X-Message-Number: 8177
Date: Sun, 4 May 1997 20:10:43 -0700 (PDT)
From: John K Clark <>
Subject: CRYONICS Life and Death and Certainty
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In #8170 "Sentience Nolastname" <> wrote a very
intelligent and interesting post. He gives some excellent ways to convince a
logical person of the value of Cryonics. Unfortunately most people are not
logical about life and death. The demand is for certainty, being correct is
optional, this is even true for most atheists. People can learn to accept
total oblivion after their death, but not uncertainty, and certainty is the
one thing that Cryonics can not give, at least not if it's explained in a
honest way.
Sometimes I fear that if Cryonics is ever to become mainstream it will need a
charismatic guru who abandons logic but has the gift of gab. If somebody has
the enough salesmanship to convince a bunch of people that it would be a
really good idea for them to cut their balls off and then drink poison
because a spaceship following a comet full of little green men will take them
to never never land, then they sure as hell have enough salesmanship to
convince a lot of people of the value of Cryonics. It might be fun to be a
cult leader, but I don't have the aptitude for it, nobody in the movement
seems to, so far it at least it just hasn't attracted that sort of person.
>Advanced races may try to "pray" up to the "next level"
If the original Alpha computer could perform an infinite, and not just an
astronomical number of calculations, then it wouldn't make sense to pray to
the beings in the next level up, because even though their computer is
simulating you, you could very well be smarter than them. Strange things
happen in the arithmetic of infinity, the number of all integers and the
number of odd integers are exactly the same, that is, you can find a one to
one correspondence between one and the other.
But isn't infinite computation a fantasy? If the universe has a finite number
of particles and all of them are engaged in computation, isn't that a limit?
Perhaps not. The particles could be performing calculations at a faster and
faster speed, of course you'd need an unlimited supply of energy to do that,
but that's exactly what you'd have at The Big Crunch. Tipler thinks that life
will be able to engineer the Universe so that when it contracts to a
mathematical point, it will be asymmetrical, so one part of the sky will
always be hotter than another and so you can always run a heat engine.
The hot spot will keep getting hotter without limit, in other words infinite
energy.
You'd also need a way for the parts of the computer to communicate with the
other parts at a ever increasing speed, you can't move faster than light, so
the only way to do this is to make the distance between the parts shorter.
This is also exactly what you'd have at The Big Crunch.
There is a finite amount of time to the Big Crunch, but Tipler says that a
beam of light could circle the entire universe an INFINITE ( and not just
very large ) number of times before then, because the universe will keep
getting smaller without limit. In this way a finite amount of matter in a
finite amount of time could produce a INFINITE number of calculations and so
generate a INFINITE subjective time.
My friends there is no doubt this will happen, it is an absolute certainty,
but only if you believe, only if you must let me lead you, you must
demonstrate your faith by giving me all your worldly possessions, you must ...
Oh forget it, I told you I didn't have the aptitude.
John K Clark
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