Episode 118: Christian Transhumanism (with Micah Redding)

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Unofficial, reviewed transcript. It may still contain mistakes; check the podcast when wording matters.

Speakers are labeled by first name where identified. Unidentified-speaker labels may refer to different people. Bracketed question marks indicate uncertain wording.

Transcript

[00:00:00]  Unidentified speaker: Hello out there.

[00:00:02]  Peter: 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 world's 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.

[00:00:49]  Peter: Welcome to The Theory of Anything podcast. How you doing, Bruce?

[00:00:54]  Unidentified speaker: Doing good.

[00:00:55]  Bruce: How you doing, Peter?

[00:00:56]  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? I don't pretend like you're not extremely prominent either, but you're, 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?

[00:01:53]  Micah: Well, you've always got a fact check, ChatGPT.

[00:01:56]  Unidentified speaker: That's something there, but yeah, thanks for having me on.

[00:02:00]  Micah: 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, there 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.

[00:03:20]  Unidentified speaker: But that's the basics.

[00:03:23]  Peter: 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.

[00:03:43]  Unidentified speaker: There's always hope.

[00:03:44]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:03:45]  Peter: So, you know, I thought one of the ways we could start this off, I don't know if this is a core tenet of Christian Transhumanism or any kind of Transhumanism.

[00:03:59]  Unidentified speaker: I think it probably is.

[00:04:01]  Unidentified speaker: I, 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.

[00:04:28]  Peter: I think when you really reflect on this idea, this idea that we could, that reality is computational, I mean, it's just that, it doesn't mean that reality is a computation.

[00:04:41]  Unidentified speaker: Maybe there's a distinction there.

[00:04:43]  Unidentified speaker: I don't know if we necessarily live in a, like a Nick Bostrom kind of simulated universe or not.

[00:04:53]  Unidentified speaker: I mean, that's one conclusion people make from this.

[00:04:56]  Unidentified speaker: You know, you can also, another conclusion is just that something more like Tipler's Omega Point, which I think we're gonna really try to get into today, that knowledge expands into the universe.

[00:05:09]  Peter: 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.

[00:05:22]  Unidentified speaker: Well, if we have post-biological descendants, you 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 a multiverse or something like that, which, and, you know, in the Tipler's Omega Point, the natural conclusion to that is that every human or, you know, knowledge-creating entity that could ever exist or has ever existed or could conceivably ever exist anywhere in the multiverse could be simulated.

[00:06:05]  Peter: 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 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.

[00:06:36]  Unidentified speaker: It's very hard.

[00:06:38]  Peter: I'm sure that you've had the experience of trying to explain that to a, quote unquote, regular person who's never heard of transhumanism. I've tried to explain that to people, and I kind of get a blank stare. I mean, is it just, and then what I say, and I don't even know, 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.

[00:07:21]  Unidentified speaker: It seems to me maybe another way of saying that, just saying that life follows laws or patterns or is algorithmic, follows the laws of physics, but it's hard to make that jump between we follow laws to reality is algorithmic.

[00:07:41]  Unidentified speaker: And of course, I'm aware that, you know, Roger Penrose wrote a whole book, Emperor's New Mind, you know, one of the most famous physicists in the world, casting doubt on this assertion.

[00:07:54]  Peter: It seems like most people maybe, you know, to make an argument from authority, it seems like most people who've really really contemplated this question, who are far smarter than I am, do agree that reality is computational. Maybe I'm off base there. Maybe those are just the loudest voices.

[00:08:17]  Unidentified speaker: But let me put this question to you, Micah, and then you, Bruce.

[00:08:24]  Peter: Do you think A, reality is computational? What does that mean and why do you think that?

[00:08:32]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:08:33]  Micah: So I think the obstacle here is that it is very hard to know what we mean by computational. For most people, the only reference point is to look at computers that we have in our everyday lives.

[00:08:49]  Unidentified speaker: Specifically, digital computers, right?

[00:08:51]  Bruce: 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]  Peter: You're thinking quantum computers, it could also mean?

[00:09:02]  Bruce: It could mean analog computer. There are many, many ways to build a computer that are nothing like our digital computers.

[00:09:09]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:09:11]  Micah: Somebody is going to look at a laptop or a phone or something like this and say, well, obviously, lots and lots of reality is not like this at all. That's true. When someone does say reality is computational, I think that immediately becomes this difficult thing to try to explain. So 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 digital computers and so on. So 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 emulate these other processes, in fact, any other process. And that is, as you said, it goes to the fact that our 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 1. That we are made in the image of God, made to be creators like God is a creator. So 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. And I think that is, in contemporary physics terms, that is what we would mean by saying reality is computational.

[00:11:27]  Unidentified speaker: I can imagine that when you explain this to other Christians, they're probably the ones that are, it's mostly maybe the materialists who would be more open to this.

[00:11:38]  Peter: I can't imagine that there's too many Christians that are open to this assertion.

[00:11:46]  Unidentified speaker: It was what I would imagine.

[00:11:47]  Unidentified speaker: But you tell me.

[00:11:50]  Micah: So, of course, what most people think just in terms of sheer numbers is just going to be always going to be a patchwork of common sense and different ideas, that kind of thing. And so when you 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, well, we don't want to be reductive.

[00:12:28]  Unidentified speaker: 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-comprehensible things, un-computated or un-computatable things in the cosmos.

[00:12:52]  Micah: Because that in some sense seems more friendly to a more kind of magical worldview, so to speak. If you imagine angels and demons and fairies and all this kind of stuff, right? It's easier to get there if you imagine that reality is, in fact, not computational, that we can't understand everything. That has been a, I think, that's an intellectual strategy that a lot of Christian thinkers pursue. I think it's actually wrong-headed, like I 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. They think this is part of the Christian faith and Christian understanding of the world. I think just where things are now for most people is influenced by intellectual trends, and I understand completely why Christians do want to believe in a incredible universe that has all kinds of being and all kinds of potential and all this stuff. And I just think they can get there through science and computation and so forth in actually a much more tangible way. And that's not a common thought yet, but perhaps in the future.

[00:14:26]  Unidentified speaker: Well, you say it's not common.

[00:14:27]  Peter: Oh, sorry. But I just listened to that Walter Isaacson book about biography of Einstein, which is so good.

[00:14:37]  Unidentified speaker: It's one of the best books I've experienced lately.

[00:14:42]  Unidentified speaker: But this God doesn't play dice with the universe thing.

[00:14:46]  Unidentified speaker: That was pretty, that wasn't just a throwaway comment.

[00:14:51]  Peter: That was something that he wrestled with his entire life. And 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 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.

[00:15:28]  Unidentified speaker: I mean, I don't know if the word faith is the right word, but that's what he saw as his, central to his conception of God and religion.

[00:15:39]  Unidentified speaker: So, yeah, yeah.

[00:15:41]  Micah: So yeah, to be clear, I think the Christian intellectual tradition and in a broader sense, the Judeo-Christian intellectual tradition and in the 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 this is your very much correct to see that in showing up throughout the intellectual tradition. I do think we essentially live in a sort of intellectual bubble in our current society where I think, like I said, the dominant intellectual idea in Christian circles anyway, doesn't go there. But that is an anomaly. And even if you just look back 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 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, a rational reality, that is ultimately comprehensible by humans and any other kind of person there might be.

