From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Thu May 22 2003 - 10:26:51 MDT
Emlyn writes:
> The very fact that we have scarcity is crazy. Why isn't our environment
> directly manipulable; eg: why is there matter? Humans are having to go to
> absolutely extreme lengths to make matter behave like software (not there
> yet), when it could have been that way from the beginning.
It's possible that such an "easy" universe would not have been suitable
for the emergence of intelligent life.
With so much power and flexibility, the universe might even be too
chaotic and random to allow life itself to form. Even if life could
begin, it would quickly evolve to exploit the "magical" potentialities
of the universe if they could be so easily accessed. It could fill in
the niches so well that there would be little evolutionary pressure for
complexity and ultimately intelligence.
It might well be that the ideal universe is not too different from what we
see: one that allows life to form and evolve, but with enough difficulty
that a huge number of different strategies and structures are explored;
one that rewards intelligence with incredible powers, but sets the bar
so high that unintelligent life cannot manipulate these potentialities;
and one that leaves the universe mostly empty, so that once intelligent
life does form and develop the potential to spread, it has vast rewards
for doing so.
One of the ideas I have played with is that the universe is likely not
lawful. It would be expected to approximate physical laws but to have
rare exceptions. The reasoning is that universes with simple physical
laws are likely to be more probable than those with complex ones; but
that the number of different universes with complex laws is greater,
approximately cancelling this effect.
To get life and evolution, you need relatively simple laws, so that
the universe is predictable and structured. But there would also be
universes with basically simple laws that also have complex exceptions -
so called "white rabbit" universes, as the concept has been discussed
on Wei's Everything list - universes where magic exists. The total
collection of white rabbit universes of all forms is roughly equal in
size to the simple ones. So we could be living in such a universe.
Along the lines above, access to the magic cannot be too easy, or
intelligent life cannot evolve. So the anthropic principle rules out
those universes. That leaves those for which magic is possible, but
only with the aid of intelligence. We might live in such a universe.
Going forward, then, I would not be surprised if our efforts to
create a Theory of Everything are thwarted by the discovery of rare
exceptions. And it's possible that we could exploit these loopholes
through technology. Or it could be that the conditions to trigger
exceptional behavior are so rare that we never find them - the key to
Magic forever unobtainable. Maybe our descendants will spend some of
their vast resources constantly probing the fundamental laws, looking
to see if there is a flaw, like a hacker searching for back doors into
his target system.
Hal
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