The Beginning of Infinity
Page 60
see also undecidable; unpredictability; optimism
unpredictability
of knowledge growth 104, 133, 193, 194, 197, 198, 199, 206, 212, 358, 387–8, 425, 438, 439, 440, 457, 458
of new art 358
of qualia 153–4, 268, 367
due to randomness 197
reasons for 269–70
due to the ‘Singularity’ 456
unsustainability 422, 441
uranium 13, 145, 436
utilitarianism 122
utopias 65
blind optimism of revolutionary utopians 210
utopian (Continental) Enlightenment 65–6
see also Golden Age myths
vacuum 39, 46, 47, 53, 62, 267
variation and selection
Veblen, Thorstein 433
Vinge, Vernor 456
virtual reality 7, 68, 119, 190, 241n, 455
and the simulation argument 453–5
vitamin C 57, 80, 88
volcanoes 143, 292
super-volcano 208
von Neumann, John 334, 335
voting 216, 234, 328
decision-making in 342, 344–5
plurality voting system 346–50, 352
proportional representation 326–33, 339, 346, 347–8
women’s right to vote 351
see also representative government
wars/warfare 20, 109, 110, 139, 148, 196, 205, 206, 218, 244, 245, 246–7, 248, 249, 250, 251, 259, 294, 303, 334, 380, 390, 418, 427, 428, 431, 457
see also World War II; Cold War
Washington, George 326, 330
waves
of differentiation 273–4, 275, 276, 278–9, 283–5, 295, 297–8, 303
and particles 291
and the Schrödinger equation 307
wealth 202, 204, 208, 213, 217, 219, 221, 249, 424, 428, 437, 438, 442, 444–5, 456
weapons 50, 196, 208, 400
biological 196, 204, 205
civilization-destroying 196, 204, 208
nuclear 139, 196, 205
weather 20, 207
forecasting 27, 96, 139
Webster, Daniel 330, 343–4
‘weighing’ metaphor in decision-making 340–42
Weizenbaum, Joseph 148–9
‘what is it like to be a’ (Nagel)
bat 367
dollar 268
West, the 23, 31, 121, 214, 254, 313–14, 335, 350, 351, 386, 387, 390, 391, 393, 397, 428, 431, 442
Wheeler, John Archibald 1, 26, 104, 353, 354, 458–9
‘who should rule’ see Popper, Karl: criterion of ridding ourselves of bad governments without violence
Wigner, Eugene 189, 308
paradox of Wigner’s friend 308
will of the people 335, 336, 337–8, 350
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 166, 313, 314
wizards 260
Wolfe, Art 56–7
Wooters, William 299
world, distinguished from ‘universe’, ‘multiverse’ and ‘history’ 265
World War II 109, 139, 205, 334
computers of 140, 148
in Fatherland 259
writing systems 125–7
X-rays 2, 68
Xenophanes of Colophon 216–17, 227, 230, 231, 238, 242
Xenophon 83–4, 216
Young, Peyton 334
Balinski and Young’s theorem 334, 339
Zeno of Elea 182–3
Zeno’s mistake (confusing abstract attributes with physical ones of the same name) 182–6, 343
Zuse, Konrad 139
Zweig, Stefan 205
*The term was coined by the philosopher Norwood Russell Hanson.
*This terminology differs slightly from that of Dawkins. Anything that is copied, for whatever reason, he calls a replicator. What I call a replicator he calls an ‘active replicator’.
*These are not the ‘parallel universes’ of the quantum multiverse, which I shall describe in Chapter 11. Those universes all obey the same laws of physics and are in constant slight interaction with each other. They are also much less speculative.
*Hence what I am calling ‘AI’ is sometimes called ‘AGI’: Artificial General Intelligence.
*First, they announce to the existing guests, ‘For each natural number N, will the guest in room number N please move immediately to room number N (N + 1)/2.’ Then they announce, ‘For all natural numbers N and M, will the N th passenger from the M th train please go to room number [(N + M)2 + N − M]/2.’
*In the story as told by Plato in his Apology, Chaerophon asks the Oracle whether there is anyone wiser than Socrates, and is told no. But would he really have wasted this expensive and solemn privilege on a question with only two possible answers, one flattering, the other frustrating, and neither very interesting?
*In this dialogue, Socrates sometimes exaggerates the attributes and achievements of his beloved home city-state, Athens. In this case he is ignoring the contributions of other Greek city-states to the defeats of two invasion attempts by the Persian Empire, both of them before he was born.
*Popper’s translation in The World of Parmenides (1998).
*I shall say more about the difference between those two kinds of society – which I call static and dynamic societies – in Chapter 15.
*Which some would mistakenly think were ‘derived from experience’.
*The ancient Greeks were not very clear about where sensory experiences are located. Even in the case of vision, many in Socrates’ time believed that the eye emits something like light, and that the sensation of seeing an object consists of some sort of interaction between the object and that light.
*Our experience of the world is indeed a form of virtual-reality rendering which happens wholly inside the brain.
*Namely the Parthenon.
*‘Glayvin’ is a term of indeterminate meaning, coined by The Simpsons.
*Identical entities that were at different locations in an otherwise empty space would not be fungible, but some philosophers have argued that they would be ‘indiscernible’ in Leibniz’s sense. If so, then this is yet another respect in which fungibility is worse than Leibniz imagined.
*That this information is carried entirely locally in objects is currently somewhat controversial. For a detailed technical discussion see the paper ‘Information Flow in Entangled Quantum Systems’ by myself and Patrick Hayden (Proceedings of the Royal Society A456 (2000)).
*This rule is often misinterpreted as illustrating how slaves were regarded as less than fully human. But that has nothing to do with the issue. Black people were indeed widely regarded as being inferior to white ones, but this particular measure was designed to reduce the power of slave-owning states compared to what it would have been if slaves had been counted like everyone else.
*It should of course be physicists.
*I am counting the Christian Democrat CDU and the regionally based CSU as being one party for present purposes.
* Let me remind the reader that these highly speculative parallel universes have nothing to do with the universes or histories in the quantum multiverse, for whose existence there is overwhelming evidence. Strictly speaking, the standard anthropic explanations postulate infinitely many quantum multiverses.