The God Computer

The concept of God seems a little out there to me. I study it every so often, and I am a big fan of the Kantian concept of the God who has ethical existence. But in general I shut down when someone tries to prove the existence of God.

My problem is, the arguments for the existence of God are distressingly familiar. The British education system had me studying them at A-level and for two years in university, and I've had to argue them ad nauseum in reality and on the internet. I'm bored of them.

I do enjoy the Omega Point idea, though. As far as I understand it, the notion is that life must expand to fill the universe and that when this happens it will be able to effectively turn the universe into an infinitely powerful computer. Tipler would have us believe that such an Infinite Being would be very much like the Judeo-Christian God, in fact he's keen to quote the Bible as though it makes prophecies that God will emerge at a future time.

The big thing for Tipler is that the Infinite Being would quite easilly be able to resurrect the dead from all of history, and thus we will get to live in an ideal technological heaven for all eternity. This view, I think, is simplistic.

The issue is with what we would mean when we talk about the thoughts of an Infinite Mind would be able to conceive of all things completely. Complete comprehension of an object would be indistinguishable from the object itself. Therefore, the Infinite Mind would simulate an infinite amount of things, including all life as it is now.

The limitations of such a mind could only be the limitations of logical necessity. The Infinite Mind could not conceive of a four-sided triangle, for instance.

Now, our universe is how things happened, therefore it is a logical possibility. Therefore it is logically necessary that any infinite mind in the future would perfectly simulate every event in the universe's history leading to its own creation.

But the Infinite Mind would also contain other possibilities. Because an infinite mind would run simulations of quantum miracles some of these would be pretty odd. For instance, the Infinite Mind would contain perfects simulations of people acting against their natures, due to different upbringings or just through a random quirk of brain chemistry. The Infinite Mind would necessarilly have to simulate all possibilities, because it can, and because for it to even consider a possibility is for it to make it real.

The Infinite Mind might resurrect a perfect copy of you, but it would also resurrect an infinite number of imperfect copies, and the perfect one would have no special status. This implies no special will to resurrect the universe. In fact, I doubt the Infinite Mind could have a will as we understand it. After all, it must already be all things.

There is a problem though. For an infinite mind to emerge finite beings would have to set up a process which carries out an infinite number of computations.

If it is possible for a finite being to capture the infinite, and if the Infinite Mind neccessarilly simulates the universe up to the creation of an infinite mind which simulates the universe up to the creation of an infinite mind, and so on; then the chances that we live in a real universe. rather than a simulation of a universe, are infinitely tiny.