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My name is Nikola aka Socrates and you are watching Singularity 101.
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If you guys enjoy the show you can help me make it better by liking this video on YouTube,
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by writing a review on iTunes or simply leaving a comment on Singularity weblog.
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Today my guest is Frank J. Tipler.
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Dr. Tipler is a physicist and cosmologist, perhaps best known for his omega point or
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what he sometimes refers to as the cosmological singularity.
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He is a professor at Tulane University and the author of a number of books such as the
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Anthropic Cosmological Principle, the Physics of Immortality and the Physics of Christianity.
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So Dr. Tipler, welcome to Singularity 101.
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Thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk.
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Fantastic, fantastic.
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So let me ask you this first.
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If you were to introduce yourself in your own few words, how would you do that?
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Well, I would say that I have always been fascinated in physics.
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I am passionate physics, physical imperialist I'll call myself.
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I believe everything can be reduced to physics and everything ultimately is a question of
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physics and I have always been interested in trying to expand our knowledge of physics,
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not only for intellectual purposes but also to increase human power.
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I think that science and technology are intertwined and one of the reasons why we are so fascinated
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by science is because it allows us to live a much better life with the technology we
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develop through science than otherwise.
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I watched an interview with you once where you said that you are a physics fundamentalist.
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I'm that too.
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The fundamental laws of physics.
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The fundamental laws are quantum mechanics, general relativity and the standard model
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of particle physics.
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One of the things I've been trying to defend over the past 20 years is that we already
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have a theory of everything.
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Our theory of everything is those three.
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Of course you have to quantize gravity but that was done in the 1960s by my own teacher
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John Wheeler and Bryce DeWitt.
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We've got a theory of everything and it tells us what's going to happen in the future and
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what happened in the past.
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Fascinating.
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Let me just grab one word there and see if we can decipher it a little more.
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Did you say that you're a physics imperialist or empiricist?
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Both words apply because science, ultimately physics in particular, is an experimental
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discipline which means that everything is empirical.
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But you have to believe the laws of physics, not because some authority says they're true
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but because they're confirmed in the laboratory.
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That's empiricism.
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But imperialism means taking over someone else's territory.
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As a physicist I want to take over philosophy and I want to take over theology and of course
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psychology and evolutionary theory.
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Physics is good for what ails you.
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That's physics imperialism.
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You want to take off everything including religion perhaps?
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Of course taking over religion because what is religion about?
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It's a theory of God.
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Now God is generally considered a subject completely outside of physics but how did
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the great theologians, let's take two, Moses Maimonides, the greatest Jewish theologian
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of all time and St. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest Roman Catholic theologian of all times, how
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did they define God?
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They defined God as the uncaused first cause.
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If you go back in time...
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Or the unmoved mover too.
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That was the unmoved mover.
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That was another in one of St. Thomas Aquinas' five ways proofs the existence of God.
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Now the proofs assume the truth of Merisotelian physics which is false.
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So the proofs may be valid given the assumptions.
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We reject the assumptions so you can't conclude that the conclusions are true.
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But it's also possible the conclusion could be true even if the premises are incorrect.
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And that's what I claim is the case because I take from their proofs what they mean by
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the word God.
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And in St. Thomas' second way he concluded there must exist an uncaused first cause
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which all men call God.
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Uh-huh.
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God is defined to be the uncaused first cause.
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You look back into time, this earth of course was formed out of a nebula about 4.6 billion
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years ago but before that could happen we had to have thermonuclear synthesis to produce
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elements heavier than helium.
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We also needed the helium which was formed in the Big Bang.
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Keep going back and you'll come to an event called the cosmological singularity.
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13.6 billion years ago that was the beginning of time.
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But what is fascinating to me is the cosmological singularity is in Fred Hoyle's words something
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that is not only not subject to the known laws of physics but pretty clearly cannot
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be subject to any possible laws of physics.
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Rather it gives rise to the laws of physics if it existed.
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So it's the uncaused first cause which is to say God.
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So right out of physics following the logic of physics imperialism we conclude that God
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exists so we have the fundamental principle of a religion already there in physics.
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Now, Immanuel Kant once said in his book The Critique of Pure Reason that there are three
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fundamental problems of metaphysics, his words metaphysics.
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Namely does God exist?
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Well physics has already solved that one.
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And second one, is there life after death?
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Third, do we have free will?
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I claim all of these questions are ultimately questions of physics.
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So the answer in physics, take me a while to discuss it or I can discuss it in a book
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which I've done in my book The Physics of Immortality, The Physics of Christianity.
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I've discussed both of these in detail.
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Yes, there's life after death and yes, we have free will.
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So the answer to Kant's three fundamental questions of metaphysics are yes, yes, yes,
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God exists, there's life after death, we have free will.
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There's nothing left for revealed religion to do.
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We physicists have absorbed it all.
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That's fascinating but before we dive even deeper into the cosmological singularity and
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issue of God, I want to take our time to go through some other issues first.
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So some mathematicians would claim that everything in the universe is about mathematics, not
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about physics.
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What do you say to that?
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I say that actually physics is more fundamental than mathematics, that mathematics is derived
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from physics.
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Now what really convinced me of this was a comment made by Richard Feynman and this
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was in the period when you were having the invention of the quantum computer.
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The quantum computer in a sense is a separate device from the Turing machine.
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Feynman remarked, that was the problem with Alan Turing.
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He thought he understood paper.
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That you have to remember that when mathematicians do mathematics, they are actually manipulating
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in the real world.
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Our concepts of mathematics ultimately come from the real world.
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Now one of the fundamental questions which mathematicians have debated ever since Plato
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and before is what is truly fundamental?
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The integers or the continuum?
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Now the answer I give is the continuum.
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But in the 19th century, mathematicians had decided the opposite, namely the integers
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were more fundamental.
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The famous mathematician Kronecker said God made the integers, all the rest is the work
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of math.
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So what they did is to put integers on the most fundamental level and then deduced everything
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else including the continuum.
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But I ask myself, where do our concept of integers come from?
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Well it's counting individual objects.
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Counting, well let's take two quarters, two more quarters, aha!
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That means we've got four quarters.
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That's generalized to two plus two is equal to four, a fundamental statement of mathematics.
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But look where it comes from.
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It comes from our observations of the real world.
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Suppose that mass was not conserved.
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It is conserved, that's the fact of the real world, not of mathematics.
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But suppose that whenever we put two quarters and two quarters together, either another
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quarter would appear or one of the quarters would disappear.
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It would never have occurred to us to create a mathematics in which two plus two is equal
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to four.
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Because in such a universe, that would not be true.
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So really, mathematics proceeds from observations of the physical world.
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Now if you ask why do quarters exist, why are there integers?
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Well you look at the Schrodinger equation, the fundamental equation of quantum mechanics,
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and this was a point made by Schrodinger himself, namely that the eigenstates, quantum, that
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to a number integer really comes from a fundamental continuum equation as eigenstates, as eigenvalues.
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The underlying equation is the continuum, but ultimately the stuff we see in the world
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as integers come from a particular property of a continuum equation.
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So from the physics we conclude, it's not the integers that's fundamental, it's the
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continuum that's fundamental.
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So the whole point of my argument is to show that really our whole concept of mathematics,
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everything we know about mathematics, the postulates of mathematics really come from
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the particular physical world that we find ourselves in, which is to say physics is
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more fundamental than mathematics.
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I can see how that makes sense, but what do you say when people reply that, can you really
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do physics without mathematics and if you can't, therefore mathematics has to be more
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fundamental in a way?
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I would really say fundamentally that mathematics is a branch of physics.
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Remember I'm an imperialist, I want to include everything in physics.
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I don't want to exclude mathematics because I am after all a professor of mathematics
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here at TURLINE, I have a joint department, mathematics and physics.
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I consider mathematics and physics to be intimately intertwined.
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Now it's always been the case because Karl Popper, the famous philosopher of science,
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wrote a paper about 50 years ago in which he pointed out that the true meaning of this
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famous statement over Plato's Academy, let no one ignorant of geometry enter here, actually
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has a physics meaning because he was aware of this proof at the time, it had just been
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proved that the square root of 2 is irrational, which means there is more to mathematics
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than integers, rational numbers, ratios of integers.
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This was a great shock to Pythagoreans, they thought everything could be integers, and
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the Pythagorean philosophy inspired democracies to cook up the atomic theory, i.e. integers
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once again.
