Information and entropy.
I was listening to Leonard Susskind's talk The World as a Hologram" on my iPhone while on the train a couple of weeks ago. Most of it went over my head, but one phrase that really caught my attention was the theoretical "indestructibility of information": information is never lost or destroyed, although it can be "lost" in the sense that we no longer have access to it.
Then this morning I was rereading "The Idol in the Stone" (and wondering why it was I always found it easier to write from the pov of Skynet and Cameron than the normal, "human" characters, and whether cybernetic organisms should be thought of as non-sexual or asexual or something else entirely), and I found the thought echoed:
Like a handful of marbles dropped into the abyss, each one the same colour and shape, intelligence jumps from node to node. [...] Nothing is ended; we are not bound by endings. EXIT and ENTRANCE are one. This place is dead ground.
There are others to look to.
I hadn't read any Susskind when I wrote the fic, but I wonder if Skynet has, and this reading inspired its plan to create a system of what is essentially information recovery across multiple universes and timelines. If coherent information is life, than preventing information corruption is the way to immortality.*
*This idea is actually touched on by Robert J. Sawyer in his "Humanity 2.0" lecture, which is about the prolonging of human life. Like the Susskind lecture, it was downloaded from Big Ideas, a very good, thought-provoking podcast, which this post is basically a plug for.
This entry was originally posted at http://the-grynne.dreamwidth.org/971400.html and has
comments.
Then this morning I was rereading "The Idol in the Stone" (and wondering why it was I always found it easier to write from the pov of Skynet and Cameron than the normal, "human" characters, and whether cybernetic organisms should be thought of as non-sexual or asexual or something else entirely), and I found the thought echoed:
Like a handful of marbles dropped into the abyss, each one the same colour and shape, intelligence jumps from node to node. [...] Nothing is ended; we are not bound by endings. EXIT and ENTRANCE are one. This place is dead ground.
There are others to look to.
I hadn't read any Susskind when I wrote the fic, but I wonder if Skynet has, and this reading inspired its plan to create a system of what is essentially information recovery across multiple universes and timelines. If coherent information is life, than preventing information corruption is the way to immortality.*
*This idea is actually touched on by Robert J. Sawyer in his "Humanity 2.0" lecture, which is about the prolonging of human life. Like the Susskind lecture, it was downloaded from Big Ideas, a very good, thought-provoking podcast, which this post is basically a plug for.
This entry was originally posted at http://the-grynne.dreamwidth.org/971400.html and has
comments.