The following passage, taken from Wikipedia, gives a pretty good summary of the Omega Point Theory:
“In his controversial 1994 book The Physics of Immortality, Frank J. Tipler claims to provide a mechanism for immortality and the resurrection of the dead consistent with the known laws of physics, provided by a computer intelligence he terms the Omega Point and which he identifies with God. The line of argument is that the evolution of intelligent species will enable scientific progress to grow exponentially, eventually enabling control over the universe even on the largest possible scale. Tipler predicts that this process will culminate with an all-powerful intelligence whose computing speed and information storage will grow exponentially at a rate exceeding the collapse of the universe, thus providing infinite ‘experiential time’ which will be used to run computer simulations of all intelligent life that has ever lived in the history of our universe. This virtual reality emulation is what Tipler means by ‘the resurrection of the dead’. In more recent works, Tipler says that the existence of the Omega Point is required to avoid the violation of the known laws of physics.
According to George Ellis's review of Tipler's book in the journal Nature, Tipler's book on the Omega Point is “a masterpiece of pseudoscience ... the product of a fertile and creative imagination unhampered by the normal constraints of scientific and philosophical discipline", and Michael Shermer devoted a chapter of Why People Believe Weird Things to enumerating flaws in Tipler's thesis. [..]”
In Tipler’s view, theology is just a special branch of physics which could answer the question of God shaped into three basic questions concerning metaphysics, liberty and immortality:
“[..] I shall argue in the body of this book that these questions can be answered, and that the answers to all three are probably He does exist, probably we have free will, and probably He will grant us eternal life after we have died. I say ‘probably’ because science is not in the business of giving an absolutely certain-to-be-true answer, valid for all time. Science can only give ‘probably true’ answers, as witness the fate of the geocentric hypothesis of Ptolemy, [...]” (The Physics of Immortality, p.7).
As is obvious just from this quotation, Tipler raises hopes which he cannot fulfil. He himself doubts the existence of the Omega Point God who, furthermore, does not seem to be identical with the God of common knowledge (p. 12). This is an extremely bad starting point for someone who tries to prove the existence of God!
Neither can he prove the existence of eternal life. As he says on page 66: “The Omega Point Theory is based on the Eternal Life Postulate.” This means that Tipler postulates an aspect he was going to prove as a precondition for the correctness of his theory. However, demanding something as a precondition which is supposed to be the subject of evidence means killing off the theory as a whole.
Tipler starts his arguments with a nominal definition of human beings who, in his view, are nothing but some kind of computing machines. The brain is seen as the centre of computation and the human soul is just a running software programme. Those are just some superficial facts that can be proved easily, an analogy of which could be a fisherman who uses a fishing net which has string holes four inches across, so that he only catches fish which are at least four inches big. From this, he deduces that all fish are four inches long, which should be no surprise, of course, and which does not necessarily mean that there are not other fish smaller that four inches, which he erroneously concludes. Furthermore, for Tipler’s theory to work, it is essential to assume that man is just a biochemical machine. It should be clear from this that there are still many fish which are not caught by a net that has such wide holes in it.
In Tipler’s view, everything that is alive codes information. Life is just some kind of data processing and the human mind is some kind of highly developed computer (p.124). This definition does not include highly developed biological life forms on a carbon basis, but also any other kind of machine that can compete with the former in some way. Eternal life, in his view, is a continual progress in life that will go on forever, while resurrection is nothing but a perfect computer emulation of the death. But an emulation is nothing more than an emulation, however perfect it may be. Tipler believes that the emulated sensing and feeling of those emulated will be real because they have no way of telling that they are just perfect simulations. Furthermore, people in this computed world would live forever. However, Tipler does not consider what might happen if the computer goes down or has a power failure.
Processed individuals would gain their freedom in the way that there were several parallel worlds in which every possible future development is being implemented, claims Tipler. One may conclude, however, that those individuals trapped in such a parallel world do not have a free will. Besides, they do not know that there are copies of him or herself also trapped in different paralleled worlds, having totally different experiences in life, which brings up the question of how far these individuals are supposed to be related to each other.
Another problem is that Tipler’s machines must not only be intelligent and aware of themselves. They also must have conscience. Tipler proposes the so-called Turing test to guarantee this. This test states that there is a human being and machine, each of them in one separate room with no sight of each other. In a third room there is another person asking questions to both of them in order to find out who is the human and who is the machine. If the asking person cannot tell which one is which, even after years, then the machine passes the test. However, there are some problems with that procedure. First of all, the machine must be able to lie, because it could be asked “Are you a machine?”. Second, how much time must pass by until the person asking the questions will give in? It could not last forever, because human life is biologically restricted. After, say, a hundred years, the person questioning and the one answering will both be dead and the only survivor will be the machine. Besides, a cyborg or something that was as intelligent as a human being, and that has the qualities of conscience and self-awareness, would probably refuse to join in such a rather dumb game. He also could decide not to spread human life but copies of himself instead. Thinking individuals are unlike machines, in that they are simply unpredictable.