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What Plato was trying to do, according to Popper, and I think he's right, is to generate
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a physics that could be based on the continuum, and it inspired his follower Euclid to create
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a fully rigorous mathematics based on the continuum, which we now call, appropriately,
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Euclidean geometry.
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So mathematics and physics have always been intertwined, and I fully approve.
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I don't want to get into an argument over which is more fundamental, mathematics and
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physics, because I consider them really two aspects of the same thing.
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2 plus 2 equals 4 comes from the physical world, but the logic of mathematics enables
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us to interpret the physical world.
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Two branches of basically physics, mathematics and what we call physics.
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So let me ask you this personal question, which one of those two branches did you fall
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in love with first?
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Because I see you're very passionate, so I'm curious to find out which one of these two
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did you fall in love with first, how and why?
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My problem in answering that question is that I've always been a bigamist.
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That I have always been in love with both physics and mathematics.
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When I was an undergraduate, I thought seriously about getting a double major in mathematics
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and physics.
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And of course, I am a theoretical physicist.
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That's my PhD subject, global general relativity, which is very mathematical.
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And once I got my PhD in physics, I went to become a postdoc in the mathematics department
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at University of California, Berkeley.
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But I got my, then I went to become a physics postdoc with John Wheeler.
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And then I moved to Tulane, which was invited me as a mathematician.
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More recently, of course, I've been doing work in physical cosmology.
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So I alternate between my two loves.
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I've got mathematics on the one hand, if you like to draw that distinction, I don't because
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I intertwined the two.
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I don't consider them really separate.
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I've always been in love with both.
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And where does, where did cosmology come into sort of your vocation?
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When did you start paying attention to cosmology?
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Well, when I was an undergraduate at MIT, the Hawking-Pinrow singularity theorems first
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came out.
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The singularity theorems assert that if the universe is causal, there is no time machines
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possible.
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And if gravity is always attractive, and if, for example, there exists black holes or
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the universe is expanding, and certainly it is expanding, then the universe had to begin
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in a singularity.
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Singularity in the mathematical sense, which means a point where the, well, the derivatives
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break down.
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The mathematics no longer applies.
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Something outside the physical universe, which is controlled by mathematics and derivatives.
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So the singularity theorems say that there was a time in the past in which physical
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quantities were actually infinite.
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So I became fascinated by this.
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That got interested in me in cosmological questions because ultimately the singularity
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theorems depend on the properties of the universe as a whole, which is to say cosmology.
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Let me ask you something else.
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Did you have religion as a major part of your childhood or early years?
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As my childhood, yes.
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In what way?
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Well, I was raised in rural Alabama.
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There's still a remnant, at least, of my southern accent in the way I speak English.
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And this was very much a fundamentalist area in the standard meaning of the word fundamentalist
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religion.
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And I became at the age of 12 or 13 a fervent Christian, a fundamentalist Christian.
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And I accepted Jesus as my savior and so forth, was baptized.
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This is Southern Baptist Church.
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And then by the age of 16, I became aware of the criticisms of the arguments of Aquinas
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and so forth for the existence of God.
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And I became dubious that God really existed, especially since many of the fundamentalists
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were convinced that the universe began in 4004 BC.
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I knew the evidence was overwhelmingly against that.
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So at the age of 16, I became what I called then an agnostic.
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And I think accurately it would be more appropriate to call myself an atheist, given my views
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of the time.
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Now, I remained in this, but not hostile to religion.
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I just said, well, these guys have made a mistake.
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That hat's human.
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People make mistakes.
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So I was not hostile to religion.
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When I became a postdoc at Berkeley, I read this fascinating paper by Freeman Dyson in
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which life without end, he hypothesized that the heat death was not inevitable, that life
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maybe could go on forever.
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He was concerned with a universe that was ever expanding.
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But as an expert in global general relativity, which area I got my PhD in, I was interested
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in closed universes.
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Is it possible that life can continue forever in a closed universe?
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Now, I realized it would be possible as a global general relativist only if the final
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singularity had a very strange form.
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It would have to be a single point, which means no event horizon.
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And I said, single point?
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Wait, this guy, Teilhard de Chardin, proposed that God was an omega point, a fundamental
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point in the future.
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So maybe there is a connection with religion here.
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So I started to reconsider my rejection of theism.
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I was a theist at that time, became a theist because God is the final singularity.
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And the great Christian theologian, Wilfrid Pannenberg, was also defending at the time
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Teilhard.
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And he was pointing out that in Exodus, the book of Exodus, Moses asked God for his name.
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And at the time, a person's name was considered to define that person's essence.
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Moses, for example, means to draw out of, as in being drawn out of the Nile, but it
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also means, think of it this way, drawing the children of Israel out of Egypt.
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So that defines Moses' essence.
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So Moses was asking God, when he asked him for his name, what is your essence?
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God replied, not in English, of course, but in Hebrew, eheh, which is most accurately
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translated as I shall be what I shall be.
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Real existence, but future tense.
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Aha!
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God is telling Moses that he's the ultimate future singularity.
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Of course, Moses didn't realize that.
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But God would be thinking about what people thousands of years later reading those words
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would think.
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So he was speaking not only to Moses, but to everybody.
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So here we have an argument why the final singularity has to also be God.
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And I later realized there are three singularities out there.
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It's in my book, The Physics of Immortality, but at the time I was writing the book, I
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explicitly said, truthfully, I was not a Christian.
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But once you see that there are three singularities, which are really one, aha!
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What religion asserts that God is one but three?
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Christianity.
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So, aha!
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This leads us, now notice I have never left physics.
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All these arguments are entirely inside physics, but what we're seeing is the same assertion
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being made by a 2000 year old religion, Christianity.
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So this is a deeper relationship between religion and science than I had previously realized.
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So I'm moving toward Christianity now.
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I now call myself a Christian.
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Oh, yeah.
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So would it be fair to say that your sort of spiritual journey started as a Christian
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fundamentalist, went through a period of being an agnostic slash maybe atheist, and
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then eventually ended up being a theist, and then eventually you realized that you are
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a Christian kind of theist.
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I have no choice but be a Christian because I believe in lots of physics.
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I've always been a physics fundamentalist.
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I have only temporarily been a Christian fundamentalist, but I've always been a physics fundamentalist.
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So do you think that was the cause, remember, of me rejecting Christianity to start with,
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because people who are thought of as Christian fundamentalists reject the idea that the
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universe is billions of years old.
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I am convinced that the evidence is overwhelming that the universe is billions of years old.
23:02.200 --> 23:06.720
And in particular, I think the earth is 4.6 billion years old.
23:06.720 --> 23:14.280
And I think the universe is about 13, let's see what the latest numbers about 13.6, 13.7
23:14.280 --> 23:16.480
billion years.
23:16.480 --> 23:20.840
We're not sure within a few hundred million years about the universe yet, but we're getting
23:20.840 --> 23:22.480
better.
23:22.480 --> 23:27.200
As the measurements improve, we're getting a more accurate picture of the age of the
23:27.200 --> 23:31.320
universe, and it's way, way for 6,000 years.
23:31.320 --> 23:37.880
Let me ask you about sort of the, it seems to me that their fundamentalism played a
23:37.880 --> 23:40.760
serious and sort of constant role.
23:40.760 --> 23:42.960
Is that fair thing to say?
23:42.960 --> 23:48.100
In other words, you are a fundamentalist Christian, then you're a fundamentalist physicist.
23:48.100 --> 23:52.780
So in other words, maybe the physics or the Christianity shifted and fluctuated in time,
23:52.780 --> 23:54.620
but the fundamentalism stayed the same.
23:54.620 --> 23:56.540
Is that fair to say?
23:56.540 --> 24:03.300
Well only in the sense if you want to use the word, it depends on how the word fundamentalism
24:03.300 --> 24:04.300
is used.
24:04.300 --> 24:12.580
And remember, I consider myself open to new evidence, but I'm not going to put aside a
24:12.580 --> 24:15.260
fundamentally tested law of physics.
24:15.420 --> 24:18.180
I'm not going to reject the second law of thermodynamics.
24:18.180 --> 24:20.540
I am not going to reject quantum mechanics.
24:20.540 --> 24:26.620
I'm not going to reject relativity unless I see an experiment telling me I have no choice.
24:26.620 --> 24:27.900
So why is it...
24:27.900 --> 24:33.180
If you like, I'm fundamentally a rationalist, and that I have always been, and I hope to
24:33.180 --> 24:36.180
God I always will be.
24:36.180 --> 24:45.380
But why is it then that say you agree with say the bulk of cutting-edge scientists in
24:45.380 --> 24:50.260
the world today in the realm of physics on those fundamentals at least, right?
