That works best for me, I can't promise it will work for you :) My company, Vivox, provides voice integration for MMORPGs and grids like Second Life. I'm only in my third month there but so far it's been helping me understand better what Tom has been talking about with his references to the Sims and WoW. This stuff is all very new to me - I'm not ashamed to admit I am a member of the pinball generation.

Somewhere around here, there is a thread about conserving or saving computer cycles that might interest you. If I can dig it up I will post it.

Edit: Here you go viewtopic.php?f=9&t=3849&hilit=computer+cycles How does calculating probabilities save computation cycles?

Hey thanks for that, ill give it a read later this evening.

Last night i was sitting at my desk a little distracted from my work, i was listening to a radio interview with Tom, and in it a radio presenter asked a question about collecting data from a probable future.

If we can collect data from the future, then couldn't we go into the future now, and find cures for certain illnesses? or bring back new ideas for technology?

What is stopping us from finding that cure for cancer?

People do go off and bring back what they might... ever read HG Wells? And sometimes the tech stuff is near enough to be understandable and developed. Probably there are cures for cancers out there, and get applied here and there, but there are heavily vested interests (financial) in maintaining disease. You know, some 15 or 20 years ago there was a big discovery, and it was announced that you would be able to get a preventive shot in the arm and it would knock out dental decay for the rest of your life. It was all but certain to get final approval. It happened though that the American Dental Association bought the rights to it, said they would study it, and golly gosh, we never heard a thing about it again.

-Montana

It's not The Future. It's many possible/probable ones with a probability assigned to each one. If cures are in all the probable futures, it will be easier to do what you're talking about.

But consider all the possibilities and reasons why people might not want cures to be made known?

This discussion of accessing the future probability database made me think about what I found about Jules Verne. Everybody knows that he wrote a number of books in which many of the details described (his visions about what the future holds) were to be found in the later years.

But one of books which is not known to the public is "Paris in the Twentieth Century".

The information is taken from wikipedia. I don't know how reliable is the information since I haven't read the book. But it may give you an idea about how you can access future probability database.



More information -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_in_the_20th_Century.

This idea about viewing possible technologies was tested also by remote viewer Joe McMoneagle.

Here is an excerpt from an interview http://www.firedocs.com/remoteviewing/joe/transcripts/mi960104jm.html

In his book The Ultimate Time Machine he expands upon his concepts about viewing the past, present and future. A good review which also includes some of his predictions of the future is here -> http://www.intuitive-connections.net/2006/book-timemachine.htm.

Right, so those things were all very probable - they had a high probability associated with them about being true in "the" future, "a" future, or "many" futures.

I wonder if the designers of the Eiffle Tower and the pyramid in the Louvre courtyard had read Joules Verne's book and decided that the prediction sounded like a good idea? That is a real possibility.

The rest was certainly not a copy from the book.

Ted

Nostradamus probably had access, and got his quatrains from what he saw so fuzzily in future probability threads.
Love
Bette

_________________
All That Is
what is?
Consciousness.

The thread on science fiction and the future got me thinking about a short, science fiction novel that I really like called "The City and The Stars" by Arthur C. Clarke (1953). I re-read it periodically and the last time I did so, I was struck by a number of concepts in the book that seemed to have parallels in MBT.

The story concerns a city far in the future, in which people are the products of a Master Computer which rules the city. They are "born" from the computer and when it is time for them to die, they return to the computer which adds their memories to the "folder" for that personality. After an interval of time the personality is reincarnated with all of its accumulated positive memories. Most of the people are in the grip of highly limiting fears and beliefs. The city is part physical and part virtual. Young people in the city play "sagas" which are a type of multi-player virtual reality game. Eventually a being is encountered of pure consciousness, whose perceptions are not limited by the constraints of physical matter reality.

I cannot help wondering if Clarke, who had a solid reputation as a futurist, did not unconsciously access the larger consciousness system while writing the book.

For those who might be interested, here is a link to an HTML version of the book, which will be up for two weeks:
http://www.adrive.com/public/5b2cab9eed87868f3b6efdd5be1beed407478a963b3d363e7b312f7366123f92.html

Whitcomb,

That's awesome, I'm definitely intrigued. I downloaded the book and will add it to my reading queue. Thanks!

I wonder the same thing about Isaac Asimov. Here's a short story by him called "The Last Question" that deals with entropy, computers, and consciousness:
http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
(Hyperspace could be taken as a metaphor for NPMR)

_________________
Mike