Episode 118: Christian Transhumanism (with Micah Redding)
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Transcript
[00:00:00] Blue: Hello out there! This week on the Theory of Anything podcast, we speak to Micah Redding, who is the host of the Christian Transhumanist podcast. We discuss various conceptions of the singularity, the computational nature of reality, free will from a many worlds perspective, the problem of evil in Omega Point Cosmology, and whether or not my sweet dog JoJo will join me in the afterlife. This was about the most fun I’ve ever had on this podcast. So many aha moments, and I hope others get something out of this too. Welcome to the Theory of Anything podcast! How you doing, Bruce? Doing good! How you doing, Peter? I am great, great mood, exceptionally excited to talk about this subject. And we’ve got Micah Redding, who I described to my, it’s about to say girlfriend. I don’t know if she’s my girlfriend, but I said that he is an extremely prominent Christian transhumanist. Maybe we can start out! Micah, what’s a Christian transhumanist? Don’t pretend like you’re not extremely prominent either, but… Well, I should say, because when I looked up, when I asked ChatGPT, what is Christian transhumanism? It listed some, like, the three most prominent Christian transhumanists, and your name was on it. So ChatGPT knows about you. So what is Christian transhumanism? Well,
[00:01:54] Red: you’ve already got a fact
[00:01:55] Blue: check, ChatGPT. That’s something there. But
[00:01:57] Red: yeah, thanks for having me on. It’s great to chat with you guys again. Christian transhumanism is essentially, maybe if I step back a second, a lot of people don’t know what transhumanism is. So I would just define transhumanism as the ethical use of science and technology to transform the human condition. And so there’s this kind of intellectual movement that has been going on for a while, depending on how you want to count, that is seeking to think about how we do that, how we use our science and technology to transform the human condition, and really where that could take us, where it should take us, what that might look like. And Christian transhumanism is simply transhumanism as understood through the ethics, the lens of Christ. So within the transhumanist conversation, community, movement are different proposed ethics. And so Christians can propose a Christian ethic, a Christian aim, a Christian vision for what the future of science and technology might look like. And that’s basically it in a nutshell. There’s a lot of history. We can talk about some of that too that might touch on our topic today, but that’s the basics.
[00:03:23] Blue: Okay. Well, if people are, I’m sure some of our audience might be scratching their heads right now, but I think as the conversation unfolds, your unique perspective will make a lot more sense to people, I hope. There’s always hope. Okay. So, you know what, I thought one of the ways we could start this off, I don’t know if this is a core tenant of Christian transhumanism or any kind of transhumanism. I think it probably is. You know, it seems to me all of these sort of far, far out scenarios for the future of the universe that at least I like to think about. And I think Bruce does too, rely on this central claim that reality is computational. I think when you really reflect on this idea, this idea that reality is computational, I mean, it doesn’t mean that reality is a computation. Maybe there’s a distinction there. I don’t know if we necessarily live in a like a Nick Bostrom kind of simulated universe or not. I mean, that’s one conclusion people make from this. You know, you can also another conclusion is just that something more like Tipler’s Omega Point, which I think we’re going to really try to get into today that knowledge expands into the universe. And as humans harness the power of stars and galaxies and sort of like take over, or I say humans, but what I really mean is more of our post biological descendants. Well, if we have post biological descendants, you
[00:05:26] Blue: know, I mean, that kind of gets into this idea that life and human consciousness is not substrate dependent, meaning that we could put our minds on a quantum computer or something like that, which and you know, in the Tipler’s Omega Point, the natural conclusion to that is that every human or knowledge creating entity that could ever exist or has ever existed, or could conceivably ever exist anywhere in the multiverse could be simulated. It’s kind of a far out assertion. But to even go down this road, we’ve got to start with something that to me, on one hand, I believe is very plausible. And that’s that the reality is computational that in John Wheeler’s words, the physicist John Wheeler, we get it from bit. Okay, so reality could theoretically be divisible into a series of yes, no questions. It’s very hard. I’m sure that you’ve had the experience of trying to explain that to a quote unquote regular person who’s not it was never heard of transhumanism. I I’ve tried to explain that to people and I kind of get a blank stare. I mean, is it is it just and then what I say and you know, I don’t even know. I maybe I don’t even understand myself because I don’t really, you know, like there’s this idea that if you can explain something to someone, then you know, if you really understand something, then you can explain it to regular people. I don’t know if I can explain to regular people. So maybe I don’t understand it. It seems to me maybe another way of saying that just saying that life follows laws or patterns or as algorithmic follows the laws of physics.
[00:07:33] Blue: But it’s hard to make that jump between we follow laws to reality is algorithmic. And of course, I’m aware that, you know, Roger Penrose wrote a whole book in person new mind, you know, one of the most famous physicists in the world, casting doubt on this assertion. It seems like most people maybe, you know, to make an argument from authority. It seems like most people who have really, really contemplated this question who are far smarter than I am do agree that reality is is computational. Maybe maybe I’m off base there. Maybe those are just the loudest voices. But let me put this question to you, Micah, and then you, Bruce, do you think a reality is compute computational? What does that mean? And why do you think that?
[00:08:32] Red: Yeah, so I think the obstacle here is that it is very hard to know what we mean by computational. And for most people, the only kind of reference point is to look at computers that we have in our everyday lives, right? So
[00:08:49] Green: specifically digital computers, right? They don’t even they don’t even know that the word could mean something else, right? It’s the word computer means digital computer to them.
[00:08:58] Blue: You’re thinking quantum computers. It could also mean
[00:09:01] Green: it could mean analog computer like there are many, many ways to build a computer that are nothing like our digital computers. Okay, okay.
[00:09:11] Red: But somebody is somebody is going to look at, you know, a laptop or a phone or something like this and say, well, obviously, lots and lots of reality is not like this at all. And that’s true. And so that when someone does say, you know, reality is computational, I think that immediately becomes this difficult, you know, thing to try to explain. So I would, you know, I would go with how David Deutsch kind of defined this as I understand it, which is that there is a mapping between any physical system in the universe and what can be simulated or emulated within our own physicality within our own brains and within certain kinds of objects that we create such as such as digital computers and so on. So that that connection that self similarity in some sense is is I think why we would say it’s computational because what we mean by computation ultimately has to do with our ability to to emulate these these other processes, in fact, any other process. And that is, as you said, it goes to the fact that physical physical universe is governed by laws. And from a Christian perspective, we’ve always said that kind of thing, right? The universe is governed by laws. It’s governed by laws that are connected specifically with a creator. And we are creators like that. This is what you see in Genesis one that we are made an image of God made to be creators like God as a creator. So there is a there’s a contention in the Christian tradition that the human mind is in some sense, capable of fully comprehending and simulating all of those physical laws.
[00:11:17] Red: And I think that’s that is in contemporary physical terms, physics terms that that is what we would mean by saying reality is computational.
[00:11:27] Blue: I can imagine that Christian that that when you explain this to other Christians, they’re probably the ones that are, you know, it’s mostly the maybe the materialists would be more open to this. I can’t imagine that there’s too many Christians that are open to this assertion. It was what I would imagine. But you tell me. So
[00:11:49] Red: and of course, you know, what most people think just in terms of sheer numbers is just going to be kind of always going to be a patchwork of common sense and different ideas, you know, that kind of thing. And so when you like push into a little more rigorous thought where someone is trying to understand what Christianity might say about these things. I think the dominant intellectual idea among Christian intellectuals is that we don’t want to be reductive. We don’t want to reduce everything to just computation or just physical laws or things like this that we want to kind of allow for this space of un. Uncomprehensible things, you know, uncomputated or uncomputable things in the cosmos, because in some sense seems more friendly to a more kind of magical worldview, so to speak. You know, if you imagine angels and demons and, you know, fairies and all this kind of stuff, right? It’s easier to get there if you if you imagine that reality is in fact not computational that we can’t understand everything. And that has been a I think that’s an intellectual strategy that a lot of Christian thinkers pursue. And I think it’s it’s actually wrong headed like I kind of already alluded to. I think the Christian tradition, even if you go back a few hundred years or say 1700, go back to thinkers in the 300s, they’re not thinking in this way. They think that reality is fully comprehensible. And that’s that they think this is part of the sort of Christian faith and Christian understanding of the world. And so, yeah, I think, you know, just where where things are now for most people is influenced by intellectual trends.
[00:13:57] Red: And I understand completely why, you know, Christians do want to believe in kind of a incredible universe that has, you know, all kinds of of being and all kinds of potential and all this kind of stuff. And I just think they they can get there through science and computation and so forth in actually a much more tangible way. And that’s, yeah, not a common thought yet. But well, you say it’s not
[00:14:27] Blue: common. Oh, sorry. But I just listened to that Walter Isaacson book book about biography of Einstein, which is so good. It’s one of the best books I’ve I’ve experienced lately. But you know, this God doesn’t play dice with the universe thing. That was pretty, that was, you know, that wasn’t just a throwaway comment. That was something that he wrestled with his entire life. And, you know, this in some ways, it could be seen as a great evidence for a God or something like God like that the universe does follow laws. And, you know, that we that are comprehensible to human minds. And I think that that’s in the way it’s portrayed in the book, that was really something that Einstein believed as sort of the core. I mean, I don’t I don’t know if the word faith is the right word, but that’s what he he saw as his central to his conception of God and religion.
[00:15:40] Red: Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, to be clear, I think the Christian intellectual tradition and in a broader sense, the Judeo Christian intellectual tradition and in an even broader sense, the monotheistic intellectual tradition is really committed to something like that, something like what you’re saying, the orderliness and ultimately the rationality of the cosmos. And so I think I think this is this you’re you’re very much correct to see that in, you know, showing up throughout the intellectual tradition, it’s, I do think we essentially live in a sort of intellectual bubble in our current society where I think, like I said, the the dominant intellectual idea in Christian circles anyway, doesn’t go there. But that is an anomaly. And even if you just look back, you know, 70 years, things look different. If you read CS Lewis, he talks a lot about supernatural. He means something very different than what people would think he means. He means rationality when he says supernatural. So, so yeah, I think the intellectual tradition of Christianity is where you are perceiving it to be. It’s about an orderly, orderly reality, reasonable reality, rational reality that is ultimately comprehensible by humans and any other kind of person there might be. So you would link computational with
[00:17:22] Blue: comprehensible. Those are interwoven concepts.
[00:17:27] Red: I think so, because at least as as, you know, do it just framing it right, the idea that we can comprehend something is essentially the idea that we can simulate it within our own within our own minds within our own physicality, so that we can create that, you know, ultimate kind of similarity between these two very different physical systems. So that’s comprehensive that comprehensive ability. And that’s the cause of this property of computationality or, you know, you could split that up or talk about those concepts in different ways. But yeah, for something to be computable means that we can compute it, we can, we can mentally model it, we can physically model it, we can model it on paper, we can model it in systems we build, that sort of thing.