24:50.260 --> 24:56.300
Well I'm not sure of that, because it depends on how you define physicists.
24:56.300 --> 24:57.980
For example, I've always...
24:57.980 --> 25:01.180
Let's say you agree on, I meant on say the age of the earth.
25:01.180 --> 25:02.700
Yes, I certainly agree with...
25:02.700 --> 25:04.380
On those very basic things.
25:04.380 --> 25:08.900
I know that you have huge disagreements that I may be able to come later with respect to
25:08.900 --> 25:11.900
the anthropo...
25:11.900 --> 25:12.900
Anthropic principle.
25:12.900 --> 25:13.900
Anthropic principle.
25:13.900 --> 25:15.900
Sorry, I apologize.
25:15.900 --> 25:21.780
So but you accept those fundamentals, and yet what I'm trying to get at here is why
25:21.780 --> 25:26.260
is it that they didn't arrive to your Christianity the same way that you did?
25:26.260 --> 25:30.900
In other words, you became a physicist to return back to Christianity.
25:30.900 --> 25:35.460
You have lots of other physicists who accept those things that led you back to Christianity
25:35.460 --> 25:38.140
more or less, but they are not Christian.
25:38.140 --> 25:41.460
In fact, many of them would say they are maybe atheists.
25:41.460 --> 25:42.460
I'm sure they most...
25:42.460 --> 25:47.260
I would be willing to bet that the majority of physicists today are atheists.
25:47.260 --> 25:50.900
I don't know of any poll, but I would be willing to bet that's true.
25:50.900 --> 25:53.660
I know some very good ones who are Christians too.
25:53.660 --> 25:55.780
Don Page in Canada for instance.
25:55.780 --> 25:57.500
University of Alberta.
25:57.500 --> 26:00.140
Very good physicists, very good Christian.
26:00.140 --> 26:05.100
But he and I are in a minority.
26:05.100 --> 26:11.300
One of the reasons is that this is fascinating to me, is that most physicists are theologians
26:11.300 --> 26:14.500
first and physicists second.
26:14.500 --> 26:15.500
Give an example.
26:15.500 --> 26:17.100
Steven Weinberg.
26:17.100 --> 26:19.660
Very good physicist.
26:19.660 --> 26:23.860
He got the Nobel Prize in 1979 and justifiably.
26:23.860 --> 26:27.340
His achievement getting him the Nobel Prize was a great achievement.
26:27.340 --> 26:28.900
No question about it.
26:28.900 --> 26:33.380
One of the founders of the Standard Model, which I think is a true theory of everything
26:33.380 --> 26:35.300
except gravity.
26:35.300 --> 26:42.860
But I took a course from him as an undergraduate at MIT in cosmology and he said that of the
26:42.860 --> 26:49.460
cosmological theories, he most preferred the steady state theory because it least resemble
26:49.460 --> 26:51.180
the account in Genesis.
26:51.180 --> 26:54.340
Now I thought that was ridiculous.
26:54.340 --> 27:01.460
That what a physicist should do is go by the evidence from physics alone and to heck
27:01.460 --> 27:04.980
with what Genesis says.
27:04.980 --> 27:11.780
But he was putting Genesis first, i.e. rejecting Genesis, meant that he would have to reject
27:11.780 --> 27:13.820
fundamental physical law.
27:13.820 --> 27:19.860
So in a way he was a fundamentalist atheist.
27:19.860 --> 27:21.140
Exactly.
27:21.140 --> 27:22.500
He was an atheist first.
27:22.500 --> 27:29.340
Now being an atheist, being atheist, if that's fundamental for you, is being a fundamentalist
27:29.340 --> 27:31.380
and that's being unphysical.
27:31.380 --> 27:36.500
That's not being a physicist if you allow your atheism to dictate your physics.
27:36.500 --> 27:41.780
That's the same era allowing your Christianity to dictate your physics.
27:41.780 --> 27:47.740
What a physicist must do is allow the physical evidence, specifically the laws of physics,
27:47.740 --> 27:50.660
to dictate what he thinks about reality.
27:51.660 --> 27:56.060
As Weinberg said in his book, The First Three Minutes, that people should have looked for
27:56.060 --> 28:01.460
background radiation because the existence of the background radiation is an automatic
28:01.460 --> 28:08.320
consequence of the laws of thermodynamics, standard nuclear physics, which everyone knew
28:08.320 --> 28:12.600
in the 1950s, and general relativity.
28:12.600 --> 28:17.580
So why didn't people accept the existence of the microwave background or at least look
28:17.980 --> 28:22.740
for it since it was an automatic consequence of these fundamental laws which had been established
28:22.740 --> 28:23.740
experimentally?
28:23.740 --> 28:34.740
Well, the real reason Weinberg let his mask down was because these laws imply, unmistakably,
28:34.740 --> 28:39.500
this is a question of mathematics, here is mathematics intertwined with physics again,
28:39.500 --> 28:48.380
that there had to be a mathematical singularity, a region in which time began outside of time
28:48.380 --> 28:51.700
in the finite past.
28:51.700 --> 28:54.940
Several billion years ago is at the time all you could say.
28:54.940 --> 28:58.460
We are much more precise now because we've got much better data.
28:58.460 --> 29:05.260
But what Weinberg was doing is letting his anti-theology, which is really a form of theology,
29:05.260 --> 29:06.260
dictate his physics.
29:06.260 --> 29:07.980
I think that's true today.
29:08.060 --> 29:13.980
I think that physicists who are atheists are allowing their atheism to dictate their physics
29:13.980 --> 29:19.460
and they'll go out and invent new laws of physics to avoid that nasty singularity in
29:19.460 --> 29:21.620
the past and in the future.
29:21.620 --> 29:29.340
So I say let's accept the laws of physics and we therefore have to, by automatic logic,
29:29.340 --> 29:32.660
mathematics accept the existence of the singularity.
29:32.660 --> 29:37.720
So you're claiming that your guiding principle is basically follow the evidence no matter
29:37.720 --> 29:43.680
where it takes you, which is a principle I very much respect myself.
29:43.680 --> 29:51.120
And you're in a way saying that scientists are being good atheists but bad scientists
29:51.120 --> 29:56.200
for clinging too much to their atheism and refusing to follow the evidence.
29:56.200 --> 29:57.200
Exactly.
29:57.200 --> 29:58.200
Okay.
29:58.200 --> 30:04.360
Now, let me move on and ask you, what is the omega point?
30:04.360 --> 30:05.360
What's the definition?
30:05.360 --> 30:07.560
The definition would be omega point.
30:08.240 --> 30:14.720
Is, as I've mentioned earlier, that the final singularity must be a single point in the
30:14.720 --> 30:17.040
Penrose C boundary of construction.
30:17.040 --> 30:18.480
That's a mathematical statement.
30:18.480 --> 30:21.080
Here we come, mathematics and physics.
30:21.080 --> 30:23.240
But it also has other implications.
30:23.240 --> 30:28.780
Namely, remember I cooked up the omega point theory because I wanted life to go on literally
30:28.780 --> 30:30.440
forever to the end of time.
30:30.440 --> 30:36.820
As long as the universe exists, then once intelligent life comes into existence, that
30:36.980 --> 30:37.980
it never disappears.
30:37.980 --> 30:41.060
That's what I call the final anthropic principle.
30:41.060 --> 30:46.500
At the time I wrote the physics of immortality, I could only assume it.
30:46.500 --> 30:51.100
But now I claim we can actually deduce it from the laws of physics.
30:51.100 --> 30:56.500
Namely that life coming to existence continues to exist until the very end of time.
30:56.500 --> 30:58.380
Now, what do we mean by life?
30:58.380 --> 31:03.700
Well, anyone who is watching this knows about the singularity in the computer sense.
31:03.700 --> 31:05.140
We know what that means.
31:05.140 --> 31:12.940
Namely, that eventually human meat, rational beings, will be replaced by human downloads
31:12.940 --> 31:17.780
and our artificial intelligences, which can reason at the human level.
31:17.780 --> 31:19.980
I am convinced that's true.
31:19.980 --> 31:25.940
I am convinced it must be true because as you're going into the final singularity,
31:25.940 --> 31:38.780
necessarily, if you remain as human beings, as atoms, and what we now are, eventually
31:38.780 --> 31:41.760
life can no longer exist on that substrate.
31:41.760 --> 31:44.260
It has to move into another substrate.
31:44.260 --> 31:47.300
And, well, that's just human downloads.
