Fireworks to heaven
All the way to the Omega Point!
Happy New Year to all readers!
This beautiful Christmas tree is actually a Chandra image of a cluster of stars called NGC 2264. May it inspire you until next Christmas!
2024 was full of fireworks to say the least. In 2025 we could see even more fireworks.
I’m playing with mind fire now: my friend
came to Budapest for a few days of brainstorming. She’s really a firebrand. We’ll launch some of them fireworks this year. I’ll say more soon. One word: blaxxky. Stay tuned.
I took this picture at Memento Park in Budapest, which hosts a collection of sculptures and artwork from the old Communist regime. But to me this picture represents intelligence (the hands) engulfing the universe (the sphere). I’m hardly the first to notice the parallels between Soviet and Cosmist esthetics. To me, this picture represents Cosmism and Frank Tipler’s Omega Point cosmology.
John Horgan has recently interviewed Frank Tipler. Very interesting interview!
I’ll interview Frank again soon. Some relevant passages from my last book, where I make frequent references to Frank’s ideas on fundamental physics, free will, and the time-transcending nature of the Omega Point (aka God):
[Tipler] could well be right and be proven right by future science. Time will tell. Meanwhile, I read his works as visionary, inspiring science fiction on steroids, scientifically plausible enough to suspend disbelief in the possibility that future science might have something hopeful to say about life after death.
Free will is real “only if our actual decisions are not determined by the rest of the universe, past, present, or future, but instead we ourselves are the ultimate and irreducible source of our decisions” [Tipler 1994].
Frank Tipler made similar considerations in [Tipler 1994]. Our laws of physics of the local here and now, he said, must necessarily “have a little vagueness” and cannot determine all decisions of all agents. “The free decisions of the agents are an irreducible factor in the generation of the physical universe and its laws, not merely the reverse,” he said. “For the free decisions of all the agents past, present, and future collectively generate the totality of existence.”
Frank Tipler argued that “the indeterminism in quantum gravity is ontological and logically irremovable: it ultimately comes from Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem” [Tipler 1994].
Frank Tipler argued that libertarian free will in the sense that you “could have done otherwise” [Tipler 1994] requires multiple timelines.
Wolfhart Pannenberg argued that Tipler’s Omega God, which comes into being at the end of time, is the God of all times, and also created the universe at the beginning: The divine reality, “according to Tipler, does not come into being only at the omega but is to be thought of as free from all the restrictions of time at the omega,” he said. This divine reality “is present at each phase of the cosmic process, and hence as already the creative origin of the universe at the beginning of its course.” Tipler told me that what Pannenberg said is a very nice short description of his own views. The Omega Point “creates the physical universe” [Tipler 1994].
Heaven is “a simulated world” essentially similar to our expectations [Tipler 1994]. Tipler argues that life in his simulated Heaven is the “resurrection of the flesh” promised by Christian theology [Tipler 1994].
The quotes above are from “The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead” (1994). In later works, Frank adopted a somewhat different approach to some of the points above. I look forward to talking to him to find out how, and how much, his current ideas are different from 1994.