The collapse to the final singularity takes an infinite time as viewed from inside the universe. During that time the robots recreate all the humans and life forms that ever existed in a computer simulation. Not only do we all live our lives over again in that simulation, but over and over and over again. And not just our lives, but also all the possible lives we ever might have had, good and bad. That’s the immortality Tipler says we can look forward to.

That sounds like the ending to this creepy Charles Stross story.

One of my biggest problems with his line of logic falls on his understanding (or lack thereof) of the word “consistent.” In his argument, for the laws of physics to be consistent throughout time, life must exist and advance to sufficient technology level to somehow buffer the Second Law of Thermodynamics against violation in the collapsing universe. This, to me, means that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is not a fundamental, consistent law of the universe. Either that, or it means the collapse cannot happen without help. However, his assumption was that the collapse must happen - “the laws of physics guarantee it” is his mantra, it seems - which leads to the conclusion that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is only consistent with the intervention of life in the universe, which means it is not consistent.

It’s just one of many problems. What I found most fascinating was that I think that Christians will find this book just as disappointing as physicists (not to imply there can’t be a substantial overlap between the two). For example, his definition of “heaven” as a utopia for uploaded or simulated concsciousnesses that mimic life lacks a hell … something which he does not address in his book much, if at all … I don’t recall any mention of hell, actually. I’ll have to check the index.

It describes neither recognizable physics nor recognizable Christianity, though Tipler is clearly knowledgable enough in both fields to avoid any outright falsehood in talking about either, and instead skirts the issue with compelling misdirections.

Some ruminations on the writing of the book, its themes, and the CERN LHC can be found on my blog http://moridura.blogspot.com also some sample chapters.

[Tipler] argues that the resurrection of Jesus occurred when the atoms in his body spontaneously decayed into neutrinos and antineutrinos, which later converted back into atoms to reconstitute him.

Maybe there were two external observations of the life of Christ, An interference of Born probability through the reconstruction of his wave function, creating a reverse superposition that will not be observed until a certain point in the future, therefore leaving resurrection still a possibility.

For those non-social-scientists in the crowd (e.g. everyone but me), a quick introduction. The Coase Theorem basically proves that in a world with no transaction costs (e.g. costs of finding out who you can deal with, costs of negotiating, costs of enforcing contracts, etc.), the economy will be welfare-maximizing. (summary)

It’s hard to figure out what exactly the argument is, because it’s filled with insane digressions about “the relation between the cosmos and humanity” and so forth. But as far as I can tell, he argues that a world with “no transaction costs” also entails:
- A world of universal mind-reading, and, indeed, universal omniscience (”if transactions cost nothing, then information costs nothing, so all actors have all, and I mean all information relevant to their actions.”)
- “eternity is experienced in a split second.”
- everyone will have complete empathy for everyone else
- Since everyone knows all facts, they agree on all social/moral decisions.

Needless to say, the first three points are silly and that last point ignores so many philosophical questions about ethics that it’s worthless to any serious reader. For example, he suggests that perfect knowledge about who would turn out to be a criminal (and what sorts of positions does that commit him to about fatalism, etc.?) would entail agreement on who should be killed, etc. But that assumes away a whole ethical debate over the morality of intervening, e.g., to save A and B by killing C.

More to the point, he “refutes” the fact/value distinction by simply ignoring it, by claiming that in a world of universal empathy and omniscience, the values *of course* would be the same. Argument? Well, there isn’t one.

And then, of course, he suggests a moral rule for this, “thou shalt act to reduce transaction costs for others.” Somehow this “underlies” the scientific rule against faking data. And then he claims that he’s achieve the reduction of philosophy of economics and of economics (natch) to physics.

I read a bizarre essay in in late ’90s where the author contended that the internet was going to evolve into God.

Maybe it’s part of the plan.

e.

Splitter.

One day, the universe will recollapse to an infinitely small counterpart of the big bang called the Omega Point (I believe this was invented by a guy named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin).

Yes, the ‘Omega Point’ idea traces its origin to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin who coined the idea in a series of essays circa 1920-1930 and wrote about it more extensively in ‘The Phenomenon of Man’. He saw the Omega Point as something inevitable in the context of biological evolution, which in turn is simply another link in the chain of evolution from cosmological to stellar, to geological ..etc. While the emergence of life on Earth initiated the birth of the ‘biosphere’, he thought of the emergence of beings with rational free agency as the birth of the ‘noosphere’, the sphere of thought/self-conscious reflection. From this point, evolution isn’t just physiological but psychological-social. This emergence also necessitates the emergence of units of ‘cultural inheritance’ (there’s some interesting discussion of something that sounds like memes …40 years before Dawkins). Etc. Etc. Eventually this has something to do with God and Christianity and such. His ideas have some rather well known champions, including Julian Huxley, Theodosius Dobzhansky, and (today) Simon Conway Morris: not exactly lightweights. On the other hand, he’s had some fierce critics, most notably Peter Medawar who came completely unglued in a review of the book circa 1960. This happened after Teilhard had died (so he couldn’t defend himself), though it’s pretty clear to me his criticisms were rather silly: Medawar didn’t read the book very carefully.

While the idea shares the same name as Tipler’s, he never went into specifics about how the Omega Point would actually be reached. Certainly nothing was said of robots or computers bringing the Omega Point to actualization (even though there is one section in ‘The Phenomenon of Man’ that sounds eerily close to discussing the Internet, one of many extremely far-sighted aspects of that book).
While there are aspects of Teilhard’s thesis which are suspect -veers too close to Lamarckism at some points (though his argument is better without it) and the same ’squaring the circle’ feeling you get from Tipler – it seems to feel less ‘contrived’ than saying that the Higgs field holds the key to understanding the resurrection.

One day, the universe will recollapse to an infinitely small counterpart of the big bang called the Omega Point (I believe this was invented by a guy named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin). At this point, all information in the universe will be compressed in an infinitesimal space, and thus any creature living in that space will have access to all information from the past. This creature will be a descendant of previous creatures like ourselves, but will also be god, by virtue of being omniscient. This creature will simulate every living being that has ever lived in its mind, which will be like an enormous computer. These living beings will thereby be resurrected.

Clearly, there is quite a number of things here that don’t follow, but if anyone wants to know, there it is. I remember a whole chapter being devoted to the plausibility of simulating a living creature in a computer, etc.

The collapse to the final singularity takes an infinite time as viewed from inside the universe. During that time the robots recreate all the humans and life forms that ever existed in a computer simulation. Not only do we all live our lives over again in that simulation, but over and over and over again. And not just our lives, but also all the possible lives we ever might have had, good and bad. That’s the immortality Tipler says we can look forward to.

So, any simulated observer will just experience a normal life. I mean there are only a finite number of quantum state a brain can be in. On the whole set of all possible states you can define a partial order according to a notion of subjective time….

Anthropic reasoning will then force you to conclude that we are already living in this sort of simulation. But then I don’t undestand why Jesus had to be resurrected in that very exotic way. Why didn’t Tipler let the robots take care of that?

Meanwhile, the new Creationist museum in Kentucky has a planaetarium:
Astronomy for Creationists

http://content.hamptonroads.com/story.cfm?story=125584&ran=220383

I guess I’ll just publish it myself on the internet so I don’t have to share with those greedy publishers

Suggested titles?

e.