17 KiB
"The Eternal Return" rephrased for rationalists.
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Author: u/mack2028 *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/5wbf2k/the_eternal_return_rephrased_for_rationalists/
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Score: 0
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Created: 2017-02-26T18:09:48
Post:
[removed]
Comments:
u/vakusdrake [+6] (38 minutes later)
I would go so far as to say even if you got to live the next subjective century in the simulated paradise of your choosing having it then repeated forever would still be horrifying.
For someone like myself who feels the need for progress and is deeply uncomfortable with this sort of memory erasal, the idea of having one's memories erased and reliving events over and over forever is viscerally terrifying even without the extra terror of knowing that actually given the way you specified the scenario I can look forward to probably ceasing to exist once this simulation reaches its end and is replaced with another.
u/FeepingCreature [+5] GCV Literally The Entire Culture (3 hours later)
I can put you at ease: having your memories erased and reliving events over and over is exactly the same as the world ending. There is no such thing as two different worlds with the exact same state.
u/PeridexisErrant [+2] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (3 hours later)
What about an infinitely large number of perfect copies of you, who live the same perfect century and then die?
u/vakusdrake [+2] (4 hours later)
Well I'm not nearly altruistic enough to give much of a shit what happens to copies of myself after i'm no longer in a position to be capable of caring about that or anything else for that matter.
u/696e6372656469626c65 [+10] I think, therefore I am pretentious. (4 hours later)
Three points:
- From a computational perspective, there is no meaningful distinction between a process occurring an infinite number of times and that process occurring only once. So from that perspective, the entire question becomes meaningless.
- From a physical perspective, the Poincare recurrence theorem suggests that this could happen over the course of ordinary physics. If so, there's no need for demons or computer simulations--ordinary physics will suffice.
- Giving a preexisting idea a new paint job does not appreciably alter any of the relevant features of that idea. If I find eternal recurrence to be a dubious concept, I'm not likely to change my mind about it just because you mentioned computer simulations while presenting it to me. Beliefs aren't attire.
Overall, this post strikes me as somewhat low-effort, and as it is I don't think there's much productive discussion to be had on the topic.
u/HelperBot_ [+1] (4 hours later)
Non-Mobile link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poincar%C3%A9_recurrence_theorem
^HelperBot ^v1.1 ^/r/HelperBot_ ^I ^am ^a ^bot. ^Please ^message ^/u/swim1929 ^with ^any ^feedback ^and/or ^hate. ^Counter: ^36978
u/mack2028 [+1] (8 hours later)
Sorry this wasn't enough effort for you. I have spent days trying to work this idea into a form that would make sense and hours rewriting and editing it despite the fact that it was only a few paragraphs. I thought we were trying to work together but I guess I'm just not good enough to join in.
u/696e6372656469626c65 [+7] I think, therefore I am pretentious. (8 hours later)
The main issue with your post is that it has no thrust. In effect, all you have done is plop down an idea in front of us, dressed it up in "rationalist" terminology, and said, "Discuss." All questions of plausibility aside, you have presented no reason that this particular scenario is one that is worthy of serious examination (except possibly "Nietzsche discussed it before"). Additionally, both the content of the post itself ("let me see if I can rephrase it") and one of your other comments ("the question still seems to be phrased to create a negative bias") give me the impression that your main concern is with phrasing rather than with content, and this response has only served to reinforce that impression. It's in this sense that I called your post "low-effort"--and that remains true regardless of how much time you spent on it.
Please don't misunderstand me: my remarks are not meant as discouragement, and if I came across as overly harsh, I apologize for that. But the fact remains that this post, as it currently is, does nothing for me--and given its current karma status, I think it's fair to say that at least a substantial fraction of this subreddit shares that opinion. This community tends to be a fairly open one, and I'm sure there are many here who'd be happy to have a discussion with you, myself included. Right now, however, that's a bit hard to do, mostly because I don't know what you're trying to get at. Clarify your meaning rather than mentioning how much time you spent coming up with this, and this conversation becomes that much more likely to be a productive one.
u/mack2028 [+1] (17 hours later)
Let me explain the thrust better then. The eternal return is a way to overcome the bias generated by directly asking the question "Does your life have value." By phrasing it in a way that removes you from the question that is really being asked. You don't think to yourself "Am I a person of value" and instead ask "Is the idea of living my life again as I have lived it a pleasant one? If I got to live my life again would I?" And in answering that question you discover if you are inherently valuable or if you must change to make your life worth living.