One important idea of Tipler’s is that terrestrial life must leave its planet because earth is doomed to destruction and life can only survive in space. To do this, men must build space probes, so-called Von Neumann Probes, whose task is to create new life somewhere in space. This point is interesting insofar as life on earth could have been created by robot space probes, as an alternative to the currently valid evolutionary theory. According to Tipler, life must go into space if it does not wish to either die of heat, i.e. to submit to the final state of the universe, or the so-called heat death, or run into an eternal circle in which all events in nature repeat themselves in exact detail over and over again, which also means that an exact copy of the reader will have to read an exact copy of Tripler’s book. This process is also known as the Eternal Return (p.66-67). In the long run, this might lead to Nihilism, the “Overman” and, finally, Nazism. Unfortunately, Tipler does not indicate how much the eternal reading of his book contributes to that.
For Tipler, the universe is defined as the entirety of everything that exists. If God exists, then he is somewhere in the universe, or a part of it, and physicists must find Him one day. However, what if God does not want to be found?
Tipler believes that Einstein’s equations make it possible for life to force the universe to avoid collapse. All mankind has to do is conquer the universe and reach a much higher level of existence. However, if God is the universe, then men are supposed to conquer God and force him to allow eternal life. By doing this, life would also restrict God’s omnipotence and gain his omniscience, which obviously conflicts with omnipotence.
Even the Holy Spirit has an equivalent in Tipler’s theory: the Universal Wave Function, which terminates in the future Omega Point. This wave function is supposed to be alive somehow and would repeal physics, so to speak. It is not clear how this is supposed to work, nor how the mathematical formula has been worked out, despite the high volume of maths and calculations Tipler presents.
But even the most complicated formula and calculations cannot deny that Tipler announces nothing but a computer process as eternal life. Actually, he reduces men to characters in a computer game. Yet he demands massive amounts of public money to be spent on space research and super particle accelerators, even though a simple Gameboy might do just as well.
“In his controversial 1994 book The Physics of Immortality, Frank J. Tipler claims to provide a mechanism for immortality and the resurrection of the dead consistent with the known laws of physics, provided by a computer intelligence he terms the Omega Point and which he identifies with God. The line of argument is that the evolution of intelligent species will enable scientific progress to grow exponentially, eventually enabling control over the universe even on the largest possible scale. Tipler predicts that this process will culminate with an all-powerful intelligence whose computing speed and information storage will grow exponentially at a rate exceeding the collapse of the universe, thus providing infinite ‘experiential time’ which will be used to run computer simulations of all intelligent life that has ever lived in the history of our universe. This virtual reality emulation is what Tipler means by ‘the resurrection of the dead’. In more recent works, Tipler says that the existence of the Omega Point is required to avoid the violation of the known laws of physics.
According to George Ellis's review of Tipler's book in the journal Nature, Tipler's book on the Omega Point is “a masterpiece of pseudoscience ... the product of a fertile and creative imagination unhampered by the normal constraints of scientific and philosophical discipline", and Michael Shermer devoted a chapter of Why People Believe Weird Things to enumerating flaws in Tipler's thesis. [..]”
In Tipler’s view, theology is just a special branch of physics which could answer the question of God shaped into three basic questions concerning metaphysics, liberty and immortality:
“[..] I shall argue in the body of this book that these questions can be answered, and that the answers to all three are probably He does exist, probably we have free will, and probably He will grant us eternal life after we have died. I say ‘probably’ because science is not in the business of giving an absolutely certain-to-be-true answer, valid for all time. Science can only give ‘probably true’ answers, as witness the fate of the geocentric hypothesis of Ptolemy, [...]” (The Physics of Immortality, p.7).
As is obvious just from this quotation, Tipler raises hopes which he cannot fulfil. He himself doubts the existence of the Omega Point God who, furthermore, does not seem to be identical with the God of common knowledge (p. 12). This is an extremely bad starting point for someone who tries to prove the existence of God!
Neither can he prove the existence of eternal life. As he says on page 66: “The Omega Point Theory is based on the Eternal Life Postulate.” This means that Tipler postulates an aspect he was going to prove as a precondition for the correctness of his theory. However, demanding something as a precondition which is supposed to be the subject of evidence means killing off the theory as a whole.
