Ted Chiang's novella "Story of Your Life" had a similar theme; it was recently made into the movie "Arrival". I'm very skeptical that anything we would call "life" could exist in a really time-symmetric environment. What we call life is very complicated, and achieved its current complexity due to natural selection. I don't think the concept of natural selection is coherent in a time-symmetric environment, and can't think of any other effect that would favor such complexity. On Wed, Nov 28, 2018 at 1:01 PM Veit Elser <ve10@cornell.edu> wrote:
On Nov 28, 2018, at 11:31 AM, James Propp <jamespropp@gmail.com> wrote:
Julia Robinson has a good quote: "What is proved about numbers will be a fact in any universe.”
This still suffers from the bias that “intelligent life” runs on a platform that is “open” in the sense of physics, where there is a sense of “now” that runs unidirectionally into the future. For example, if some form of life was effectively a closed system, with perfect symmetry under time reversal (i.e. unitary evolution), I very much doubt that questions involving the operations of arithmetic or logic, most of which are not reversible, would arise (be considered interesting).
The only work of fiction I know of that brings up this bias is Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, in which the Tralfamadorians have managed to become “unstuck in time”, that is, they experience the events on their world-lines not in sequence but as a single entity.
We have the means, in principle, to build new kinds of AIs that are not subject to this bias. Whether there is anything interesting to talk about with them, or whether there is even a sense in which we could carry on a conversation, is another question.
-Veit
Though I suppose there could be universes harboring intelligent life in which the laws of physics are such that pi isn't seen as a very
interesting
number until fairly late in a culture's development, and facts about pi are seen as arcane and boring.
By the way, have any of you read the R. A. Lafferty short story in which some people discover some small integers (less than ten) that had hitherto gone unnoticed? The relevant phrase is something like "involutive number series" but I couldn't dig up any information with Google.
Jim Propp
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