X-Message-Number: 31703 From: Date: Sun, 31 May 2009 23:16:03 EDT Subject: Pizer's time travel Content-Language: en Dave Pizer proposes virtual "travel" into the past, first by retrodicting history and then creating a virtual reality reflecting that. I have discussed some of these questions in Youniverse. I think it is probable ( currently a minority opinion) that the universe is deterministic and that information cannot be destroyed, hence duplication or near-duplication of people and events may be possible in principle. However, I do not agree that virtual reality would necessarily allow virtual people to be real in the sense of having subjective experiences, these latter (qualia) being the essence of life as we know it. As just one example of the problems, a virtual "world" would necessarily behave according to the rules of physics as understood (or imagined) by the programmers. But for the foreseeable future our models of the world will be incomplete and partly wrong, hence will not fully or accurately reflect reality, Robert Ettinger **************We found the real aC~Hotel CaliforniaaC and the aC~SeinfeldaC diner. What will you find? Explore WhereItsAt.com. (http://www.whereitsat.com/#/music/all-spots/355/47.796964/-66.374711/2/Youve-Found-Where-Its-At?ncid=eml cntnew00000007) Content-Type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII" [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=31703