5HC : Skinner, Turing and yet more Laplace

maru · 17 Feb 2005, 20:29 · from 2005-February.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: marudubshinki at gmail.com (maru)
Date: Thu Feb 17 20:29:27 2005
Subject: (urth) 5HC : Skinner, Turing and yet more Laplace
In-Reply-To: <1f7617370502161013313befb7 at mail.gmail.com>
References: <42115130.8040009 at gmail.com>	<BAY102-F399F963956FB06C812BCF0B96C0 at phx.gbl>
	<1f7617370502161013313befb7 at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <42156F23.5060409 at gmail.com>

Seems fairly foolish: such a document could save you tremendous amounts
of trouble.
Instance: what if you read that you were going to spend 30 years 
bouncing around
as a penniless bum, deperately unhappy, ill with all sorts of nasty 
diseases, when, due
to sheer chance, you discover that it was your reason on Earth, your 
raison d'etre, to
become an ink artist.  And then it says you are slated to die of a heart 
breaking from joy,
which only happened because in your 30 years on the street you had to 
eat a lot of McDonalds.

Wouldn't a youthful version of you want to skip the hellish 30 years and 
maybe make something
of yourself as an artist before you die?

~Maru
As a rule, I always obey instructions from future versions of me.

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:

>>[T]he issue isn't what the demon knows, it's what _you_,
>>as the person who has just been given the prediction, are correct in
>>believing; the implication being that there's no determinate plan of your
>>future actions that you'd be correct in believing if only you knew it.
>>    
>>
>
>If I were given a determinate plan of my future actions, the first
>thing on the list would be "burn this document." And I would.
>
>Obviously, a lot of this kind of speculation is reflected in 
>myths and stories about the working-out of prophecies by those 
>who try to avoid them (Oedipus, the Appointment in Samarra, 
>etc.) - a great deal of effort has been gone to over the ages to 
>show that predestination and free will are not inherently 
>incompatible concepts.
>  
>
>
>  
>

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net