From: John K Clark (johnkclark@fastmail.fm)
Date: Thu May 21 2009 - 09:46:03 MDT
On Wed, 20 May 2009 "Matt Mahoney"
<matmahoney@yahoo.com> said:
> I assume as higher beings, that:
> (1) we would want to be rational,
> (2) we would want to be immortal,
> (3) we would want to know that we are immortal.
> And I claim you can't have both (1) and (3).
Well, even if we prove that immortality is possible we won’t know that
WE are immortal; but can we even do that?
As I said immortality depends on Physics and Cosmology but as Gödel
proved there is not even a complete theory of consistent mathematics, so
there is probably not a physical theory of everything either.
And even if there is such a theory figuring out all the implications of
it is almost certainly not possible; you
can learn the basic laws of the game Go in a few minutes but it takes a
lifetime to get good at it and nobody
is even close to being perfect at it.
And even if you know all the implications of the theory Cosmology also
depends on initial conditions,
the point where you start the game, and we will almost certainly never
know that in sufficient detail
to work out the future of the universe for infinity.
For these reasons I think your above statement is true but we will never
be able to prove it true.
However I can’t prove that either.
John K Clark
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John K Clark
johnkclark@fastmail.fm
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