[ExI] [humor] Tipler destroys realm?

[Giu1i0 Pri5c0]

Yes S please send the full New Scientist review. The beginning is quite strong:

"HALFWAY through Frank Tipler's new book, I scanned the table of
contents and was disappointed to find there would be no explanation of
the recently reported miraculous appearance of Mother Teresa's image
on a cheese Danish in Nashville, Tennessee. That was surprising, since
Tipler goes out of his way to provide convoluted physics
justifications for similar Christian miracles, including the image of
Jesus on the Turin shroud, long debunked as a forgery by many experts.
When conventional physics doesn't provide a sufficient explanation for
the religious phenomenon in question, Tipler reinvents it. As a
collection of half-truths and exaggerations, I am tempted to describe
Tipler's new book as nonsense - but that would be unfair to the
concept of nonsense. It is far more dangerous than mere nonsense".

If this is the case, then we will have to conclude that Tipler is
doing a bad service to the sci/cul trends that frequently bear his
name. I am more for what I would call a "soft Tiplerian" view. Quoting
from some recent posts of mine to wta-talk):

----

In The Physics of Immortality, Tipler proposed a high level concept:

that future technology may be able to resurrect the dead of past ages
by some kind of "copying them to the future"

plus a specific resurrection mechanism based on:

Intelligent life in the Universe steering a Big Crunch in such a way
as to permit an infinite amount of computing cycles in the subjective
timeline of observers living through it. With infinite computing
power, it seems feasible to emulate conscious being of past ages even
on the basis of incomplete information, and copy them to some kind or
Heaven, or Hell, or whatever.

I do not care very much for the specific resurrection mechanism
proposed by Tipler, not only for the reasons you give pointers to but
also because I think perhaps we will find some better ways to do it
much before a BC that may or may not take place (like the fictional
example in Clarke and Baxter's novel). But I do relate deeply to
Tipler's high level concept and, in the spirit of "There are more
things in Heaven and Earth...", allow myself to contemplate such
possibilities.

I also liked Deutsch's account of Tipler's vision more than Tipler's
own account. I have read The Physics of Immortality and, while I found
some parts of the book *very* interesting, I was not impressed with
the overall conceptual clarity and felt that he was stretching some
interesting analogies far too much.

The beautiful and useful (in a memetic sense) concepts that I retained
are that, as you put it, there may be a point where consciousness
becomes a important factor in the destiny of the universe (I just love
Kurzweil's statement that we will have to choose and build the
universe we want to live in, at the end of The Age of Spiritual
Machines), and that someday/somewhere technology may restore the dead
of past ages by copying them to the future.

Since these are very long term visions, I also do not put them in the
realistic/programmatic world. What I do put in the
realistic/programmatic world, in a "thing big, act small" sense, is
taking the first small steps toward the advancement of our species on
this cosmic path, while at the same time trying to ensure its
immediate survival. The future can be magic and beautiful, and we want
to be there to see it happen.

On 5/22/07, scerir <scerir at libero.it> wrote:
> Eugen (speaking of Limbo):
> > This stuff just cracks me up.
> > Even Xenu doesn't get any weirder.
>
> 'Tis a strange place, this Limbo! -- not a Place,
> Yet name it so; -- where Time & weary Space
> Fettered from flight, with night-mair sense of fleeing,
> Strive for their last crepuscular half-being;'
> [-Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 'Limbo']
>
> Btw, it seems that Frank Tipler published
> a book ('The Physics of Christianity',
> Doubleday, 2007) even weirder than Limbo,
> and Xenu.
>
> A review, by Victor Stenger
> http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/RelSci/PhysicsChrist.htm
>
> Another one by Lawrence Krauss (New Scientist, 12 May)
> http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19426032.000-ithe-physics-of-christian
> ityi-by-frank-tipler.html
> [I have the full review, and I can send it]
>
> Btw-btw, recently Tipler wrote a paper
> about intelligent life in the Universe,
> and Fermi paradox
> http://www.arxiv.org/abs/0704.0058
>
> and another (Tegmarkian) paper about the
> structure of the world from 'pure numbers'
> http://www.math.tulane.edu/~tipler/theoryofeverything.pdf
>
>
>
>
>
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