X-Message-Number: 4778
Date: Sun, 13 Aug 1995 19:23:14 -0700
From: John K Clark <>
Subject: SCI.CRYONICS Moravec and Determinism

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

I'm a fan of uploading and of Hans Moravec. I think he's
absolutely brilliant and I loved his book "Mind Children". I am
puzzled however by his indifference to Cryonics.  He thinks it's
unnecessary because huge computers could take a detailed look at
the present environment and then work backward to figure out how
things were in the past. In this way he thinks we could obtain
detailed information about any individual who ever lived, enough
information to reconstruct anyone.

I think this idea is, to put it as politely as I can, unlikely.
I can see 3 fundamental objections ( probably many more practical 
objections but I haven't even bothered to think about those).

1) According to Quantum Mechanics we don't live in a
deterministic universe.

2) Even if you ignore #1, chaos theory says you'd have to know
the initial conditions with infinite precision  and perform
calculations with infinite accuracy to make long range predictions.

3) Even ignoring  #1 and #2,  the universe could be
deterministic and it could still be impossible to deduce it's
history. Chance is not involved in Chess but if I gave you a
picture of a chess board halfway through a game you could still
not determine all the moves that led up to it, because there are
many different ways it could happen. If event A always causes
event C to happen and event B also causes event C to happen
things are deterministic, but if all you know about is event C there 
is no way to know what caused it, event A or B. History is ambiguous.

I still like Moravec, I think he has some very provocative ideas, 
he does have a blind spot but then we all do, someplace. 

Speaking of non determinism, some have said that it's non scientific, 
illogical and downright mystical, I disagree. If the world is 
deterministic then that means that if you detect an event 
you can always determine that one , or one of several,
events preceded it. If the world is not deterministic then that
means that some events tell you nothing about what events
preceded it. Neither idea is illogical. We can not determine
which one is true by armchair philosophy, we need experiment.
The experiments performed in the last 90 years have come out
strongly in favor of the non determinism.


                                         John K Clark         

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: 2.6.i

iQCzAgUBMC6u2303wfSpid95AQEmcQTvbNjTXEPnFs62r0rCgwLAkZ2PNTrq3Z3g
VUBW/aUpLEjBQ0UUOweLZj9XGLMVB5heZPbgGb/rnUjs4kEYAm7asMCP4+ztWq+z
BMmg4Y6mIEnWguRV+hQoTndSY1Q+E/iBFV5UGkpyGnLOl6nrZGb3vFvj9mYzbEmg
fEX9qeZNr+CKD1RxpwTRQOb66sxbaaYWn7Xl9QPY0fFivrqkVUY=
=4HUG
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----


Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=4778