> At 02:24 PM 13/11/96 -0800, Tadeusz Niwinski wrote:
> >exists independent of ALL of us. In other words, if the Earth blows up
> and all
> >humans, books, DNA, and even the internet are torn to tiny pieces the
> world (or
> >the universe) will still exist. Will memes still exist? Will "statements"
> >still exist? (David McF: I don't have your answer on this -- have I missed it
> >or you haven't replied?).
>
> There are different kinds of statements: active (residing in an intentional
> agent) and dormant (residing in an artifact like a book or a floppy disk),
> human and alien, actual and potential.
>
> In your scenario all actual, human, active and dormant statements will
> cease to exist. Others kinds may exist elsewhere after the earth has
> been destroyed.
This assumes that all statements have to be physically stored somehow.
Having had to look into the biochemistry of learning in order to apply
biofeedback directly to it: I'm still not convinced that this has been
demonstrated as of 1993. Access, YES. Storage: Inconclusive. A
sufficient [overkill!] demonstration of YES for storage would be the
nanomemory editor: say, to install the arithmetic tables for the numbers
1 to 1000 by 1 to 1000.
[CLIP]
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
/ Towards the conversion of data into information....
/
/ Kenneth Boyd
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////