more on Can this box see into the future?

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Brad Templeton <btm () templetons com>
Organization: http://www.templetons.com/brad
Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2005 12:07:04 -0800
To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Cc: <psaffo () iftf org>
Subject: Re: [IP] Can this box see into the future?

> I am hoping someone on the list have some perspective on this. Seems
> like very much bump-in-the-dark stuff to me, but...


Paul, I first ran into this several years ago when I leared some people
I respected -- with good scientific skeptic's instincts -- were
running the random number generators for this project.

They remainded skeptical but interested.

The great problem here is the classic one of "If you look hard enough
in enough data, you can find anything."   There is a great danger that,
even knowing this rule, you will not constrain your search enough.

They claim Sept. 11 as a vindication, when I read their paper after
that event I felt it was a failure.  They had followed a good
methodology, in that they laid out the constraints of what would be
an anomaly in advance and "waited" for a huge world event (like 9/11.)

However when 9/11 came it did _not_ meet their test.  Instead, they hunted
in the data and found a new test where it showed a big spike.  That's
bad science.


I will give you the very science-fiction theory for this phenomenon,
if it actually exists.

You and I are inside a digital universe, a virtual reality,
created by a programmer.  It is not, as some people like to call it,
a "simulation" any more than Deep Blue "simulates" playing chess -- it
really
does play chess, and the people in a digital universe really are thinking,
not simulating doing it.

However, this digital universe runs on a real and vast, but finite computer.
Thus it allocates resources to various activity out of a finite pool.
When something "giant" happens which causes vast amounts of mental
activity, the software doing the quantum level phenomenon loses some
resources and goes out of whack.


Not that we have any evidence for this, other than the noosphere project
under discussion, and the famous "proof that we're in a digital universe"
which roughly says, "If a VR is possible at all, then there will be billions
of them, along with one original physical universe.  What are the odds
that we're in that one original one?"


------ End of Forwarded Message


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