An insane syphilitic man more than a hundred years ago found a way to overcome the bias of his audience by getting them to answer a question they didn't know they were answering. You instead of simply reading the question and taking it seriously decided to rip on me because I posed an idea in a way you didn't recognize, not realizing that was the point.
u/MultipartiteMind [+1] (21 hours later)
'person of value' thought: If one assigns value to breaking new ground (treading new paths), or in the more common phrasing 'changing the world'(/universe), or even just 'discovering new things', then the situation as presented can be undesirable. --Specifically, the exact same lifetime can be treated as 'of value' if some of its fruits are retained for the next universe in a chain, and 'not of value' if absolutely nothing is left of it.
This can end up as a discussion of 'if each lifetime is inherently of no value, how can there be any value even in infinite potential influence?', a possible counterargument of 'lifetime of finite satisfactory value, the real prize being the value over infinite time outweighing any finite value', to which 'decreasing influence over time on reality after the end of personal influence', to which 'and /that's/ why reject death itself, aiming to always be existing and influential'...
In any case, (at least for me) the reaction to 'Your reality exists (and only exists, assuming it's a simulated-from-scratch universe not based on a real one with its own infinite future)' with a finite end of which nothing will remain' is 'Okay, let's devote every resource I have to cracking the system so that that's not the case any more' rather than deciding that there's a life I could live for which I wouldn't mind that.
...passing along memoreis or messages from one universe to the next comes to mind first, but the more tempting and realistic approach is to try to set things up such that my thoughts are encountered by someone during one of the universe-simulations ("This situation seems really controversial! Even if every single 'me' picks this same situation, I'm betting that the computer's user is going to pick this situation for fact-checking at some point, at which point they'll notice my giant really-convincing banner! Maybe! Best hope I have!") and eiher influence the outside infinite-future world in some meaningful way, or--better--open up a discussion with someone in the outside world, maybe giving a copy of me a chance to get out and do influential things in the infinite-future world.
...and if that world has an expected universe/multiverse death, again the raging against the dying of the light and trying to get to another universe/multiverse/[something] before the lights go out...
Gain through desire, gain through greed, gain through curiosity, gain through never allowing satisfaction, for apathy is death and a living gourmet of delicacies and stories is happier than a skeleton that feels nothing, a skeleton that used to be a gourmet for ten years no different from a skeleton that used to be a gourmet for five... rejection of the finite, rejection of the futile, striving for the eternal.
--Echoing another comment about identical programs effectively being the same: even if something takes place chronologically differently, if the exact same end--death, extermination, annihilation--take place then it's as though they all take place in parallel, leaving nothing. At least, when one cannot affect others, when there's no 'building', no changing-over-time like a single mind changing throughout phases of wake and sleep while inheriting memories from its prior self.
A world is snuffed out like a candle. Another world send out sparks of life to colonise and remember and feel joy. The one person dies, the other propagates. The one person sleeps an eternal sleep, the other picks up a new book and begins reading it with glee, always hungry for new stimuli. There are those who can be satisfied with a single lifetime, but if anyone survives past that boundary to represent our amalgamations of thought, curiosity, adventure--it will not be them.
I would rather be one of those hammering against that diamond wall, trying to be one of those who will break open a crack and get through, than be one who smiles at 'a life well lived' and then ceases all thought, memory, activity.
u/ElizabethRobinThales [+4] Practically Perfect in Every Way (3 hours later)
"How could that possibly be with the laws of physics being the way they are?"
I don't see how this is a problem. If the universe runs in cycles of "Big Bang followed by Big Crunch followed by Big Bang followed by Big Crunch followed by Big Bang ad infinitum," then it seems obvious that, eventually, after 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000^100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000^100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 iterations, the particular arrangement/organization of particles which we would recognize as "our universe" would occur again down to the atom.
u/696e6372656469626c65 [+2] I think, therefore I am pretentious. (6 hours later)
Your main point is correct, but a brief nitpick: the number you give is large, but not quite large enough.
u/ElizabethRobinThales [+1] Practically Perfect in Every Way (7 hours later)
Are you sure 10^10^10^10^2.08 is bigger than (10^68)^(10^68)^(10^68)? I don't even know how to go about figuring that out.
