If there is even a touch of truth in the idea that God is the creator, then there simply must be an intimate relation between the creator and the creation, a relation which can be studied scientifically.
We are seeing the universe in a very early stage in its history. Most of the physical universe lies in our future, and we cannot truly understand the entire physical universe without understanding this future. But we can study this future reality, in particular the ultimate future which constitutes the end of time, only if in some way this Final State of the universe makes an imprint on the present. It is, after all, obvious that we cannot do direct experiments on the future in the present.
The really fascinating consequence of this assumption, however, is what it implies if life really does exercise its option to exist forever. There must exist in this future (but in a precise mathematical sense, also in the present and past) a Person who is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, who is simultaneously both transcendent to yet immanent in the physical universe of space, time, and matter. In the Person’s immanent temporal aspect, the Person is changing (forever growing in knowledge and power), but in the Person’s transcendent eternal aspect, forever complete and unchanging.
I claim that a ‘living being’ is an entity which codes ‘information’ (in the sense this word is used by physicists), with the information coded being preserved by natural selection (for a justification of this definition, see Barrow and Tipler 1986, section 8.2). Thus life is a form of information processing, and the human mind—and the human soul—is a very complex computer program.
I claim that a ‘living being’ is an entity which codes ‘information’ (in the sense this word is used by physicists), with the information coded being preserved by natural selection. Thus life is a form of information processing, and the human mind—and the human soul—is a very complex computer program.
At the most basic nuts-and-bolts physics level, all of the above-mentioned activities of ‘real’ people, indeed all of the possible activities of people, are in fact types of information processing. The human activities of listening, enjoying, reflecting, worshiping, and loving are mental activities and correspond to mental activity in the brain. In other words, at the physics level they are information processing and nothing but information processing. At the human level, though, they are not cold and austere ‘information processing’ but warm and human listening, enjoying, reflecting, worshiping, and loving.
The laws of physics place constraints on information processing and hence on the activities and existence of life. If the laws of physics do not permit information processing in a region of spacetime, then life simply cannot exist there. Conversely, if the laws of physics permit information processing in a region, then it is possible for some form of life to exist there. These limitations and opportunities are analogous to those imposed by food at the biological level.
Life is organization, and organization can only be maintained by constant communication among the different parts of the organization.
Time duration is most properly measured by the thinking rate rather than by proper time as measured by atomic clocks. The length of time it takes an intelligent being to process one bit of information—to think one thought—is a direct measure of subjective time, and hence is the most important measure of time from the perspective of life. A person who has thought ten times as much or experienced ten times as much (there is no basic physical difference between these options) as the average person has in a fundamental sense lived ten times as long as the average person, even if the rapid-thinking person’s chronological age is shorter than the average.
Survival dictates that life collectively gain control of all matter and energy sources available near the Final State, with this control becoming total at the Omega Point. We can say that life becomes omnipotent at the instant the Omega Point is reached. Since by hypothesis the information stored becomes infinite at the Omega Point, it is reasonable to say that the Omega Point is omniscient; it knows whatever it is possible to know about the physical universe (and hence about itself).
When life has completely engulfed the entire universe it will incorporate more and more material into itself, and the distinction between living and non-living matter will lose its meaning.
If the ascent of Life into the Omega Point is to occur, one day the most advanced minds must be non-Homo sapiens. The heirs of our civilization must be another species, and their heirs yet another, ad infinitum into the Omega Point. We must die—as individuals, as a species—in order that our civilization might live. But the contributions to civilization which we make as individuals will survive our individual deaths. Judging form the rapid advance of computers at present, I would guess that the next stage of intelligent life would be quite literally information-processing machines. At the present rate, computers will reach the human level in information-processing and integration ability probably within a century, certainly within a thousand years.
I shall refer to the total universal information-processing system in existence at any given universal time as the ‘universal mind’.