TIPLER'S QUEST FOR IMMORTALITY
George Hammond
Copyright George Hammond 2011
Tulane professor Frank Tipler is a renowned authority in
Relativity. As a postdoc of John Wheeler's at Princeton he
wowed the scientific community early on with his
mathematical prowess by discovering the first time-travel
mechanism involving the famous "Tipler Cylinder". Today he
is world renowned as a spellbinding public speaker and as a
best selling author.
Since about 1994 with _The Physics of Immortality_ and
again in 2007 with _The Physics of Christianity_ Tipler has
been perfecting a "life after death theory" based on
resurrecting dead people as virtual realities inside
gigantic high speed computers. Naturally the scientific
community who avoids God never mind life after death has
once again been rocked on its heels by the powerful and
popular Professor Tipler.
You don't need to wade through his books by the way
because Frank Tipler is all over the Internet. For instance
he can be seen in this video on time travel which explains
how his computerized Life After Death theory could work:
Time Trip 4of4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2XESntdGao&NR=1
and you can even get the theory directly from Tipler himself
at a recent TED conference in Brussels at:
TEDx Brussels 2010 - Frank Tipler - The Ultimate Future
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNkuJvhyfP0
Now, I have a few remarks to make about Tipler's Life
After Death scheme, and if anybody has a cogent comment
about them I would like to hear from them on this thread.
First, while I AGREE that an exact emulation of a person
on a big enough computer, WOULD actually be identical to the
person.... I have to DISAGREE that accomplishing such a feat
would constitute raising the person from the dead. In fact,
I think it is rather obvious that the only thing Frank
Tipler would be creating with such a computer program is a
CLONE of the original person. In other words, now there
would be TWO IDIENTICAL PEOPLE... but obviously, if I were
one of these two identical people and I died.... the
existence of the second identical clone would NOT bring ME
back to life again.... any more than a surviving identical
twin constitutes a "resurrection" his dead identical twin
brother!
Ultimately, I think Tiplers mistake lies in the fact that
he fails to identify the fact that it is the SUBSTANCE of
our bodies that makes us uniquely us. when our substance
dies, we can only be resurrected is our substance is
reanimated again..... and a "virtual reality" body has no
"real substance" and therefore it DOES NOT constitute a
"resurrection to life" of our dead bodies.
Incidentally, Frank as pondered this question is his 1994
book where he discusses "pattern resurrection" versus
"continuity resurrection". Erroneously, I believe, Frank
concludes that "pattern resurrection" is sufficient for Life
After Death, whereas it is patently obvious to me that
"material continuity" must be present in order to "raise the
dead" because it is only the "actual substance" of your own
body that makes you uniquely you. Even if you had two
materially identical bodies, the continued existence of the
second one will NOT constitute a resurrection of the first
one, as demonstrated by the case of identical twins. While
quantum mechanics says that two electrons in the same
quantum state are "identical" and "indistinguishable"….
nevertheless, quantum mechanics recognizes that there are
TWO of them, not ONE of them… hence if one of them,
"disappears"… the single survivor obviously cannot
substitute for TWO of them!
As a further proof of this, suppose I was somehow able to
build one of these super-computers and actually succeeded in
generating an exact identical clone of MYSELF in a virtual
reality identical to my own, inside the computer. Then I
would be able to sit at the consol and TALK TO MYSLELF,
would I not?. Indeed it might not even be too different
from talking to my self as I do now quite frequently. The
only difference is that I could "pull the plug" on the
computer and the "other me" would suddenly die.... I however
would be totally unaffected… and vice versa!
So the answer is NO.... Tipler's "computer clone" idea
will NOT RESURRECT A DEAD PERSON; not at all...!
HOWEVER.... before we unceremoniously dump Tipler’s
elaborate immortality theory on the ash heap of history....
there has (since 1994) been a dramatic experimental
discovery which now makes Prof. Tipler’s theorizing of
CRUCIAL SCIENTIFIC RELEVANCE. This is the discovery by
Hameroff and Penrose of an additional 15 orders of magnitude
of computing power in the cytoskeleton of the human brain
(microtubules)..... it now appears likely that "Tipler’s
Computer" actually ALREADY EXISTS in the human brain, and
just like Tipler says, it actually resurrects us to life
after death..... and in this case "physical continuity" is
no longer a problem.... because it is the real substance
(real cytoskeleton) of our OWN BODIES that is being
resurrected. This is explained in a letter I wrote to Prof.