[00:18:18] Blue: That was a good answer. I had several aha moments while I was listening to you. So Bruce, how about some more aha moments from you? Why is reality computational?
[00:18:31] Green: So I think the right way to approach this, like saying is reality computational could mean a number of different things. And some of them would be true and some of them would be false. And I think sometimes when people object to that phrasing, they may be thinking of a false version of it so they’re right to object. So if you want to approach this kind of the way that I think it actually is, you have to look at it in terms of computational theory. So computational theory is a theory. And like all theories, it’s a highly corroborated theory. We don’t have a good alternative to it. It’s hard to even conceive what a good alternative to it would look like because it’s such a good theory. And I’m going to do real computational theory today is based at the quantum level, but to keep it simple, I’ll do it just classical because it’s easier to understand. But all the they work the same way either way. So there was this idea of that there’s different types of computers that can run different types of programs or algorithms. So you have like a finite state machine, you’ve got like the push down automata. And then there was this thing called the Turing machine. And the Turing machine was was a imaginary computer. It was imagined not as a digital computer that was this is way before digital computers. But it was imagined as like a mechanical device and it would like write on a tape and it would read off the tape.
[00:19:58] Green: And the tape that it was reading and writing off would be its memory and it have some sort of processor that knew what to do with the different symbols that it would read and write off the tape. And so Alan is called Turing machine because Alan Turing the famous mathematician, he’s the one who came up with it. Now there’s another guy at the same time, church Alonzo church who came up with a grammar. And church’s grammar was also like a it wasn’t conceived as a machine it was conceived more like a grammar that you would solve problems with. And Turing showed that the two even though they look so different ones like a machine and ones like a calculus right and he showed that they were mathematically equivalent that you could map one to the other and back again. And so they had to be exactly the same in terms of which algorithms they could run or which programs they should run I should probably say. I’m going to say algorithms because I honestly think the distinction between algorithm program is so overblown. And so I’m going to use the word algorithm and I really mean program. So now that’s a that’s a surprising fact that’s not something that is at all obvious that these two completely different things should be equivalent. And why would that even be the case right like why would it even make sense that you would have two people working out two entirely different things and they would happen to be exactly equivalent. So Turing had this idea that maybe there’s a maximum level of computationality right that maybe the laws of physics only allow a certain final jump of universality in terms of what algorithms you can run.
[00:21:40] Green: And then after that you’ve reached that peak and all computers have the exact same set of algorithms that they can run and that they run in the same computational amount of time. They’re necessarily like one computer might be faster than another. But in terms of the algorithm there’s like different classes of algorithms P versus NP you may have heard of that the algorithms will stay in the same classes right in terms of whether they’re exponential or linear or things like that. And so he hypothesized this idea that the Turing machine or if you prefer the church grammar that that was the universal computer and that all computers were equivalent at most to the Turing machine. Now there was no way to mathematically prove this right and so if you’re thinking of computational theory as mathematics which it kind of is you would normally want some sort of proof and they couldn’t come up with any sort of proof. What they did do though is they tried out different types of computers. They would say what if you made the tape 2D what if you made it 3D you know what if you and they just came up with sort of crazy ideas and every single one was mappable back to the Turing machine and turned out to have the exact same power of the Turing machine. Like again that’s not obvious if you have a 2D sheet that you can move around you would think that’s more powerful than just a tape. It’s not right and it’s possible to show mathematically by mapping them that they’re exactly equivalent to each other. They couldn’t even think of a computer that was that could compute things more than what the Turing machine could.
[00:23:18] Green: That’s actually not quite true they could think of computers that could compute them but they were physically impossible to instantiate. Okay so one of the aspects of computational theory is they will study impossible computers but computational theory is rooted in what the laws of physics actually allow us to build. And they’ll use these other hypothetical machines for comparison purposes but they always kind of come back to the theory is rooted around what’s actually possible to build. And so the church Turing thesis is this theory that says that all physical systems have the same that matter what how you tried to build them into some sort of computer that they’re all ultimately going to be either equivalent to the Turing machine or they’re less than the Turing machine. It has to be one of the two it can never be more than the Turing machine. Now that theory got partially refuted by David Deutsch who showed that a quantum computation can do things a Turing machine can’t. But that just then updated the theory so now we have now the class the the universal computer is now considered the quantum Turing machine rather than the Turing machine. And honestly, they are still equivalent. It’s just that the quantum computer, there are certain algorithms that it can run much much faster than a classical machine. But in theory, the classical Turing machine could also run them it would just be exponentially slower. And so they still have a certain kind of equivalence, but they they the quantum machine breaks like which types of algorithms, what class of algorithms the algorithms can go into.
[00:24:59] Green: So based on this, all this may even just seem like when I was taught this in school taking computer science, they teach it very dryly as a sort of mathematical theory, right? It doesn’t seem to occur to people that there’s implications of this theory if you accept it is true. And one of them is that it means the brain, which is also a physical system. It has to be equivalent to a Turing machine or maybe a quantum Turing machine, but probably just a classical Turing machine because there’s there’s reasons to believe that there’s no quantum computations going on inside the human brain. And this really kind of blows people’s minds that this idea that the human brain is actually a computer. Like I talked to a woman who was a PhD in neuroscience and I told her this and she’s like, no, that’s totally not true. And like, I mean, like this is the actual theory, right? Like it’s not like there’s some alternative theory. Like if you’re going to say the brain isn’t a Turing machine is an equivalent what it’s doing. It’s substrate is equivalent to a Turing machine. You’re claiming that the Turing thesis is incorrect. Nobody knows how to possibly make it incorrect. That would require you to be able to show that you could build a computer using classical physics that can compute things or compute different classes than a Turing machine. If you’re going to make the claim that the brain is not a computer. I mean, I don’t know. It’s just a theory.
[00:26:23] Green: You could be right, but you sort of have this responsibility now to show me what you mean and to show me that it is possible for the brain to compute things that a Turing machine can’t or compute things faster. Than a regular computer could. When I say faster, I don’t mean like processing speed. I mean more like the class of algorithms. There’s actually two senses of the word fast that are in play here. And nobody knows any idea how to do that, right? Like it’s just it’s mind blowing to even think about the possibility. So you either have to endorse this theory as correct or you have to claim it’s incorrect but then offer no explanation for how it could possibly be incorrect. And you’re stuck between those two points of view as of today, right? Unless somebody comes up with a new theory of computation at some future point, which would almost to surely require new physics. Now, who knows? It could be that the theory is false. It could be that when we discover quantum gravity that we’re going to discover that it is possible to make entirely new types of computers. David Deutsch has written about this possibility of maybe building an oracle machine using a quantum gravity loop. Scott, Scott Erickson’s written about it. I mean, it’s on people’s minds that it might happen. But it’s like as of today, nobody has any idea how it would even be possible that the brain could be doing something different than a Turing machine, right? Based on our understandings of the laws of physics.
[00:27:51] Green: And even if you did have a quantum gravity computer in some time in the future that’s much better type of computer than a Turing machine, there’s no particular reason at all to believe that the human brain is somehow using quantum time loops. I mean, like it’s so far -fetched, it’s crazy, right? So almost assuredly, even then, we’re going to find that the human brain is a Turing machine, equivalent to a Turing machine. Even though it operates in some totally different sort of way.
[00:28:23] Blue: So quantum gravity is what, speaking as a layman, of course, is what would unite quantum mechanics and general relativity. Right, it’s the unknown
[00:28:35] Green: theory,
[00:28:36] Blue: right? It’s the unknown, and a new kind of computer could conceivably come out of that.
[00:28:41] Green: Yes. I mean, that’s always a possibility. It also may just reconfirm what computational theory already says.
[00:28:48] Blue: So it wouldn’t necessarily be able to do anything that a quantum computer could do. It would just be faster?
[00:28:58] Green: Well,
[00:28:59] Blue: okay. Or maybe that’s why. We’re making
[00:29:01] Green: massive speculation. But let’s say that quantum gravity computational theory, which is a theory that doesn’t exist as of today. But let’s say we have it at some future point. And let’s say it allows you to create a closed time loop where you can solve the halting problem. So you can build an oracle machine. They’re called oracle machines when they can solve the halting problem.
[00:29:22] Unknown: Okay,
[00:29:22] Blue: oracle machine.
[00:29:23] Green: So now that computer would itself have a halting problem, but it would be able to solve the halting problem for, say, a classical Turing machine. Now, this would allow it to run a program, the halting problem, that isn’t possible to run on any current computer. And that could be what the algorithm running in human consciousness. People speculate about stuff. Okay, I know, I know. And you know, I didn’t want to downplay this, right? Because, of course, these all just are theories, ultimately. But when people say, like, when this PhD lady, friend of mine, says, Oh, you know, I don’t believe that. Like, she doesn’t understand the weight of what she’s saying, the intellectual weight of what she’s saying, right? Yeah. She’s missing the significance of her claim and the implications of her claim and the degree to which it breaks just a wide variety of existing theories without replacing them. And I think if you understand that, you feel a little foolish saying things like, Oh, I don’t believe that, right? And it’s not that I then do believe it, right? I mean, we talked about belief and whether we need beliefs or not in the last several, or there’ll probably be future podcasts. We’ll probably do the Micah one first here. But the truth is that I see no way around these theories. These theories are so deep. They’re so well corroborated. It’s hard to even conceive other than as a vague idea that maybe future physics will allow us a different type of computer. Like, think about what a vague statement that is, right? So at this moment in time, we have every reason to believe that the human brain is equivalent to a Turing machine and no reason to believe otherwise.
[00:31:13] Green: Like, none, not even a little bit.
[00:31:16] Blue: Well, I mean, Roger Penrose wrote a whole book about it, right? I mean, it’s not like he had bad ideas, right?
[00:31:23] Green: So that’s a good question. Do you want me to, I’m not prepared to do this, but do you want me to give you my short response to Roger Penrose? His book essentially, I mean, like, it’s a super sophisticated book and it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read. He actually, both his books on this topic, The Emperor’s New Mind and Shadows of the Mind, are both excellent books and I highly recommend them. And he has got to be one of the most interesting scientific writers and he does not shy away from the math. Don’t let that scare you. He teaches you the math so that you deeply understand physics in a way that you wouldn’t if you didn’t read his books. I learned physics better from reading his books than when I took physics in college, right? And a lot of my physics training, I’m not a physicist but I know a bit of physics, came from reading Roger Penrose’s books.
[00:32:15] Blue: Wow.
[00:32:16] Green: I spent years reading through his books and then reading books to help me understand the parts I didn’t quite understand like Hofstadter’s book, Godel Asher Bach was excellent in explaining the whole Godel’s theorem and the significance of that, which is a huge part of Penrose’s argument. And once I fully understood Penrose’s argument, I can tell you in a nutshell what it is. He’s basically saying that he’s using Godel’s theorem to show that if a computer were an AGI that we would be able to create using Godel’s theorem a proof that it couldn’t understand. And therefore he says the humans could understand it and therefore the computer wouldn’t be able to and therefore we must be as humans above computers in some way. He’s completely wrong. He’s in every conceivable sense wrong. It is trivial to make a proof that Micah or you could not possibly quote unquote understand by simply making it something like David Deutch does this in his book where he says, Peter cannot read this sense consistently as true. I’ve now created for you a Godel’s paradox where there’s a sentence that I can see as true, but you can’t. Wait, you see the sentence again? Peter cannot consistently read this sentence as true.
