Re: Brin story in Nature

From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Sat Mar 18 2000 - 14:52:33 MST


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.

-- 
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Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
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