Wikipedia summarizes Tipler's argument thusly:
According to Tipler's Omega Point cosmology, for the known laws of physics to be mutually consistent it is required that intelligent life take over all matter in the universe and eventually force the collapse of the universe. During that collapse the computational capacity of the universe diverges to infinity and environments emulated with that computational capacity last for infinite duration as the universe goes into a solitary-point cosmological singularity (with life eventually using elementary particles to directly compute on, due to the temperature's diverging to infinity), which singularity Tipler terms the Omega Point.[6] With computational resources diverging to infinity, Tipler states that the far-future society will be able to resurrect the dead by perfectly emulating the entire multiverse from its start at the Big Bang.[7] Tipler identifies the Omega Point final singularity as God since in his view the Omega Point has all the properties claimed for God by most of the traditional religions.[7The article doesn't capture the flavor of Tipler's writing; go the Amazon link. You really have to be a high-level physics student to understand the arguments - and I'm not. Alas, those who are real physicists tend to regard Tipler as a crackpot.
But he answers a question 20th century philosophy ignored: how can you do Meta-physics if you don't know Physics? The answer - obviously - is that you can't. Existentialists aside, twentieth century philosophy was narrow, parochial. Tipler may be the last Great System Builder. If so it's a hollow victory, won by forfeit.
The logical positivists could certainly do physics, but they decided to call all metaphysics bunk or at best "poetry."
ReplyDeleteIIRC, Tipler said experimental evidence for the Omega point was lacking, so he didn't believe in it himself. From (what I recall) of his description of the Omega point as one where all possible states of matter were constantly present, it sounds more like a description of hell than a heaven: "...[A]lmost three-quarters [of Christian believers] opt for a heaven where good lives on earth will be eternally rewarded, with more than half basking in the company of God and Jesus, but fewer than half within that of friends, relatives, and spouses. Oddly enough under these circumstances, only 5 percent expect eternity to be boring." (William Gaddis, "Old Foes with New Faces")
Tipler's "Heaven" is one in which people with repairable character defects are resurrected with those defects cured. If you're not fixable (he's not sure about Hitler) you just aren't bought back. At least that's how I remember it. Omega Point theory has certainly not been provable; for me the book is interesting as an attempt by a "real" physicist to use reason to prove an essentially Christian worldview (his later books "The Physics of Christianity" does that explicitly. He's the last of the V8 Interceptors, IOW.
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