pataphor <pataphor@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> For me this question looks a lot like the situation in the Matrix
> movie where someone is asking to be put back into the matrix in
> exchange for betraying his friends. What he bargains for is his future
> self forgets his betrayal, he loses his knowledge about being inside a
> simulation and he will have a good life. I'm afraid he's
> insufficiently paranoid though, because if he agrees to having his
> memory wiped how would he know the other party is honoring the
> agreement?
In the worst case, he remembers the betrayal and the agreement and has a
horrible life, and he doesn't know whether it's Matrix or not.
And -- can that happen to him even if he doesn't do the betrayal, or can
they only affect his memories etc if he agrees? If it can happen without
his agreement then he doesn't have much to bargain with.
> I can even explain why we are not seeing technologically
> advanced alien life forms in this universe. They all switched to
> another routine in the same computer that gets more processing cycles
> and this enables faster than light travel.
Etc. Yes, we can't be sure this isn't possible. Imagine a bunch of
isolated swiss villages that communicate by yodeling, and then they get
better technology and use flugelhorns. The winds aren't good for smoke
signals and the terrain is too hilly for heliographs. After some long
time they wonder why there isn't anybody else in the world trying to
communicate with them. They arrange silent hours where their best
listeners listen for faint signals. They build a giant flugelhorn on a
mountain to send signals to the rest of the world. But nobody's
listening. Everybody else is using radio etc.
We can't be sure there's no undiscovered physics that all the advanced
species are using. There isn't much evidence one way or another.
> I'm having trouble weening myself from oracle use. I know it's
> just random input but at the same time I prefer it over the horror
> vacui. But most of the time the procrastination results in avoiding
> action. Is staring at a wall or exhausting oneself by physical
> exercise any better?
I made my own oracle once with M&Ms. I think I lost it in a disk crash.
The backups were on 5.25" floppy disks, and years ago I copied all the
ones that were still good before I threw them away, and left a lot of
unsorted retrieved garbage unsorted.
I sort of remember that the number of green M&Ms was a measure of how
reliable the answer was. If there were no green ones then you shouldn't
put much trust in it. And the number of blue M&Ms was a measure of how
well you framed the question. Only one blue M&M indicated that you had
missed the point and asked almost entirely the wrong question.
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