My two points:
(1) This is not something that can be rigorously defined and answered and calculated and proven
(2) Let’s tentatively define a human action as something that a human being can spend 2 hours or less doing which does NOT involve just remaining physically motionless.
(2) Is it possible for a human to take two actions that seem distinct to that human, but which appear identical when viewed on DVD? If not, or if only trivially, then there’s a mapping from human actions onto DVD, which (since there are certainly DVDs that can NOT be represented by human actions) means that the number of DVDs is greater than the number of human actions.
How about feeling? Tasting? Smelling?
I would certainly count smelling, say, a decomposing corpse as a distinct action when compared with smelling, say, a rose. However, someone watching my actions would only see me breathe in.
(Or, if you’re going to nitpick, a rose scented like a decomposing corpse vs a rose scented like a rose)
Hey, some of us would take issue with the “psychopathic madman” catagorization—we just have a different value of some things is all.
And sometimes, in an arbitrary, rudderless world, it’s the attitude one needs to soar—if at their base, most of the behaviors if life forms are magnifications and distortions of survival habits, the end-products of natural selection, then what could be more in keeping with that drive than to rise above evolution itself?
If the universe has no meaning, then we need not stop at vain, furtive attempts to find meaning in our fleeting lives; we can strike out and give meaning to the cosmos! To learn and understand all knowable, and to take up that knowledge to break down and recast the cosmos in our own image; that, that would be long beyond the simple rising above the slime of our roots, it would nothing less than an ascent to GODHOOD! A-HAHAHAHAHAHA!
::Thunder, lightning crashes behind Ran, casting his stark sillouette::
Sorry, it’s late. I’ll come up with a better rant next time.
Of course, one might argue the oppisate, too…I mean, ya ever felt nostalgia? Ever had a time in your life you wished you could live again? And…have you ever gone back to a playground you played in as a toddler, as an adult? I guess what I’m saying is, in the real world, a “perfect” fantasy-like reality is often not as perfect as it seemed at the time, and even at that, wouldn’t be able to exist outside that fragile moment in time. An escapist, in a way, might recognize that…and, in a way, persuing the fantasy is working to make it, but in a more perfect, truer form than could ever exist in reality.
Kinda “Gygaxian Quixotic Platonism,” or something.
I think the question is, are we deliberately trying to spoof the test? If so, we could also have a person sit stock still in a chair watching a variety of things that are off camera, and have our DVD camera focusing only on that person. Or we could go into a darkened room, turn off all the lights, and do various quiet things with the lights off. Except that a DVD could represent what we were doing, it would just require a bit more technology and preparation. Is this a question of video hardware and limitations, or a question of information theory?
As for something like smell, well, first of all, if the person taking the action is cooperating with the DVD-making (which there’s no reason they shouldn’t be), they could describe what they are smelling. Alternatively, it’s certainly quite plausible to construct an odor-sniffing device and add its output into a secondary track (like subtitles) to the DVD. Now, that may seem like a bit of a cheap way out, but again, the question is not “can current DVD encoding standards measure all the same things human sense can measure”, it’s “is the number of possible perceptibly and memorably distinct human experiences greater than 2^(2^33)”, or something like that.
I assume you meant actions, since the number of possible distinct human experiences is far beyond that 2^(2^33) number. There are, let’s say, 6 billion people alive right now. They are each experiencing something different, as their location (spatial and mental) is different. Furthermore, they will experience something new every Y unit of time. This experience is not the same for everyone, since it will be modified by what they experienced in the last Y unit. So now we have 6billion people experiencing something new every Y unit of time (6 billion)^(number of Y units it takes humans to be extinct). If you take an infinite length DVD then this argument, in its current form, does not hold. However, since we are not using an infinite length DVD there is no issue. Therefore, the number of possible distinct human experiences is greater than the number of possible combinations on a single DVD.
So, back to actions: What makes an action perceptibly and memorably distinct? If I walk outside and step on a bug, what is my action?
Did I just commit the action of squishing a bug?
The action of taking a step?
The action of going outside?
The action of going outside and taking a step and squishing a bug?
What if the bug was Billy’s pet bug?
Did I then commit the action of going outside and taking a step and squishing Billy’s bug?
Or did I commit three different actions: I went outside, I took a step, and I squished Billy’s bug.
What if the bug was given to Billy by his grandmother?
Did I then squish Billy’s bug that was given to him by his grandmother, or just squish Billy’s bug?
Would it be different if I went outside to squish Billy’s bug?
If the answer is yes, then we run into the problem of trying to store too much information, for you need to know everything about the bug, why Billy valued it, and why I wanted to squish it.
If the answer is no, then you could take it to the extreme. What makes taking one step different from taking any other? Nothing, since they’re all just people moving. Oh, what makes one person moving different from another person moving? Nothing, it’s all just people doing something. What makes one person doing something different from another person doing something? The person involved? Since doing something is about as broad as you can get to describe an action, I can sum up the entirety of human actions in three words: People doing something.
No need for a DVD.
This is where my question about what it means to represent an action was leading.
Sure, you can construct an odor-sniffing device, and an odor-making device. However, what I smell doesn’t always match what other people smell; it is subjective.
Human action and experience is not objective. You can not accurately record actions using purely objective means. The DVD in this case, however, is objective. Sure, I can say what I’m thinking, but why I’m thinking what I am also plays a part. Therefore, a DVD can not accurately record a human action.
Furthermore, the result of my action plays a part in determining what my action was. This presents quite a bit of difficulty, since you need to figure out where to draw the line; when do you say something stops being the result of one action, and starts being the result of another?
You’re vastly, vastly, vastly underestimating how big 2^(2^33) is.
Let’s suppose that there are 8 billion humans on earth. And let’s suppose that each one of them experiences something every NANOsecond (that is, every billionth of a second). And let’s suppose that they do this 24/7/365. And let’s suppose that there have been 8 billion humans on earth for the last 100,000 years. Many of these estimations are WAY overestimations, just so I’m erring on your side.
So, that means the total number of human experiences ever experienced is:
the number of possible DVD is around 10^2000000000
It’s not even close.
All fine questions, but like I said, there’s no real point in trying to come up with a rigorous definition.
Here’s another way of thinking about it. On a DVD we could put 2 hours of high quality video of the experience, PLUS 10 novel-length books discussing the experience, from the point of view of the experiencer PLUS 7 experts and 2 psychics, and still have enough data left over for incredibly accurate bio-metric sensor data, or smell-o-vision, or stock market quotes, or pretty much anything else you can imagine that might help describe the experience.
So, is it possible for a person to have two different experiences which SEEM DISTINCT to that person, but which produce identical DVDs?
And note, by the way, that it’s trivially easy to observe that the opposite IS possible. If I sit still and breathe twice, the two breaths will seem identical to me, but DVDs of the events will NOT be identical, barring ungodly probabilistic unlikelihood.
You are correct. I erred in my initial judgment of the problem, thinking it exponential when it wasn’t.
There are a few ways to respond to this…one is easily shot down, provided we have a bigger DVD…Can a human brain store more information than a DVD?
Another response goes back to what it means to represent/store an action.
I think we should end this discussion in this thread now…we stopped talking about being attracted to the hyperlogical, mad-scientist type a while ago
You know, now it all makes sense.
Every time I call those 976 / $2.95 a minute numbers on late night T.V and start with the line “Yeah baby, got my Engineering diploma right here” those girls go, like, craaaazy.
Thank you for reassuring me it’s not really my credit card money they want after all.
I have to get back to the lab now though, the monkeys are hoarding all the good sub-cultures from the petri bar.