Reddit isn't formatting that correctly, but (10 to the 68) to the (ten to the 68) to the (ten to the 68).
u/696e6372656469626c65 [+3] I think, therefore I am pretentious. (8 hours later)
(a^b)^c = a^(b*c)
So, that means that what we really have is 10^(68 * 10^(68 * 10^68)). Let's round up 68 to 10^2 , just to make things easier:
10^(68 * 10^(68 * 10^68)) < 10^(10^2 * 10^(10^2 * 10^68)) = 10^(10^2 * 10^10^70) = 10^10^(2+10^70) ≈ 10^10^10^70
So, we now have two numbers which are much easier to compare: 10^10^10^70 and 10^10^10^10^2.08 ≈ 10^10^10^120 . As 70 < 120, the second number is clearly larger than the first (and by a rather large amount as well).
Basically, the main takeaway here is that when dealing with towers of exponents (a.k.a. "power-towers"), increasing the value of the highest exponent in the tower has a far greater effect than increasing any of the lower exponents (or the base). And, as a corollary of this: taller towers are usually bigger than shorter ones, regardless of the values of the lower exponents (or the base).
EDIT: Also, I agree--Reddit formatting is a bitch when it comes to carets.
u/ElizabethRobinThales [+1] Practically Perfect in Every Way (10 hours later)
If a, b, and c are all 10^68, wouldn't it be (10^68)^(10^68)(10^68) since "b" and "c" are discrete variables and...
Lemme just work this out with easier numbers...
(10^2)^(10^2)(10^2) = (100)^(100)(100) = 100^10,000 = 10^20,000
10^(2(10^(2(10^2)))) = 10^(2(10^(200)) = 10^200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
Those two ways of splitting the numbers give incredibly different results, and I'm incredibly confuddled. But I really don't think "(10^68)(10^68)" is equivalent to "10^(68(10^68))." Wait...
(10^2)(10^2) = (100)(100) = 10,000 = 10^4
10^(2(100)) = 10^200
Nope, still confuzzlated.
EDIT:
And Reddit really can't handle parentheses and carets used in conjunction.
u/696e6372656469626c65 [+3] I think, therefore I am pretentious. (10 hours later)
The formatting in your comment is really wonky, so I can't really tell what the expressions you're working with are meant to represent. In any case, let me try expanding your original number a bit more slowly:
(10^68)^(10^68)^(10^68)Now, I'm going to place a set of dollar signs around the part of the expression that we're going to expand first, like so:
(10^68)^$(10^68)^(10^68)$Let a = 10, b = 68, and c = 10^68 . Then we have:
(10^68)^((a^b)^c) = (10^68)^(a^(b*c))Replacing the variables with their actual values once more, we get:
(10^68)^(a^(b * c)) = (10^68)^(10^(68*10^68))Now, let a = 10 and b = 68 again. This time, however, we'll let c equal the entire rightmost part of the expression (indicated with dollar signs):
(10^68)^$(10^(68*10^68))$Performing the replacement:
(a^b)^c = a^(b*c)Putting the numbers back in:
a^(b*c) = 10^(68*10^(68*10^68))And so we have a final expansion of 10^(68 * 10^(68 * 10^68)).
Let me know if any part of that didn't make sense.
u/ElizabethRobinThales [+1] Practically Perfect in Every Way (7 days later)
I don't even know what I wasn't getting here, reddit is a horrible platform for math. Also, I said 100 to the 100 was 10,000 for some reason, and that's off by an order of magnitude.
EDIT:
It might be off by like 50 orders of magnitude.
u/696e6372656469626c65 [+2] I think, therefore I am pretentious. (7 days later)
196 orders of magnitude, actually. :P
u/callmebrotherg [+6] now posting as /u/callmesalticidae (46 minutes later)
This is neither fiction nor a discussion of particular fiction. It belongs in one of the weekly threads.
u/None [+4] (7 hours later)
[deleted]
u/mack2028 [+0] (8 hours later)
I don't see why my fanfic of Nitzchi is any less valid than one of Rowling just because mine is shorter.
u/mack2028 [-1] (17 hours later)
Is there a particular reason my fanfic of Nitzchi isn't as valid as any other fic?
u/-main [+6] (17 hours later)
Since when is rephrasing a philosophical exercises considered a form of fiction? Not all text is tells a story.
u/callmebrotherg [+3] now posting as /u/callmesalticidae (23 hours later)
How is this fanfic?
u/mack2028 [+1] (a minute later)
My first thought is that the question still seems to be phrased to create a negative bias. If someone wanted to go through and see if they could take out the negative stuff while making the question remain clear I'll edit the post and credit you.