Robin Hanson <rhanson@gmu.edu> writes:
> David Brin has a short story in the latest Nature,
> where he mentions the "Great Filter" and names a
> character after me (sort of).
>
> Nature Contents: 16 March 2000
> 16 March 2000 Volume 404 No. 6775
> http://www.nature.com/nature/
Interesting little piece.
It seems to mirror the non-trivial fact that the set of all possible
Turing-machine programs is of fairly low complexity (it is trivial to
write a program that generates all possible programs), but that any
individual program may be arbitrarily complex - the whole is simpler
than its parts. If this holds true for the universe (especially in the
MWI and chaotic inflation scenarios) then omniscience may indeed be a
problem of the same kind as Brin speaks of.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:05:45 MDT