Think! no wonder it takes hundreds of years for the Newtons, the Hawkings and the Tiplers to emerge. You should all be ashamed to be representative of the scared, ignorant, rabid masses to whom a threat to their individual world view quickly becomes a threat to their very minimal being.

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.