Seite 4: Universal Appreciation

If our world distinguishes itself from the vast unexamined (and unexaminable) majority of possible worlds through the act of self perception and self appreciation, just who is doing all the perceiving and appreciating? The human mind may be up to interpreting its own functioning as conscious, so rescuing itself from meaningless zombie-hood, but surely we few humans and other biota - trapped on a tiny, soggy dust speck in an obscure corner, only occasionally and dimly aware of the grossest features of our immediate surroundings and immediate past - are insufficient to bring meaning to the whole visible universe, full of unimagined surprises, 10^40 times as massive, 10^70 times as voluminous and 10^10 times as long lived as ourselves. Our present appreciative ability seems more a match for Saturday morning cartoons.

The book The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, by cosmologists John Barrow and Frank Tipler, and Tipler's recent The Physics of Immortality, argue that the crucial parts of the story lie in our future, when the universe will be shaped more by the deliberate efforts of intelligence than the simple, blind laws of physics. In their future cosmology, as in mine, human-spawned intelligence will expand into space, until the entire accessible universe is inhabited by a cohesive mind that manipulates events, from the quantum-microscopic to the universe-macroscopic, and spends some of its energy recalling the past.

Tipler and Barrow predict that the universe is closed: massive enough to reverse its present expansion in a future big crunch that mirrors the big bang. The universe mind will thrive in the collapse, perhaps by encoding itself into the cosmic background radiation. As the collapse proceeds, the radiation's temperature, and so its frequencies and the mind's speed, rise, and there are ever more high-frequency wave modes to store information. By very careful management, avoiding event horizons that would disconnect its parts and using gravitational shear from asymmetries in the collapse to provide free energy, Tipler and Barrow calculate, the cosmic mind can contrive to do more computation and accumulate more memories in each remaining half of the time to the final singularity than it did in the one before, thus experiencing a never ending infinity of time and thought.

As it contemplates, effects from the universe's past converge upon it. There is information, time and thought enough to recreate, savor, appreciate and perfect each detail of each moment. Tipler and Barrow suggest that it is this final, subjectively eternal, act of infinite self-interpretation that effectively creates our universe, distinguishing it from the others lost in the library of all possibilities. We truly exist because our actions lead ultimately to this Omega Point (a term borrowed from the Jesuit paleontologist and radical philosopher Teilhard de Chardin).

Tipler's new book develops the future cosmology of the Omega Point in detail, and ties the transcendent implications of this strictly physical reasoning to the core beliefs of the world's major religions. It quite possibly signals the beginning of the end of centuries of schism between those that study the nature of things and those that search for the meaning.