[00:17:19]  Peter: So you would link computational with comprehensible.

[00:17:24]  Unidentified speaker: Those are interwoven concepts?

[00:17:27]  Micah: I think so, because at least as, as, you know, Deutsch is 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.

[00:17:53]  Unidentified speaker: So that's comprehensible, comprehensibility, and that's because of this property of, of computationality or, you know, you could split that up or talk about those concepts in different ways.

[00:18:05]  Micah: 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.

[00:18:17]  Unidentified speaker: Well, that was a good answer.

[00:18:18]  Unidentified speaker: I had several aha moments while I was listening to you.

[00:18:23]  Unidentified speaker: So Bruce, how about some more aha moments from you?

[00:18:27]  Peter: Is reality computational?

[00:18:30]  Bruce: 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 their 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 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. And the tape that it was reading and writing off would be its memory.

[00:20:01]  Bruce: 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, it's 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, one's like a machine and one's 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 and program is so overblown, and so I'm going to use the word algorithm and I really mean program. So, now 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]  Bruce: 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 not 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?

[00:22:44]  Unidentified speaker: What if you made it 3D?

[00:22:45]  Unidentified speaker: You know, what if you...

[00:22:46]  Bruce: 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.

[00:23:17]  Unidentified speaker: That's actually not quite true.

[00:23:18]  Bruce: 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 no matter how you try 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.

[00:24:04]  Unidentified speaker: It has to be one of the two.

[00:24:05]  Bruce: 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.

[00:24:44]  Unidentified speaker: It would just be exponentially slower.

[00:24:46]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[00:24:47]  Bruce: And so they still have a certain kind of equivalence, but the quantum machine breaks like which types of algorithms, what class of algorithms the algorithms can go into. So based on this, all this may even just seem, and when I was taught this in school, taking computer science, they teach it very dryly as a mathematical theory.

[00:25:08]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[00:25:10]  Bruce: It doesn't seem to occur to people that there's implications of this theory if you accept it as 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 reasons to believe that there's no quantum computations going on inside the human brain. And this really kind of blows people's minds, 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 I'm like, no, 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, as an equivalent what it's doing, its substrate is equivalent to a Turing machine, you're claiming that the Church-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, 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.

[00:26:39]  Bruce: 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 assuredly 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 [Aaronson?]'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. And even if you did have a quantum gravity computer at the end sometime 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, you know what I mean? Like it's so far-fetched, it's crazy, right?

[00:28:11]  Bruce: So almost assuredly, even then, we're gonna 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]  Peter: So quantum gravity is what, speaking as a layman, of course, is what would unite quantum mechanics and general relativity.

[00:28:34]  Bruce: Right, it's the unknown theory, right.

[00:28:36]  Unidentified speaker: It's the unknown, and a new kind of computer could conceivably come out of that.

[00:28:41]  Bruce: Yes, I mean, that's always a possibility. It also may just reconfirm what computational theory already says.

[00:28:49]  Unidentified speaker: So it wouldn't necessarily be able to do anything that a quantum computer could do.

[00:28:55]  Unidentified speaker: It would just be faster?

[00:28:57]  Unidentified speaker: Well, okay.

[00:28:59]  Unidentified speaker: Or maybe that's why.

[00:29:00]  Bruce: We're making 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.

[00:29:17]  Unidentified speaker: So you can build an oracle machine.

[00:29:19]  Unidentified speaker: They're called oracle machines when they can solve the halting problem.

[00:29:21]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:29:22]  Unidentified speaker: Oracle machine.

[00:29:23]  Bruce: 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.

[00:29:40]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:29:41]  Unidentified speaker: And that could be what the algorithm running in human consciousness.

[00:29:45]  Bruce: People speculate about stuff.

[00:29:47]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:29:47]  Unidentified speaker: I know, I know.

[00:29:50]  Bruce: And you know, I didn't want to downplay this, right? Because of course, these all just are theories, ultimately.

[00:29:55]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:29:56]  Bruce: 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? 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 they'll probably be future podcasts.

[00:30:36]  Unidentified speaker: We'll probably do the Micah one first here.

[00:30:38]  Bruce: 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.

[00:31:12]  Unidentified speaker: Like none.

[00:31:14]  Bruce: Not even a little bit.

[00:31:16]  Unidentified speaker: Well, I mean, Roger Penrose wrote a whole book about it, right?

[00:31:19]  Unidentified speaker: I mean, it's not like he had bad ideas, right?

[00:31:22]  Unidentified speaker: So that's a good question.

[00:31:25]  Bruce: Do you want me to, I mean, I'm not prepared to do this, but 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]  Unidentified speaker: Wow.

[00:32:15]  Bruce: 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, Gödel, Escher, 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 Deutsch does this in his book where he says, Peter cannot read this sense consistently as true.

[00:33:34]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[00:33:35]  Bruce: 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.

[00:33:43]  Unidentified speaker: At least in—

[00:33:43]  Unidentified speaker: Wait, say the sentence again? Peter cannot what?

[00:33:46]  Bruce: Peter cannot consistently read this sentence as true.

[00:33:48]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:33:50]  Bruce: So if you think you can, then the sentence is false.

[00:33:54]  Unidentified speaker: It's like the liar's paradox.

[00:33:56]  Unidentified speaker: It's the liars.

[00:33:57]  Bruce: It's just the liar's paradox.

[00:33:58]  Unidentified speaker: Right.

[00:33:59]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:34:00]  Bruce: So the fact is, 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. And 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.

[00:35:46]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:35:47]  Unidentified speaker: Well, that's a...

[00:35:49]  Unidentified speaker: I'm getting great answers to my questions so far.

[00:35:52]  Unidentified speaker: Thanks guys.

[00:35:53]  Bruce: 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]  Unidentified speaker: Oh, okay.

[00:36:06]  Unidentified speaker: Wow.

[00:36:07]  Unidentified speaker: That's...

[00:36:08]  Unidentified speaker: Maybe we can get him on the podcast.

[00:36:11]  Unidentified speaker: Talk about this.

[00:36:12]  Unidentified speaker: We'll see.

[00:36:13]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:36:14]  Unidentified speaker: So I thought we could start...

[00:36:16]  Unidentified speaker: 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.

[00:36:26]  Unidentified speaker: So the singularity.

[00:36:29]  Peter: Let's talk about that. I mean, I know there's different kinds of singularity.

[00:36:35]  Unidentified speaker: I think probably when you say that word to most people, these days, they're going to think of the technological singularity as Kurzweil talks about how 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.

[00:37:09]  Unidentified speaker: I think probably all of us have reasons to doubt that particular scenario.

[00:37:17]  Unidentified speaker: At least as I understand it, the Big Bang could be going backwards in time.

[00:37:23]  Peter: If you take general relativity backwards in time, you'll have a singularity where time, space, matter, and energy becomes infinitely dense.

