From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Sat Apr 26 2003 - 14:27:20 MDT
On Sat, Apr 26, 2003 at 01:43:49PM -0400, Spudboy100@aol.com wrote:
> A. Sandberg stated:
> <<I was hardly first with that idea - it is inherent in the early
> extropian writings and the work of Ilya Priogogine. Open systems can use
> free energy to decrease their own entropy, and certain kinds of systems
> have an internal dynamics that also increases their complexity (which is
> still a somewhat vague term even after more than a decade of debate in
> the alife and complexity community).>>
>
> I remember reading Prigognine's small tome, which is hiding in plain site in
> my bookshelf now. He might have been able to do the science of
> thermodynamics, but explaining was not his particular forte'.
Yes, that book was a fascinating disappointment. I remember trying
to read it several times as a kid, but always failing. It felt
like it should contain great secrets and insights, but everything
I got out of it seemed obvious or just confused.
> <<My preliminary answer would be that in a finite region there can only be
> a finite amount of complexity. But this could very well be an
> exponential function of the number of available states. >>
>
> Yes, back to Plato. If the Universe is infinite, so is available
> knowledge then; platonic forms and all that.
Hmm, that implies that there are patterns of arbitrary size to
have knowledge about. If you have a finite past lightcone (= the
things you can know about) then the amount of knowledge is bounded
(but increasing).
> Getting back to the
> original query by Jef; we need to ask if its easier to develop
> complexity, then it is to use energy to travel? There may or may
> not be theoretical limits to knowledge/complexity, but there are
> surely practical limits, if only temporary. There are limits to
> travel speed, and the energy expended, but one goal may be more
> achievable then the other. Right, now, in the very early
> Interplanetary Epoch, we don't know.
I think Robert is right about the trouble of lugging around a
civilization. Right now it would seem we could pack all of human
knowledge plus some nanoassemblers into a suitcase, but by the
time we have the tech to do that, the information will doubtlessly
have increased far beyond what we can fit in.
To make more complexity, you need matter to store it in and energy
to dissipate. The energy dissipation requirements are around kTln2
per bit, so they can be fairly low. Moving that bit around in
space requires either radiating a signal or sending the matter; in
the first case you need to convert it into radiation sufficiently
strong to be received far away, which is a rather serious loss
over interstellar distances (maybe one could do a GPS like signal
amplification scheme, but I don't think that gives you many orders
of magnitude). Shipping the bit requires energy to accelerate it,
and if you want it to go interstellar distances fast that means
energy on the order of the rest mass. So it is easier to put
information into matter locally than transmit it elsewhere. Which
bodes ill for the interlibrary loans of the postsingularity world.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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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