[00:33:49] Blue: Okay.
[00:33:50] Green: So if you think you can, then the sentence is false.
[00:33:54] Blue: It’s like the liar’s paradox. It’s just the liar’s paradox.
[00:33:59] Green: Right. Okay. So the fact is that you can Godelize a human just as easily as you can a computer. Therefore it tells you nothing about AGI, not a thing. And his whole argument is based on that and it goes nowhere. He also digs into why he thinks quantum physics is an incomplete theory. I mean, I don’t think anybody doubts quantum physics is an incomplete theory. It doesn’t explain gravity, right? But he goes deeper into that, trying to explain what he thinks will replace it. One of the things epistemologically that I just don’t think people get that really reading Popper is very helpful on is that when you can show a problem with a theory, it doesn’t create a direction towards your theory, right? Just because Penrose shows, hey, there’s something incomplete with quantum theory that doesn’t therefore mean that his ideas about a future theory of quantum theory are the right new theory, right? There’s just no direction like that that exists within Popper’s epistemology until his theory can be made testable and can be falsified and it can be corroborated through testing. The fact that he’s showing a problem with an existing theory doesn’t tell you anything about his theory. His theory is at best an interesting conjecture. That’s it. Daniel Dennett joked that Penrose did us a favor. He showed that to show that the human brain isn’t a Turing machine only requires that we entirely violate our entire understanding of computational theory and the laws of physics. That’s basically what Penrose is saying. That is not an unfair framing of Penrose.
[00:35:47] Blue: Okay. Well, that’s a… I’m getting great answers to my questions so far. Thanks, guys.
[00:35:53] Green: By the way, somebody once jokingly said, Penrose is like saying, hey, you know what? I don’t know what the answer is, but I’m convinced it’s under that rocket right over there. I think that’s exactly what Penrose is doing.
[00:36:05] Blue: Okay. Wow. Maybe we can get him on the podcast about this piece. We’ll see. Okay. So I thought we could start… I’m just in the mood to start big, big picture, and then we’ll get into these more trivial issues like free will and knowledge and art and beauty and things. So the singularity. Let’s talk about that. I mean, I know there’s different kinds of singularity. I think probably when most… When you say that word to most people these days, they’re going to think of the technological singularity as Kurtzweil or whatever. Ray Kurtzweil talks about how the… When AI can suddenly create better AI and in this infinite feedback loop, and then maybe that’s when AI escapes into the cosmos or decides to destroy humans or I think probably all of us have reasons to doubt that particular scenario. At least as I understand it, the big bang could be going backwards in time. If you take general relativity backwards in time, you’ll have a singularity where time, space, matter, and energy becomes infinitely dense. That’s another, as I understand it, another example of a singularity. We have a… I think what Templar talks about is sort of like a cosmological or knowledge -based singularity where knowledge expands into the universe. Our post -biological descendants to the point where it becomes like a dominant force in the universe, it takes over essentially. So we become something like gods, I guess you could say. So it kind of has this intersection with religion where if you look at the core… What is the core claim of religion? Basically all religions say that we are not this body. Life continues after death.
[00:38:43] Blue: We’re part of something bigger than just this material world as we currently are living in it. So I think that’s sort of… To me, I think of it as I started thinking about this as a concept. It’s one of the most out -there ideas that kind of rings true to me. So Micah, what do you think? Am I making sense? Is there a connection between this knowledge slash cosmological singularity and a religious conception of life?
[00:39:30] Red: Yeah, so I think the essence of the religious claim in general that you’re kind of pointing to is that life is ultimately the dominant force of everything, the dominant force in the cosmos, the dominant force in reality, this sort of thing. And we can narrow that more specifically if we want to and say something like intelligence, intelligent life specifically. And maybe there are even ways to narrow that down. But what that brings us to is the idea, well, okay, if life and intelligence is dominant, is the ultimate thing that sort of wins out in terms of governing how reality unfolds. Well, then all kinds of things that we take for granted now go away, right? So it’s not hard to imagine in the near future as we gain more capability in terms of biology, in terms of physics, all this kind of stuff. Well, our ability of intelligence to govern the physical world will very quickly mean that we will attempt and probably succeed at eliminating all diseases. We will eliminate aging. We will eliminate all kinds of catastrophes and things that happen and so forth. And as we push that farther, then we will, you know, transform our physicality in some way so that we, our physicality becomes what we would have to characterize as transform it transformational, some kind of almost new category of life. It may
[00:41:35] Green: transform so much that it would be difficult to still think of us as just regular humans anymore is what you’re saying.
[00:41:41] Red: Yeah, and so Max Tegmark has a categorization scheme that I think is really helpful for this. He talks about his book as Life 3.0 and he’s talking about AI, but he’s categorizing life as existing in kind of three different stages. And the first stage is fixed software and fixed hardware. And so he’s thinking of something like a single celled organism that doesn’t actually develop or change in the course of its whole existence. It just has a pre -programmed behavior pattern and a pre -programmed physical pattern. And that’s what exists. And then there’s Life 2.0, which is animal life, human life, so forth, where we have dynamic software and fixed hardware. So our bodies don’t change a lot in the course of our lives. They grow on this fairly predictable path, but our minds change a lot and they change in ways that are very hard to predict. And so we can learn all kinds of things that our ancestors never knew, even though our bodies are pretty similar to the bodies our ancestors had. So that’s Life 1.0, Life 2.0. And then so we just following that scheme, then there’s Life 3.0. And that’s where we have dynamic software and dynamic hardware. So where our minds are capable of learning all kinds of new things, our bodies are also capable of transforming in all kinds of ways, right? And so he’s looking at that as like that’s the key thing with AI is that AI would be able to transform its hardware almost as easily as we could can transform our software, basically.
[00:43:28] Red: But I think it applies here that we can imagine a physical body that is under our, that is governed by intelligence and knowledge creation to the same extent that our minds are and even a greater extent than our current minds are as we learn to use our minds better. And so yeah, then we would have a sort of transcendent physicality, a transcendent transformed embodiment and that’s actually I would argue what Paul described St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 15. He talks about what he calls a natural body. The word is actually a psychical body or soul body and a spirit body, spiritual body. And he doesn’t mean disembodiment. He means a transformed embodiment and embodiment that is as spiritual, which is how he would describe the mind. It’s knowledge -based. It can evolve, it can transform a body that has those same properties. So yeah, if we extend our knowledge, the ability of intelligence to govern physical reality, that includes biological reality and that leads directly to a kind of physicality, a kind of embodiment that the ancients would have described as transformed, transcendent, the resurrection, the transfiguration, all these kinds of things. These are not different visions. They are just kind of visions that are articulated in slightly different technical terms, but it’s the same idea. And you can see why. Our ancestors intuitively understood that the human mind is capable of profound transformation. And they also understood in a more shadowy, ambiguous way that ultimately our minds are capable of transforming the world around us as well. And if you just follow that trajectory out, then that is where all of the religious visions come from. If life, if intelligence can transform this cosmos, then everything in religion becomes true.
[00:45:49] Blue: I was just, while you were talking, I was just reflecting how this David Deutsch’s principle of optimism, problems are solvable, pretty, pretty, it almost sounds trite to people, really. It’s just self -evidently true in a way. You can make the jump between that and what Tipler calls the final anthropic principle, that life is destined to take over the universe and then from there to a kind of, you know, cosmological singularity. I mean, at least in my mind,
[00:46:33] Red: it
[00:46:33] Blue: doesn’t seem so far -fetched, but I love what you’re saying.
[00:46:40] Red: I think it’s true, even if, so Frank Tipler has a very specific vision of this, right, of how this is going to play out and ultimately what it’s going to lead to. But even if we just kind of look at the next, say, million years of life, if we are successful in continuing to grow knowledge and continuing to grow our capacity to govern the physical world, you know, we’ll be governing the galaxy and we will be doing it in a way that will look like from our current perspective, you know, if we’re able to kind of look forward to that future, it’s going to look like a future of of angelic superpowered, unimaginable beings, right, governing this heavenly cosmos. That’s what it’s going to look like. And we don’t even have to get to all the things that Tipler thinks are going to happen. We just have to go, you know, I saw him talking about this recently about what, yeah, a million years from now, we’re basically going to be governing the galaxy or we’re going to be dead. That’s the scenario and if we’re governing the galaxy, that looks like a religious vision. Like if we just think like very closely about what that would actually mean is there. Which I think is a much more likely scenario.
[00:48:12] Blue: Honestly, I mean of course the future is impossible to predict, but and I know that pessimism seems to be very popular right now, but I don’t know. I mean, maybe I’m just a naturally optimistic person, but it seems more likely to me that knowledge will continue to grow into infinity the alternative will be something like Vostrom’s about the doomsday hypothesis you take the black ball and the world just ends when the right kind of knowledge is created. I guess that’s possible too. I mean, I can’t really say it’s not, but I mean anyway, Bruce, I want to get your thoughts. The singularity like is there a connection between a conception of the singularity and religion?
[00:49:19] Green: Yes. So first of all, I can really appreciate the fact, Peter, that I’ve often called you a lay expert. The fact that you even know that there are lines of singularities and that the term has multiple meanings is very, very good. So let me just say that the Kurtzweil singularity, let’s call it that is almost assuredly false and it’s been called the second coming or the rapture for geeks. The rapture for geeks. So it is religious, right? It’s in my opinion a false religion, but it’s a religious view that Kurtzweil has he even calls it the age of spiritual machines. He’s not hiding the fact that he’s putting this forward as a religious vision, right? I mean, there’s a certain logic to it. There is, there is but it’s based on some questionable assumptions. Assumptions, yes. So, but you know what? I find his vision somewhat compelling, I have to admit. And there is a certain amount of truth to it. There’s problems with it, like somebody on Twitter pointed out after listening to one of our podcasts, Peter he pointed out that I had noted that when you grow the power of your computation exponentially, it only actually grows your ability to calculate an exponential problem linearly. The growth is only linear, which is like nothing like that was something that you and I talked about in one of our podcast episodes because and most of the problems are exponential, right? So, this isn’t the way he portrays it is maybe somewhat doesn’t work, right? And yet there’s a different kind, there are different kinds of singularities, like Templar is just way smarter at this than than Kurtzweil is. He’s way more serious.
