Hi Christian,

Glad you enjoyed my work. I look forward to reading yours soon.

Thanks for putting your questions and comments in a numbered list, so here I go point by point:

1) "Displaying for its operator every possible future, but could not show which one will occur" is similar to the collapse of the wave function in quantum mechanics. This should be the Bohr's point of view, while the Cassandra machines should represent Einstein's point of view. I think you suggest a third, intermediate point of view. Something like "a deterministic quantum mechanics".

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That's a cool observation. Yes, some kind of deterministic quantum mechanics is indeed the most attractive kind of interpretation of quantum mechanics in my opinion. My favorite paper about quantum interpretation is called "Quantum mechanics of measurement" by N.J. Cerf and C. Adami (1997). I've gotten something new and valuable every time I've read it, but I would probably need a Ph.D. in physics to be able to understand all of it.

2) I like your statement that "One must realize that we are still at a very early stage of science and technology". In science we need both humility and optimism.

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Yes, I'm glad you like it. Every generation seems to fancy themselves as somehow finally being at the pinnacle of progress, and every generation which believes such a thing is wrong.

3) Don't you think that it is, in a certain sense, a full circle that a case wherein an individual or group helps to bring certain future outcomes to fruition, based upon what has been learned in viewer foreknowledge?

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Yes, that's the (self-consistent) nature of it.

4) What is the difference between "unmistakable viewer foreknowledge" and "effectively unmistakable viewer foreknowledge"?

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Glad you asked. Technical note six offers a number of methods that FM operators might use to confirm instances of viewer foreknowledge, as such. So, "effectively unmistakable viewer foreknowledge" simply refers to viewer foreknowledge that can only be recognized as such after these techniques are used. Since, it is unmistakable in the end, I thought a good term would be effectively unmistakable. This term of convenience would not have been necessary if there was no length restriction for the essay--in that case, technical note six would have been part of the text.

5) What is called "second-time-around fallacy" in philosophy is called "chronology protection conjecture" in physics.

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Well, there is a definite distinction between the two. From Wikipedia: "The chronology protection conjecture is a conjecture by the physicist Professor Stephen Hawking that the laws of physics are such as to prevent time travel on all but sub-microscopic scales." However, the second-time-around fallacy essentially states that it is a fallacy to imagine that the past can be altered in a do-over initiated by the visit of a time traveler. The second-time-around fallacy is perfectly consistent with widespread use of pastward time travel, because time travel does not involve even the possibility of making changes to the past. That's why, on page 6, I refer to "time travel paradoxes" as a misnomer. They should henceforward be called "past alteration paradoxes," since the paradoxical results that have mistakenly been associated with time travel could only emerge from changes to the past, yet genuine time travel would strictly forbid any changes to the past whatsoever.

6) When Kurt Gödel have shown that closed timelike curves could in principle exist in general relativity, Einstein claimed that "such a potential existence gives me shivers running down my spine"

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That seems like an appropriate response to what was, in my opinion, one of the most important scientific developments of the 20th Century.

7) On one hand, the idea that the future will steer humanity looks intriguing. On the other and, don't you think that removing the element of surprise could mean that life will become bore? See also point 3).

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When foreknowledge machine technology is well-understood and has long been applied for maximum effect, if such a day ever comes, I really don't think it will be boring to know that one's children will grow up in a world that will be safe all their lives, without war, systematic oppression, corruption, or famine. To my way of thinking, that sounds like the opposite of boring.

Christian, thanks very much for your comments and questions. We could certainly do this again, if you should find that you have more.

Warmly,

Aaron

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

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

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

    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

      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.

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      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.

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      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