Stuart Hameroff, and which he answered and forwarded a copy
to Prof Tipler.... appended below:
Dear Professor Stuart Hameroff:
Prof. Frank Tipler (Physics, Tulane) is an
internationally prominent scientist and a best-selling
author. He is a personal friend of Roger Penrose and in
fact you may even know him personally.
In a celebrated 1994 book entitled the _Physics of
Immortality_ he advanced the notion that if you could build
a large enough compute that it is theoretically possible to
simulate any given human being. In fact, he proposed that
somewhere in the distant future such a computer will be
built and used to resurrect people to life after death...
i.e. as a virtual person living in cyberspace inside a
gigantic computer.
Now, as a physicist myself, I recognize that such a
hypothetical idea is trivially true logically, even though
of course, it is a practical impossibility. He advances for
instance, that you would need an astronomically sized
computer to actually do the job.
He published the book in 1994 the same year that Roger
Penrose published his best-selling book _Shadows of the
Mind_ in which he succeeded in putting microtubules on the
map of the scientific world. This means that Professor
Tipler was totally unaware of the additional 15 orders of
magnitude of microtubule computing power that actually
exists in the human brain when he wrote his book.
So, my question to you is simply this: If we can accept
Tipler's thesis that a big enough computer could resurrect
the body in virtual reality, is it possible that the then
unknown microtubule computer already extant in the brain,
actually does just exactly that-- resurrect the body after
death?
As you have mentioned many times the cytoskeleton remains
viable for up to 30 minutes after death. And a simple
numerical calculation shows that comparing Frohlich's
frequency to neuronal frequency, a prerecorded year-long
afterlife dream; could be downloaded from the cytoskeleton
in a fraction of a second. The Observer of that dream of
course would be the cytoskeleton of the entire brain itself,
so that even though the bedside observer would see the
person expire in a fraction of a second, the dearly departed
would subjectively live on for a year in cyber-paradise
despite his Frohlich-speed millisecond demise.
So my question to you Professor Hameroff, is simply this:
Would you be prepared to say that such a thing is; flat
out scientifically impossible? Note that I am trying to
avoid putting you on the spot by not asking you if you think
it is possible, but rather asking you if you think it is
impossible!
NOTA BENE:
PROF. STUART HAMEROFF SENT ME THE FOLLOWING EMAIL REPLY:
Date: Sat, 05 Dec 2009 09:43:23 -0700
From: Stuart Hameroff
Subject: Re: A Scientifically Competent Religious Question
for Stuart Hameroff
To: George Hammond
Cc: Frank Tipler
Dear George Hammond:
I believe downloading and afterlife are possible.
I’ve addressed this in several forms on my website
www.quantumconsciousness.org
See my blog
Being the skunk at an atheist convention
and my recent talks including the one to the Singularity
Summit
Regards, Stuart Hameroff
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James Redford
They wouldn't be identical if one died and the other lived. If one can
describe any differences about them, then they are not identical.
Logically speaking, an exact emulation of you is you. If it were not,
then this would violate the Law of Identity in the field of logic, and
thus it would be a logical contradiction. An exact emulation of, e.g.,
a human is merely a very large number (per the Bekenstein Bound).
Indeed, even the entire lifetime of a human can be perfectly described
by a single number--a tremendously large number compared to the
numbers we're used to dealing with, but still quite finite.
To suppose that an exact emulation is not the thing being emulated
would be the same as thinking that 3765258724 does not = 3765258724,
i.e., that there is something about the number 3765258724 on the
left-hand side which makes it nonequivalent to the version on the
right-hand side. But this is a logical contradiction, as it violates
the Law of Identity that A = A.
So as sure as one can maintain that A = A (and one can be certain of
this), then one can be confident that your resurrected self will be
you in every possible way, and that your consciousness will continue.
Again, to think otherwise involves a logical contradiction.
----------------------------------------
James Redford, author of "Jesus Is an Anarchist", Social Science
Research Network (SSRN), revised and expanded edition, October 17,
2009 (originally published December 19, 2001)
http://ssrn.com/abstract=1337761 ,
http://www.webcitation.org/5tsc7yJAM ,
http://theophysics.ifastnet.com/anarchist-jesus.html
Theophysics: God Is the Ultimate Physicist (a website with information
on Prof. Frank J. Tipler's Omega Point Theory and the quantum gravity
Theory of Everything [TOE]) http://theophysics.chimehost.net ,
http://theophysics.host56.com