[00:37:38]  Unidentified speaker: That's another, as I understand it, another example of a singularity.

[00:37:44]  Unidentified speaker: We have a, like what I think what Tipler talks about is sort of like a cosmological or knowledge-based singularity, where knowledge expands into the universe.

[00:38:06]  Unidentified speaker: Our post-biological descendants into the point where it becomes like a dominant force in the universe.

[00:38:16]  Peter: It takes over, essentially. So we become something like gods, I guess you could say.

[00:38:25]  Unidentified speaker: So it kind of has this intersection of, with religion, where, you know, if you look at the core, what is the core claim of religion?

[00:38:35]  Peter: Basically, all religions say that we are not this body, life continues after death, we're part of something bigger than just this material world as we currently are living in it.

[00:38:51]  Unidentified speaker: Which, so I think that's sort of, to me, I think of it, you know, as I started thinking about this as a concept, it just, it's one of the most out there ideas that kind of rings true to me, that, so Micah, what do you think?

[00:39:14]  Peter: Is, am I making sense? Is there a connection between this knowledge slash cosmological singularity and a religious conception of life?

[00:39:29]  Micah: 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, right? It's 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.

[00:40:59]  Unidentified speaker: We will eliminate aging.

[00:41:00]  Micah: We will eliminate all kinds of catastrophes and things that happen and so forth. As we push that farther, then we will transform our physicality in some way, so that we, our physicality becomes what we have to characterize as transformative, transformational, some kind of almost new category of life.

[00:41:35]  Unidentified speaker: It may 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]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:41:42]  Micah: And so Max Tegmark has a categorization scheme that I think is really helpful for this. He talks about his book is 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 it 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 can transform our software basically.

[00:43:28]  Micah: And 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.

[00:43:51]  Unidentified speaker: And so, yeah, then we would have a sort of transcendent physicality, a transcendent, transformed embodiment.

[00:43:58]  Micah: And that's actually, I would argue, what Paul describes 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.

[00:44:14]  Unidentified speaker: And he doesn't mean disembodiment.

[00:44:17]  Micah: He means a transformed embodiment, an embodiment that is as spiritual, which is how he would describe the mind, right? It's knowledge-based, it can evolve, it can transform at 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.

[00:45:50]  Peter: I was just, while you were talking, I was just reflecting how this, this David Deutsch's principle of optimism, problems are solvable, pretty, pretty, you know, it's, it almost sounds trite to people really.

[00:46:06]  Unidentified speaker: It's just self-evidently true in a way.

[00:46:11]  Peter: I mean, you can, you can make the jump between that and to, to, you know, 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.

[00:46:31]  Unidentified speaker: I mean, at least in my mind, it's, there's, it doesn't seem so far-fetched, but.

[00:46:38]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[00:46:38]  Unidentified speaker: I love what you're saying.

[00:46:40]  Micah: I think it's true, even if, so Frank Tipler has a very specific vision of this, right, of how this is gonna 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, we'll be governing the galaxy, and we will be doing it in a way that will look like, from our current perspective, if we're able to kind of look forward to that future, it's going to look like a future of angelic, super-powered, unimaginable beings 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.

[00:47:42]  Micah: You know, Deutsch was— 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.

[00:47:57]  Unidentified speaker: That's the scenario.

[00:47:58]  Unidentified speaker: And if we're governing the galaxy, that looks like a religious vision.

[00:48:03]  Micah: Like if we just think very closely about what that would actually mean.

[00:48:09]  Peter: Which I think is a much more likely scenario, honestly.

[00:48:13]  Unidentified speaker: I mean, of course, the future is impossible to predict, but I know that pessimism seems to be very popular right now, but I don't know.

[00:48:26]  Unidentified speaker: 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.

[00:48:38]  Unidentified speaker: The alternatives will be something like Bostrom's, about the doomsday hypothesis.

[00:48:48]  Unidentified speaker: You take the black ball and the world just ends when the right kind of knowledge is created.

[00:48:59]  Unidentified speaker: But I guess that's possible too.

[00:49:02]  Unidentified speaker: I mean, I can't really say it's not, but I mean...

[00:49:07]  Unidentified speaker: Anyway, Bruce, I want to get your thoughts.

[00:49:09]  Peter: The singularity, like, is there a connection between a conception of the singularity and religion?

[00:49:18]  Bruce: 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 different kinds of singularities and that the term has multiple meanings is very, very good. So, let me just say that the Kurzweil singularity, let's call it that, is almost assuredly false. And it's been called the second coming or the rapture for geeks.

[00:49:48]  Unidentified speaker: The rapture for geeks.

[00:49:51]  Bruce: So, it is religious, right? It's, in my opinion, a false religion, but like it's a religious view that Kurzweil 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?

[00:50:07]  Unidentified speaker: I mean, there's a certain logic to it.

[00:50:10]  Bruce: There is, there is. But it's based on some questionable-

[00:50:16]  Unidentified speaker: Assumptions.

[00:50:17]  Unidentified speaker: Assumptions, yes.

[00:50:20]  Unidentified speaker: So, but you know what?

[00:50:22]  Bruce: I find his vision somewhat compelling, I have to admit. And there is a certain amount of truth to it.

[00:50:29]  Unidentified speaker: There's problems with it.

[00:50:30]  Bruce: 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, Tipler is just way smarter at this than, than Kurzweil is. He's way more serious. He understands the physics in a way that Kurzweil doesn't. And that's why Tipler has, has this idea of an omega point singularity. One of the things that's, you know, 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, Omega Point like cosmology for the moment. One of the things that Deutsch points out is that it means that there are no [incomputational?] problems.

[00:52:03]  Bruce: 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? At 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.

[00:52:43]  Unidentified speaker: He's not a physicist.

[00:52:44]  Unidentified speaker: He doesn't think this far, right?

[00:52:47]  Bruce: When you reach that point, then yeah, you're starting to see things that you would have thought was impossible starting to happen. 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 the resurrection for the dead is just a problem to be solved. I mean, that's so weird. And even the vast majority of crit-rats that I know that kind of come from the Deutschian 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 them 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 idea 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, an infinite, infinity of them as memory grows, but there's only certain programs that you can program within whatever size of memory.

[00:54:15]  Bruce: 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? And I think even just that idea, even though it completely follows from all of Deutsch's theories, it's just too religious, right? It's so religious, they don't want to touch it.

[00:54:41]  Unidentified speaker: It's a third rail.

[00:54:42]  Unidentified speaker: They don't want to go there, right?

[00:54:44]  Bruce: And Deutsch will even talk about, well, I'm going to be dead by then anyhow, right? 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.

[00:55:21]  Unidentified speaker: There's some problems.

[00:55:22]  Unidentified speaker: I'm not denying that.

[00:55:23]  Bruce: 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 Deutsch's Four Strands 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.

[00:55:56]  Unidentified speaker: That would be my answer.

[00:55:58]  Unidentified speaker: Hmm.

[00:56:00]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[00:56:01]  Unidentified speaker: I'm loving this conversation.

[00:56:02]  Unidentified speaker: Wow.

