On Mon, 23 Jul 2007 08:32:37 +0800, andrew burke <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I take issue with 'It will give you the same answer
> each time you ask it'
I understand (though I'm hardly an expert in such matters) that there is a
school of physicists who believe that certain phenomena observable on the
quantum level are explainable only on the assumption that each time the
phenomenon occurs, an alternate universe is cloned which is identical to
this one, except that the phenomenon in question has in that universe a
probabilistic outcome opposite to the one which it has in this one. Thus
the existence of one universe implies the existence of an infinite, or at
least very large, number of others.
I only wrote "will" because there exists no word which also means "won't."
We might speculate that each meaningful element in any given poem generates
another poem which is identical except for that element having the opposite
meaning to the one it has in the poem before us. Or perhaps each element
generates a number of alternate poems equal to the number of possible
meanings which that element could have. Thus the existence of one poem
implies the existence of an infinite, or at least very large, number of others.
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