From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed Oct 20 1999 - 12:33:19 MDT
hal@finney.org writes:
> Frank Tipler and David Deutsch both take an aggressive and (to me)
> puzzling approach to these issues. They claim on philosophical grounds
> that the universe MUST be such that life can exist (and grow) forever.
> Therefore if we are right about eternal life being impossible in an open
> universe, we must be wrong about the universe being open. So one of the
> predictions of Tipler's theory is that current astronomical opinion is
> wrong, and the universe will turn out to be closed.
I find their approach puzzling, essentially they are putting the horse
behind the cart. It is almost like one of those medieval proofs of
God's existence. Unfortunately this backward reasoning doesn't
promote physical eschatology among other physicists.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:05:33 MST