RE: many worlds theory of immortality

From: Jonathan Colvin <jcolvin.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Sun, 17 Apr 2005 17:39:16 -0700

Hal wrote:
>Consider a 2-D cellular automaton world like Conway's Life.
>Every cell is either occupied or unoccupied. It has one of
>two states. Now let us consider such a world in which one
>cell holds much more than one bit of information. Suppose it
>holds a million bits. This one cell is tiny like an electron;
>yet it holds a great deal of information, like an omniscient entity.
>
>This description is logically contradictory. A system with
>only two states cannot hold a million bits of information.
>That is an elementary theorem of mathematical information theory.
>
>The problem is not specific to a world. The problem is with
>the concept that a two state system can hold a million bits.
>That concept is inherently contradictory. That makes it
>meaningless. Trying to apply it to a world or to anything
>else is going to produce meaningless results.
>
>Rather than say that such a world cannot exist because it is
>logically contradictory, it makes more sense to say that
>logically contradictory descriptions fail to describe worlds,
>because they fail to describe anything in a meaningful way.

In what way are those two statements not equivalent? They both seem to make
the same point, which is that logically contradictory descriptions "do not
refer".

Jonathan
Received on Sun Apr 17 2005 - 20:50:12 PDT