Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="paradox42" data-source="post: 3766946" data-attributes="member: 29746">It's actually a consequence of an obscure part of information theory- processing requires energy, so to reach a different state than you were in before you have to have energy to spend on it. But in theory, if you do some processing that has no result, which is to say that it eventually "loops" the whole back around to its original state, then it is possible to have whatever processing you did during the loop take no energy whatsoever. This, in turn, would be the only type of process available after the final "heat death" of the universe, after which there is literally no energy (or matter to convert to energy) left to use. Any information process occurring after that point, therefore, would be required to think thoughts in circles- always coming back to the starting point.This is a plot point in Stephen Baxter's novel Manifold: Time, within which the author suggested that the entities living in the processors doing these looping computations slowly went insane as the eons progressed because they were forced to think the same thoughts over and over again in cycles. I have to say that I agree with the conclusion, though technically sanity would be restored at the start of every cycle since by definition it would have to reach its starting state to be a cycle at all. Unless we assume the entities were insane to begin with, which may not be far off the mark, but that's neither here nor there. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />And yes, it is possible to have a system be finite but also boundless- the point is that some aspects of it are and remain finite, but other aspects are not necessarily so. This is what the Elemental Planes in 2nd Edition were like- they were supposed to be infinite planes, but they had borders that bled into each other so that you could actually cross physically from one plane to the other just by traveling in the correct direction for a long enough distance. The way this can happen is that if the infinity is in the direction away from the rest of the planes, then each plane becomes like a three-dimensional slice out of an infinitely thick pie or cake- there is no contradiction with assembling this. Why people had trouble understanding this concept has, frankly, always been beyond me- I "got it" right away. But I know my mind has little to no trouble thinking in three dimensions (heck, every now and then I'm even capable of thinking in four), so perhaps that's it.</blockquote>

Verification