Talk:Dyson's eternal intelligence

And this is why the great old ones are sleeping — Preceding unsigned comment added by 200.160.80.90 (talk) 19:33, 29 August 2012 (UTC)

stub?
How do I classify this as a stub? Kangy 23:44, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

Wasn't part of this eternal intelligence concept that the person be held in suspended animation for ever-longer time periods or something? Ben Finn 13:17, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

tipler
it would be good for tipler to be mentioned here rather than just a "see also" pointing at omega point theory. 69.143.136.139 23:56, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

incomplete description for a layman like myself
Surely if you keep dividing forever you'll eventually end up with so few particles for fuel that thought may not be powered? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.133.183.47 (talk) 21:32, 5 March 2009 (UTC)


 * What makes you think the energy source would be particles? Energy can be stored in all sorts of ways - position in a gravitational field, for example. That's not necessarily discrete. --Gwern (contribs) 17:57 6 June 2009 (GMT)


 * This is like the old mathematician vs. engineer joke that says a mathematician will starve to death because he thinks he can just eat half the leftover spaghetti each night. I don't really see how this theory is any more reasonable than that. 71.245.139.158 (talk) 15:59, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

What about particle decay, is it taken into account? i haven't read the the article but it should be considered (unless somehow the system doesn't use particles that decay.... or particles at all) Harroyo (talk) 04:31, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

Why was this text removed?
I noticed that some text was removed by a non-registered user in 2007. Why? See: Danny (talk) 23:20, 14 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Probably for being OR. I've read Dyson's talk, and I'm not sure those criticisms are even straightforward interpretations of his talk & recent research. --Gwern (contribs) 14:10 17 June 2009 (GMT)

Zeno's paradox?
Is it just me, or does Dyson's "infinite-thoughts-on-finite-energy" argument just seem like a rehash of one of Zeno's paradoxes? At the moment, the article reads like the crux of Dyson's solution to gain "infinite" thoughts is just to use successively smaller fractions of a finite pool of energy. The idea, presumably, being that if you only ever use half of your stash for any one bout of serious thinking, you'll never run out. In which case, the solution appears to hinge on presupposing that energy is infinitely divisible. Which seems a dubious proposition at best. Anyway, it may just be that the article is currently not sufficiently clear (at least for me), and that Dyson means something altogether cleverer. Or, if he doesn't, the article should be edited such that it's clear that Dyson's infinity isn't quite as big as infinity. --P LUMBAGO 14:48, 28 August 2009 (UTC)

The text today saying "As the universe cooled, the thoughts would be slower and slower, but there would still be an infinite number of them." is not the same as having able to think an infinite amounts of thoughts. However, I would think that Dyson has shown that the sum of these times does not converge if the sleep intervals are choosen properly, but instead goes to infinity. I think the article should be updated (whether I'm right in my guess or not), but unfortunately I'm not the right person to do that. -- LM 27 Nov 2009 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 60.48.160.75 (talk) 08:49, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

But how does that work? Energy is stored and released in ultimately discrete forms, isn't it? Hence the "quantum" in "quantum mechanics". I don't see how it can diverge to infinity in a discrete system. I, too, immediately thought of Zeno's paradox, which does not work at all in a discrete system for the simple reason that you can't continue dividing in half forever... eventually you're left with one unit of energy, one quantum, and you can either use it or not use it, but there is no "use half of it" option. Right? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 97.100.133.125 (talk) 02:23, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

Gaurav Dhar (talk) 07:07, 29 March 2011 (UTC) Lately i have felt this way. It's a great work and helped me solve my problem to a level. Now if the universe cools once we are over with the thoughts and in line to gain more energies (from food in that case), we would naturally come to a conclusion if the universe cools, it has to contract. Now our patch, the solar system as the system, Earth is getting hotter due to global warming and during that time the rest of the universe would have to cool to obey that Energy is conserved. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-energy_universe). - cheers! Signature - Gaurav Dhar

As long as the geometric series 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + 1/32 + ... = 2 converges, I do not see how a countable number of iterations could produce infinitely many thoughts. Is this explained anywhere? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.78.31.168 (talk) 00:17, 8 October 2014 (UTC)

The amount of energy required to do computation drops as the ambient temperature drops. So, you can wait for the temperature to drop more and get the SAME number of thoughts out of a SMALLER amount of energy... not a SMALLER number of thoughts out of a SMALLER amount of energy. -- Luke Somers — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.191.225.120 (talk) 17:46, 26 August 2016 (UTC)