Removing the Element of Surprise by Aaron M. Feeney

Dear Aaron,

Thanks for your kind clarifications. It is my pleasure discussing with you. Let us keep in touch then.

Cheers, Ch.

Hi Aaron,

I've given you that rating you deserve. Haven't had time yet to get your book from Amazon. I keep getting lots of ideas which I turn into articles at my page on vixra.org. My computer screen turned pink 6 months ago, and is extremely hard to read now, so I hope your book is available in printed form.

Regards,

Rodney

Dear Feeney,

You see? I told you you'll be bombarded. Yours is a bold essay.

What I personally find intriguing (even frustrating) is that without having before set a camera therein we cannot just walk into a room and decide to view say its past 1 hour or 30 minutes etc. Feeney, once we can get a method to zoom in and out of space-time then future and past viewing will become one. In fact I wager that past viewing in this sense will be far more useful because it will revolutionize crime investigation, privacy, etc.

Now to the practical side, isn't a conservation law actually kind of a natural future knowledge "machine"?

In other words, to adopt a different "conservation law" (universal constant) is to adopt a different observer/space-time.

I take this approach , so you can understand that our thesis somehow merge, namely: man will be then the "space-time" i.e. the de facto unit for measuring/predicting space and time.

I appreciate your statement that: "...not only will viewer foreknowledge eliminate the uncertainty and deception that warfare requires for its existence, it will also gradually eliminate the concept of collective enemies."

In your own words I'll say, your essay was very good and I learnt a lot!

Chidi

Was me above.

and, does this computer have mind of it own? Keeps logging me out!

Chidi

Dear Aaron!

I read your essay. It is well written, and yes theoretically or factually there may be already 'future viewing machines' in operation.

However, there are some crucial questions worth considering applying such kind of 'machines'.

1. Everything start there - we all are able to control at least estimate the possible outcomes of our own thoughts, before inventing any kind of technology.

2. Is there a necessity to establish over us a sophisticated intelligence who controls our thoughts?

3. As a human can't you enjoy when happening getting some surprise?

As per my consideration, because every past experience action, event based on thoughts and the thoughts can be changed, so the past unfortunately can't be fixed also the future can't be predicted unambiguously. Everything is tested in a present moment of thinkers' actual focus but based on their individual experiences and controlling or not their own thoughts, and that is what very difficult to predict using only a human mind.

I offer you some links for your further reading:

How to time travel

Rumored Technology

Paycheck - film

Fred Allan Wolf - material

Damien Broderick Living in the future right now

Kind regards,

Valeria

Hi Aaron,

I could need some more rating. I hope you reciprocate the favour (see my comment above) and rate and hopefully also comment on my essay.

Thanks

Luca

Good luck the with the exam ... and the contest.

Luca

Dear Aaron,

You have requested me reading your essay, make comment and rate you which I have done, but you promised to reciprocate the same but I am yet to see you do all these. STRIKING A BALANCE BETWEEN TECHNOLOGY AND ECOSYSTEM use this direct link http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/2020

Expect you you.

Wishing you the best as said earlier.

Regards

Gbenga

Dear Aaron,

I like your idea of the foreknowledge machines. Excellent imagination. I rated your unique essay a full score 10.

Good luck!

Leo KoGuan

Lots of interesting stuff to discuss here. I don't have as much time as I would like now, but two quick points occur to me:

2) Because the laws of physics basically work the same forward as backward, photons traveling forward through time are equivalent to photons traveling backward through time in the other direction. In a sense it's not clear that photons travel through time at all, since the interval along the path of a photon is zero. We can think of the photons that leave a flashlight just as well as photons that arrive at the bulb from the future. So I think we need another explanation for the arrow of time--for, specifically, why we appear to get useful information only from photons arriving from the past--beside the finite speed of light.

3) Observing the arrival of radiation from a gamma-ray burst 20 years in the future requires information about the burst to travel from the source to us in the present day faster than the speed of light in apparent violation of general relativity. Using the same principle we could send a message faster than the speed of light by transmitting it to the future of a receiver with a foreknowledge machine. Maybe this is possible, but it suggests that foreknowledge machines depend on the existence of exotic spacetimes, which makes me skeptical.

Good luck on your exam--and I look forward to hearing your thoughts on my own essay!

Robert

Aaron,

It took me a minute to grasp that viewing the future in your context is not the same as predicting events. So I see we share a philosophy about the relativity of time. The nature of predictability, in fact, was the subject of my last year's FQXi essay.

You should find that your modulo 4 counting system exactly corresponds to the Bell-Aspect interpretation of quantum mechanics; there is no way in principle to beat the nonlocality of a programmed observation. The space simply isn't big enough.

The added degree of freedom imparted, however, both by the Everett hypothesis and a simple point at infinity in a 4-dimension spacetime, does allow local-global mapping of events continuously to themselves, with a deterministic result that is as much future as it is present. That is, the complete measure of events on a closed [0,1] interval, locally, corresponds in a self-similar way to the global half open interval [0,1).

Engaging essay, and I wish you well with it.

Best,

Tom

Damn logouts.

Dear Aaron,

I hope that I am still on your spreadsheet.

In my post of may 12 I sent you my idea of "consciouss time travel" but the illustration did not come along, so here it is again.

