Re: PHYSICS/SPACE: Legitimate time traval proposal

From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Fri May 18 2001 - 15:04:07 MDT


xgl wrote:
>
> why would one need a time machine to simulate a time machine? i
> mean, if i were not the chrononaut who's actually going back in time, all
> i would see are some newspaper headlines. if i _were_ going back in time,
> the only overhead would be the portion of the world that i would notice to
> be different -- one wouldn't even need to fork the entire simulation.

Problem is, nobody's talking about the transport of a massive physical
object through time. They're talking about sending information back in
time, and running other experiments, at least from what I can make out.
Maybe the experimental results can be known in advance if the simulator
has already been playing with time machines for a while, but it might be
that for real simulation - not just pretending that the experiments
happened - you'd need to recreate the experiment in top-level reality. Or
if there are enough experimental variables, it might not be possible to
compute all the results in advance.

Alternatively, of course, you could just return fake results - but then
people come up with different physical theories, and your correspondence
to the ancestral world being simulated starts to break down.

-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://intelligence.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence



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