[00:51:19] Green: He understands the physics in a way that Kurtzweil doesn’t and that’s why Templar has this idea of an omega point singularity. One of the things that’s keep in mind, I’m not necessarily endorsing the omega point theory because I think the theory has problems. But let’s call it an omega point like theory, just some sort of theory that involves an infinite growth of computation forever, okay? Which is distinct from a theory where life lives forever. There are different theories where life would live forever and computation doesn’t grow forever. But let’s keep with the omega point cosmology for the moment, make a point like cosmology for the moment. One of the things that Deutsch points out is that it means that there are no computational problems. You just have to wait a little longer and then the power of your computing has grown enough that eventually you can address that problem. So, there are no intractable problems anymore, right? Any given moment there are intractable problems, but in a moment later, the problem won’t be intractable anymore. Now, that is very similar on the surface to Kurzweil’s vision. But it’s based around this different sort of singularity that’s a physical singularity of the universe where computation grows towards infinity, right? And Kurzweil got no notion of that in his ideas. He’s not a physicist, he doesn’t think this far, right? When you reach that point then, yeah, you’re starting to see things that you would have thought was impossible starting to happen.
[00:52:57] Green: And one of the main things that Tipler kind of comes up with that was one of the things that kind of knocked me over when I first heard about his theory and when read his books was the idea that, like, the resurrection for the dead is just a problem to be solved. I mean, that’s so weird and even the vast majority of crats that I know that kind of come from the Deuchy side of that even though he talks about it in one of his books and goes over Tipler’s theories and about the resurrection for the dead, I don’t think any of him give any thought to that possibility and when I’ve asked them about it, I’ve asked a number of them about it they go, I’ve never thought about it and that’s the answer I’ve gotten every single time. And I think it’s an
[00:53:41] Unknown: idea
[00:53:41] Green: that has such strong religious overtones even if you’re not playing the Tipler game of trying to make it religious if you just simply talk about, look, we’re all programs and we’re programs running on hardware, that’s what the brain is or you could consider the whole body maybe because you have a nervous system that goes throughout your whole body, it’s not just your brain and it still represents some sort of Turing machine if Turing machines have a set number of infinite infinity of them as memory grows but there’s only certain programs that you can program within whatever size of memory, humans have a limited memory so there’s only a limited number of humans human programs that are possible okay, what’s to stop you from instantiating them all once you have the computational power to do so and if you did, you would literally resurrect everyone from the dead, right
[00:54:31] Green: and I think even just that idea, even though it completely follows from all of Deutsche’s theories it’s just too religious right, it’s so religious they don’t want to touch it, it’s a third rail they don’t want to go there, right and Deutsche will even talk about well, I’m going to be dead by then anyhow he doesn’t even consider that much the possibility he kind of considers it a little bit not too much the possibility that he might actually be in the future and still alive, right and he may die and then be alive later and but this is the idea that Tipler was really working on, that’s why it’s called the physics of immortality right, his book is titled that and I have to agree with Micah, it just comes across even though it’s a purely scientific theory, it’s even rooted in some fairly good theories there’s some problems, I’m not denying that, like there really are some problems with the theory but when you look at that in this way, I think it’s just so hard not to go towards a religious mindset, the moment you start to endorse this side of the theory and I think that’s why most of the atheists who are critical rationalists who are into Deutsche’s, you know, Forstrand’s just don’t go there, whereas someone like Micah, because he has a religious background that becomes interesting to him and he’s willing and able to spend time looking at that theory taking it seriously that maybe it could be a true theory, that would be my answer
[00:55:58] Blue: hmm okay, I’m loving this conversation, wow I wanted to talk about since we have a prominent Christian transhumanist on the show I wanted to talk about the what I think that many religious people even would even concede is one of the hardest things to wrestle with to understand about a religious worldview and that’s the problem of evil why if we have a benevolent God assuming that we don’t live in a Lovecraftian universe where reality is created by an evil wizard assuming that however you think about God, whether it’s a singularity or whatever that this is basically we live in a fundamentally good place but why do you know children get cancer or why is there so much suffering in the world I think what Tipler says and I’m just kind of I don’t even know if I’m completely getting my mind around it but I find it to be such a compelling way to look at it you know Tipler is, as Bruce has said, is the original forest rander the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is all over his book I think he was probably writing in a point where most people didn’t even know about it so it was probably pretty confusing to a lot of people who were reading that book I mean it wasn’t long before Marvel movies people knew what the multiverse was or anything or at least normal people so what he says is that the world we live in is a world of maximum evil and maximum good which is you know I mean it’s easy to see how that you know if you think of the multiverse it’s basically everything that can happen according to the laws of physics
[00:58:29] Blue: and that you know there’s probably some ambiguity about what that is I mean but it does happen everything that can happen does happen and to him that’s how we solve the problem of evil and also how we get free will because you know free will is based on this idea that counterfactuals at least could happen but the multiverse seems to indicate that counterfactuals do happen I guess I’m still a little fuzzy on this but I find it to be such a compelling idea this this universe that we live in with maximum evil and maximum good where counterfactuals are real solves the problem of free will solves the problem of evil I don’t know if it does but it makes it just kind of rings true as a compelling idea to me I what do you think Micah does yeah yeah I think you see where I’m going with this
[00:59:35] Red: yeah totally so um I when I read this book so I read the physics of immortality probably when I was 13 wow and I you know I think it came out in 94 and I think I picked it up from the library I read it I came back to it several times checked it out again and read it several more times over the next you know year or two just a
[01:00:05] Green: little light reading for 13
[01:00:07] Red: so it was um it was profound to me in a lot of different ways like it really uh kind of I don’t know I don’t know how to say it but it connected a lot of things for me collected connected a lot of my interests it’s it allowed me it gave me sort of a philosophy that I could resonate with and in a profound way both in it’s like optimism for the future but also he talks about things like towards the end of the book the idea that all progress is ultimately the same that um that progress in economics and science and and morality and all this like ultimately it has to converge and so that was all these kinds of ideas were profound for me one of them is how he dealt with the problem of evil and my sense of that at the time was that he didn’t fully articulate sort of what he was saying but that it was it was glimpsable what what he was getting at right and um and I so I tried to talk about this to a lot of people at the time and it really did not compute the people what what I was trying to say about the problem of evil so
[01:01:43] Red: what it boils down to if you if you do think about you know the the multiverse the full existence of every of every possible human every possible intelligent being you know everything that can happen does happen and then if you follow tippler’s kind of trajectory you end up in a future where not only that but um it happens uh something like an infinite number of times it’s it’s re re computed recalculated over and over wheat until everything is you know has been perfected all this kind of stuff and so you have to grapple with a lot of philosophical questions there but I think the the key thing that that as you point out that tippler is bringing up is you know here’s this sort of infinite possibility infinite actuality that is being played out across the multiverse that will be played out in the future and the question then is simply who gets to participate who gets to be a part of that and then it’s a question of not just whether you know okay so I had a bike accident when I was 15 busted up my my mouth had to get all kind of stitches all this kind of stuff there’s a there’s an alternate timeline where that accident didn’t happen and so there’s two different versions of mica that have had different experiences in life as a result of one of them having this accident and one of them not having this accident so for tippler the question is then which mica gets to participate in that infinite unfolding future
[01:03:37] Red: is it just one of them or is it both of them and in fact every version of mica that that could exist and so that’s the that changes the idea of the problem of evil it’s not why did god let me get into a bike accident it’s does god essentially allow the version of me that got into a bike accident to continue it to exist forever or not and when put that way I think you can see like at least for the vast majority of cases you know I am the mica who got in that bike accident I am glad that I exist I do want to continue to exist in that infinite future so yeah so that’s not able to be separated from the fact that in a sense god allowed that to happen right god allowing it to happen was really just allowing the me that is to exist and it gets into questions of when is it ethically preferable to allow certain kinds of beings to exist and this goes to something that’s much more dealt with in traditional Christian theology and this is the the
[01:05:13] Red: answer to the problem of evil or the is from Saint Irenaeus and his answer is essentially that so many bad things happen because it is the necessary condition for the ultimate future that we are going to be allowed to participate in that we can grow through these things to become much greater beings than this and that if we were to eliminate all of the negative things it would actually rob us of that profound transcendent future and so I do think ultimately it boils down to these are the same sort of philosophical answer to the question I was allowed to have the evil experience of being in a bike wreck because that allowed the me of today to exist and to continue to exist into the infinite unfolding incredible future that we will have I don’t know if
[01:06:26] Blue: that is a good summation of those thoughts or not it seems like there’s a certain kind of like arrogance when you say that basically what you’re saying is that certain kinds of experiences and certain kinds of people their lives are not worth living if there’s that
[01:06:55] Red: is not intuitively what people think they are saying but logically that seems to be what they’re saying and you can actually hear this in common parlance so I’ve heard people talk about if they got certain diseases that they would not consider it worthwhile to continue to exist and I think looking at someone like Stephen Hawking who seems to have felt it worthwhile to continue to exist despite having a very debilitating disease he still found existence worthwhile oh
[01:07:37] Blue: yeah he was dating all
[01:07:38] Red: his nurses and stuff but there’s a lot of people who write off that sort of existence where they’re implicitly saying yeah that life is not worth having so we should just cut that out you know and I think we can see that’s actually wrong the life is worth having even under what are often terrible conditions in both our our history and prehistory and so forth there is life that’s worth having and especially if it’s true that we can have dramatically more transformed life in the future then it’s worth holding on to despite the kind of evils that we experience along the way I
[01:08:31] Blue: love that answer what do you think Bruce the problem of evil the multiverse
[01:08:38] Green: when we were on Micah’s podcast I tried to give an answer to that question and it was basically the same as what Micah just said but I think he probably did a better job articulating it than I did so I think that is definitely he did a good job of articulating Tipler’s view better than Tipler did articulating Tipler’s view and I think he’s got it correct that Tipler is trying to explain this in terms of let’s say that in fact let’s even just do this there is a multiverse and that is a part of his theory and so that plays a big role in his theodicy theory of how to solve the problem of evil but even if you didn’t have a multiverse I think of one of the reasons why the problem of evil seems like such an intractable problem to people is partially because people don’t know that there is a multiverse and so they think of it in terms of a single universe so they try to imagine a universe where Micah didn’t suffer and then they say well why would God let Micah have a bike accident and suffer that doesn’t even make sense that a good God would let Philip Goff talks about this why would a good God do that he must not be both all powerful and good so in Philip Goff’s case since he believes in a God that isn’t all powerful he says well I think it’s a not an omnipotent God and if you’re thinking about this purely in terms of a single universe and you’re thinking of it purely in terms of
[01:10:18] Green: there’s a single identity that is you which is just physically not true right like not even in our normal straightforward materialistic atheistic view of a single universe the Micah who gets into a bike accident and suffers is a different person than the one that didn’t and for you to say well Micah should not get into that bike accident and not suffer for you to say that you are shaving off the existence of another human being whether you realize it or not and this does just follow straight from the idea that brains your computers and we are in fact programs right and so it changes the question and if you’re trying to think if you’re holding there’s a strange this may seem the reason why people struggle so much with the problem of evil is actually because they have too much of a Christian concept even though they may be atheists and they’re still thinking of it in terms of a single soul that is that person and there’s only one of them and it’s unique and that person that single soul could have multiple experiences but it would still either way be the same soul and that’s really kind of what they have in mind
[01:11:36] Green: and once you understand it more in terms of actual science and computation you start to realize that the two Micas are different people they may have a shared history up to a certain point but once they diverge they diverge and they are different people from that point forward even in a single universe even if there wasn’t a multiverse if we reached the point where we could bring people back from the dead would we want to only bring back people whose lives were perfect or would we want to actually bring back the people whose lives were imperfect and let them participate in this wonderful world where we’ve removed suffering and lived forever and things like that. Once you understand that that’s the question we’re actually asking the problem of evil seems to just dissolve. It just sort of goes away. Now of course I’m here assuming that the Omega Point is a real thing, that there’s an actual Omega Point cosmology and I don’t know if that’s really as strong a best theory as Tipler thought it was. So in fact that’s going to be some of my questions for Micah was about some of the problems with the theory. But if we are assuming some sort of beginning of infinity, Deutsche’s term, and we are assuming that it goes on forever and we’re assuming that computation grows forever I think that’s an important point that a lot of people miss is that that is a part of Tipler’s theory that may not be part of the dark energy model. I’m a little unclear that Deutsche puts forward. Then it seems like you really have solved the problem of evil.