Tipler starts his arguments with a nominal definition of human beings who, in his view, are nothing but some kind of computing machines. The brain is seen as the centre of computation and the human soul is just a running software programme. Those are just some superficial facts that can be proved easily, an analogy of which could be a fisherman who uses a fishing net which has string holes four inches across, so that he only catches fish which are at least four inches big. From this, he deduces that all fish are four inches long, which should be no surprise, of course, and which does not necessarily mean that there are not other fish smaller that four inches, which he erroneously concludes. Furthermore, for Tipler’s theory to work, it is essential to assume that man is just a biochemical machine. It should be clear from this that there are still many fish which are not caught by a net that has such wide holes in it.
In Tipler’s view, everything that is alive codes information. Life is just some kind of data processing and the human mind is some kind of highly developed computer (p.124). This definition does not include highly developed biological life forms on a carbon basis, but also any other kind of machine that can compete with the former in some way. Eternal life, in his view, is a continual progress in life that will go on forever, while resurrection is nothing but a perfect computer emulation of the death. But an emulation is nothing more than an emulation, however perfect it may be. Tipler believes that the emulated sensing and feeling of those emulated will be real because they have no way of telling that they are just perfect simulations. Furthermore, people in this computed world would live forever. However, Tipler does not consider what might happen if the computer goes down or has a power failure.
Processed individuals would gain their freedom in the way that there were several parallel worlds in which every possible future development is being implemented, claims Tipler. One may conclude, however, that those individuals trapped in such a parallel world do not have a free will. Besides, they do not know that there are copies of him or herself also trapped in different paralleled worlds, having totally different experiences in life, which brings up the question of how far these individuals are supposed to be related to each other.
Another problem is that Tipler’s machines must not only be intelligent and aware of themselves. They also must have conscience. Tipler proposes the so-called Turing test to guarantee this. This test states that there is a human being and machine, each of them in one separate room with no sight of each other. In a third room there is another person asking questions to both of them in order to find out who is the human and who is the machine. If the asking person cannot tell which one is which, even after years, then the machine passes the test. However, there are some problems with that procedure. First of all, the machine must be able to lie, because it could be asked “Are you a machine?”. Second, how much time must pass by until the person asking the questions will give in? It could not last forever, because human life is biologically restricted. After, say, a hundred years, the person questioning and the one answering will both be dead and the only survivor will be the machine. Besides, a cyborg or something that was as intelligent as a human being, and that has the qualities of conscience and self-awareness, would probably refuse to join in such a rather dumb game. He also could decide not to spread human life but copies of himself instead. Thinking individuals are unlike machines, in that they are simply unpredictable.
One important idea of Tipler’s is that terrestrial life must leave its planet because earth is doomed to destruction and life can only survive in space. To do this, men must build space probes, so-called Von Neumann Probes, whose task is to create new life somewhere in space. This point is interesting insofar as life on earth could have been created by robot space probes, as an alternative to the currently valid evolutionary theory. According to Tipler, life must go into space if it does not wish to either die of heat, i.e. to submit to the final state of the universe, or the so-called heat death, or run into an eternal circle in which all events in nature repeat themselves in exact detail over and over again, which also means that an exact copy of the reader will have to read an exact copy of Tripler’s book. This process is also known as the Eternal Return (p.66-67). In the long run, this might lead to Nihilism, the “Overman” and, finally, Nazism. Unfortunately, Tipler does not indicate how much the eternal reading of his book contributes to that.
For Tipler, the universe is defined as the entirety of everything that exists. If God exists, then he is somewhere in the universe, or a part of it, and physicists must find Him one day. However, what if God does not want to be found?
Tipler believes that Einstein’s equations make it possible for life to force the universe to avoid collapse. All mankind has to do is conquer the universe and reach a much higher level of existence. However, if God is the universe, then men are supposed to conquer God and force him to allow eternal life. By doing this, life would also restrict God’s omnipotence and gain his omniscience, which obviously conflicts with omnipotence.
Even the Holy Spirit has an equivalent in Tipler’s theory: the Universal Wave Function, which terminates in the future Omega Point. This wave function is supposed to be alive somehow and would repeal physics, so to speak. It is not clear how this is supposed to work, nor how the mathematical formula has been worked out, despite the high volume of maths and calculations Tipler presents.
But even the most complicated formula and calculations cannot deny that Tipler announces nothing but a computer process as eternal life. Actually, he reduces men to characters in a computer game. Yet he demands massive amounts of public money to be spent on space research and super particle accelerators, even though a simple Gameboy might do just as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment