I had yet another great conversation with Frank Tipler. As I say at the beginning of the conversation, Frank is one of the thinkers who had a very deep influence on me.
This video is also on YouTube.
I mention Frank frequently in “Irrational Mechanics.” Here’s an excerpt:
“He could well be right and be proven right by future science. Time will tell. Meanwhile, I read his works as visionary, inspiring science fiction on steroids, scientifically plausible enough to suspend disbelief in the possibility that future science might have something hopeful to say about life after death…
I won’t repeat the summary of Tipler’s theory with commentary that I wrote in [Chapter 15 of Prisco 2020], but let me say this again: If I have to choose between Tipler and his critics, I'll take Tipler anytime, at least he is intellectually engaging in an inspiring way.And to the many bureaucrats of science who attacked and continue to attack him, I’d like to ask this: are your own ideas celebrated in a poem penned by a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature? The ideas of Tipler are [Miłosz 1995]. Of course this doesn’t prove him right, but it does show that our collective mind is yearning for new scientific paths to transcendence…”
We start the conversation discussing Frank’s recent interview with John Horgan and Artificial Intelligence (AI) today and in the far future of the universe, when people and AIs will be one and the same form of intelligence running on the very fabric of space and time.
Then we talked about Frank’s work after the publication of “The Physics of Immortality” (1994), and in particular his 2005 and 2014 papers and his last book “The Physics of Christianity” (2007).
I mostly wanted to discuss Frank’s current ideas on free will and the concept of the cosmological singularity “creating” the universe in some sense. In my book I comment on some related passages in “The Physics of Immortality,” but now Frank has a somewhat different take.
We get to these things near the end of the conversation.
Free will: Frank is persuaded that we live in Everett’s quantum multiverse. The multiverse of many worlds evolves deterministically as a whole, but will happen in a particular branch of the multiverse (world) is unknowable. So what the particular you in this particular world will do is unknowable (non-predetermined). See the chapter “The Problem of Evil and Free Will” in “The Physics of Christianity.”
The cosmological singularity creates the universe: Frank sent me a recent unpublished essay, very much related, and gave me permission to include it here. Here it is:
How Intellectuals Should Find God
Frank J. Tipler
Professor of Mathematical Physics
Tulane University
Intellectuals should find God via their intellect, not by their feelings. Yet in the Free Press article “How Intellectuals Found God,” all the people described found God via their feelings, not by their intellect. All the intellectuals discussed claim to be Christians, and Christianity has always insisted that the existence of God can be established by rational argument. The Bible verse usually cited for this belief is Romans 1:20: “For ever since the creation of the universe, God’s invisible nature and attributes, specifically His eternal power and divinity, have been made intelligible and clearly discernible in and through the created universe. So, people are altogether without any justification if they deny the existence of God (my translation).”
St. Paul’s language suggests that proofs for God’s existence would have to be based on physics. St. Thomas Aquinas certainly thought so, basing his Five Ways (five proofs of the existence of God) on Aristotelean physics: the First Way establishing God as the source of all motion and the other four Ways being based on the four types of causes in Aristotelean physics. In Chapter 1 of “Propositions of the Philosophers,” Part II of his Guide for the Perplexed, the greatest of the Jewish theologians, Moses Maimonides, presents essentially the same Aristotelean physics arguments for the existence of God. We no longer accept these arguments, since we now know Aristotelean physics, their starting point, is wrong.
However, in his 1946 book Space and Spirit, the great mathematician Sir Edmund Whittaker, FRS, Sylvester Medalist, and Copley Medalist, pointed out that Aquinas’ Five Ways are just mathematical sequence completion arguments that go through even better in modern physics than they ever did in Aristotelean physics. And so it has turned out.
In 2020, Sir Roger Penrose, FRS, Copley Medalist, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his paper proving the existence of a singularity in the future of the universe. What is a singularity?
A singularity is a supernatural Being that created the universe out of nothing, and that controls everything that happens in the universe.
Let’s unpack this sentence in stages. First, “supernatural” literally means “outside of (or above) nature.” This is exactly what a singularity is: it is outside of space and time, so a singularity is outside of nature. Further, the great cosmologist Fred Hoyle emphasized that a singularity is not subject to any logically possible law of physics, so it is also above nature. Now consider what is meant by “creation of the universe out of nothing.”
We first will have to understand more about the singularity whose existence Penrose established. Stephen Hawking immediately applied Penrose’s argument to the past and established that an initial singularity had to exist. Hawking then generalized Penrose’s mathematics and proved that there was one single all-encompassing singularity in the past of the entire universe. My own mentor, the great physicist John A. Wheeler (two of his students, Richard Feynman and Kip Thorne, won Nobel Prizes in Physics) argued for decades that the future singularity established by Penrose should also be all-encompassing: all future histories must end in a single final singularity. I have proven that Wheeler was correct.
So, physics tells us that the entire universe is bounded in the past by a singularity and in the future by a singularity. Outside the universe and the supernatural singularity that forms its boundaries, there is nothing: no space, no time, and no matter. What determines what happens inside the universe, and even whether the universe exists at all? The singularity, of course.
To see this, consider how we reach the initial singularity out of which the universe began. The state of the universe now is determined by the laws of physics and the state of the universe a moment before. The state of the universe a moment before that is determined by the laws of physics and the state of the universe a moment before that, and so on. We thus have Whittaker’s mathematical sequence, and its completion is the initial singularity. This is the modern version of Aquinas’ Second Way, the argument from efficient cause. The initial singularity is the ultimate source of the state of the universe (“initial data” is the technical term) at any subsequent time.
Since there is only one universe, there is only one “state of the universe,” so this has the same unique status as the laws of physics themselves. John A. Wheeler also conjectured that the ultimate laws of physics would have only one solution. If so, the solution and the laws would be equivalent. I have shown that Wheeler’s conjecture is correct. Thus, the initial singularity is the source not only of the initial data, but of the laws of physics themselves. The initial singularity indeed creates the universe and determines everything that happens therein.
What about the final singularity? A fundamental principle of quantum mechanics called “unitarity” says that causality works in either time direction, and must give the same result. So, I could have done the above argument with the final singularity rather than the initial singularity. This would have been the modern version of Aquinas’ Fifth Way, the argument from final cause. Considering creation and determinism, the two singularities are the same singularity. Or if one looks at reality from the quantum mechanical Many-Worlds point of view, one sees that there is a third singularity out there, which connects the initial and final singularities, and obviously establishes the two singularities to be one and the same.
So, using only physics and rational argument, we can establish not only the existence of God, but God’s trinitarian nature. We are well on the way toward Christianity.
Full Christianity requires more steps. Richard Dawkins, in his Open Letter to Ayaan Hirsi Ali and in their God Debate, lists the main ones: Was Jesus really the Son of God (one of the singularities), was he really born of a virgin, did he really rise from the dead on the third day, and are we all resurrected, never to die again? To answer these questions would require a book. Which I’ve written: The Physics of Christianity.
I may be wrong about most of the above, but I am right about one thing: this is how an intellectual should find God.
Frank J. Tipler is Professor of Mathematical Physics at Tulane University. He is the author of The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford University Press [with John D. Barrow, FRS]), The Physics of Immortality (Doubleday), and The Physics of Christianity (Doubleday).
G, Thanks sincerely for this conversation. I am 'content' with the notion that what Frank calls supernatural might be 'natural' in an as yet unknown condition. In words that Frank might consider to be intelligible: there might be an infinite regression (think many, thus different, not identical) of what he calls 'supernaturals' or Gods. William James would say this describes a radical pluralism of discontinuous realms of non unified 'physics.' This might be correlated to Godel's theories too. It allows for a working hypothesis of reality (convicted trust or faith) that is solid, but always open to surprises and revisions for all entities--Gods (singularities) that don't know or remember each other, being a way of thinking about it. Best wishes, Randall
@Randall Paul, I like what you are saying here. Kurt Gödel's incompletenes and irreducability is probably at the heart of how we come to understand anything. "Is" (or "intentionality" to be about something) is only what the mind remembers anyway. Time's arrow itself prevents us from measuring "is." When we "measure" or observe something, we are measuring only what we call "material." We are really only taking account of the "affectation"(for lack of a better word) that material thing had in our earthbound realm (world). J.S. Bell called this "essence" of the measurment "unspeakable." Erwin Lazlo called it "Akashic." That nature of the mechanical universe does not prevent us from understanding it. It is no less mechanical. Consciousness in that respect is just fundamental.
Thanks, James, for this thoughtful response.
Randall
I think consciousness is NOT "non-fundamental," but this doesn't mean that consciousness is THE fundamental aspect of reality. I see what we call consciousness as one of an entangled set of fundamental aspects of reality. I'm close to what Bertrand Russell called neutral monism, or dual-aspect monism. And as you say, consciousness and whatever we can say about the would are strongly conditioned by our experience of time, which perhaps is not a primary element of the reality of the thing itself.
Hi Randall, good to see you here.
What you say matches very closely my own views, but I'm not sure Frank would agree.
In my last book I quote and comment on some "leftovers" from "The Physics of Immortality" that I found especially interesting on a second read, such as:
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Free will is real “only if our actual decisions are not determined by the rest of the universe, past, present, or future, but instead we ourselves are the ultimate and irreducible source of our decisions” [Tipler 1994].
Frank Tipler made similar considerations in [Tipler 1994]. Our laws of physics of the local here and now, he said, must necessarily “have a little vagueness” and cannot determine all decisions of all agents. “The free decisions of the agents are an irreducible factor in the generation of the physical universe and its laws, not merely the reverse,” he said. “For the free decisions of all the agents past, present, and future collectively generate the totality of existence.”
Frank Tipler argued that “the indeterminism in quantum gravity is ontological and logically irremovable: it ultimately comes from Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem” [Tipler 1994].
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It seems to me that, in his latest papers and in "The Physics of Christianity," Frank adopts a streamlined but oversimplified view.
Thanks for this response, Giulio. My working hypothesis is that monism should be considered monisms! No ultimate foundation, no ultimate purpose. Adequate foundations for adequate purposes--both functions of decisions of collaborative 'Gods' that 'set-up' social, material forms for penultimate purposes. As a Christian and LDS I trust that optimizing the joyful (& often sad) experience of 'ever-lasting' mutual interpersonal love is the main purpose for us (divine humans). LDS believe our infinite pasts are veiled from memory while we are mortal. Apparently this brief mortal learning experience provides a sense of loneliness, meaninglessness, bewildered by coming from nowhere, fear of becoming food for worms--all for the purpose of creating more value for long-lasting loving relations--whatever purposes we next develop and forms we decide to employ. Godel for the Gods. I especially enjoyed this citation: Free will is real “only if our actual decisions are not determined by the rest of the universe, past, present, or future, but instead we ourselves are the ultimate and irreducible source of our decisions” [Tipler 1994]. Whitehead's creative synthesis faced the matter by saying all the past 'merely limits' the infinite creativity of the next instant. So always everywhere 1+1=3. Because of conscious creative free will the summation of the past meets 'another apparently emerging term' each instant. He thought a kind of panpsychism might be real. I prefer the notion of different densities and complexities that made some existing stuff creative and other stuff not so much. Enough rambling on my part. So grateful you are sharing you work 'out loud.' Randall
I love Whitehead's "the past 'merely limits' the infinite creativity of the next instant" but I don't find this quote in Process and Reality, could you give me a source?
G, This was my paraphrase of my view of the idea of infinite continual creative future emerging 'out of' a past that is 'determined or finished' each instant.
Perplexity quickly answered my attempt to obtain an exact quotation that inspired my summation:
Your conclusion about A.N. Whitehead's process theory aligns closely with his philosophical ideas, though it simplifies a complex concept. Whitehead's process philosophy emphasizes the dynamic, creative nature of reality, where each moment builds upon the past while introducing novelty. This is how
In "Process and Reality," Whitehead introduces the concept of creativity as the ultimate principle, describing it as "the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact"[1]. This creativity is not constrained but rather conditioned by its past, allowing for both continuity and novelty in each new moment.
Whitehead's notion of "concrescence" supports your (Randall's) interpretation:
Concrescence is the process by which each actual entity forms itself, taking into account the entire universe of past events while also introducing new possibilities[1]. This process embodies the idea that the past limits but does not fully determine the present.
The phrase "the many become one and are increased by one" further illustrates this concept[5]. Each new actual entity (or moment of experience) unifies the many elements of the past while adding something new, thus increasing the potential for future becomings.
Whitehead's emphasis on the "creative advance" or "passage of nature" also supports your conclusion[2]. This ongoing process of creation is fundamental to his metaphysics, highlighting the continuous emergence of novelty within the constraints of what has come before.
While your summary captures the essence of Whitehead's theory, it's important to note that his philosophy is more nuanced. The past does more than "merely limit" - it provides the raw material for creativity, and each new moment is a complex synthesis of past and potential[1][5]. Nonetheless, your conclusion effectively captures the spirit of Whitehead's emphasis on ongoing creativity within the context of an interconnected universe.
Citations:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Becoming_(philosophy)
[2] https://www.religion-online.org/article/the-metaphysical-significance-of-whiteheads-creativity/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_and_Reality
[4] https://encyclopedia.whiteheadresearch.org/entries/thematic/metaphysics/the-mystery-of-creativity/
[5] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/851541.Process_and_Reality
[6] https://iep.utm.edu/whitehead/
[7] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-philosophy/
[8] https://voicesofvr.com/primer-on-whiteheads-process-philosophy-as-a-paradigm-shift-foundation-for-experiential-design/
Thank you Randall! I'm reading those passages in "Process and Reality" now. If only Whitehead had paid more attention to clarity of exposition :-( But he spoke as a genius speaks and it is up to us to interpret what he said.
I agree with Whitehead concept as far as I understand it. Robert Pirsig said similar things (see Chapter 7 of my last book), and I agree with both. Too bad I didn't quote Whitehead directly.
I agree about A.N.W.’s dense prose. If only he had learned how to explain clearly (as well as to conceive pluralism) from William James!
OMG! Eureka! This is it. Frank is another believer (like us) who doubts. When we say words like "unknowable", "unobservable" or "unspeakable' we realize those are "just words." And still, words are "representational" and not the "cause" of the information we communicate. Our words are merely the compaction of the thought we were having about the cosmological singularity that is happening. I tell you that mankind can speak God's name, but when you hear me say it and realize that I am only staring at you with the most blank stare mimicking a beckoning or invitation, suddeny Frank's and your words also start to sound poetic (even though you do not rhyme).
I think Frank has achieved a very high level of confidence in his own picture of reality, so he doesn't really doubt. To him, thinking that God is "unknowable", "unobservable" or "unspeakable" (which is what Christian, Jewish and Islamic theologians have been saying for centuries and more) doesn't contradict belief.
I talked about this idea of belief and doubt with my friend Josh last week. I said that belief is a strong confidence in the assertion and doubt is a low confidence in the assertion and we only treat belief and doubt as opposite because of that construct we create in society. He said no that belief and doubt are opposites because belief is a high confidence in the assertion and doubt is a high confidence in the counterfactual of the assertion. If the assertion is Frank's "3 singularities" then Frank holds a high level of confidence in that assertion (he says he has proven it mathematically) and he would like to convince us to have a low confidence in the counterfactual of 3 singularities.
Frank wants to persuade us that his mathematical proof that the three singularities are one and the same and God is correct. His confidence make him a true believer.
As a believer who doubts (or a doubter who believes), I see belief and doubt as complementary in many ways. They come together to me, I couldn't have one without the other.
Agreed Giulio. I always respect your insights (having read your books). There are many ways of looking at these questions concerning belief and doubt as opposites rather than levels (or perspectives) of the same thing. Do you think Frank would be more of a monist (idea that all things and particularly mind and body are all part of one great whole) or more of a dualist (mind and body are separate and distinct)? I think your "in the bedrock" approach in your three part "The Mind: Consciousness and Freewill in the Bedrock of Reality" tells me you might be more of a compatibilist. Though I think I take compatibility one step further and just say "fundamental" or "nature." The intentionality part of consciousness just is. It has to be that way because of the bedrock, not in spite of it.
If I'm to use these labels I see myself as more of a monist (mind and matter, or particles and fields, or the large and the small, are aspects of a whole and undivided "thing itself." Frank also seems more of a monist to me, but he comes closer to dualism regarding the difference between the cosmological singularity (aka God) and everything else.