From: Mark Walker (mark@permanentend.org)
Date: Mon Jul 21 2003 - 20:26:42 MDT
----- Original Message -----
From: "Anders Sandberg" <>
> Exactly. This is my own personal guess at the answer of the Fermi
> paradox. But it has the problem of invoking the existence of some kind
> of physics we do not know about; not an unlikely assumption or
> prediction, but rather unsatisfying since it does not tell us anything
> and cannot be tested.
>
> Or can it? The assumption says that there should exist a domain in
> nature where structures of extremely high complexity can persist and
> perform at least Turing-computable operations, and that this domain does
> not look out of the ordinary to us. The current candidates seem to be
> either dark matter (essentially going back to "some unknown stuff") or
> spacetime on the Planck scale. This case is interesting: it wouldn't
> surprise me if one could prove that spacetime evolution in GR can do
> Turing type computation (proof sketch: one could implement a billiard
> ball computer with black holes using very massive cosmic strings or
> wormholes as reflectors - but a real proof needs to show that this is
> stable enough), but it would be needed to show that stable information
> storage was also possible in principle.
>
>
I have sympathy with the general line of thought, in fact I've argued before
that contemporary science should take serious the possibility of a missing
science. If we think of the universe in its early stages only physical
phenomena were present--the phenomena currently studied by physics--later
chemical,
biological, psychological, sociological and economic phenomena emerged.
Surely the question arises whether there process might continue, i.e.,
whether there might be further (emergent) development that calls for a new
science.
Once you allow for this possibility then indeed it is quite a natural
thought to think that the explanation for the Fermi paradox lies with the
missing science. (With reductionist tendencies one might want to insist that
physics is incomplete rather than a new level of phenomena (requiring a new
science) has emerged). This new emergent level may be inscrutable to us,
which I suppose would not be satisfying even if true. However, even we
accept this explanation it seems that there must be some "top down" effect.
If all advanced life forms disappear into dark matter it is still a mystery
that as a matter of bad housekeeping they didn't leave one single genesis
probe around, i.e., a single von
Neumann machine that is bent on populating the universe with life forms at
our stage of development. The top down effect is that all such genesis
probes get thwarted by the emergent phenomena. If this is the case then
there must be some "iron laws" of development, be they physical, social or
political or emergent that guarantee that not even a single rogue genesis
gets loose in the universe. This means that we might not be as free as we
appear to be. Consider that we should soon have the technology to launch
just such a genesis probe. The iron laws say that this must fail.
Mark
Mark Walker, PhD
Research Associate, Philosophy, Trinity College
University of Toronto
Room 214 Gerald Larkin Building
15 Devonshire Place
Toronto
M5S 1H8
www.permanentend.org
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