From: charles griffiths (cs.griffiths@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Oct 16 2007 - 18:43:13 MDT
Hi Bryan,
Fwiw:
Boredom is evolved behavior. When you're a collection of processes running on computronium, you don't get cpu time unless you have something to work on. Why would you?
Time currently spent in boredom could be spent in other ways (reliability measures like maintenance or redundancy, efficiency measures, or whatever), unless boredom turns out to be desirable for some reason.
Charles Griffiths
Bryan Bishop <kanzure@gmail.com> wrote: On Monday 15 October 2007 23:20, Harry Chesley wrote:
> Perhaps boredom is evolution's way of detecting and avoiding infinite
> loops.
(Is it safe to talk of evolution like that?)
Statistically, the redundant mental cycles hit ups and downs on a graph,
presumably where the more intelligent sophonts (sentients/progs) would
be the ones to 'gravitate' more strongly to the x-axis which for each
mind may or may not have a special offset for their 'normal mode of
operation'. An example of a 'down' period might be a multigenerational
ship passing the void between edges of neighboring galaxies.
Ideally, there is a way to control redundant mental cycles and
perpetually keep us in an "up" or at least climbing a latter and
hitting "save" points to reset the x-axis to the higher points.
Thoughts? I am still interested in coming up with an information
theoretic proof of the (lack of?) inevitability of boredom, i.e. to
show that there is in fact a way to always have something new to work
with for some definition of 'new'. (Some already claim "there is
nothing new under the sun.")
- Bryan
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