Path: utzoo!dciem!nrcaer!sce!cognos!garym
From: garym@cognos.UUCP (Gary Murphy)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: intelligence and the initial conditions of the universe (BANG!!!)
Message-ID: <6744@cognos.UUCP>
Date: 6 Aug 89 11:19:41 GMT
References: <2182@hub.UUCP>
Reply-To: garym@cognos.UUCP (Gary Murphy)
Organization: Cognos Inc., Ottawa, Canada
Lines: 34

In article <2182@hub.UUCP> silber@voodoo.ucsb.edu writes:
>
>Intelligence and its instantiation as reasoning must be conditioned by
>the initial conditions of the universe; if the universe had started as
>a continuous distribution of matter, there would have been no discrete
>sets (?), hence no numbers. if the initial conditions had decreed a different
>set of discrete elementary particles, there would have been a different
>number theory, different primes, or perhaps no primes at all (?)

What a curious posting; a provocation perhaps?

I wonder about this first premise, since recent talk here does not
neccessarily predicate Reason as an instance of Intelligence (some
might say Reason is, in Humans, a client or even the operator of
intelligence, most would call both terms fuzzy).  The second step 
is even more odd, given the all-but-certain quantized nature of
JAE (Just About Everything).

Given Hawking, Guth & al, One could restate the conclusion as "IN a
Universe started as...", replace Silber's romantic-but-unsupportable
'continuous' with something more plausible, such as a different ratio
of matter vs light vs anti-matter, or more simply 'different Laws',
and the conclusion (ignoring the ?) might hold.  Including the ?,
it becomes anthropic: all other configurations are too unstable to
permit our evolution.

Is this what Silber meant?  Does Silber know?


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