aren't higher-order strings that it'd end up chasing into extradimensional infinity. I think that, if such a machine existed, you'd be doing the poor thing a favor by just turning it off.

zenmasterw August 13 2008, 19:05:35 UTC

I swear to Thor that was working when I posted it. And if gave me the LJ weirdness trying to fix it, but as of RIGHT THIS MOMENT, the link works. Get it while it's hot.

Anyway, I also find it particularly unfeasible that such a machine can exist according to the rules as they are currently understood. But all these people seem to think that these machines will be so effing smart that the rules won't apply to them? Or that since they can track all the data effortlessly, simulation error can just be handwaved away.

I take comfort in my intuition that even if that were true, that there would still be the fact that even perfect foreknowledge is a stupid reason to quit doing things like, I dunno, eating food.

The higher-order strings of infinity should be a D&D plane of existence, also.