[01:13:08] Green: Surely at a minimum, Tipler’s solution to the problem of evil is the only really good one I’ve ever come across. You have read all these Christian thinkers and people make fun of them because their arguments aren’t that good and people are right, like Philip Goff kind of makes fun of the Christian thinkers, their arguments aren’t that good. He’s right, they’re for the most part they aren’t because they’re still thinking single universe, they’re still thinking unique soul, things like that. To solve the problem you really do have to think in terms of actual that people are programs.
[01:13:41] Blue: Philip Goff says that I’m trying to remember how he handles that in this book. He basically says that God does not, God created the universe, he’s a religious I think, but he said God or something created the universe but does not control it. That’s how he tries to solve it.
[01:14:07] Green: That’s right.
[01:14:08] Blue: Is that right?
[01:14:09] Green: If we’re going to be honest his theory has got probably much bigger problems than the one he’s trying to replace. It’s not a compelling solution to the problem. I think that’s the thing I loved about Tipler. We tried to get Tipler on this show, we’re going to try again a bit of a miscommunication, we didn’t end up getting him on the show and I want to ask him a lot of these questions directly because I feel like he’s a smart guy who can maybe explain a lot of the things I didn’t quite get reading his book to me. I can see in Tipler someone who is just taking this further than anybody else. I often call him a mad genius. Some of the stuff he comes up with is just so wacky. I don’t take it very seriously. But he’s clearly put thought into this in a way that a Philip Goff just hasn’t. Even though this is like Philip Goff’s whole career. And Tipler’s a physicist who this isn’t his main career, right? And he’s put more thought into it than Deutsch has. He’s put more thought into it than just really anybody. Yeah, he kind of goes off the rails at times. That was almost inevitable. Like point to me someone who didn’t go off the rails at points, right? So it’s when he does, it’s a little wacky. I think it comes across as humorous and bad to other people. But even in the places where he goes off the rails, he makes his theories testable. Don’t make fun of people for having testable theories. Go refute their theories, right? Trying to turn it into a personal attack like Michael Sherman does or like it’s just really kind of icky.
[01:16:05] Green: And so I feel a great deal of I like Tipler’s books. I like what he’s doing, even though he can sometimes be a difficult personality. He can sometimes be a little weird and wacky. And I’m not denying any of that. But I think you have to look at what were the best parts of his theory and what was he doing and what did he solve that like I really wish Philip Goff had read Tipler’s book before he decided to come up with his theory of how to solve the problem of evil. Since Tipler’s was the best attempt to solve the problem of evil and Goff has no knowledge of it. So of course what he comes up with is going to be substandard, right? And that’s just the way these things work. So anyhow, great job, Micah, explaining Tipler’s Theodicy there. And I do have to admit that I think it’s the only really good one I’ve ever come across.
[01:17:05] Blue: What’s the definition of the word Theodicy? It’s how to try to solve the problem of evil.
[01:17:10] Red: Okay. Yeah, there’s technically I always get them confused. There’s an attempt to show that the problem of evil is not logically exclusive of the existence of God. And then there’s the attempt to actually propose a solution which explains sort of why the evil exists something like that. So there’s these two different sort of intellectual strategies that people employ. But yeah I wanted to say Tipler is as Bruce said kind of a mad genius in part because he tries to locate these religious ideas within the physical world, within the laws of physics and so forth. And that’s what makes it bizarre to people. So if he were just a devout Catholic and he did physics and he didn’t let those two things interact with each other, nobody would really think much about that. And if he if he maintained this kind of spiritual idea that totally disconnected from from a theory about how it would play out yeah it just wouldn’t be that weird to people.
[01:18:37] Blue: It’s kind of an artificial distinction this idea that science and religion should be just two separate things. Someone just decided that. Yeah it’s Stephen Gold. We know
[01:18:48] Green: who it was that’s called the separate magisterium.
[01:18:53] Blue: Yeah
[01:18:53] Red: and I think it’s a new thing in terms of it’s from even just the impulse is only as new as the last few centuries. If you read the folks in the scientific revolution, you read like Robert Boyle or Francis Bacon or something like this, they didn’t think of these separate magisteria in that way. And it wasn’t until the mid 1800’s where the membership of the Royal Society had been something like 30 % clergy up to that point and the the new secularists decided they needed to drive women in clergy out of the scientific institutions and so they succeeded. And created this kind of cultural divide and I’m saying that from one perspective, I think the church the Christian religion is also at fault for allowing this kind of divide to happen or even maybe encouraging it because certain people you feel safer if people from another domain can’t challenge your thinking.
[01:20:21] Green: You know so there
[01:20:22] Red: are certain theologians in time or certain religious leaders who felt safer if scientists stayed in their lane and so they were willing to give up engaging with the science in this deep rooted way that had always been the historic way of engaging with it. So anyway, so yeah Tipler is breaking down that wall and regardless of Tipler’s own thinking, his theories, his solutions, I think that wall needs to come down and this is actually so Tipler proposed his theory at least as early as 1989 he published about the Omega Point theory and the theologian Wolfhard Pannenberg engaged it and Pannenberg like calls this out because Pannenberg is doing the same sort of thing. He’s saying no, no, no. These are not two different magisteria. Ultimately we’re talking about if we’re religious or we’re scientific we’re talking about the future of the universe, the future of the world the future of the cosmos. This is a physical question. It’s a question that that is scientific every bit as much as it is religious and so I think I always think that’s interesting that one of the people who did take Tipler seriously is Pannenberg who’s very influential and respected theologian. Anyway, so sorry that was a diversion perhaps but yeah, I think that’s why this seems so weird to people is to try to articulate Christian hopes religious hopes in physical terms but that’s ultimately what we want and that is what the early Christians were doing. The early Christians too were ridiculed for having quote -unquote misunderstood Plato the critic said oh, you know, Plato talks about
[01:22:34] Red: immortality but he doesn’t mean you’re going to have like a body and have immortality in this physical universe and the Christians were like no, no, no, that is what we mean we didn’t misunderstand that you know, Plato, yeah, he didn’t Plato was not optimistic enough to think that matter could be transformed but we are. So anyway, yeah, there’s a long intellectual history behind that kind of question too.
[01:23:04] Green: By the way, it’s called non -overlapping magisteria. I just looked it up on Wikipedia or Nama came from Steven J. Gould in 1997 in an essay called though non -overlapping magisteria for natural history magazine and later his book Rock of Ages. Here’s a quote from him that ought to get Deutschians hackles up. These two magisteria do not overlap meaning religion and science. Nor do they encompass all inquiry consider for example the magisteria of art and the meaning of beauty. So he’s assuming up front that science has nothing to say about beauty. That’s part of his stance. So if I could maybe like this is something I’ve heard a lot about is Gold’s non -overlapping magisteria when back before I had discovered Deutsch’s beginning of infinity things like that didn’t know anything about Tipler. I was already a religious person that was also a rationalist often found those two worlds to be very separated. So I could at least understand why Gold would want to create non -overlapping magisteria but I could never sign on with it. I knew a lot of really smart people who really bought his non -overlapping magisteria. People who were religious and college professors or whatever and scientists and they would often talk about the non -overlapping magisteria and the problem that I always faced with it was that they just weren’t overlapping like if you’re taking the scientific world view pre -Tipler -Deutsch and you’re looking at you know the heat death cosmology and you’re starting with that world view which is the world view of the vast majority of atheists and the vast majority of scientists today even still at one point it was all of them unless they happen to be Christian or something
[01:25:16] Green: that world view does not say nothing about morality it simply makes morality purely subjective which is why like Ivan is a moral subjectivist. It doesn’t actually say nothing about these things that he’s claiming are separated between religion and science. It just simply gives Lovecraftian answers to those questions that no scientist is going to endorse but they are there, right? And I noticed that and I caught on to that and I really struggled with the non -overlapping magisteria I couldn’t accept it myself even though I could understand why people would find it interesting and would want to endorse it but it struck me as irrational and so I couldn’t bring myself to ever endorse it or accept it and I really struggled with it because of that and at that time I would have had a world view similar to the one that C.S. Lewis explains in his book Surprised by Joy back when he was an atheist where I would have seen it as you’ve got this world view of religion and you’ve got this world view of science and rationality and the two just aren’t the same they are in contradiction to each other and one of them is really bad, the science one and one of them is really good, the religious one and I don’t know like maybe I always was someone who’s playing with theories going either way, maybe religion is false and maybe science is true but as like C.S. Lewis put it in like the Narnia series
[01:26:53] Green: when the people are in the cave and they say there is no Narnia he finally puddle glum just says well you know what, we’re going to go off and live our lives in this cave believing that there is a Narnia because honestly that’s better anyhow and that was how he overcomes the witch’s powers over him is by seeing that loophole in her logic and I kind of saw the world that way at that point it wasn’t really until I came across Tipper’s theories initially in Deutsche’s books that I realized that I had missed something that there may actually be some way to try to mingle these two world views together that isn’t in straight contradiction to each other and I do think that that’s an amazing accomplishment even if ultimately it turns out to be false just the very fact that he was able to get so far is stunning and it’s a much better response than the non -overlatching overlapping magisteria which is just false to the ground like it’s in every conceivable way it just is false and it’s obviously false it’s irrational in a deep way and it’s so much better to actually try to do what Tipper did even if you fail it was kind of my current point of view if that makes any sense
[01:28:13] Red: yeah I would say there well I don’t know there’s a lot to say but Tipper even if his theories aren’t true it is the Popperian thing to do to try to propose these things and Tipper is very influenced by Popper I think and his way of bringing together those things is probably correct even if the actual way that plays out isn’t correct so in terms of you know what it means to talk about God and heaven and resurrection and all these sorts of things like he’s offering solutions to that that aren’t just physical solutions they’re also like philosophical solutions and those philosophical solutions may very well be correct even if the physical answer looks somewhat different and I think that’s actually useful to think about yeah and I mentioned Pannenberg Pannenberg had actually proposed in some sense a lot of those solutions in theological terms and Tipper is able to find common ground and translate between those things Pannenberg had lacked a physical language for talking about it but had proposed that as sort of an understanding of Christian thought Christian futurism so to speak even before thinking about the actual physical instantiation so I don’t know anyway I think it’s really helpful philosophically to think through
[01:30:09] Green: Michael let me ask you some questions if that’s okay so one of the things I remember reading from Tipper is that he did try to kind of put this theory forward amongst Christians and it didn’t really catch on much which wouldn’t surprise me at all like that’s what I would have been surprised if it had in any way caught on it’s surely enough different than the way most Christians perceive their religion that it would be seen as alien in my opinion so now you’re a Christian transhuman you’re one of the big three Christian transhumanists according to chatGPT my guess is that you have to go through some of that yourself maybe you’ve learned to navigate that better than Tipper Tipper is definitely a bit of an on -re personality so maybe it would be harder for him to navigate that than for you but I would like to know how you’ve navigated that and to what degree you’ve maybe failed to navigate that
