X-Message-Number: 11241
Date: Tue, 09 Feb 1999 02:00:35 -0700
From: Mike Perry <>
Subject: Re: CryoNet #11226

Thomas Donaldson writes,
...
>
>Finally, as to Mike Perry's answer to my comment about his use of Tipler:
>Tipler is certainly an intelligent man, and I would hardly claim that
>he's had nothing of value to say. I will point out, though, that merely
>believing that human beings are finite state machines is hardly a sign
>of originality. Lots of other people have the same opinion. (I will give
>my own suggestions on this issue later in this message). So
>my question remains: what has Tipler got to say, now, on the issue of our
survival
>in any form at all? Simply being intelligent is too broad a test to 
>answer my question: why are his ideas still of interest?

Tipler considers, among other things, what it should mean to be a person, to
be resurrected, to survive and endure as part of the universal process.
Among other things, his ideas depend on a reductionist point of view: that
we are "nothing but" digital processes, in effect, computer programs running
on hardware of a certain sort, and over the short term, finite state
machines. Lots of other people do have those opinions too. But none to my
knowledge has managed to tie their ideas together as comprehensively as
Tipler has, and gone so far as to produce a book 
comparable to his. (The closest rival may be *The Anthropic Cosmological
principle* by Barrow and Tipler; it has much the same ideas too, only less
focused specifically on the problems of immortality.) So Tipler's book makes
a useful reference, which is why I refer to it, though of course one must
respect its limitations too.
>
>And here, as promised, are my comments on the issue of whether or not
>human beings are finite state machines.
...
>NOW: whether or not human beings can only adopt a finite set of states,
>given the ideas which I have just summarized, is likely to depend strongly
>on whether the Universe itself has only a finite number of states
>(naturally larger than the number of states of human beings in it). 

Well, as a localized phenomenon, a person could have only a finite number of
states while the universe as a whole was infinite in this respect. But by
indications, the universe too has only a finite number of states. Barrow and
Tipler, *The Anthropic Cosmological Principle*, p. 662,  estimate the total
information content of the visible universe as 10^98 bits, which would yield
2^(10^98) possible configurations or "states"--a finite number. This may be
growing with time (let's hope so; we need that to be immortal, to avoid an
Eternal Return, one good point that is made in Tipler's own book). Over
*infinite* time a device with a growing number of states, including its
memory or information storage element, cannot be emulated by a finite state
machine, but, subject to certain reasonable restrictions, it could be so
emulated over a finite interval, because then the number of states is
bounded. (Actually there is a discussion of this point in Barrow and Tipler,
p. 661.) So this is the sense in which we (for now, short-term) can be
considered finite-state machines, as part of a larger system (the universe
as a whole) which is also, for now, a finite-state device.

As a final thought, one may hope that the accelerating, expanding universe
that now seems to be what we are in will allow a growing number of states.

Mike Perry

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