Damien Broderick <d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au> writes:
> Could well be. I suppose it depends on whether the post-Spike future is
> *literally unimaginably strange* (perhaps with `magic physics', etc), or
> just *strictly unpredictable in detail* but functioning within today's
> rules, more or less (given a better fusion of QT and relativity, say).
Exactly. Unless the third law of thermodynamics is a kind of
phlogiston theory believed in by primitive civilisations, even the
post-spike entities will do stuff to entropy. And this is likely to be
noticeable, assuming they do big entropy-modifying things.
(Which hinges on the assumption that they would do that, which might
of course be a culturally influenced assumption we make since we
currently live in a "more is better" culture. The environmentally
conscious posthumans of Egan's _Diaspora_ might have a different
view).
This discussion brings up an interesting problem: what can we say
about the large scale character of physical law? Is there any way of
estimating the complexity of the rules making up the universe, or
whether there are magic physics out there? The first case seems very
hard to answer, especially since we cannot base an answer much on what
we have discovered so far, since that nmight be heavily biased by our
parochial mammal-water-carbon-planetlife outlook. The second at least
can be answered if we notice big anomalies elsewhere.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
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