Free The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil Page A

behavior as zero) is enough for evolution to beat entropy and create wonderful designs, given enough time, in the same way that an ever so slight asymmetry in the balance between matter and antimatter was enough to allow matter to almost completely overtake its antithesis.
    Evolution is thereby only a quantum smarter than completely unintelligent behavior. The reason that our human-created evolutionary algorithms are effective is that we speed up time a million- or billionfold, so as to concentrate and focus its otherwise diffuse power. In contrast, humans are a lot smarter than just a quantum greater than total stupidity (of course, your view may vary depending on the latest news reports).
 
    THE END OF THE UNIVERSE
     
    What does the Law of Time and Chaos say about the end of the Universe?
    One theory is that the Universe will continue its expansion forever. Alternatively, if there’s enough stuff, then the force of the Universe’s own gravity will stop the expansion, resulting in a final “big crunch.” Unless, of course, there’s an antigravity force. Or if the “cosmological constant,” Einstein’s “fudge factor,” is big enough. I’ve had to rewrite this paragraph three times over the past several months because the physicists can’t make up their minds. The latest speculation apparently favors indefinite expansion.
    Personally, I prefer the idea of the Universe closing in again on itself as more aesthetically pleasing. That would mean that the Universe would reverse its expansion and reach a singularity again. We can speculate that it would again expand and contract in an endless cycle. Most things in the Universe seem to move in cycles, so why not the Universe itself? The Universe could then be regarded as a tiny wave particle in some other really big Universe. And that big Universe would itself be a vibrating particle in yet another even bigger Universe. Conversely, the tiny wave particles in our Universe can each be regarded as little Universes with each of their vibrations lasting fractions of a trillionth of a second in our Universe representing billions of years of expansion and contraction in that little Universe. And each particle in those little Universes could be ... okay, so I’m getting a little carried away.
    How to Unsmash a Cup
     
    Let’s say the Universe reverses its expansion. The phase of contraction has the opposite characteristics of the phase of expansion that we are now in. Clearly, chaos in the Universe will be decreasing as the Universe gets smaller. 1 can see that this is the case by considering the endpoint, which is again a singularity with no size, and therefore no disorder.
    We regard time as moving in one direction because processes in time are not generally reversible. If we smash a cup, we find it difficult to unsmash it. The reason for this has to do with the second law of thermodynamics. Since overall entropy may increase but can never decrease, time has directionality. Smashing a cup increases randomness. Unsmashing the cup would violate the second law of thermodynamics. Yet in the contracting phase of the Universe, chaos is decreasing, so we should regard time’s direction as reversed.
    This reverses all processes in time, turning evolution into devolution, Time moves backward during the second half of the Universe’s time span. So if you smash a favorite cup, try to do it as we approach the midpoint of the Universe’ s time span. You should find the cup coming together again as we cross over into the Universe’s contracting phase of its time span. Now if time is moving blackward during this contracting phase, what we (living in the expanding phase of the Universe) look forward to as the big crunch is actually a big bang to the creatures living (in reverse time) during the contracting phase. Consider the perspective of these time-reversed creatures living in what we regard as the contracting phase of the Universe. From their perspective, what we regard ad the