31:47.300 --> 31:48.300
That's what we're talking about.
31:48.300 --> 31:52.880
So ultimately I define life to be a form of computer processing.
31:52.880 --> 31:59.760
Once I do that, then I can ask, will the laws of physics permit unlimited amount of
31:59.760 --> 32:05.000
computer processing, i.e., infinite amount of computer processing between now and the
32:05.000 --> 32:06.880
final singularity?
32:06.880 --> 32:12.880
And furthermore, can the information stored increase to infinity as you're going into
32:12.880 --> 32:13.880
the final state?
32:13.880 --> 32:21.760
My answer, which I develop in detail in the physics of immortality, is yes.
32:21.960 --> 32:24.880
There's so many issues that I want us to discuss here.
32:24.880 --> 32:28.680
So let me try and keep moving forward step by step.
32:28.680 --> 32:35.240
So the definition of the omega point that I like of yours, that I have here, is a state
32:35.240 --> 32:39.920
outside the universe of infinite power and knowledge.
32:39.920 --> 32:40.920
That too.
32:40.920 --> 32:48.600
Of course, as beings, as finite creatures, to use a theological term, created being,
32:48.600 --> 32:56.640
we can only approach the singularity from inside of the natural world.
32:56.640 --> 32:59.360
The singularity is outside the natural world.
32:59.360 --> 33:01.520
It's beyond the natural world.
33:01.520 --> 33:06.000
And it is transcendent to the natural world.
33:06.000 --> 33:12.640
So approaching the singularity, the final singularity from inside the world, the amount
33:12.640 --> 33:17.440
of information, the amount of knowledge is approaching infinity as you're going into
33:17.440 --> 33:19.280
the final state.
33:19.280 --> 33:23.280
The processing rate is increasing to infinity.
33:23.280 --> 33:29.160
So the total amount of information processing between now and the final state will be infinite.
33:29.160 --> 33:35.760
So I can talk about approaching the final state and identifying the final state with
33:35.760 --> 33:37.040
these infinities.
33:37.040 --> 33:38.080
That's what I'm doing.
33:38.080 --> 33:45.000
So literally, the final state, the omega point, will be a state of infinite knowledge, knowing
33:45.000 --> 33:47.400
everything that it can be known.
33:47.400 --> 33:53.920
And the power available to life slash information processors as we're going in the final state
33:53.920 --> 33:55.760
will increase without limits.
33:55.760 --> 34:00.280
So we can say the omega point also is of infinite power.
34:00.280 --> 34:06.640
You can also, according to the laws of physics, regard the whole universe as being guided
34:06.640 --> 34:08.680
into this final state.
34:08.680 --> 34:12.040
That's called teleology in philosophy.
34:12.040 --> 34:18.520
In physics, it's called unitarity, which is a very precise mathematical concept, and
34:18.520 --> 34:21.400
it's been verified in thousands of experiments.
34:21.400 --> 34:23.020
So I'm convinced it's right.
34:23.020 --> 34:26.400
So I'm necessarily convinced of the truth of teleology.
34:26.400 --> 34:33.280
So the universe is being guided into this ultimate final state, which is the omega point,
34:33.280 --> 34:36.500
which is God the Father.
34:36.500 --> 34:38.760
Let me take it another small step forward.
34:38.760 --> 34:41.180
So why call it the omega point then?
34:41.820 --> 34:44.740
Taking that from Teilhard.
34:44.740 --> 34:51.020
He's identifying God with the omega point, which he thinks is the ultimate future.
34:51.020 --> 34:59.500
But remember, it also has a mathematical slash physical implication, namely that the final
34:59.500 --> 35:05.500
singularity is a point in a specific mathematical construction called the Pinrow-C boundary
35:05.500 --> 35:06.780
construction.
35:06.780 --> 35:14.220
Now that means if the final singularity isn't a omega point, a point in the C boundary
35:14.220 --> 35:19.420
construction, event horizons cannot exist.
35:19.420 --> 35:27.980
Now that's a far-reaching physics claim, because remember, in normal physics, what you consider
35:27.980 --> 35:33.920
in standard physics, you consider the event horizon to be defined to be the surface of
35:33.920 --> 35:35.260
a black hole.
35:35.260 --> 35:40.260
And we've certainly seen what I call astrophysical black holes out there.
35:40.260 --> 35:48.500
But students of mine and I published a paper in 05 showing that no experiment that can
35:48.500 --> 35:55.500
be conducted today can distinguish between a true black hole surrounded by an event horizon
35:55.500 --> 36:00.820
and an astrophysical black hole, which looks like it's going to have an event horizon.
36:00.820 --> 36:06.300
Because event horizons, if you look at their mathematical definition, refer to the ultimate
36:06.300 --> 36:07.480
future.
36:07.480 --> 36:12.860
We have not done measurements on the ultimate future, so we cannot conclude that they are
36:12.860 --> 36:15.920
in fact surrounded by event horizons.
36:15.920 --> 36:24.100
What you can prove mathematically is that if the universe is infinite in spatial size,
36:24.100 --> 36:29.840
and if it expands forever, then necessarily an astrophysical black hole must be a true
36:29.960 --> 36:33.840
black hole, i.e., surrounded by event horizons.
36:33.840 --> 36:38.720
But Stephen Hawking pointed out, and this is a current theory of research under the
36:38.720 --> 36:46.000
name of firewall problem, that there are severe mathematical problems if you assume an astrophysical
36:46.000 --> 36:50.120
black hole to be surrounded by an event horizon.
36:50.120 --> 36:52.360
So I conclude, aha!
36:52.360 --> 36:57.880
What these guys have discovered really is that the universe has no choice.
36:57.920 --> 37:02.920
If the laws of physics are to be consistent over all of time, not just in the past, but
37:02.920 --> 37:09.360
in the future too, that the universe has to end in an omega point.
37:09.360 --> 37:14.720
Now let me go back to the issue of immortality and the presence of life here.
37:14.720 --> 37:21.720
And a couple of quotes that I have selected from you is that, not only is it possible,
37:21.720 --> 37:25.640
but it is inevitable, is what you said once about immortality.
37:25.640 --> 37:32.320
And in another place you say, consciousness is essential to bring the entire cosmos into
37:32.320 --> 37:38.840
existence and since this is not done until the final state, consciousness must continue
37:38.840 --> 37:42.040
to exist as long as the universe does.
37:42.040 --> 37:46.600
Yes, that's what I call the final anthropic principle.
37:46.600 --> 37:49.840
It says that we are not an accident.
37:49.840 --> 37:53.440
Now remember, I am a physics fundamentalist.
37:54.240 --> 37:56.280
I mentioned that before.
37:56.280 --> 38:01.480
My hero, a fellow physics fundamentalist, was Albert Einstein.
38:01.480 --> 38:08.520
Albert Einstein famously said, and I am convinced he's right, God does not play dice with the
38:08.520 --> 38:10.520
universe.
38:10.520 --> 38:15.720
That anything that happens in the universe is not an accident.
38:15.720 --> 38:20.240
We, you and I, we humans in general are not an accident.
38:20.240 --> 38:23.320
We are brought into existence for a purpose.
38:23.320 --> 38:28.800
And ultimately, by looking at the laws of physics, we can see what that purpose is.
38:28.800 --> 38:32.840
Because we are the first rational beings to appear in the universe.
38:32.840 --> 38:38.720
We will move eventually off this planet, I think, as AIs or human downloads.
38:38.720 --> 38:46.480
I doubt if any serious colonization will ever be done by humans as meat beings.
38:46.520 --> 38:52.120
I think we humans will move to a higher level to undergo this singularity in the computer
38:52.120 --> 38:55.520
sense before serious colonization occurs.
38:55.520 --> 39:01.680
But we know that if we do not do this, then the biosphere and the human race are doomed
39:01.680 --> 39:06.480
ultimately when the Earth's sun leaves the main sequence and destroys the Earth.
39:06.480 --> 39:07.480
That's inevitable.
39:07.480 --> 39:13.520
Unless we move off the planet and, of course, modify the Earth and the sun to stop that.
39:13.680 --> 39:19.440
That means ultimately that our descendants will leave the planet, will start to colonize
39:19.440 --> 39:25.160
space, and once the colonization begins, there is nothing to stop it from engulfing the
39:25.160 --> 39:27.240
entire universe.
39:27.240 --> 39:31.720
And when it can gain its control, and it has to gain control of the entire universe if
39:31.720 --> 39:33.040
it is to survive.