[01:31:15] Red: yeah so I guess maybe to what degree I’ve failed to try to translate between these things I don’t feel like I’ve been able to translate Tipper’s whole viewpoint to many others and I haven’t tried seriously but it would be an incredible task to try to take on all of that and translate it directly I will say so I mentioned this being influential to me at a young age other Christian transhumanists also read this in the same era and it influenced and shaped their perspective so there are probably more people out there who are thinking along these lines in terms of their Christian faith than we are currently aware of or that’s obvious or anything like that but the biggest thing and this has been I think the key element of Christian transhumanism is that in the world I was born into the assumption in most Christian circles was something like this that you are going to die and your spirit is going to leave your body and float up into another realm which we call heaven and that future that you are going to have is entirely disconnected from the world that we currently inhabit so that even to sort of invest yourself too much into the physical world or something like this would actually be a dereliction of your spiritual duty because there is another world that we are trying to invest in it’s a different world, it’s a spiritual world and it’s a world that again doesn’t have really any meaningful connection with our own that is a message that I heard growing up in the churches I was around from other Christians in different churches it’s the explanation of Christianity that I heard from secular people
[01:33:44] Red: and that I heard from transhumanists from atheist transhumanists when I first began talking with them they said well Christianity is this sort of escapist religion which is telling you there is another world that you are going to somewhere that doesn’t have anything to do with this world and therefore Christians really cannot be invested in science or technology or the future of the planet or the cosmos or anything like this so that’s a true characterization of how a lot of people have thought about Christianity and the fact is it’s just not a very historical or orthodox or biblical view of Christianity and and that’s been the biggest obstacle is when Christians by you know when they sort of engage me or confront me about the transhumanism thing a lot of times they’ll say wait a second you’re invested in the future of this world and that’s not very Christian of you and so my answer is well actually you’re wrong about what Christianity is and it’s not that hard to see that you’re wrong about what Christianity is we just have to go to any of our source documents any intellectual thinker over the past 2,000 years you know any of this and so one of the things that I actually got as a 13 year old reading tipler is that he draws on this he points this out he points out that the traditional Christian message is about the resurrection of the body which entails the
[01:35:26] Red: transformation of the cosmos and Scripture is very clear about this yes and you know even like it’s just not hard to find to find examples so I will most commonly point out the Lord’s prayer which millions of Christians recite every week it says our Father who art in heaven hallowed be thy name thy kingdom come that will be done on earth as it is in heaven that is a statement that the world the earth and ultimately the cosmos is going to be transformed to be like this ultimate good that we are looking to and hoping in and having faith and trust in and it’s just very clear Romans 8 is another one Romans 8 19 through 21 it is all creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed in hopes that creation itself will be transformed to participate in the freedom and the glory of the children of God the vision is that the cosmos will be transformed that is the Christian thing and in the in my adult life fortunately scholars like N.T. Wright prominently Richard Bilton have really mainlined this view and so you can look in like a publication like Christianity today and well they’ll say oh yeah a lot of the way we’ve been talking about this for the past few decades is actually really wrong really unbiblical and and really anti -Christian tradition so we need to get back to this idea that we’re actually hoping for the transformation of the physical world the physical cosmos and for me you know looking at C.S. Lewis looking at G.K.
[01:37:29] Red: Chesterton looking at some of these early you know it just got me interested in the Christian faith in a deeper more historic way and so that’s the big thing in most conversations with Christians that’s where we start they’ll be like wait why are you invested in the radical technological scientific future and I will say you know look at N.T. Wright look at the Lord’s Prayer look at Romans 8 look at the book of Revelation look at you know etc etc and most people will say oh yeah you’re right that is what we say okay now we got to think about what that means what that looks like
[01:38:11] Green: Kelly hard to chug another good one
[01:38:14] Red: yeah that’s right so so Templar is very much inspired by Teyar de Chardin like he’s a Jesuit priest he’s a paleontologist and you know he’s writing in the 30s the 40s and then his books his book is published in the 50s actually and he’s trying to look at what the future of evolution looks like sort of from the perspective of you know his understanding of both evolution and his understanding of the Catholic faith and his you know his scientific construction is not what we would lean on there but his vision of like sort of what Christianity is looking at is is pretty compelling the sort of Christian hope I guess would be the way to put it and he’s very influential on the secular transhumanist movement Julian Huxley writes the forward to Teyar de Chardin’s phenomenon of man 1955 it comes out Julian Huxley is a atheist he says I you know I can’t accept the fullness of what he’s going for here but I want what he has in a non -religious form and later he formulates his own idea you know he writes an essay called transhumanism he says you know this is the new philosophy of the future the new belief of the future I believe in transhumanism humanity transforming itself you know and yet remaining human this kind of thing so he’s very explicitly adapting these religious ideas into a secular terminology he actually has a book called religion without revelation where he goes through his sort of attempt to do this and the secular transhumanist movement draws from that Christian vision translated through Huxley’s you know very explicit attempt to secularize it and so
[01:40:18] Red: once you dig into the history I think it’s very it becomes very compelling for Christians to understand that actually this is very much rooted in our history it’s the fact that we sometimes see this transhumanist futurist world as alien is really a kind of historical anomaly it is us being cut off from our own tradition in some way
[01:40:46] Green: by the way excellent book about Deschardin I can probably not pronounce that name right how did you say it it’s very hard
[01:40:53] Red: to pronounce it I don’t think I get it right
[01:40:55] Green: Deschardin
[01:40:58] Red: Deschardin something like that
[01:41:01] Green: the Jesuit in the skull telly hard Deschardin evolution and the search for pecking men became men pecking man I think I listened to that book many many years ago on audible excellent book it tells this kind of a biography of his life and really interesting things like as a Catholic priest that you know had taken celibacy he had no end of women following him around interested in him he must have been like a handsome guy or something yeah and which was very hard because a lot of times they would fall in love with him and like one woman in particular fell in love with him and he was going to keep his vows right and so it was kind of heartbreaking part of the story but the book shows also like the Catholic church at the time didn’t accept evolution so he was very revolutionary they do today by the way at least to some degree so due to in part his influence they turned it around and changed their minds about that but at the time they didn’t want him Jesuit priest publishing a book about evolution and the book does portray them as kind of oppressing him which might be a little unfair because like he was such a devout
[01:42:30] Green: Catholic priest that of course he wanted to do what they wanted to do and so that might have been a more fair way to portray it but like he arranges to have the book published after he’s dead which they hadn’t said he couldn’t do that so he arranged to have it published once he died and that’s how we ended up getting the phenomenon of man but just an excellent book that really kind of explains the interesting way that evolution and priests like he was a scientist right that’s the Jesuit priests were often scientists and that was their job was to be a scientist and so he was one of the most important figures in biological evolution at the time and he was also this Jesuit priest that was trying to come up with this this theory that he called the Omega point theory by the way but it’s a biological evolutionary based theory instead of a physics based theory alright thank you for that that answer so that makes sense and I agree with you like if you do I’ve gone back and I’ve read a lot of the earlier Christian documents and you’re right that kind of the modern view of we die you spirit goes to heaven that sort of thing that really just isn’t found in the first you know several centuries maybe millennia of Christian thought it does seem to be something that came later so that’s interesting so it seems like what you’re doing is you’re kind of helping them try to go back to more original Christian thought and then it’s more comfortable for them it doesn’t seem so alien anymore am I getting that right
[01:44:10] Red: yeah I think so and you know there are other questions that come up then but I mean for most of us who are in the Christian transhumanist community it was exactly that that basically brought us into recognizing ourselves as transhumanist just a deeper engagement with Christian history Christian tradition and so you know there are other questions that come up you know deep sometimes deeply theological questions questions about the nature of humanity a lot of those questions are it’s interesting because they they again adopt a frame that is not a Christian frame and this you know I’ve seen Christian intellectuals do this where they are maybe attempting to explain the reservations about something like life extension you know radical longevity something like this and they turn to like a Greek myth like Icarus or something where you know where this you know too great of an aspiration is punished by the gods right and so again that’s a pagan myth it’s a Greek myth it’s not a Christian myth it’s not a Christian story the Christian scripture and the Christian tradition is very explicit and rejecting these sorts of ideas and so we just go we just go through that so like you know sometimes it’s very easy to see I don’t you know I’m never trying to prove text but I’m trying to get back to like the what the Christian story is historically and in its roots Isaiah 6520 you know it says in this kind of future that Isaiah is imagining the one who dies at 100 will be thought a mere child like Isaiah is a radical longevity
[01:46:21] Red: he’s envisioning people who have life spans stretching into centuries or millennia and that’s not even the final vision for him right in what he just said he’s still imagining people dying but he’s imagining a dramatically better future and then he imagines you know a further future or the Christian scripture imagines a further future where death itself is eradicated holy so if you just look at the you know sort of go back to what the tradition actually is and kind of question the framing that we’ve sort of been sort of been like taught to bring to some of these stories where we’re afraid of this like you breasts or something like that again those are those are ancient stories of their own those are pagan stories that the Christian tradition and the Jewish tradition before it were actually very clear and rejecting though those stories rejecting the implications of those stories I can give another example if you read the Babylonian creation myth it has humans were created to be the slaves of the gods so the gods are lazy they don’t want to do work so they say let’s create some being that can be our slave and the Hebrew story if you read Genesis 1 a lot of people say yeah this is a similar story there’s like a lot of the same thematic elements and that’s true but the point of the story the point of using those thematic elements is very much to contradict the implications of that Babylonian story so the Babylonian story said the gods make human the slaves and the Hebrew story says god makes humans to be godlike to rule over creation not to be their slaves but to actually be the rulers
[01:48:28] Red: so I think that original conception runs throughout from the first page of the Bible throughout all of Christian history when you actually dig into it that’s the message that’s the heart of the story and so we just have to continue to get back to that that vision in some ways I
[01:48:51] Green: have to hear just mention that because I grew up I’m still very actively Mormon Mormons do have a long history of deification and so a lot of these things they took a different route and so like they’re kind of radical materialists and don’t believe there’s such a thing as a spirit without some sort of body and things like that so a lot of these are ideas that Micah is bringing up this is what I was taught in church growing up instead and of course we had all the little scriptures and had all the places in the Bible where it talks about this and we had them all memorized and things like that so I can confirm there’s like a ton of them and we’re not even talking like reimagined like the Bible just to its heart really does talk about these things exactly like Micah is saying so that may be a surprise to many people that that’s the case but yeah there is this hugely materialist element to the Bible and to Christian thought and
