Re: Alpha-Point computing

From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Fri Jan 18 2002 - 18:50:44 MST


At 11:45 PM 1/17/02 -0500, Eliezer wrote:

>Actually, if I recall correctly, I picked up the phrase (and concept)
>"Alpha Point" from _The Spike_ - it's "Alpha Line" that is my own
>invention. I didn't know that you were the originator, though.

I should clarify that at once: `Alpha Point', cited in THE SPIKE, is a
coinage of Anders Sandberg:

< Still more delightfully bizarre is a playful conjecture based on
Tipler's cosmological deity, advanced by Anders Sandberg:

        "life evolves towards the Omega Point, but in the vicinity of the final
moment `angels', life based on back-propagating causality (which Tipler's
theory seems to imply) are created and move backwards through time. They
are unobservable in the present, since they are acausal from our
perspective... and probably very thinly spread (possibly `extinct').
Eventually conditions become better and better for them, they spread across
the universe and use the shear energy to create the Alpha Point--which is
isomorphic to the Omega Point and creates `angels' moving forward in time.
Note that if the backwards-moving beings use shear energy from the
`collapse' of the universe they see, this may explain the homogeneity and
isotropy of the universe despite the chaos of the Big Bang--from our
perspective they smoothed the early universe!" >

The only part I'm staking a claim on is the idea that the very earliest
universe might have contained sufficient distinct atto- (whatever-) regimes
for intelligence to have evolved from scratch during the Big Bang, possibly
prior to complete force decoupling.

Damien Broderick



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