Posted by Tom Buckner on April 07, 1999 at 20:24:01:
In Reply to: Virtual Reality and Identity posted by Pierre Charles on August 05, 1998 at 19:16:43:
Read and was hugely impressed by Tipler's book.
Here are some IMO comments:
Tipler's theory makes certain predictions about our universe that may fail to pan out. However I would like to suggest that since many scientists think ours is only one of a vast number of universes like beer bubbles in superspace, it may be enough (invoking quantum equivalence as Tipler does) that ONE of them, not necessarily ours, have the necessary attributes.
The Hindus and Buddhists refer to asankheya kalpas, a kalpa being a complete cycle of creation from the birth of the universe to the end, asankheya being a very vast number. I feel their cosmology makes prescientific Western religious cosmologies look primitive.
Since some quantum experiments show that subatomic particles behave in ways influenced by consciousness and since it is not logically possible to prove the existence of an exterior world at all, I suggest we might in some sense already exist in a cosmos which is more like the Omega Point than we suspect and only the mystics realize this (we ASSUME they're hallucinating when they claim to have been touched by the mind of God.)
There's more going on than meets the eye, and the more we learn the more interesting it gets.