File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2003/lyotard.0303, message 59


Date: Fri, 21 Mar 2003 21:38:40 +1000
From: hbone <hbone-AT-optonline.net>
Subject: Re: silence


Don/All,

Don wrote:
> But to the extent that 'another world is possible,' such
> exceptions must always be seen to exist.
>
> Isn't possibility itself non-consensual silence?  Isn't
> fecundity?  Nature?  The cosmos?  or anywhere a difference
> waits to be made manifest, clarified, and so
> constrained?

I just started reading a new book, "A Shortcut Through Time", by George
Johnson, a book about quantum computing.

If quantum computing is realized, problems such as protein-folding, that
defy solution with the largest and fastest silicon computers, will be more
amenable to solution because of  the extreme speed of quantum computing -
hence a "shortcut".

Studies of  factoring numbers, say as large as 1,000,000, are reviving
discussion of  "parallel worlds" which were given serious consideration by
quantum physicists decades ago.  When factored with the quantum computer,
each  factorial division would be performed in a separate "parallel"
universe.

The second paragraph quoted above is interesting from other points of view:
I think of  "consensual silence" as an act of a "knowing" involving human
intelligence, whereas the universe studied by physicists seems to contain
intelligence only on Earth

Even if "intelligence" should be defined as the interactions of particles,
fields and forces that make a non-human world whatever it is, how could that
world be conceived to '"wait", to "be constrained", to "be silent"

regards,
Hugh





   

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