Re: Time - Crunch or Stretch? (was Re: Big Bang is Bunk)

From: Zero Powers (zero_powers@hotmail.com)
Date: Mon Jul 30 2001 - 22:15:48 MDT


>From: "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com>

>Zero Powers wrote:
> >
> > Not so sure. It's hard to tell how the human mind would hold up after a
> > couple thousand years seeing as how no one has yet made it to a couple
> > hundred. Although senility and Alzheimers might tend to support your
> > theory, seems to me the problem with old brains is physical wear and
>tear
> > and degradation, rather than the running down of some amorphous
>biological
> > clock. But, again, I'm no scientist.
>
>The problems with current brains are due to physical wear and tear and the
>running down of the biological clock. *If* you fix that, *then* after a
>couple of centuries, you start running into the running down of the
>amorphous informational clock which I am postulating.

Interesting... What do you see as the basis for the non-physical
degradation of the "informational clock"? Is it simply that there are a
finite (though huge) number of possible neural pathways, and that in order
to form new patterns old ones must necessarily degrade? If that's your
viewpoint I suppose I could see that there would be a limit somewhere on the
total amount of information a meat-based brain could acquire. But I don't
necessarily see that as a problem. It seems that for every new datum you
acquire there's probably an obsolete one you could discard to make space.
You may not remember *everything* but the good stuff you'll keep.

For instance I still remember very well how to operate an 8 track tape
player. I'd gladly give up that space for something useful (like, say, how
to use Winamp).

-Zero

Life is good. Refuse to die.

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