[00:56:04]  Peter: 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 about to understand about a religious worldview.

[00:56:35]  Unidentified speaker: And that's the problem of evil.

[00:56:38]  Peter: 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, you know, 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 Four Strander, the, you know, the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is all over his book. I think he was probably writing at a point where most people didn't even know about it.

[00:57:48]  Unidentified speaker: So it was probably pretty confusing to a lot of people who were reading that book.

[00:57:54]  Peter: I mean, it wasn't long before Marvel movies, or, you know, 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 as basically everything that can happen according to the laws of physics, and that, you know, there's probably some ambiguity about what that is.

[00:58:32]  Unidentified speaker: I mean, but it does happen.

[00:58:34]  Peter: 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 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. What do you think Micah?

[00:59:33]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, I think you see where I'm going with this.

[00:59:36]  Micah: Yeah, totally.

[00:59:41]  Micah: When I read this book, so I read, The Physics of Immortality, probably when I was 13. And 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 year or two.

[01:00:05]  Bruce: It's just a little light reading for a 13-year-old.

[01:00:09]  Unidentified speaker: So it was profound to me in a lot of different ways.

[01:00:15]  Micah: Like it really kind of, I don't know how to say it, but it connected a lot of things for me, it connected a lot of my interests. It allowed me, it gave me sort of a philosophy that I could resonate with in a profound way, both in its 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 progress in economics and science and morality and all this, like ultimately, it has to converge. So all these kinds of ideas were profound for me. One of them is how he dealt with the problem of evil.

[01:01:06]  Unidentified speaker: My sense of that at the time was that he didn't fully articulate what he was saying, but that it was glimpsable what he was getting at.

[01:01:26]  Micah: So I tried to talk about this to a lot of people at the time, and it really did not compute to people what I was trying to say about the problem of evil. So what it boils down to, if you do think about the multiverse, the full existence of every possible human, every possible intelligent being, everything that can happen does happen. And then if you follow Tipler's trajectory, you end up in a future where not only that, but it happens something like an infinite number of times. It's re-computed, re-calculated over and over, tweaked until everything 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 key thing that, that as you point out that Tipler is bringing up is, 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?

[01:02:51]  Unidentified speaker: Who gets to be a part of that?

[01:02:54]  Micah: And then it's a question of not just whether, okay, so I had a bike accident when I was 15, busted up my mouth, had to get all kinds of stitches, all this kind of stuff. There's an alternate timeline where that accident didn't happen. And so there's two different versions of Micah 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 Tipler, the question is then, which Micah gets to participate in that infinite unfolding future? Is it just one of them or is it both of them and, in fact, every version of Micah that could exist? And so 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 to exist forever or not? And when put that way, I think you can see, at least for the vast majority of cases, I am the Micah who got in that bike accident.

[01:04:23]  Unidentified speaker: I am glad I exist.

[01:04:25]  Micah: 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 then it gets into questions of, you know, 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 Irenaean, the answer to the problem of evil, or the is from St. Irenaeus. And his answer is essentially that so many bad things happen because it is the necessary condition for the ultimate future that we're 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 that is a good summation of those thoughts or not, but...

[01:06:31]  Unidentified speaker: No, it seems like there's a certain kind of arrogance when you say that...

[01:06:40]  Peter: I mean, 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...

[01:06:55]  Micah: Yeah, that 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.

[01:07:07]  Unidentified speaker: So people...

[01:07:10]  Micah: I've heard people talk about, you know, if they got certain diseases, that they would not consider it worthwhile to continue to exist. And I think, you know, 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.

[01:07:37]  Peter: Oh yeah, he was dating all his nurses and stuff.

[01:07:40]  Unidentified speaker: Yes.

[01:07:42]  Micah: 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.

[01:07:53]  Unidentified speaker: And I think we can see that's actually wrong.

[01:07:57]  Micah: That life is worth having, even under what are often terrible conditions in both 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 evils that we experience along the way.

[01:08:31]  Unidentified speaker: I love that answer.

[01:08:33]  Peter: What do you think, Bruce?

[01:08:35]  Unidentified speaker: The problem of evil, the multiverse.

[01:08:38]  Bruce: 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 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, just, there is a multiverse, and that is a part of his theory, right? 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 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, right? 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 not an omnipotent God, right? And if you're thinking about this purely in terms of a single universe, and you're thinking of it purely in terms of there's a single identity that is you, which is just physically not true, right?

[01:10:23]  Bruce: 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 are 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, it's 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, okay? And once you understand it more in terms of actual science and computation, you start to realize that the two Micahs 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?

[01:12:04]  Bruce: Or would we want to actually bring back the people whose lives were imperfect, right? And let them participate in this wonderful world where we've removed suffering and lived forever and things like that, right? Once you understand that that's the question we're actually asking, the problem of evil seems to just dissolve, right? 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, Deutsch's term, and we are assuming that it goes on forever, and we are 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.

[01:13:00]  Unidentified speaker: I'm a little unclear that Deutsch puts forward.

[01:13:04]  Bruce: Then it seems like you really have solved the problem of evil. Surely at a minimum, Tipler's solution to the problem of evil is the only really good one I've ever come across. And you know, you have read all these Christian thinkers and people make fun of them because their arguments aren't that good.

[01:13:22]  Unidentified speaker: People are right.

[01:13:23]  Bruce: Like Philip Goff kind of makes fun of the Christian thinkers. Their arguments aren't that good.

[01:13:26]  Unidentified speaker: He's right.

[01:13:27]  Bruce: For the most part, they aren't because they're still thinking single universe. They're still thinking unique soul, things like that, right? To solve the problem, you really do have to think in terms of actual that people are programs.

[01:13:41]  Unidentified speaker: Philip Goff like says that I'm trying to remember how he handles that in his book.

[01:13:49]  Unidentified speaker: He basically says that God does not—God created the universe.

[01:13:54]  Unidentified speaker: He's religious, I think, but he said God or something created the universe but does not control it.

[01:14:03]  Unidentified speaker: That's how he tries to solve it.

[01:14:06]  Unidentified speaker: That's right.

[01:14:08]  Unidentified speaker: Is that right?

[01:14:08]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:14:10]  Bruce: If we're going to be honest, his theory has got probably much bigger problems than the one he's trying to replace.

[01:14:17]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:14:17]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:14:19]  Bruce: It's not a compelling solution to the problem, right? 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. I want to ask him a lot of these questions directly, right? 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. But I can see in Tipler someone who is just taking this further than anybody else, right? He's, and I often call him a mad genius, like some of the stuff he comes up with is just so wacky, right? Like, 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, right? Even though this is like Philip Goff's whole career. And Tipler is 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. And yeah, he kind of goes off the rails at times, but 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 that 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. Like don't make fun of people for having testable theories.

[01:15:53]  Unidentified speaker: Go refute their theories, right?

[01:15:55]  Bruce: Like trying to turn it into a personal attack like Michael Shermer does. Like it's just really kind of icky. 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, you know, 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 yeah, I, 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.

[01:17:04]  Peter: Is that what's the definition of the word Theodicy?