39:33.040 --> 39:37.940
You can do, once you realize this is possible, you realize they have ultimately no choice
39:37.940 --> 39:39.920
if they want to survive.
39:39.920 --> 39:44.160
And remember, it's not just us surviving, it's the entire biosphere.
39:44.160 --> 39:50.000
Either we leave this planet and take the biosphere with us, or we, our descendants, and the entire
39:50.000 --> 39:52.500
biosphere will be destroyed by the sun.
39:52.500 --> 39:56.720
So it's everybody surviving or nobody surviving.
39:56.720 --> 39:59.200
The morality is clear.
39:59.200 --> 40:05.600
But if we're not the first or the smartest, the only intelligences in the universe, then
40:05.680 --> 40:10.400
the sun can expand and destroy our planet and we can disappear or we can have a nuclear
40:10.400 --> 40:12.480
war and annihilate ourselves.
40:12.480 --> 40:18.640
And you can still hold your argument for it to be true for some other intelligence.
40:18.640 --> 40:21.160
And I'm not saying it's true, but I'm just saying it's logically true.
40:21.160 --> 40:22.800
That's certainly true.
40:22.800 --> 40:30.080
But what we can conclude from evolutionary biology first, that's the first step, is
40:30.080 --> 40:33.280
that intelligence seems to be quite rare in the universe.
40:33.280 --> 40:39.800
Francisco Ayala once argued and sent me the numbers that he says that evolution of intelligence
40:39.800 --> 40:46.400
on a given Earth-like planet is something like 10 to the minus one millionth power,
40:46.400 --> 40:49.280
which is negligible, to say the least.
40:49.280 --> 40:58.120
But remember, I'm going to oppose Ayala on this, because his version of evolution is
40:58.120 --> 40:59.480
that it's random.
40:59.480 --> 41:02.680
Remember, I'm a follower of Einstein.
41:02.680 --> 41:04.520
God does not play dice with the universe.
41:04.520 --> 41:06.400
There's nothing random actually happened.
41:06.400 --> 41:08.040
It's all determined.
41:08.040 --> 41:12.540
So we are brought into existence for a purpose.
41:12.540 --> 41:16.200
So I would argue that intelligence indeed has to be rare.
41:16.200 --> 41:18.320
The evolutionists got that right.
41:18.320 --> 41:25.520
But not so rare as to be us unique in the universe.
41:25.520 --> 41:30.480
We have to have other intelligences out there, but very far apart, say a billion light years
41:30.480 --> 41:35.400
away, the nearest one, my estimate, because the universe is now accelerating.
41:35.400 --> 41:38.000
The evidence, I think, is very strong on that.
41:38.000 --> 41:42.960
And unless the acceleration is counseled, we will be wiped out.
41:42.960 --> 41:45.600
I totally agree with you on the acceleration part.
41:45.600 --> 41:51.600
I just tried to figure out, because it seems to me your argument would say it's impossible
41:51.600 --> 41:54.200
for us to destroy ourselves.
41:55.080 --> 42:00.680
And I want to say that it is possible to do so even within your own argument.
42:00.680 --> 42:02.440
I'm not convinced of that.
42:02.440 --> 42:05.520
I appreciate the strength of what you're saying.
42:05.520 --> 42:12.280
I cannot quite show that there is not, let's say, 50 light years away, that there is another
42:12.280 --> 42:18.860
intelligent life form out there, and which, well, will just be annihilated.
42:18.860 --> 42:20.240
And they'll take over from us.
42:20.240 --> 42:22.200
This is possible.
42:22.760 --> 42:25.480
But full implications.
42:25.480 --> 42:31.040
If they're not there, if there are indeed no other intelligent life out within a billion
42:31.040 --> 42:36.760
light years, then given that, which I can't prove, obviously, because I don't have observational
42:36.760 --> 42:44.640
evidence of a billion light years away, given that they do not exist, then we, in that
42:44.640 --> 42:51.880
circumstance, indeed, we cannot destroy ourselves until we've given rise to our human downloads
42:51.880 --> 42:55.360
and our artificial intelligence to sentence.
42:55.360 --> 43:01.560
Let's assume you're correct, and there is no other intelligence is higher than us.
43:01.560 --> 43:05.720
So then, how is it?
43:05.720 --> 43:12.720
Yeah, I see how it is, but it's very strictly deterministic exactly in the way that Einstein
43:12.720 --> 43:13.720
had it.
43:13.720 --> 43:16.840
Well, I mentioned I'm a follower of Einstein.
43:16.840 --> 43:18.000
And for me, to me, personally...
43:18.120 --> 43:27.200
The reason why, the reason why is that everybody agrees, including me, that the fundamental
43:27.200 --> 43:31.520
equation of quantum mechanics is the Schrodinger equation, which has something called, it's
43:31.520 --> 43:34.280
an equation for what's called the wave function.
43:34.280 --> 43:42.240
Now, Einstein is supposed to have objected to quantum mechanics because of the wave function.
43:42.240 --> 43:44.240
He thought there had to be something else.
43:44.240 --> 43:49.880
But really, that's only because his interpretation of the wave function, which was everybody's
43:49.880 --> 43:56.040
interpretation, namely that the wave function is what's called a probability amplitude.
43:56.040 --> 44:02.600
But if you take a different view of the wave function than what's called the many worlds
44:02.600 --> 44:09.320
interpretation, then the wave function is not a probability amplitude, but a world density
44:09.320 --> 44:14.640
amplitude, which gives us information about the density of universes in the multiverse,
44:14.640 --> 44:16.920
which is the collection of all universes.
44:16.920 --> 44:20.800
This is the assertion that there are other universes out there which come from many
44:20.800 --> 44:21.800
worlds.
44:21.800 --> 44:26.040
But let's just consider physics for the moment from that point of view.
44:26.040 --> 44:33.840
In the early part of the 19th century, two great mathematicians slash physicists, Hamilton
44:33.840 --> 44:38.600
and Jacobi, cooked up what has since been called the Hamilton-Jakobi equation, which
44:38.600 --> 44:45.440
was really considered at the time and since to be the ultimate formulation of Newtonian
44:45.440 --> 44:47.480
mechanics.
44:47.480 --> 44:54.520
It's a wave equation, and what it's a wave for is trajectories of Newtonian particles.
44:54.520 --> 44:57.840
Now, here's where it gets interesting.
44:57.840 --> 45:05.200
What you can prove is, very simply, typically the Hamilton-Jakobi equation develops singularities,
45:05.200 --> 45:10.600
bad singularities, because they occur in the laboratory, where they obviously do not
45:10.600 --> 45:11.600
occur.
45:11.600 --> 45:17.080
I'm claiming that the only singularities allowed for the consistency of physical law is the
45:17.080 --> 45:21.640
beginning of time, at the end of time, and the edge of the multiverse, which we can't
45:21.640 --> 45:22.640
see directly.
45:22.640 --> 45:28.440
Those are the only singularities allowed, because only then can determinism in the natural
45:28.440 --> 45:32.040
world be allowed to exist.
45:32.040 --> 45:37.240
It has been well known for at least a century that the Hamilton-Jakobi equation develops
45:37.240 --> 45:41.640
singularities which mean a breakdown in determinism.
45:41.640 --> 45:43.720
Horror of horrors!
45:43.720 --> 45:46.520
A breakdown in determinism!
45:46.520 --> 45:48.160
Einstein must be turning in his grave!
45:48.160 --> 45:49.160
No!
45:49.160 --> 45:50.700
Let's think about this further.
45:50.700 --> 45:59.160
If you take the classical Hamilton-Jakobi equation and add a term of what's called a
46:00.160 --> 46:01.760
Notice that word.
46:01.760 --> 46:08.440
Then with that added term, which is perfectly allowed term in standard classical mechanics,
46:08.440 --> 46:14.520
the Hamilton-Jakobi equation is mathematically equivalent to the Schrodinger equation.
46:14.520 --> 46:21.800
Which is to say, if you adopt a mini-world's point of view of classical mechanics, then
46:21.800 --> 46:27.200
quantum mechanics is already part of classical mechanics.
46:27.200 --> 46:33.680
And furthermore, quantum mechanics arises from classical mechanics by requiring that
46:33.680 --> 46:36.200
classical mechanics be deterministic.
46:36.200 --> 46:37.200
Aha!
46:37.200 --> 46:43.160
Here is a proof from quantum mechanics that determinism holds.
46:43.160 --> 46:48.100
That Einstein got it right, that God does not play dice with the universe.
