From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Mon Jun 09 2003 - 23:09:34 MDT
Randall Randall wrote:
>
> On Monday, June 9, 2003, at 04:13 PM, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
>
>>
>> IANAP. With that in mind, my understanding goes something like this:
>> The instrument is attracted to where the star's projected position is,
>> according to the star's velocity in the past. This is because of the
>> way the star's velocity bends the potential well generated by the
>> star. If you're one light-minute away, you are not attracted to where
>> the star is now. You're attracted to where, one minute ago, the star
>> would have been in one minute, had it continued on at the same
>> velocity it had one minute ago, from the position it had one minute
>> ago. (I'm not quite sure if acceleration is supposed to be taken into
>> account as well, or maybe it was some other property of the star's
>> behavior aside from or in addition to the velocity, but I think this
>> is roughly how it goes...)
>
> I don't see how future acceleration could be taken into account in this
> scenario, so I'll assume that it isn't.
Not future acceleration. Acceleration at time (t - x/c). Whatever force
you experience at time t is always determined solely by the events that
took place in your past light cone, at time t minus the propagation delay
through space. If there were a property that depended on the
acceleration, it would depend on the past acceleration, not the
"simultaneous" acceleration (relativity, of course, says that there is no
such thing).
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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