Remarks on F. J. Tipler

Recently, there has been a wide discussion of Frank J. Tipler's conception of life in a collapsing universe, near the Omega Point. Putting aside the fantasies about gods and resurrection, one might wonder what are the real problems which reveal themselves in all that argument.

I suppose that the root of the speculations of that kind is in the restrictively physicalist treatment of matter, energy, space and time, evolution and development, life and reason. Of course, a scientist may play with theoretical models, and apply any concept to anything. However, if the conclusions derived from a particular application prove to be absurd, one should adjust the model, rather than proclaim this absurd as a final truth. Most people are aware of the fact that physics is not well suited for studying psychics, life, or even chemical processes - and the very existence of different sciences indicates some difference in their subjects. Therefore, a scenario of cosmic evolution based on one or another physical conception may only be an illustration of the formalism, and such an unlimited extrapolation would only be useful to stress the limits of the theory's applicability.

Many bright scientists become fascinated by their professional work to the extent when they cannot distinguish the models of reality they build from reality itself. This disease is especially characteristic of pure theoreticians, like gravitationists or quantum-field scientists. Well, mathematical tricks may be most exciting - but they will ever remain just formal manipulations which have to be filled with meaning from somewhere else. Mathematicians like talking about "rigor" and "proof" some philosophers believed them and spoke of "verification" or "falsification". However, nothing can be ultimately "proved", since any proof is based on some a priori assumed statements, and follows some logical tradition; the both premises may be argued, and subject to historical development. If something is properly "deduced", it is not necessarily true; this circumstance has now been partially reflected in the mathematics of computability.

So, the role of extrapolations like Tipler's (or Dyson's) is to indicate the limits of contemporary theory, and to express the necessity of a new conceptual basis. I could formulate several problems that might objectively inspire Tipler (on the conscious or unconscious level):

1. Inadequacy of the physical description of space and time. The ideas of space and time refer to the development of the world, while modern physics is still based on the traditional "coordinate frame" understanding of space-time, imagining an entity existing before some physical events may be related to it. General relativity tried to bind the structure of space-time to matter, but this original approach has eventually been replaced with its inverse: modern physicists always try to deduce matter from geometry, which inevitably drives them to a dead end.

2. Poor understanding of the connection between different levels of existence. Few people realize the qualitative difference between physical motion and life, or between life and reason. This leads to more and more attempts to derive higher forms from the lower, and to reduce one level of complexity to another. However, life has nothing to do with physics, though it assumes definite physical processes. Actually, life generates a specific physical environment, which may drastically change the character of physical motion. In the same way, subjectivity is just accompanied with some biological or physical events, being quite different from them. Conscious action links physical phenomena of any kind together, and thus it may influence the direction of physical processes, as soon as they become involved into cultural orbit.

3. Unknown place of subjectivity in the world. Modern science (and philosophy) cannot comprehend the necessity of reason as a definite stage of natural development. This makes scientists either reject the very idea of subjectivity, or reduce it to arbitrariness, or to claim it something principally incomprehensible outside the world (god). All these trends are mixed in Tipler's approach, where people are replaced with computers, choosing between many random destinies governed by their Omega-god.