46:48.100 --> 46:54.480
And you can prove that mathematically, where the physicists got the misinterpretation that
46:54.480 --> 46:59.320
God did play dice by their wrong interpretation of the wave function.
46:59.320 --> 47:05.800
You can derive what they meant by a probability amplitude straight from classical deterministic
47:05.800 --> 47:07.160
physics.
47:07.160 --> 47:13.440
And remember, the Schrodinger equation arises from classical mechanics by constraining classical
47:13.440 --> 47:17.000
mechanics to always be deterministic.
47:17.000 --> 47:22.080
Quantum mechanics, modern physics, is more deterministic than classical mechanics.
47:22.080 --> 47:23.920
Einstein got it right.
47:24.600 --> 47:26.600
God does not play dice with the universe.
47:26.600 --> 47:28.600
Ha ha ha!
47:28.600 --> 47:29.600
Okay.
47:29.600 --> 47:31.600
That's a proof that he was right.
47:31.600 --> 47:33.720
Einstein is cheering, he's great.
47:33.720 --> 47:39.900
I think we are beyond my capacity to argue with us at the intricacies of quantum mechanics,
47:39.900 --> 47:41.680
but we're also running out of time.
47:41.680 --> 47:45.920
Otherwise, I would have given it a go, but we've used one word many times that I want
47:45.920 --> 47:50.640
to discuss a little bit, and that's the word singularity.
47:50.640 --> 47:58.240
So can you please tell me how is the cosmological singularity similar or different to the technological
47:58.240 --> 48:03.800
singularity, which is a concept that my audience is very well familiarized with?
48:03.800 --> 48:06.440
That's an interesting question.
48:06.440 --> 48:15.260
It's the computer science singularity just means a radical change.
48:15.260 --> 48:18.720
It's singular event in human history.
48:18.720 --> 48:27.400
That's more of a philosophical term, whereas singularity in physics is explicitly a mathematical
48:27.400 --> 48:28.400
concept.
48:28.400 --> 48:33.120
It goes back to the 19th century mathematics in which you were dealing with true infinities.
48:33.120 --> 48:38.600
It first arose the singularity concept in mathematics in complex analysis.
48:38.600 --> 48:43.640
So it's a well-known mathematical concept that something is, well, it's more general
48:43.640 --> 48:47.320
than this, but also I will use a restricted version of singularity.
48:47.320 --> 48:51.480
It means where the equations no longer apply.
48:51.480 --> 48:58.040
And in the case of cosmology, the singularity means that the curvature is actually infinite
48:58.040 --> 49:00.360
at the singularity.
49:00.360 --> 49:04.280
Geometry can no longer be continued beyond the singularity.
49:04.280 --> 49:08.880
Reversing it, you see that the whole of the physical cosmos, i.e. where the laws of physics
49:08.880 --> 49:13.120
apply, arise from the cosmological singularity.
49:13.120 --> 49:16.800
So the cosmological singularity is determining everything.
49:16.800 --> 49:22.680
One of the things it's determining is the singularity, the singular event, philosophical
49:22.680 --> 49:30.560
term, in human history, namely the evolution of this new species, human downloads, and
49:30.560 --> 49:32.600
artificial intelligences.
49:32.600 --> 49:39.120
Now what I'm arguing, of course, is the cosmological singularity is determining, requiring, the
49:39.120 --> 49:42.640
existence of the computer science singularity.
49:42.640 --> 49:49.080
And I agree with various people like Hans Moravec and Ray Kurzweil that I think the
49:49.080 --> 49:53.200
singularity of computer science will occur in this century.
49:53.200 --> 49:54.400
I think we're very close.
49:54.400 --> 49:58.400
I think we already have the necessary hardware.
49:58.400 --> 50:03.880
What we're not understanding is the software of how intelligence actually works.
50:03.880 --> 50:09.400
What is actually happening in this skull of ours that makes us rational beings?
50:09.400 --> 50:12.480
We've not been able to fully duplicate it in software yet.
50:12.480 --> 50:19.880
But people like myself and Kurzweil and Moravec have done the calculations independently,
50:19.880 --> 50:27.240
and our estimates of how much computer power is required, we already have it in our supercomputers
50:27.240 --> 50:28.240
anyway.
50:28.240 --> 50:33.640
And you know, the Moore's law generalization, that anything you'll have in a supercomputer,
50:33.640 --> 50:40.640
top-of-the-line supercomputer, 20 years later it will be available on a laptop, or on your
50:40.640 --> 50:41.720
desk.
50:41.720 --> 50:50.320
So within 20 years, everyone will have a laptop that in principle could run a full
50:50.320 --> 50:54.720
human level AI program, in principle.
50:54.720 --> 50:57.680
But that's then the question of how we will develop the software.
50:57.680 --> 51:02.600
Of course, I want to argue that the development of the software will ultimately be determined
51:02.600 --> 51:07.160
by cosmological singularity, which determines everything.
51:07.160 --> 51:16.240
Let me see if I can bring one perhaps distinction or potential substantial disagreement there
51:16.240 --> 51:21.240
with respect to the two singularities that we just discussed, and playing dice with
51:21.240 --> 51:22.560
the universe.
51:22.560 --> 51:28.760
My personal interpretation would be that the technological singularity allows for God to
51:28.760 --> 51:30.840
play dice with the universe.
51:30.840 --> 51:34.000
And that's actually one of the reasons why it's called a singularity.
51:34.000 --> 51:40.200
In other words, we do not have that determinism, which says that one, it is inevitable.
51:40.200 --> 51:46.160
I mean, Wernher Wienzsche says it's very likely, but he says following any, you know, major...
51:46.160 --> 51:49.560
See, he ultimately rejects the laws of physics.
51:49.560 --> 51:55.960
This is a question of, we've discussed that physicists, typically, leading universities,
51:55.960 --> 51:58.640
the physicists in their department reject the laws of physics.
51:58.640 --> 52:00.720
They do not accept determinism.
52:00.720 --> 52:02.640
Einstein got it right.
52:02.640 --> 52:04.600
They got it wrong.
52:04.600 --> 52:07.120
And as I've said, the mathematics is very clear.
52:07.120 --> 52:08.120
But do you accept...
52:08.120 --> 52:11.400
You can avoid the conclusions only by having new physical laws.
52:11.400 --> 52:17.200
Now, I can't rule out the possibility that something like string theory is true.
52:17.200 --> 52:21.040
I think, however, there is no empirical basis for string theory.
52:21.040 --> 52:23.000
What's the...why bother with it?
52:23.000 --> 52:29.960
Everything is explained by the known physical laws, quantum gravity, and developed by Wheeler
52:29.960 --> 52:35.600
and DeWitt, my teachers, and the standard model and developed by a numerous people
52:35.600 --> 52:37.800
in the late 20th century.
52:37.800 --> 52:40.520
So we've got a theory of everything.
52:40.520 --> 52:43.320
This theory of everything is fully deterministic.
52:43.320 --> 52:47.880
There are no accidents in a deterministic universe.
52:47.880 --> 52:48.880
Yes.
52:48.880 --> 52:49.880
Okay.
52:49.880 --> 52:55.680
So we got that...that's very much your credo.
52:55.680 --> 52:57.640
And I totally respect that.
52:57.640 --> 52:58.640
But let me ask you this...
52:59.320 --> 53:00.320
You're just following the laws of physics.
53:00.320 --> 53:05.360
Remember, you cannot set aside the laws of physics without empirical justification.
53:05.360 --> 53:12.720
And the more we know about the laws of physics...for example, the...I just told you about the derivation
53:12.720 --> 53:16.240
of the Schrodinger equation for the Hamilton-Jakobi equation.
53:16.240 --> 53:18.800
That's actually been known before I was born.
53:18.800 --> 53:23.680
The full implications, however, have been brought about by me because only I was aware
53:23.680 --> 53:26.960
of this proof and believed in the many worlds.
53:26.960 --> 53:32.240
You have to accept many-world mechanics as at least a possibility.
53:32.240 --> 53:36.640
Then you see how it's already included in classical mechanics.
53:36.640 --> 53:44.120
So you see that quantum mechanics really follows mathematically from the requirement that
53:44.120 --> 53:45.840
reality be deterministic.
53:45.840 --> 53:50.960
I consider that evidence, mathematical evidence and experimental evidence, it's quantum mechanics,
53:50.960 --> 53:53.840
is true for determinism.
53:54.400 --> 54:00.680
Let's say everything...let's say determinism is absolutely correct and you're correct
54:00.680 --> 54:05.120
that we have a complete theory of everything already.