[01:49:57] Red: it’s not even that it’s not even that hidden or obscure you can read the Catholic Catechism it just says it and it’s just that at the level of sort of culture the day to day thinking that we engage in and think about what we’re doing with our with our faith or something like that that these things get lost or you know simplified down to some kind of form where we miss really their implications so yeah there’s you know all the Christian transhumanist stuff we do there’s nothing that’s actually alien to the Christian tradition it’s not even that radical it’s just again read the Catechism you know go read an Orthodox you know scholar go read the early Christian you know the church fathers go read C.S. Lewis you know like just do it and then but do it like with your mind a little bit open to where you’re actually able to look at what they’re saying and and it’s there and it’s always been there and yeah anyway so
[01:51:13] Green: okay let me now ask you Micah my final question and let me just admit this is a tough question and I get it that you probably won’t know the answer to the question but I want to just discuss it with you it’s been on my mind a lot ever since reading Tipler you’re at least a knowledgeable lay person let’s just you and I talk about this and try to understand it as best we can it’s something that I have really struggled with with what he wrote okay so we did a podcast a while back about the principle of optimism now weren’t you on that podcast Micah or am I remembering wrong I
[01:51:48] Red: might have been there were kind of a number there’s a number of us okay
[01:51:53] Green: I asked a question and I used an example of imagine in the multiverse there’s a version of this earth where suddenly a piece of the sun breaks off and it’s heading towards earth slowly and it’s roasting us slowly or something like that some terrible thing it’s happening too fast there is zero way we can develop the technology to save ourselves right we’re doomed and I raised that as an issue to discuss and Sam Kuypers did not know what to do with that and he said let me think about that and then he came back after a while said I still don’t know what to do with that you tell me what you think right I don’t know how to respond to that and it’s actually a really tough question not just for a Christian transhumanist like yourself but it would be a really tough question for us Sam Kuypers who’s an atheist right who’s trying to hold on to this beginning of infinity world view that there’s this idea that the multiverse that it just puts life out of existence sometimes and in terrible ways or whatever right and tippler attempts to address this and I’m never sure if I understand him I think maybe I do I’m going to explain to you Micah what I think he says and you can tell me if you’ve read him differently than me and then the way he answers just seems really problematic to me and I’ve really struggled with his answer so I’m hoping that maybe you’ve got some insights that I don’t have so tippler in the physics of immortality he gives one answer to this question and then in physics of Christianity which I don’t like as much
[01:53:39] Green: he gives a different answer to this question so let me try to explain what I think each of his answers were and how they build on each other and again I may be misunderstanding the Micah so like totally say yeah Bruce you got that wrong and that’s fine if I’m getting this wrong but it looks to me like his answer in physics of immortality was he has this thing he calls the eternal life postulate and it seems to me that his answer is that if there isn’t life in a universe all the way to the Omega point that that universe doesn’t exist because there was no life to view it and then instead it’s just part of mathematical reality now that answer seems wrong to me in every possible conceivable way because of the whole thing where there would be life and then the sun would wipe it out okay so yeah there was life to observe it and I’m still a little unclear why the mere fact there’s no life to observe it makes it only mathematical okay so that was a part of his theory that I really struggled with when I read physics of immortality and that I thought was questionable he comes back in if I’m understanding correctly he comes back in physics of immortality sorry the physics of Christianity and he enhances that view quite a bit
[01:54:55] Green: though in a way that’s maybe more questionable and basically what he’s I think he’s saying and I wanted to ask him this so he could explain it to me I think what he’s saying is that the laws of physics come apart if you don’t have an Omega point so literally the laws of physics stop being the laws of physics if you don’t have an Omega point therefore there’s this Omega point boundary condition that makes it so that only the only existing universes are ones where life lives all the way to the end of end of time which would be forever right and then he that answer at least solves some of the problems I had with the original answer but it opens up a new problem which is I’m really struggling with this idea that the laws of physics are inconsistent unless life is there I just don’t even know if I can wrap my mind around that he gives this explanation for it around event horizons and there would be event horizons and it would cause the laws of physics to become inconsistent but like in the as I understand the multiverse all those different options play out and so there must be some sort of consistency with the laws of physics or I would have thought okay so Micah can you maybe help me out here as best you can even though you’re not a physicist in trying to understand this aspect of his theory and to what degree you either agree with me it’s problematic or you see that is less problematic than I do
[01:56:31] Red: yeah so I think you’re right in how you’re reading it I think in physics of immortality he does talk about this basically the necessity of observation and so this is a you know sort of an infinite regress problem right if things need to be observed to exist then then the thing that observes need to be observed and so this can only you know can only be true and the sort of like infinite infinite life postulate you know if there’s infinite life in the future to to observe the past then it sort of gives some reality to that now I I’m not clear and part of it may be my weak memory and my or just you know maybe something I I missed remembering about it or whatever but I’m not it’s not clear to me on what theoretical basis he’s he’s arguing for that that things need to be observed in order to exist I’m not sure that he’s not just sort of you know working with that as a kind of current postulate or current hypothesis that is you know contemporary assume to be true within the within quantum physics right so we in the multiverse sort of model of quantum physics we don’t typically have that kind of idea right but in the you know in some other interpretations of quantum physics you do have this this role of observation that sort of gives reality to things so I’m not sure how much he’s fully endorsing that and how much he’s working with it or maybe there’s some element there that I didn’t completely understand now he does by the time of physics of Christianity believe that
[01:58:30] Red: the the universe does have to end in an omega point in order for the laws of of physics to be true to be complete and and he gives an explanation of it that I can’t fully grapple with as a non -physicist but it’s essentially the same as saying you know in order for the second law of thermodynamics to be true like entropy always has to increase so therefore we need the capacity to increase entropy forever so if you run out of the capacity to increase entropy then you have violated the second law of thermodynamics and so that can’t be the case so therefore it must be the case that there actually is this infinite future or something like that and and so yeah he’s looking at the fact that you know if the omega point as he’s looking towards doesn’t happen then these other things happen one of which is the occurrence of event horizons all this stuff which I think he’s saying basically leads to an end to the increase of entropy which leads to the end of the second law of thermodynamics which also because information is actually destroyed by the occurrence of event horizons then this leads to a breakdown of of physics in a different way that form of argument I think is not fully alien to physics in general so Stephen Hawking has you know this idea about the the black holes evaporating over time right so they they leak they leak
[02:00:21] Red: matter and energy and something like this but there’s a concern about that which is do they destroy information and leaking right so if the black hole absorbs all this information which is then nowhere else in the universe and then the black hole evaporates and disappears destroying the information then that would actually violate some certain conservation laws of physics right so the destruction of information actually violates the laws of physics at least as we you know have them currently and so this is a problem that needs to be solved in some way and and so it poses you know sort of you have to you have to choose you know does it does it lead this way where we do destroy information and thus the laws of physics break down or is there some way that information is actually not destroyed it’s actually able to be extracted you know this sort of thing I think tepler is doing the same thing and he’s just saying yeah the the sort of solution to that is that in fact no information is destroyed and it’s not destroyed because there are no event horizons because they all come together at the the omega point so all information is accessible so the laws of physics are coherent no information is destroyed so laws are fully reversible all this sort of thing so yeah there’s a coherence there because the
[02:01:54] Red: because the omega point happens and you could say I think well we just don’t believe the laws of physics are coherent you know they actually don’t hold over the fullest expanse of time and tepler would say well that may be true but then you just made a postulate that’s more complicated than the the theory that we started with you just complicated the theory in an ad hoc way so we actually just hold to the laws of physics as we understand them then in order to continue to be consistent they have to have this kind of infinite reach or not reach infinite extent they have to essentially continue forever in the sense of continuing to do infinite tasks something like this and this entails the omega point and the further ramification of what we understand about the laws of physics that he develops is the only way we get to the omega point is if actually life intervenes and helps guide the universe so then life becomes this property intelligence and life become this property that is somehow implicit in the laws of physics themselves that’s my understanding of it I don’t know does that sound coherent to you? It does yeah
[02:03:22] Green: that at least sounds similar to what I thought I was reading him saying he’s definitely this is a his books get very technical and my physics knowledge only goes so far so sometimes he loses me
[02:03:35] Red: Well me too definitely let me ask this though let’s pose the question that I posed that Sam Kuiper’s struggled to answer okay there’s a piece of the sun that breaks off and it’s going to wipe out earth and there’s no way to solve that problem if Tipler’s here and if we’re assuming his theory is correct is the answer that that never happens is that the answer to the question in Tipler’s mind I’m still a little unclear if that’s what he is saying I think that’s what he’s saying I think yes and my sense is there’s a sort of additional aspect of this and I don’t know I understand how to make make sense of it as a computation I’m not sure how to make sense of it as a physical claim but basically if the if the sun destroys all life on earth and that’s just the end of life permanently forever then he’s saying that is a universe that is not coherent and thus does not really exist that’s
[02:04:42] Green: what I think he’s saying yeah
[02:04:43] Red: now because in some other branch of the multiverse that is not what happens life does continue to exist and life does continue to thrive all the way to the omega point and the omega point simulates all the ways that the equations could have developed along the way that led to different life forms then there is a sense in which that universe does now exist by virtue of the omega point but not by virtue of its own internal coherence
[02:05:23] Green: interesting
[02:05:23] Red: okay seems
[02:05:25] Blue: like you can support the final anthropic principle tipler’s extension of the strong anthropic principle by just bringing the multiverse and keep in mind that it’s just inevitable that human beings will expand into the cosmos so as soon as that happens the sun thing or cosmological event or something like that kind of is not as important life will still continue so that’s my kind of simplistic understanding of why the final anthropic principle makes sense let
[02:06:16] Green: me admit that this is the part of his theory that I find the least plausible which is one of the reasons why I feel uncomfortable endorsing the theory but I will admit that if he’s right and he certainly knows more physics than I do so if he’s right it’s hardly bad news the idea that the laws of physics are set up in such a way that life cannot get wiped out that would be an amazing thing if it were true so I emotionally want to accept it even if my brain is struggling to feel comfortable with it at this point and it still feels a little off to me so I certainly I hope he’s right that would be amazing if he was right
[02:07:09] Red: think about it in terms of I don’t know if you’re helpful though you are with the quantum suicide thought experiment