[01:17:07]  Bruce: Is that how to try to solve the problem of evil?

[01:17:10]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:17:12]  Micah: Yeah, there's, there's technically, I always get them confused. There's, there's a 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, you know, the, the evil exists, something like that. So there's these two different sort of intellectual strategies that people employ.

[01:17:39]  Unidentified speaker: But yeah, I wanted to say, Tipler is, as Bruce has 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.

[01:18:03]  Micah: 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.

[01:18:19]  Unidentified speaker: And if he maintained this kind of spiritual idea that totally disconnected from a theory about how it would play out, yeah, it just wouldn't be that weird to people.

[01:18:37]  Peter: But it's kind of an artificial distinction, this idea that science and religion should be just two separate things.

[01:18:43]  Unidentified speaker: Someone just decided that.

[01:18:45]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, it's Stephen Gould.

[01:18:47]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:18:48]  Bruce: We know who it was.

[01:18:49]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:18:50]  Bruce: It's called the separate magisterium.

[01:18:52]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:18:53]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:18:54]  Micah: 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, you know, it wasn't until the mid 1800s where the membership of the Royal Society had been something like 30% clergy up to that point. And the new secularists decided they needed to drive women and 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 know, you feel safer if people from another domain can't challenge your thinking. You know, so there are certain, 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, is, you know, 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, his theory at least as early as 1989. He published about the Omega Point theory, and the theologian Wolfhardt Pannenberg engaged it.

[01:21:15]  Micah: And, and Pannenberg like calls this out, because Pannenberg is doing the same sort of thing. He's saying, no, no, these are not two different magisteria. Ultimately, we're talking about like 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 is scientific every bit as much as it is religious. And so, I always think that's interesting that one of the people who did take Tipler seriously is Pannenberg, who's a 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.

[01:22:15]  Unidentified speaker: But that's ultimately what we want.

[01:22:17]  Unidentified speaker: And that is what the early Christians were doing.

[01:22:21]  Micah: The early Christians too were ridiculed for having quote unquote misunderstood Plato. The critics said, oh, you know, Plato talks about 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]  Bruce: By the way, it's called Non-Overlapping Magisteria. I just looked it up on Wikipedia or NOMA, came from Stephen J. Gould in 1997, in an essay called No—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 upfront 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 Gould's non-overlapping magisteria.

[01:23:55]  Unidentified speaker: Back before I had discovered Deutsch's beginning of infinity, things like that, didn't know anything about Tipler.

[01:24:02]  Bruce: I was already a, you know, a religious person that was also a rationalist, often found those two worlds to be very separated. So, I could at least understand why Gould would want to create non-overlapping magisteria, but I could never sign on with it. Like, 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, right, today, even still, okay? At one point, it was all of them, unless they happened to be Christian or something, right? That world view does not say nothing about morality. It simply makes morality purely subjective, right?

[01:25:25]  Unidentified speaker: Which is why, you know, like Ivan is a moral subjectivist.

[01:25:29]  Bruce: 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 worldview similar to the one that CS. 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 worldview of religion and you've got this worldview 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, 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 CS. Lewis put it in like the Narnia series, when the people are in the cave and they say there is no Narnia, he finally, Puddleglum 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.

[01:27:07]  Bruce: 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 Tipler's theories, initially in Deutsch's books, that I realized that I had missed something, right? That there may actually be some way to try to mingle these two worldviews 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-overlapping?], overlapping magisteria, which is just false to the ground, right? 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 Tipler did, even if you fail. It was kind of my current point of view, if that makes any sense.

[01:28:13]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, and I would say there...

[01:28:18]  Unidentified speaker: Well, I don't know.

[01:28:20]  Micah: There's a lot to say.

[01:28:22]  Unidentified speaker: But Tipler, even if his theories aren't true, it is the Popperian thing to do, right?

[01:28:33]  Micah: To try to propose these things. And Tipler 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 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.

[01:29:25]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:29:27]  Unidentified speaker: And I mentioned Pannenberg.

[01:29:29]  Micah: Pannenberg had actually proposed in some sense, a lot of those solutions in theological terms and Tipler 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.

[01:30:02]  Unidentified speaker: So I don't know.

[01:30:03]  Micah: Anyway, I think it's really helpful just philosophically to think through.

[01:30:08]  Bruce: Let me, Micah, let me ask you some questions, if that's okay. So one of the things I remember reading from Tipler 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, 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, is that you have to go through some of that yourself. Maybe you've learned to navigate that better than Tipler. Tipler is definitely a bit of an ornery 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]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:31:16]  Micah: 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 Tipler's whole viewpoint to many others. You know, 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, you know, 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.

[01:32:17]  Unidentified speaker: 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.

[01:32:48]  Micah: And that future that you're going to have is entirely disconnected from the world that we currently inhabit.

[01:33:03]  Unidentified speaker: And so that even to invest yourself too much into the physical world or something like this, would actually be a dereliction of your spiritual duty, right?

[01:33:16]  Micah: Because there's another world that we're 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 and different churches. It's the explanation of Christianity that I heard from secular people 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's another world that you're 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 that's been the biggest obstacle is when Christians find, 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.

[01:35:07]  Unidentified speaker: Any of this.

[01:35:08]  Micah: And so one of the things that I actually got as a 13-year-old reading Tipler is that he draws on this.

[01:35:13]  Unidentified speaker: He points this out.

[01:35:15]  Micah: He points out that the traditional Christian message is about the resurrection of the body, which entails the transformation of the cosmos. And scripture is very clear about this.

[01:35:30]  Unidentified speaker: Yes, it is.

[01:35:32]  Unidentified speaker: And even like, it's just not hard to find examples.

[01:35:38]  Micah: 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.

[01:35:49]  Unidentified speaker: Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

[01:35:54]  Micah: 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 says, 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.

[01:36:32]  Unidentified speaker: The vision is that the cosmos will be transformed.

[01:36:35]  Unidentified speaker: That is the Christian thing.

[01:36:37]  Unidentified speaker: And in my adult life, fortunately, scholars like NT.

[01:36:46]  Micah: Wright prominently, Richard Middleton have really mainlined this view. And so you can look in like a publication like Christianity Today and where 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 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.

[01:37:22]  Unidentified speaker: And for me, you know, looking at CS.

[01:37:27]  Micah: Lewis, looking at GK. Chesterton, looking at some of these early, you know, it just got me interested in the Christian faith in a deeper, more historic way.

[01:37:38]  Unidentified speaker: And so that's the big thing.

[01:37:39]  Micah: 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 NT. 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. OK, now we got to think about what that what that means, what that looks like.

[01:38:11]  Bruce: Or Teilhard de Chardin is another good one.

[01:38:14]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, that's right.

[01:38:15]  Unidentified speaker: So so Tipler is is very much inspired by by Teilhard de Chardin.

[01:38:21]  Micah: Like he's is a Jesuit priest. He's a paleontologist. And, you know, he's writing in the 30s, the 40s. And 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 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 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 foreword to the Teilhard de Chardin's phenomenon of man, 1955.

[01:39:18]  Unidentified speaker: It comes out.

