X-Message-Number: 11463
Date: Fri, 26 Mar 1999 00:23:14 -0700
From: Mike Perry <>
Subject: Information Conservation, Personal Evolution

Bob Ettinger, #11453, says,
>
> ... although I can't prove it (maybe I could if I were
>smarter or/and had more time available), I tend strongly to think that
>information is conserved in the universe, and approximately conserved in any
>reasonably large and nearly closed system. 
>
The only basis I know of for arguing this, based on modern physics, is
"phase conservation" which says that you *can* deduce the past history of a
system if you can capture every photon emanating from that system. To do
this for the earth's history would seem to require that you would have to
chase down a lot of photons from behind--rotsa ruck. Or maybe, just
possibly, we live in a closed universe and eventually the photons will all
come streaming back and we can analyze them then, as Tipler conjectured in
his book--but this too is doubtful. The universe does not appear to be
closed, especially in view of the new findings of distant acceleration. On
the other hand, I'd be happy to learn that there is some way to deduce
history that to all appearances seems lost. This would perfectly vindicate
the 19th-century Russian, Fedorov, who held that such a thing was possible
(with implications for resurrecting the dead), but his arguments were based
on a Newtonian worldview, now far outdated.
>
>The contrary thesis, that information is not conserved, and the related
>contrary thesis, that there is no unique past or history, are based on
>premises that seem flawed. One portion of the contrary thesis is that a given
>present state of a system is compatible with more than one past state. But I
>think this is only true when we limit our attention to a small part of the
>system, or to a small system. On a global scale, there are so many "anchors"
>of historical fact, so many interrelated developments of events, that the
>postdictions, or possible inferences about the past, reduce to one. 
>
Again, I'd be happy to learn that all history can be retrodicted
(postdicted). But it doesn't seem likely, for example, that the detailed
brain structure of all the people who lived 5,000 years ago is still somehow
recorded or captured in what survives from the past, even at the subatomic
level.

>I don't claim that the practical importance of such ideas is great, but it
>isn't zero either. Morale is significant, and anything that reasonably  tends
>to support morale has some significance too.
>
In the long run, I think this issue will have practical importance, and I
agree that it has significance in terms of morale. But to me, people are in
some sense recoverable even though it is likely that the past *is* ambiguous
and information *can* be irretrievably lost from our historical archives. To
say information is lost "from the archives" is not the same as saying it is
lost forever, period. But archives are still worth maintaining, and frozen
people too.

Leon Dean, #11454, says
> ...  The stories of us evolving into
>something greater than what we are, of turning into beings that are the
>essence of humanity, its creativity, its wonder, but this will be
>impossible if we all live forever.  We could be a static population of
>imbeciles, tearing ourselves apart, dreaming of what we could have become.
>

I'm not sure why you think this. Once we are immortal, we will certainly not
be limited to some particular level of advancement, but open to improvements
of intelligence and other features. The present, death-based evolutionary
mechanism, which sacrifices individuals for "the good of the species" will
give way to personal evolution, which should have no limits other than the
laws of physics.

Mike Perry

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