[02:07:18] Green: we’ve talked
[02:07:19] Blue: about that we
[02:07:20] Green: had an episode on it so
[02:07:21] Red: you probably have a different philosophical thought about it but he’s sort of proposing this for the universe as a whole so there is there is a branch of the multiverse with life in it and if that life gets wiped out then there’s just there’s still going to be a branch of the universe with life in it and that’s going to at least as long as that is a possibility than it is an actuality and so all these different branches of the multiverse will get wiped out but at least one in this theory will make it all the way to the end of time like infinite life, infinite computation all that kind of thing and so if life does die out along the way then you can have this sort of optimism that it’s actually always continuing in some branch and that the success of it continuing in that branch will then guarantee sort of your rescue wherever whatever branch you happen to be in that future is going to actually look back and pull you out even if you happen to be in one of the unfortunate branches of the multiverse I just
[02:08:53] Blue: love that so the universe is a giant quantum suicide experiment it makes some sense I
[02:09:01] Green: think the way you just pose that except for the final part about the resurrection is the Deutsch version that there’s he’s open to or believes there are branches of the multiverse where life dies out then you can tack on to that the idea that those branches will be saved by the ones that do make it to the omega point but that isn’t Tipler’s view if that had been Tipler’s view that would have been easier for me to buy Tipler’s view is something much stronger it’s this idea that the omega point boundary condition actually causes the universes that get wiped out to cease to exist you’re probably right that they still exist mathematically and therefore you could create them in the omega point that would still seem consistent with his theory but he seems to be going for a much stronger version of what Deutsch believes in if that makes any sense
[02:10:07] Red: yeah I think he believes in this consistency of physical law to a degree that I think he’s taking a very Deutschian stance here which is this is our best explanation therefore we have to go with it he says that multiple times in fact
[02:10:32] Green: I suspect Deutsch got that from him obviously it actually comes from Popper but just the way Deutsch puts it sounds so similar to the wording that Tipler uses and somewhat different the way Popper words it so I actually think that some of those ideas came from Tipler
[02:10:51] Red: you know one thing that one similarity that I think is interesting is just their conception of ethics which Tipler it says in physics of immortality like the key ethical idea might be do not destroy the means of knowledge or something like that he doesn’t say it the same way that Deutsch does but it’s essentially the same idea like you cannot destroy you cannot use force or coercion to destroy theories and I’ve always you know I always just thought that was a really interesting because it’s such a starkly different idea than most people’s ethical principles but yeah I don’t you know I don’t know I brought that up to say like I think lots and lots of physicists would say you know I don’t know if we can really believe it’s truly coherent all the way you know to that extent and it’s kind of weird because yeah he’s saying that the thing that because it those laws have to be coherent then there has to be a there is basically a boundary condition on what kind of universes are existent and yet that somehow entails these sort of half universes that don’t you know physically reach those conditions yet are sort of entailed by the the true real omega point universe you know as branches of it something like that they branch off from it
[02:12:32] Green: he takes a platonic view he actually uses the term platonic that they still exist mathematically right that yeah so thank you for the extra explanation Mike at a minimum I feel like I must have not misread him I’ve wondered if I’ve misread him or not when I was reading that I’ve read it multiple times trying to make sense of it there is a level of sophistication with physics here that just may be beyond me that I can’t quite get what he’s saying I understand the idea of a boundary condition and understand the idea that it may it could eliminate what types of universes are possible but I’m I this is definitely the part of his theory that I feel was got the biggest hole in it and that I maybe he’s filled it and I just don’t know how he’s filled it but this is definitely the hardest part of his theory for me
[02:13:26] Red: well I’m right there with you this is you know this is beyond my true comprehension it’s just you know hopefully what I articulated is fairly decent to understand or grapple with the sort of argument he’s making but yeah it’s um I definitely it’s definitely beyond me and it’s the the funny thing is that not very many people have actually grappled with it who might be competent to truly grapple with it so you know it’s kind of an interesting question
[02:14:06] Green: when I was just when I was deciding to go back to school I considered doing a masters in physics to try to understand this theory better I ended up doing computer science which makes a lot more sense for someone like me but I was I was really interested in trying to understand the theory better
[02:14:23] Blue: okay I’ve got what could be a good final question if you guys are are into it cool so both beginning of infinity and fabric a reality and I don’t hear this discussed very much if at all but they end with a very uh a similar statement about futurism and aesthetic progress and beauty I’m talking about the very very end of the chapters let me just read what George says in beginning of infinity which is somewhat he makes a similar statement in fabric of reality where he where he discusses tippler more but in beginning of infinity he says if I am right then the future of art is as mind boggling as the future of every other kind of knowledge art of the future can create unlimited increases in beauty I can only speculate but we can presumably expect new kinds of unification too when we understand better what elegance really is perhaps we shall find new and better ways to seek truth using elegance of beauty I guess that we shall also be able to design new senses and design new qualia that can encompass beauty of new kinds literally inconceivable to us now so this is also one of the arguments for god or teleology that kind of makes sense to me that if we really take seriously this idea that beauty is objective beauty and aesthetic it kind of follows from that that aesthetic progress will increase infinitely I mean if progress in art and beauty is real
[02:16:17] Blue: or if it’s objective then progress is is real and it won’t it won’t stop and he ties that in I think tippler does too ties aesthetic progress into scientific progress like these are kind of arguments for beauty or arguments for elegance that that makes some sense to me tippler also describes himself I don’t think doigt uses this word but he says he talks about many of his podcast and and appearances on youtube or whatever he says he’s a physics imperialist so to him art and music and theology and every every other human endeavor is ultimately a subset of physics which I think is kind of a both an amusing and compelling way to think about it so let me let me ask you guys so we’re on the omega point in the omega point in heaven I guess it’s another way to put it in this world of the far far future the singularity whatever are we all like how are we to think about this like I know no one I know we’re speculating beyond belief here but how are we are we physicists exploring infinite knowledge and beauty and and does my my dog Jojo get to come along
[02:18:10] Red: yeah so I would say yes yes to both so I mean this is a traditional Christian idea as well Gregory of Nissa writing the three hundreds talks about this sort of infinite upward journey into God and and that is that we are basically as we are able to see more to understand more of the fullness of God which is you know you could think of in terms of infinity then we reflect more of that in ourselves but also we long for more of it we hunger for more of it and so we are drawn upward even more and faster and so there is this aesthetic beauty that is infinite in extent that that reaches on forever and that we can continually really grow into and grow to embody ever more fully CS Lewis has the same thing in the end of the Chronicles of Narnia the last battle they are running into this kind of new world and there is ever more infinite worlds unfolding within it and so and the ones that are unfolding are bigger than the ones before and they are more beautiful than the ones before and they are like the ones before but they have grown larger and richer and deeper and wider and all these things and so the all the eternal call at the end of the Chronicles of Narnia is further up and further in meaning ever deeper into this aesthetic and and physical and
[02:20:05] Red: all of the components all the aspects of existence ever deeper into that kind of transformation and fullness and appreciation and experience and embodiment all those things are ultimately converging on one thing and so then yeah, physics and aesthetics and the biology everything else ultimately is one thing that is just in this like unfolding infinity of progress and in terms of whether you can bring your dog yes there is no limit to what you can love and bring with you and allow to flourish and so forth this isn’t a immaterial heaven in the sense of losing everything we care about it’s a very much embodied idea it’s just transformed and continuing to transform beyond all the limits that we can currently understand or know so yeah, I think that’s absolutely what we’re in for an infinite eternity of ever unfolding beauty so we’re actually doing something interesting and yes yes, absolutely yeah that’s right there’s some depictions of heaven that you’ll get in some Christian media which is just like people joke about this in church all the time like an internal unfolding church service which sounds really boring and that that’s not the picture and even when we understand what worship is in the Christian vision it’s not just sitting there in church it’s actually it’s the glorification of life it’s the glorification of ourselves and our relationships and everything that we care about and yeah that is the nature of worship that is what we’re talking about we’re not just kind of slavishly you know saying we’re not worthy to God or something like this we’re looking up into ever greater beauty and becoming ever greater beauty ourselves that’s what it is
[02:22:38] Green: so I’ll give you an answer for your dog so
[02:22:41] Blue: yes
[02:22:42] Green: I looked this up just quickly it does look like the dominant view in Christianity for a certain period of time was that animals lacked an immortal soul but that was not what I was taught growing up Mormons always take the non -dominant view it seems like so from a Christian perspective this idea of you getting to be with your dog I mean would it be heaven without your dog if not then yeah you get your dog in heaven
[02:23:08] Blue: and I’m pretty sure Templer would say yes and he would the dog comes along the dog is still just a program right so there’s no reason why you can’t resurrect the dog just like you can resurrect a human being in fact it’s one of the programs we would want to resurrect so it makes perfect sense that from an omega point Templerian view that the dog comes with you okay well sounds like a religion I’ll sign up for then okay well Micah as a you know former believer or follower of Dawkins and Hitchens I’ve got to say the me of now finds your world view much more compelling I don’t know what I am but I really have enjoyed listening to you talk and and and you too Bruce this is probably one of the most fun episodes that I’ve that we’ve had on this podcast I’ve really enjoyed this Bruce do you have any final thoughts
[02:24:21] Green: no not at all thank you very much Micah it’s been wonderful having you on the show and I’ve actually found you very insightful
[02:24:29] Red: oh yeah thank you guys so much I it’s rare for me to get an opportunity to talk about all of these things that that you guys brought up today so this is is a treat for me and I’m always grateful to be able to explore some of these things and yeah you know I think Peter what you’re saying you know Dawkins and so forth they have a future in this too you know that all of their vision what they’ve been able to see that is something that you know all of us can benefit from and doesn’t have to stop with the limits of their vision it can keep going and there’s you know infinite ramifications of that as well so I think I think we’re just lucky or blessed to be able to live in this cosmos and engage in unlimited acts of knowledge creation and conversation and aesthetic exploration so yeah thanks for letting me be a part of that with you
[02:25:41] Blue: guys and I will look forward to continuing it into infinity in the omega point so yes amen it doesn’t have to end thank you Micah thank you Bruce hello again if you’ve made it this far please consider giving us a nice rating on whatever platform you use or even making a financial contribution through the link provided in the show notes as you probably know we are a podcast loosely tied together by the popper doge theory of knowledge we believe David doge’s four strands tie everything together so we discuss science knowledge computation politics art and especially the search for artificial general intelligence also please consider connecting with Bruce on X at B Nielsen 01 also please consider joining the Facebook group the many worlds of David doge where Bruce and I first started connecting thank you
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