[01:39:20]  Unidentified speaker: Julian Huxley is atheist.

[01:39:22]  Micah: He says, 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. He writes an essay called Transhumanism. He says, this is the new philosophy of the future, the new belief of the future. I believe in transhumanism, humanity transforming itself, 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.

[01:40:04]  Unidentified speaker: And the secular transhumanist movement draws from that Christian vision, translated through Huxley's very explicit attempt to secularize it.

[01:40:16]  Micah: And so, yeah, once you dig into the history, I think 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.

[01:40:45]  Bruce: By the way, excellent book about de Chardin. I probably not pronounced that name right.

[01:40:50]  Unidentified speaker: How did you say it again?

[01:40:51]  Unidentified speaker: It's very hard to pronounce it.

[01:40:53]  Unidentified speaker: I don't think I get it right.

[01:40:55]  Unidentified speaker: [de Chardin?]?

[01:40:56]  Bruce: [de Chardin?]?

[01:40:57]  Micah: [de Chardin?], yeah, I think it's the...

[01:41:00]  Unidentified speaker: Something like that, yeah.

[01:41:01]  Bruce: The Jesuit in the Skull, Teilhard de Chardin, Evolution and the Search for the, for Peking men, Peking men?

[01:41:08]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, Peking Man, I think.

[01:41:11]  Bruce: 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 had taken vow of celibacy, he had no end of women following him around interested in him. He must have been like a handsome guy or something.

[01:41:40]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[01:41:44]  Bruce: 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 gonna keep his vows, right?

[01:41:52]  Unidentified speaker: And so it was kind of heart breaking part of the story.

[01:41:57]  Bruce: But the book shows also like the Catholic Church of 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 priests 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 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.

[01:42:46]  Unidentified speaker: So he arranged to have it published once he died.

[01:42:49]  Bruce: 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.

[01:43:15]  Unidentified speaker: And he was also this Jesuit priest that was trying to come up with this theory that he called the Omega Point Theory, by the way.

[01:43:21]  Unidentified speaker: But it's a biological evolutionary based theory instead of a physics based theory.

[01:43:27]  Unidentified speaker: All right.

[01:43:27]  Bruce: Thank you for that answer. So that makes sense.

[01:43:32]  Unidentified speaker: And I agree with you.

[01:43:33]  Bruce: 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, and that sort of thing. That really just isn't found in the first several centuries, maybe millennia of Christian thought.

[01:43:54]  Unidentified speaker: It does seem to be something that came later.

[01:43:58]  Bruce: 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.

[01:44:08]  Unidentified speaker: Am I getting that right?

[01:44:10]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, I think so.

[01:44:11]  Micah: And 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 transhumanists as just a deeper engagement with Christian history, Christian tradition. And so, yeah, like I said, there are other questions that come up, sometimes deeply theological questions, questions about the nature of humanity.

[01:44:46]  Unidentified speaker: A lot of those questions are, it's interesting because they again adopt a frame that is not a Christian frame.

[01:45:04]  Micah: And I've seen Christian intellectuals do this, where they are maybe attempting to explain the reservations about something like life extension, radical longevity, something like this. And they turn to a Greek myth, like Icarus or something, where this too great of an aspiration is punished by the gods, right?

[01:45:32]  Unidentified speaker: And so again, that's a pagan myth.

[01:45:36]  Unidentified speaker: It's a Greek myth.

[01:45:39]  Unidentified speaker: It's not a Christian myth.

[01:45:40]  Unidentified speaker: It's not a Christian story.

[01:45:43]  Unidentified speaker: The Christian scripture and the Christian tradition is very explicit in rejecting these sorts of ideas.

[01:45:49]  Micah: And so we just go, we just go through that.

[01:45:51]  Unidentified speaker: So like, you know, sometimes it's very easy to see.

[01:45:55]  Micah: I don't, you know, I'm never trying to proof-text, but I'm trying to get back to like the what the the Christian story is historically and in its roots. Isaiah 65:20, you know, it says, in this kind of future that Isaiah is imagining, the one who dies at a hundred will be thought a mere child.

[01:46:16]  Unidentified speaker: Like Isaiah is a radical longevityist.

[01:46:21]  Unidentified speaker: He's envisioning people who have lifespans, you know, stretching into centuries or millennia.

[01:46:27]  Unidentified speaker: And that's not even the final vision for him, right?

[01:46:32]  Unidentified speaker: In what he just said, he's still imagining people dying, but he's imagining a dramatically better future.

[01:46:37]  Micah: And then he imagines, you know, a further future or the Christian scripture imagined the further future where death itself is eradicated wholly.

[01:46:49]  Unidentified speaker: 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 taught to bring to some of these stories, where we're afraid of this like hubris or something like that.

[01:47:13]  Micah: Again, 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 in rejecting 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.

[01:47:48]  Unidentified speaker: And the Hebrew story, if you read Genesis 1, a lot of people say, yeah, this is a similar story.

[01:47:57]  Micah: 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 that gods make humans as 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. 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.

[01:48:41]  Unidentified speaker: That's the message.

[01:48:41]  Micah: That's the heart of the story. And so we just have to continue to get back to that vision in some ways.

[01:48:50]  Bruce: I have to here 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, you know, 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, right, 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.

[01:49:56]  Unidentified speaker: And it's not even that hidden or obscure.

[01:50:00]  Unidentified speaker: You can read the Catholic Catechism.

[01:50:02]  Unidentified speaker: It just says it.

[01:50:04]  Unidentified speaker: And it's just that at the level of sort of culture, you know, the day to day thinking that we engage in and think about what we're doing 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.

[01:50:27]  Micah: So, yeah, there's, you know, all the Christian Transhumanist stuff we do. There's nothing that's actually alien to the Christian tradition.

[01:50:39]  Unidentified speaker: It's not even that radical.

[01:50:41]  Unidentified speaker: It's just, it's again, read the Catechism, you know, go read an orthodox scholar, go read the early Christian, you know, the Church Fathers, go read CS.

[01:50:54]  Unidentified speaker: Lewis, you know, like, just do it.

[01:50:57]  Micah: 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.

[01:51:07]  Unidentified speaker: And it's there.

[01:51:08]  Micah: And it's always been there.

[01:51:10]  Unidentified speaker: And yeah, anyway, so.

[01:51:13]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:51:14]  Bruce: 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've really struggled with, with what he wrote.

[01:51:38]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:51:39]  Bruce: 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?

[01:51:48]  Unidentified speaker: I might have been.

[01:51:49]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:51:50]  Micah: There were kind of a number of us.

[01:51:51]  Unidentified speaker: There's a number of us.

[01:51:52]  Unidentified speaker: You were.

[01:51:53]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:51:53]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[01:51:53]  Bruce: 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?

[01:52:15]  Unidentified speaker: We're doomed.

[01:52:17]  Bruce: 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 and said, I still don't know what to do with that. You tell me what you think, right? And 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 a Sam Kuypers, who's an atheist, right? Who's trying to hold on to this beginning of infinity world view, okay? 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 Tipler 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, okay? So I'm hoping that maybe you've got some insights that I don't have, okay? So, Tipler 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, 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.

