Play it again!

Gordon Simons (simons@stat.unc.edu)
Thu, 29 Jun 1995 00:07:16 -0400 (EDT)

In a recent posting Lloyd Eby raised the interesting question: If the
program were run again, would it develop in the same way or differently?
Brian Harper responded to this, and perhaps others have by the time this
gets sent.

I recall a discussion we had some time ago concerning the quote attributed
to St. Augustine to the effect that "The world was created WITH time." -
not "IN time." This seems fully reasonable. If so, might the question of
"replay" have no real meaning, logically - on a par with the question of
what existed BEFORE the universe was created? Perhaps this kind of
question has already been thought through by philosophers. Does anyone
know? If the question really is meaningless, then we are spared questions
of "freewill vs. divine foreknowledge" - arising from this source at
least.

Gordie