If you are interested in the whole artiocle I will sent it to your private mail,

mine is

wilhelmus.d@orange.fr

best regards

WilhelmusAttachment #1: figure_4_ENM_HOPPER.jpg

Hi Robert,

I agree, we've been having an interesting discussion. I will get right to replying:

2) Because the laws of physics basically work the same forward as backward, photons traveling forward through time are equivalent to photons traveling backward through time in the other direction. In a sense it's not clear that photons travel through time at all, since the interval along the path of a photon is zero. We can think of the photons that leave a flashlight just as well as photons that arrive at the bulb from the future. So I think we need another explanation for the arrow of time--for, specifically, why we appear to get useful information only from photons arriving from the past--beside the finite speed of light.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This is an excellent point. I have not seen this point being raised in discussions of the arrow of time. However, I can see no reason why photons from the future would be compelled to interact with an eye or a camera, the way they can be conceived as converging upon a flashlight bulb. I think the answer to the why question you suggest comes down to a fundamental difference between emitters and absorbers.

3) Observing the arrival of radiation from a gamma-ray burst 20 years in the future requires information about the burst to travel from the source to us in the present day faster than the speed of light in apparent violation of general relativity. Using the same principle we could send a message faster than the speed of light by transmitting it to the future of a receiver with a foreknowledge machine. Maybe this is possible, but it suggests that foreknowledge machines depend on the existence of exotic spacetimes, which makes me skeptical.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Why would we need such a complicated arrangement, if we merely want to transmit superluminal messages? Superluminal signals that penetrate Faraday cages were pioneered in the late 19th century by everyone-should-know-who, and other methods have been found by other researchers since then. This may come as something of a shock (a pun in this context), but I will be happy to provide you with references. It would be more convenient to do so over email. (Go to my ebook's page on amazon.com and hover over my name to link to my author page, where you will find my email address.)

Now, I don't want to promote the idea that superluminal messages would violate relativity--this is not a simplistic area of science--there is a lot more mathematical leeway than that involved. Even superluminal travel would not necessarily violate relativity, as Miguel Alcubierre's work has so famously shown.

Other researchers have discovered a totally different way to achieve superluminal travel without running afoul of Einstein's powerful dilemma, as I will also share with you. Believe it or not, there is more than one way around the seemingly unbreakable limitation which arises through the interaction of E=mc2 and f=ma.

Again, it has been a pleasure. I look forward to continuing our discussion and expanding it over email. Also, I am nearing the end of your article, so I will be opening a new discussion with you shortly, on your page.

Warmly,

Aaron

Aaron,

Your farsighted, anticipatory, structured and generous nature provides smart and diligent guidelines to communicate in a visionary way. Definitely your essay in a poetic, analytic and challenging way provides an insight that provokes thoughts, and questions. Reading it brought up the question of how is it possible to follow the biophoton in the future? Is it contained in the biophoton a blue print to follow different structures in the layers of time or is it free? I appreciate you shared the possibility of the emergent new questionnaire of how to lead the self to a positive reality.

The suggestion of reading the posts of the persons mentioned in your post are worth reading and help to see constructive interpretations of your work, visions and eagers of helping human kind.I also appreciate you shared a score that is clever, enthusiastic and smart structured grades for qualifying other essays.

Wishing you success in achieving a way to download Cassandra and Everett machines from the intangible world into the tangible one to help human kind. We could share in the future platforms of work, meanwhile Black Sky Thinking wants to invite human kind to develop inner world to make rational cybernetics of cosmos, Cassandra/Everett machines would be an excellent tool to structure a rational platform for a positive reality for human kind. I remain thankful of your post and with the best wishes for you.

Kindly Orenda

Aaron,

Interesting essay, I have a strict belief to theory of relativities so I think we cannot get to access to the future and i do believe we can not calculate what happens in the future exactly as numerics lost some information in the process of quantization. (this maybe the same statement of recent hawking's chaos quantum condition in his black hole denying. anyway, we've got the degree of freedom to imagination and this always makes us building the future indeed so i think your essay would be deserved as rated.

ryoji

Dear Aaron,

I agree with most other comments pointing out that your essay is fun reading, and gives the definite impression that you have worked hard on the topic. But I see the following problems.

If I understand correctly, foreknowledge machines (FM) either return information (`viewer foreknowledge`) that must be definite and correct, or nothing, depending on where you point them in future spacetime. Cassandra machines are different: they would always show you the future, but they turn out to be impossible (leading to contradiction).

Then, is it correct to say that FMs are Cassandra machines that sometimes does not show anything?

After discussing FMs and related issues, you come to the topic of the contest, and you claim that FMs can be beneficial for `steering our future`. But: When they do not show anything, they can`t be useful. And when they show something, we can be sure that what the viewer sees will definitely happen (since the foreseen future is inviolable). Then, why bother acting? Can`t we comfortably sit and listen to the Beatles vinyl records, while waiting for the foreseen future to happen, whether good or bad?

At p. 7, at the bottom of the second paragraph of Section `Removing the Element of Surprise` you seem to provide a sort of proof that the usage of FMs would tend to eliminate undesirable outcomes. I feel that the crucial passage of the argument is: `However, truly undesirable outcomes that are feasible for a civilization to avoid would strongly invite a VCO, but in such cases there could be no explanation as to why a VCO does not occur.` I could not grasp the logic here. In particular, why would that strongly invite a VCO? Also, words such as `strongly` and `overwhelmingly` suggest a probabilistic argument, while the general context would seem more that of a definite, yes/no type of argument. In any case, given the limited space you had, I could not find clear and convincing argumentation for either.

Thanks for any clarification

Tommaso