[01:53:54]  Bruce: 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, 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 the only existing universes are ones where life lives all the way to the end of time, which would be forever, right?

[01:55:32]  Bruce: And then 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. That's just, 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]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[01:56:32]  Micah: So I think you're right in how you're reading it. I think in Physics of Immortality, he does talk about basically the necessity of observation. And so this is sort of an infinite regress problem, right? If things need to be observed to exist, then the thing that observes need to be observed. And so this can only be true in the sort of like infinite life postulate. You know, if there's infinite life in the future to observe the past, then it sort of gives some reality to that.

[01:57:12]  Unidentified speaker: Now, I am not clear.

[01:57:15]  Micah: And part of it may be my weak memory and my or just, you know, maybe something I am misremembering about it or whatever.

[01:57:25]  Unidentified speaker: But it's not clear to me on what theoretical basis he's arguing for that, that things need to be observed in order to exist.

[01:57:38]  Micah: 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, contemporarily assumed to be true within quantum physics, right? So we, in the multiverse sort of model of quantum physics, we don't typically have that kind of an idea, but in the, you know, in some other interpretations of quantum physics, you do have 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 the universe does have to end in an omega point in order for the laws of physics to be true, to be complete. 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.

[01:59:09]  Unidentified speaker: And so that can't be the case.

[01:59:11]  Micah: So therefore it must be the case that there actually is this infinite future, something like that. 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 physics in a different way. That form of argument, I think, is not wholly alien to physics in general. So Stephen Hawking has, you know, this idea about the black holes evaporating over time, right? So they leak matter and energy, something like this. But there's a concern about that, which is do they destroy information in 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 have them currently. And so this is a problem that needs to be solved in some way.

[02:01:01]  Micah: And so it poses, sort of, you have to choose, 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, this sort of thing.

[02:01:22]  Unidentified speaker: I think Tipler is doing the same thing.

[02:01:25]  Micah: And he's just saying, yeah, 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 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.

[02:01:49]  Unidentified speaker: So yeah, there's a coherence there because the omega point happens.

[02:01:57]  Micah: 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 full expanse of time. And Tipler would say, well, that may be true, but then you've just made a postulate that's more complicated than the theory that we've started with. You just complicated the theory in an ad hoc way. So if 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.

[02:03:13]  Unidentified speaker: That's my understanding of it.

[02:03:16]  Unidentified speaker: I don't know.

[02:03:19]  Unidentified speaker: Does that sound coherent to you?

[02:03:20]  Unidentified speaker: It does, yeah.

[02:03:21]  Bruce: That at least sounds similar to what I thought I was reading him saying. His books get very technical and my physics knowledge only goes so far, so sometimes he loses me.

[02:03:35]  Micah: Well, me too, definitely.

[02:03:36]  Bruce: Let me ask this, though. Let's pose the question that I posed that Sam Kuypers 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.

[02:04:03]  Unidentified speaker: I think that's what he's saying.

[02:04:07]  Unidentified speaker: 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 sense of it as a computation.

[02:04:21]  Micah: I'm not sure how to make sense of it as a physical claim. But basically, 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.

[02:04:41]  Unidentified speaker: That's what I think he's saying.

[02:04:42]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah.

[02:04:44]  Micah: 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.

[02:04:59]  Unidentified speaker: And the omega point simulates all the ways that the equations could have developed along the way that led to different life forms.

[02:05:12]  Micah: 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.

[02:05:22]  Unidentified speaker: Interesting.

[02:05:24]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[02:05:24]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, it seems like you can support the final anthropic principle, Tipler's extension of the strong anthropic principle by just bring in the multiverse and keep in mind that it's just inevitable that human beings will expand into the cosmos.

[02:05:50]  Unidentified speaker: So as soon as that happens, the sun thing or cosmological event or something like that is not as important, life will still continue.

[02:06:03]  Unidentified speaker: So that's my simplistic understanding of why the final anthropic principle makes sense.

[02:06:15]  Bruce: So let 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, right? Like the idea that the laws of physics are set up in such a way that life cannot get wiped out. Like that would be an amazing thing if it were true, right? 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, right? Like that would be amazing if he was right.

[02:07:09]  Micah: Think about it in terms of, I don't know if you're—how familiar you are with like the quantum suicide thought experiment.

[02:07:17]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, we've talked about that.

[02:07:19]  Unidentified speaker: We had an episode.

[02:07:21]  Micah: Yeah, so you probably have a different sort of philosophical thought, you know, thought about it. I'm not sure, but he's sort of proposing this for the universe as a whole, right? So that there is a branch of the multiverse with life in it. And if that life gets wiped out, you know, 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, then it is an actuality. And so, you know, all these different branches of the, of the, you know, multiverse will get wiped out. But at least one, you know, 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, you know, 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, right? 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.

[02:08:52]  Unidentified speaker: I just love that.

[02:08:53]  Unidentified speaker: So the universe is a giant quantum suicide experiment.

[02:08:58]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, it makes some sense.

[02:09:00]  Bruce: So I think the way you just posed that except for the final part about the resurrection is the Deutsch version, right? 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.

[02:09:25]  Unidentified speaker: But that isn't Tipler's view.

[02:09:26]  Bruce: Like, if that had been Tipler's view, that would have been easier for me to buy. Tipler's view is something much stronger, right? 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 yeah, he seems to be going for a much stronger version of what Deutsch believes in, if that makes any sense.

[02:10:07]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, I think he believes in this consistency of a physical law to a degree that I think he's taking a very Deutschian kind of stance here, which is this is our best explanation, therefore, we have to go with it.

[02:10:29]  Unidentified speaker: He has.

[02:10:30]  Bruce: He says that multiple times. In fact, I suspect Deutsch got that from him, right? Obviously, it actually comes from Popper, but just the way Deutsch puts it sounds so similar to the wording that that Tipler uses and somewhat different than the way Popper words it. So I actually think that some of those ideas came from Tipler.

[02:10:53]  Micah: One similarity that I think is interesting is just their conception of ethics, which Tipler 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. You cannot use force or coercion to destroy theories. And I've always just thought that was a really interesting, because it's such a starkly different idea than most people's ethical principles.

[02:11:34]  Unidentified speaker: But yeah, I don't know.

[02:11:38]  Micah: I brought that up to say, I think lots and lots of physicists would say, I don't know if we can really believe it's truly coherent all the way to that extent.

[02:11:52]  Unidentified speaker: And it's kind of weird because, yeah, he's saying that the thing that, because those laws have to be coherent, then there is basically a boundary condition on what kind of universes are existent.

[02:12:08]  Micah: And yet, that somehow entails these sort of half universes that don't physically reach those conditions, yet are sort of entailed by the true real omega point universe, as branches of it, something like that.

[02:12:30]  Unidentified speaker: They branch off from it.

[02:12:31]  Bruce: He takes a Platonic view, he actually uses the term Platonic, that they still exist mathematically, right? That, so thank you for the extra explanation, Micah. 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 I understand the idea that it may, it could eliminate what types of universes are possible. But this is definitely the part of his theory that I feel has 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]  Unidentified speaker: Well, I'm right there with you.

