Nelson_Flood

Concerning your first point, that the designer has to hand-insert that all-important sign bit. So how do humans come up with these sign bits? I imagine a trial-and-error process of interacting with the controlled system. During this, the person's brain is generating an error signal derived directly or indirectly from an evolutionarily-fixed set point. While trying to control the system manually using an initially random sign bit, I suppose the brain can analyze at a low level in the hardware that the error is 1) changing exponentially, and 2) has a positive or negative slope, as the case may be. If the situation is exponential and the slope is positive, you synaptically... (read more)

Last week I had an idea very similar to the "cosmic immune system out to get us" concept expressed above, as a result of reading the book "The Life of the Cosmos" (1997) by physicist Lee Smolin, who paradoxically is an opponent of the anthropic principle, preferring his concept of cosmological natural selection as the explanation of why the laws of physics are as we find them. His is a many-worlds cosmology but the individual universes in the ensemble can reproduce further universes, a process accompanied by the introduction of small mutations into the laws of physics (the genome of a universe) that the progeny inherit, which causes the ensemble to... (read 740 more words →)