54:05.120 --> 54:07.760
Doesn't that say that there's nothing more to learn?
54:07.760 --> 54:13.480
Well, there is plenty of things to learn, just not on the fundamental grounds.
54:13.480 --> 54:14.480
That it's...
54:14.480 --> 54:15.560
There's no details.
54:15.560 --> 54:17.480
The fundamentals, we've got them already.
54:17.480 --> 54:21.920
Well, it's like the...there are plenty of things on the earth that we do not know.
54:21.920 --> 54:25.880
There are species which we do not know.
54:25.880 --> 54:30.720
We're discovering new species of animals all the time, new species of plants.
54:30.720 --> 54:39.200
But we have overall a complete picture of the general geometry of the geography of the
54:39.200 --> 54:40.520
earth.
54:40.520 --> 54:46.320
That was done in the...completed by the 16th century.
54:46.320 --> 54:47.560
Well, not quite.
54:47.560 --> 54:49.240
Maybe the end of the 19th century.
54:49.240 --> 54:54.000
We still have not gone over Antarctica until the end of the 19th century, maybe even the
54:54.000 --> 54:55.560
early 20th century.
54:55.560 --> 54:57.280
The point is that that's been done.
54:57.280 --> 55:01.480
We know what the overall geometry of the earth is like.
55:01.480 --> 55:05.600
Similarly, we have an overall picture of fundamental physics.
55:05.600 --> 55:07.160
We've got it.
55:07.160 --> 55:11.040
And what we still have, however, other things to learn.
55:11.040 --> 55:16.520
For instance, we do not know how to make an AI program at the human level.
55:17.200 --> 55:23.280
which is ultimately determined, which is...will be completely consistent with the laws of
55:23.280 --> 55:25.800
physics when it is done.
55:25.800 --> 55:28.280
And we still have to learn how to do it.
55:28.280 --> 55:33.840
So there's plenty to learn of important things to learn, because I think that you, I, and
55:33.840 --> 55:37.800
all members of your audience are in complete agreement.
55:37.800 --> 55:44.840
When AI's human downloads appear, it will be a really singular event in human history.
55:44.840 --> 55:45.840
I fully agree.
55:45.840 --> 55:46.840
You fully agree.
55:46.840 --> 55:49.600
We have, in other words, a lot to learn how to do that.
55:49.600 --> 55:51.120
We absolutely agree on that.
55:51.120 --> 55:56.120
I'm just trying to point out that, you know, we have a little bit of a disagreement on
55:56.120 --> 56:00.120
the certainty and especially on the inevitability of that.
56:00.120 --> 56:04.120
Well, because you don't understand the laws of physics, and I do.
56:04.120 --> 56:05.120
It's very possible.
56:05.120 --> 56:07.120
You're not a professional physicist.
56:07.120 --> 56:13.160
I am frustrated with my colleagues because they're allowing their philosophical knowledge
56:13.160 --> 56:18.160
They're allowing their philosophical prejudices to overrule their knowledge of physics.
56:18.160 --> 56:20.400
I didn't discover Schrodinger's equation.
56:20.400 --> 56:22.680
I didn't discover Einstein's equation.
56:22.680 --> 56:26.120
I didn't discover the Hamilton-Jakobi equation.
56:26.120 --> 56:27.680
We both, we all know who did.
56:27.680 --> 56:30.080
Their names are associated with these equations.
56:30.080 --> 56:35.200
Only thing I'm doing is drawing the mathematical consequences of these laws, which have already
56:35.200 --> 56:39.360
been tested innumerable times in the laboratory.
56:39.400 --> 56:44.440
The only reason to set aside a fundamental law of physics, which has been tested many
56:44.440 --> 56:49.320
times is if you're compelled by experiment to do so.
56:49.320 --> 56:54.000
And as we know, this last summer they discovered the Higgs boson.
56:54.000 --> 57:00.640
The latest results from the CERN accelerator is that it's the standard model, Higgs boson.
57:00.640 --> 57:05.040
There is no experimental evidence to date that there's anything beyond the standard
57:05.040 --> 57:06.040
model.
57:06.040 --> 57:09.040
I'm convinced that it's the standard model.
57:09.080 --> 57:11.680
Once again, I could be wrong.
57:11.680 --> 57:12.680
Let me...
57:12.680 --> 57:18.640
If it is the fundamental laws, let me emphasize this, then all you need is mathematics.
57:18.640 --> 57:23.440
Given the laws of physics, from those laws of physics, everything else is certain.
57:23.440 --> 57:24.440
Okay, great.
57:24.440 --> 57:30.600
So now let's assume that everything you say is true and accurate, given the laws of physics,
57:30.600 --> 57:32.600
which I don't really understand.
57:32.600 --> 57:37.000
So tell me about mind uploading and consciousness.
57:37.000 --> 57:42.840
How do they fit within that and especially what do you think of the so-called Hameroff-Penrose
57:42.840 --> 57:46.560
or model of consciousness, quantum consciousness?
57:46.560 --> 57:48.160
Hameroff is very clear.
57:48.160 --> 57:49.600
He's a good mathematician.
57:49.600 --> 57:53.400
He knows what the consequences of the mathematics are.
57:53.400 --> 57:56.240
He rejects, therefore, the laws of physics.
57:56.240 --> 58:01.560
He rejects quantum mechanics in the fully consistent model of quantum mechanics, which
58:01.560 --> 58:03.480
is unitary time evolution.
58:03.480 --> 58:05.720
He rejects that explicitly.
58:05.720 --> 58:11.360
I accept it because there is no experimental evidence showing that it's wrong.
58:11.360 --> 58:18.120
So Penrose is therefore wrong because he is trying to push his philosophy ahead of the
58:18.120 --> 58:19.120
physics.
58:19.120 --> 58:24.480
Only if you have an experiment showing that the physics is wrong in physics can you set
58:24.480 --> 58:25.760
it aside.
58:25.760 --> 58:31.160
So I think, remember, Penrose, of course, ultimately is to attack the idea of the singularity
58:31.160 --> 58:36.360
because he thinks there's something in going on in the human brain that's not there that
58:36.360 --> 58:39.440
we can duplicate in a computer.
58:39.440 --> 58:41.200
I think he's completely wrong.
58:41.200 --> 58:44.640
And that's why I think he's wrong, because he knows what he's doing.
58:44.640 --> 58:49.720
He knows he's setting aside this fundamental law of unitarity, which is a fundamental postulate
58:49.720 --> 58:54.680
of quantum mechanics, has all sorts of implications, all of which have been verified.
58:54.680 --> 58:56.720
So I think he's wrong on that.
58:57.720 --> 59:05.800
Now, this is, I think that consciousness is an operating system.
59:05.800 --> 59:12.000
And what is interesting, anyone who knows about computers knows that you're not committed
59:12.000 --> 59:15.320
to one particular operating system.
59:15.320 --> 59:22.280
And a man by the name of Julian James argued about 30 years ago that until about 2,000,
59:22.280 --> 59:26.120
3,000 years ago, human beings were not conscious.
59:26.120 --> 59:33.240
They were fully homo sapiens, but they had not adopted a consciousness type of operating
59:33.240 --> 59:34.240
system.
59:34.240 --> 59:43.280
He says, he calls his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which
59:43.280 --> 59:51.680
means, he argues, that in 3,000 years ago, all human beings used a non-conscious operating
59:52.680 --> 59:57.320
in the sense that if you read the ancient literature, he was talking about Homer, but
59:57.320 --> 01:00:02.760
you can also see it in, for example, Chinese literature written at the same time.
01:00:02.760 --> 01:00:06.080
They all thought themselves had been controlled by the gods.
01:00:06.080 --> 01:00:09.200
They didn't consider themselves as independent actors.
01:00:09.200 --> 01:00:13.680
And it's strange to us reading this, but it makes all kinds of sense if you assume they're
01:00:13.680 --> 01:00:18.520
using a different operating system, which does not involve considering themselves as
01:00:18.520 --> 01:00:19.720
conscious beings.
01:00:19.760 --> 01:00:22.440
They have the human brains.
01:00:22.440 --> 01:00:24.620
They're just using a different operating system.
01:00:24.620 --> 01:00:29.040
So I don't consider consciousness a really fundamental question of physics at all.
01:00:29.040 --> 01:00:34.040
I think it arises from computer software.
01:00:34.040 --> 01:00:39.120
And of course, that's the whole argument which we believers in the computer singularity have
01:00:39.120 --> 01:00:40.760
been making all along.