[02:13:27]  Micah: This is, you know, this is beyond my true comprehension. And it's just, you know, hopefully what I articulated is a fairly decent attempt to understand or grapple with the sort of argument he's making. But yeah, it's definitely beyond me. And 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.

[02:14:07]  Bruce: When I was deciding to go back to school, I considered doing a master's in physics to try to understand this theory better, ended up doing computer science, which makes a lot more sense for someone like me. But I was really interested in trying to understand the theory better.

[02:14:23]  Unidentified speaker: Okay, I've got what could be a good final question.

[02:14:27]  Unidentified speaker: If you guys are are into it.

[02:14:29]  Unidentified speaker: Cool.

[02:14:30]  Peter: So both Beginning of Infinity and Fabric of Reality end.

[02:14:37]  Unidentified speaker: I don't hear this discussed very much, if at all, but they end with a very similar statement about futurism and aesthetic progress and beauty.

[02:14:51]  Unidentified speaker: I'm talking about the very, very end of the chapters.

[02:14:54]  Unidentified speaker: Let me just read what Deutsch says in Beginning of Infinity, which is somewhat, he makes a similar statement in Fabric of Reality, where he discusses Tipler more.

[02:15:06]  Peter: 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, that beauty and aesthetic, that it kind of follows from that, that aesthetic progress will increase infinitely. I mean, if progress in art and beauty is real, or if it's objective, then progress is real, and it won't stop, and he ties that in. I think Tipler does too, ties aesthetic progress into scientific progress.

[02:16:33]  Unidentified speaker: Like, these are kind of arguments for beauty, or arguments for elegance, that makes some sense to me.

[02:16:44]  Unidentified speaker: Tipler also describes himself, I don't know, I don't think Deutsch uses this word, but he says he's a, he talks about many of his podcasts and appearances on YouTube or whatever.

[02:16:57]  Unidentified speaker: He says he's a physics imperialist.

[02:17:01]  Unidentified speaker: So to him, art and music and theology and every other human endeavor is ultimately a subset of physics, which I think is kind of both an amusing and compelling way to think about it.

[02:17:28]  Unidentified speaker: So let me ask you guys.

[02:17:30]  Peter: So we're on the Omega Point, in the Omega Point, in heaven, I guess. So 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?

[02:17:49]  Unidentified speaker: Like, I know no one, I know we're speculating beyond belief here.

[02:17:54]  Peter: But how are we, how are we, are we physicists, physicists exploring infinite knowledge and beauty?

[02:18:02]  Unidentified speaker: And, and does my, my dog Jojo get to come along?

[02:18:10]  Micah: Yeah, so I would say yes, yes to both. So, I mean, this is a traditional Christian idea as well. Gregory of Nyssa, writing the 300s, talks about this sort of infinite upward journey into God. 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 reaches on forever, and that we can continually grow into and grow to embody ever more fully.

[02:19:17]  Unidentified speaker: CS.

[02:19:18]  Micah: Lewis has the same thing in the end of the Chronicle of Narnia, The Last Battle. They're running into this kind of new world, and there's ever more infinite worlds unfolding within it. And so the ones that are unfolding are bigger than the ones before, and they're more beautiful than the ones before. And they're like the ones before, but they've grown larger and richer and deeper and wider and all these things.

[02:19:47]  Unidentified speaker: And so the call, the eternal call at the end of the Chronicle of Narnia is further up and further in, meaning ever deeper into this aesthetic and physical and all of the components, all the aspects of existence, ever deeper into that kind of transformation and fullness and appreciation and experience and embodiment.

[02:20:17]  Micah: All of those things are ultimately converging on one thing.

[02:20:21]  Unidentified speaker: And so then, yeah, physics and aesthetics and biology, everything else ultimately is one thing that is just in this unfolding infinity of progress.

[02:20:37]  Micah: 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 an 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.

[02:21:25]  Peter: So we're actually doing something interesting in heaven.

[02:21:29]  Unidentified speaker: That's another way to put it.

[02:21:30]  Micah: Absolutely, yeah.

[02:21:32]  Unidentified speaker: Yeah, that's right.

[02:21:34]  Unidentified speaker: There's some depictions of heaven that you'll get in some Christian media, which is just like, kind of people joke about this in church all the time, like an [eternal?] unfolding church service, which sounds really boring.

[02:21:51]  Unidentified speaker: But yeah, that's not the picture.

[02:21:54]  Micah: And even when we understand what worship is in the Christian vision, it's not just sitting there in church. It's actually the, 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. No, we're, we are looking up into ever greater beauty and becoming ever greater beauty ourselves.

[02:22:33]  Unidentified speaker: That's what it is.

[02:22:37]  Bruce: So, I'll give you an answer for your dog. So, yes, it, 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.

[02:22:52]  Unidentified speaker: But that was not what I was taught growing up.

[02:22:55]  Bruce: 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]  Unidentified speaker: And I'm pretty sure Tipler would say yes.

[02:23:10]  Unidentified speaker: And he would.

[02:23:12]  Unidentified speaker: The dog comes along.

[02:23:14]  Bruce: 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 [Tipler—?] Tiplerian view that the dog comes with you.

[02:23:35]  Unidentified speaker: Okay.

[02:23:35]  Unidentified speaker: Well, sounds like a religion I'll sign up for then.

[02:23:41]  Peter: Okay. Well, Micah, as a former believer or follower of Dawkins and Hitchens, I've got to say the me of now finds your worldview much more compelling. I don't know what I am, but I really have enjoyed listening to you talk and you too, Bruce. This is probably one of the most fun episodes that we've had on this podcast. I've really enjoyed this. Bruce, do you have any final thoughts?

[02:24:20]  Unidentified speaker: No, not at all.

[02:24:21]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you very much, Micah.

[02:24:22]  Bruce: It's been wonderful having you on the show, and I've actually found you very insightful.

[02:24:29]  Unidentified speaker: Oh, yeah.

[02:24:29]  Micah: Thank you guys so much. It's rare for me to get an opportunity to talk about all of these things that you guys brought up today. So this is a treat for me, and I'm always grateful to be able to explore some of these things. And yeah, I think, Peter, what you're saying, Dawkins and so forth, they have a future in this too. That all of their vision, what they've been able to see, that is something that 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 infinite ramifications of that as well. So I think, yeah, 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 guys.

[02:25:41]  Peter: And I will look forward to continuing it into infinity in the omega point.

[02:25:48]  Unidentified speaker: So yes, amen.

[02:25:49]  Unidentified speaker: It doesn't have to end.

[02:25:51]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you Micah.

[02:25:52]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you Bruce.

[02:26:00]  Unidentified speaker: Hello again.

[02:26:02]  Peter: 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 Deutsch Theory of Knowledge. We believe David Deutsch'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 BNielson01. Also, please consider joining the Facebook group, The Many Worlds of David Deutsch, where Bruce and I first started connecting.

[02:26:45]  Unidentified speaker: Thank you.