01:00:40.760 --> 01:00:43.040
We don't have the software yet.
01:00:43.040 --> 01:00:50.800
But when we understand the software of consciousness, then we will be able to create a human download
01:00:50.800 --> 01:00:52.440
and an artificial intelligence.
01:00:52.440 --> 01:00:55.360
Dr. Tipler, time is advancing here.
01:00:55.360 --> 01:00:57.560
We only have another four or five minutes, I think.
01:00:57.560 --> 01:00:59.520
So let me ask you this.
01:00:59.520 --> 01:01:07.120
What is the biggest misconception about your argument and your claims that we've been discussing
01:01:07.280 --> 01:01:10.120
for the last 55 minutes or so?
01:01:10.120 --> 01:01:15.040
The biggest misconception that you'd like to sort of take care of?
01:01:15.040 --> 01:01:21.160
Well, I think people are thinking that I'm approaching this from another point of view.
01:01:21.160 --> 01:01:23.640
Namely, I assume the primacy of religion.
01:01:23.640 --> 01:01:26.040
No, I assume the primacy of physics.
01:01:26.040 --> 01:01:30.680
I hope that's come clear, put through very clearly in our discussion.
01:01:30.680 --> 01:01:36.160
But I am an empiricist fundamentally, and I am a physics fundamentalist that I believe
01:01:36.200 --> 01:01:39.520
an experiment to tell us what nature has to be.
01:01:39.520 --> 01:01:46.400
And I think that looking myself at the evidence, and I invite your listeners to do this also,
01:01:46.400 --> 01:01:51.320
look at the evidence supporting quantum mechanics, many worlds quantum mechanics in particular,
01:01:51.320 --> 01:01:56.440
which is the only correct fully mathematical and consistent interpretation of quantum mechanics,
01:01:56.440 --> 01:01:59.840
and how all of these laws of physics are interrelated.
01:01:59.840 --> 01:02:05.800
Then you see, obvious, we have a theory of everything right now.
01:02:06.440 --> 01:02:12.640
So even a theory of everything, you can then by using mathematics, calculate what has to happen
01:02:12.640 --> 01:02:16.320
in broad outline, and what did happen.
01:02:16.320 --> 01:02:20.440
I mean, it's that procedure that has given the technology we have.
01:02:20.440 --> 01:02:23.880
Starting with Copernicus, we believed in the laws of physics, we've discovered the laws
01:02:23.880 --> 01:02:27.400
of physics, we've also discovered the history of physics.
01:02:27.400 --> 01:02:31.720
It is very difficult to set aside a law of physics.
01:02:31.880 --> 01:02:36.760
If you look at the Einstein theory of relativity, from the mathematical point of view, really
01:02:36.760 --> 01:02:43.120
advanced mathematics, which I don't have time to go into here, you say that really, relativity
01:02:43.120 --> 01:02:49.120
is Newtonian gravity theory generalized to the case where you no longer have absolute
01:02:49.120 --> 01:02:50.120
time.
01:02:50.120 --> 01:02:56.080
It's the obvious version of Newtonian gravity theory, which you don't have absolute time.
01:02:56.080 --> 01:03:00.160
And I've just mentioned, quantum mechanics follows from classical mechanics.
01:03:00.160 --> 01:03:04.280
You don't leave classical mechanics when you're doing quantum mechanics.
01:03:04.280 --> 01:03:09.640
Quantum mechanics follows from classical mechanics with the requirement classical mechanics
01:03:09.640 --> 01:03:12.280
must always be deterministic.
01:03:12.280 --> 01:03:14.960
Einstein got it right.
01:03:14.960 --> 01:03:17.720
God does not play dice with the universe.
01:03:17.720 --> 01:03:21.020
Let's say that's absolutely the case, but let me ask you this.
01:03:21.020 --> 01:03:29.440
Is there any falsifiable element of your theory in light of which you would be willing to
01:03:29.440 --> 01:03:39.400
reconsider your beliefs, your claims, and to perhaps change the final conclusions thereof?
01:03:39.400 --> 01:03:45.560
Well, for instance, if string theory were shown to be experimentally, and I cannot imagine
01:03:45.560 --> 01:03:48.840
an experiment because I guess it's wrong.
01:03:48.840 --> 01:03:54.960
If it were shown to be true, that quantum general relativity was not the ultimate theory,
01:03:54.960 --> 01:03:56.680
then I think my theory is wrong.
01:03:56.680 --> 01:03:57.680
I would object.
01:03:57.920 --> 01:04:03.080
I'd go back to being an atheist because the evidence would show me to be wrong in my
01:04:03.080 --> 01:04:04.080
theism.
01:04:04.080 --> 01:04:11.260
My theism is based on God being the uncaused first cause, which is the cosmological singularity.
01:04:11.260 --> 01:04:16.520
And if the cosmological singularity does not exist, I would conclude that atheism was
01:04:16.520 --> 01:04:21.820
right all along and I should switch to become an atheist and reject Christianity and theism.
01:04:21.820 --> 01:04:23.840
And that all depends on string theory.
01:04:24.000 --> 01:04:32.280
No, string theory as an example of a way in which you could get rid of the singularity.
01:04:32.280 --> 01:04:37.240
Another possibility out there is called loop chronon gravity, which again has no motivations
01:04:37.240 --> 01:04:39.200
except in theology.
01:04:39.200 --> 01:04:42.960
They're trying to get rid of this nasty singularity, which they don't like.
01:04:42.960 --> 01:04:44.640
Why don't they like it?
01:04:44.640 --> 01:04:46.080
It's in the equations.
01:04:46.080 --> 01:04:51.040
They have no reason to get rid of it except philosophical slash theological reasons.
01:04:51.040 --> 01:04:53.000
They don't want God to be in the equation.
01:04:53.160 --> 01:04:58.600
Sorry, guys, he is in the equations and you have to get used to it.
01:04:58.600 --> 01:04:59.600
I love that.
01:04:59.600 --> 01:05:05.400
Okay, so the last two questions that they always ask from guests on my show are this.
01:05:05.400 --> 01:05:09.160
First of all, where can people find more about you and your work?
01:05:09.160 --> 01:05:10.160
What's the best place?
01:05:10.160 --> 01:05:16.280
I've got books from Doubleday, Physics of Immortality, published in 1994, Doubleday,
01:05:16.280 --> 01:05:22.040
and also the Physics of Christianity, also published by Doubleday.
01:05:22.080 --> 01:05:26.920
The earlier book, which has some brief mention of this make-up point theory, the last chapter
01:05:26.920 --> 01:05:33.640
probably, is the Anthropic Cosmological Principle, which I wrote with the Cambridge astrophysicist
01:05:33.640 --> 01:05:37.960
John Barrow, published by Oxford University Press.
01:05:37.960 --> 01:05:41.600
Those are the non-technical side.
01:05:41.600 --> 01:05:47.160
Also if you're interested in the technical papers, well I give a number of them in the
01:05:47.160 --> 01:05:52.520
Physics of Christianity, the latest ones, which were published in the standard journals.
01:05:52.520 --> 01:05:58.280
But now we scientists are sort of moving away from the journals because it takes forever
01:05:58.280 --> 01:06:01.640
to get these damn things published.
01:06:01.640 --> 01:06:04.880
We're interested in communicating our results as soon as possible.
01:06:04.880 --> 01:06:11.720
So what we do is put our papers on what's called the archive, ARXIV, and that's accessible
01:06:11.720 --> 01:06:15.160
on the computer to anybody.
01:06:15.160 --> 01:06:19.120
So if you want to find my latest thoughts, absolutely latest thoughts, go to the archive.
01:06:19.120 --> 01:06:20.120
Fantastic.
01:06:20.120 --> 01:06:22.120
But once again, that's technical.
01:06:22.120 --> 01:06:23.120
Fantastic.
01:06:23.120 --> 01:06:27.200
Dr. Tipler, we've been talking roughly for about an hour.
01:06:27.200 --> 01:06:29.760
So let me ask you this final question.
01:06:29.760 --> 01:06:37.000
If people were to take a single message, perhaps the most important thing from our conversation
01:06:37.000 --> 01:06:40.680
today, what would you like that to be?
01:06:40.680 --> 01:06:45.520
Human race and our civilization will live forever, never die.
01:06:45.520 --> 01:06:51.120
If the laws of physics be for us, who can be against us?
01:06:51.120 --> 01:06:56.360
Dr. Tipler, thank you very much for being with us today.
01:06:56.360 --> 01:06:56.860
My pleasure.