From: sarfatti@well.sf.ca.us (Jack Sarfatti)
Subject: Bridging C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures".
Organization: Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link
Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1993 19:35:07 GMT


Dr. Paul Gerome of Geneva, a student of Levi Straus has convinced major
Swiss financiers to fund Castalia from Hermann Hesse's Magister Ludi in
the form of a telepresence World University linked by satellite to play
The Glass Bead Game. I have been appointed to the Science Board. If you
want to play send me your cv. Grants will be available in about a year.

To start the game here is my first move:


From the WELL
Topic  56:  The Omega Point? A likely story
By: Richard Lubbock (rcl) on Wed, Aug 12, '92
        82 responses so far

 "I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and
 last things."

 Is it philosophy? Is it science? Is it comic strip or
 acid trip? The world and all the people in it was created by a
 Being, called Omega, who (or which) lives and acts in the
 uttermost future of our universe, at the far, far end of time.
 That's the hypothesis of theoretical physicist Jack Sarfatti,
 who's evangelizing it over in the Science conference. What's more
 he says he can confront it with a knockdown experimental test.

 This Being--or Force, or Civilization, or Supermind, whatever you
 will--has emerged by evolution from the deeds of the human race
 today, and from the exploits of our future generations.

 Here's how John Barrow and Frank Tipler describe the Omega point
 in their vade-mecum of teleology, The Anthropic Cosmological
 Principle:

 "At the instant the Omega Point is reached, life will have gained
 control of all matter and forces not only in a single universe,
 but in all universes whose existence is logically possible; life
 will have spread into all spatial regions in all universes which
 could logically exist, and will have stored an infinite amount of
 information, including all bits of knowledge which it is logically
 possible to know. And this is the end."

 The notion of Omega raises some fun philosphical questions. The
 very idea encourages unbridled speculation, irrepressible
 hypothesizing and the overmultiplication of hypotheses beyond any
 thought of necessity, reason and decency.

 So let's do it: Let's talk Omega. Remember, we're philosophers,
 not scientists, so we can jettison the millstone of Occam's Razor,
 and hotly embrace science's taboo topic, teleology.

82 responses total.

Topic  56:  The Omega Point? A likely story
#  1: Richard Lubbock (rcl)      Wed, Aug 12, '92  (09:52)      26 lines

 Is this Omega thing, down there at the end of time, a boon or a
 nuisance? According to Sarfatti the tangled forward time-loops are
 enough to explain human inspiration, so that our Mozarts and
 Leonardos got their ideas not by their own efforts, but from the
 future.

  The mathematicians have a saying that when one of their number
 cooks up a particularly good theorem, "God has allowed him a peek
 into his infinite book of theorems." Yes, and I have a feeling,
 when I make a successful joke, that God has allowed me a peek into
 his infinite joke book. So all jokes and theorems are already
 foreordained somewhere out there in the future.

 If that's true then the existence of Mr.Omega denies us little
 mannikins all credit for what we achieve. I don't like that. My
 jokes are *mine* and mine alone, and my name goes on them.
 Sarfatti's conjecture plays merry hob with our laws and customs of
 copyright.

 Oh, and another thing: it's not only the Mozarts and Chaucers who
 receive injections of inspiration from Omega country; madmen and
 megalomaniacs do too. So Mr. Omega inspired Hitler and Stalin and
 Allen Funt as well as George Washington and Winston Churchill.

 Is Mr. Omega really our friend? It all looks murky, dark and
 ambiguous.

Topic  56:  The Omega Point? A likely story
#  2: Richard Lubbock (rcl)      Wed, Aug 12, '92  (09:53)      13 lines

 Sarfatti claims we can in principle build machines to gather data
 from the future. He sketches a vision of huge profits for
 speculators. Really?

 Lotteries, for example. Even the $$$millions available on the
 occasional lottery ticket count as small change in today's world.
 Who wants to be a millionaire? Millionaires are paupers nowadays.

 The stock market. There might be a few big wins at first, but
 nothing spectacular; and then smart money, even without quantum
 precognition, would find a way to discount the precognitive
 effect. It would act as computerised trading does today: no more
 than a catalyst that volatilizes and speeds things up.

Topic  56:  The Omega Point? A likely story
#  8: Gerald Boyack (gaboy)      Thu, Aug 13, '92  (07:34)       4 lines

 I come nearest to believing in an Omega from hearing Mozart--as
 represented by the old saw:  Beethoven, et al., wrote heavenly
 music, but Mozart heard the music of the heavens and wrote it
 down.

Topic  56:  The Omega Point? A likely story
#  9: Jack Sarfatti (sarfatti)      Thu, Aug 13, '92  (17:17)       1 line

 I second that.

Topic  56:  The Omega Point? A likely story
# 10: Richard Lubbock (rcl)      Thu, Aug 13, '92  (21:28)      33 lines

 Misc thoughts:

  1) I wonder whether Sarfatti is perhaps not the Camille Paglia of
 physics. There's certainly something Dionysian about his physics.
 That's why the Nobellists can't see what he's driving at. In
 Apollo's eyes Dionysus is invisible. As a result, the Dionysian
 hounds can easily tear the Apollonian apart. See James Wolcott's
 superb piece in the new Vanity Fair.

  2) These tangled time loops seem to require that we get our karma
 from the future as well as the past. Dionysus again. It certainly
 makes a mess of all our moral plans. We're being punished for what
 we haven't done yet.Is that just? Gimme a break.

  3) sarfatti has by-the-way found the answer to the riddle of
 jokes--which defeated Freud as well as Koestler. The key's in his
 respose to solovay in sci 274 #137:-

  "That is not my assertion. What I am asserting is quite
 orthogonal to your irrelevant theorem."

 Orthogonality is the spice of wit. Thus:-

 Oscar Wilde   I can make a pun on any subject.
 Interlocutor  Make a pun on Queen Victoria
 Oscar Wilde   Queen Victoria is not a subject.

 Stranger outside theatre (to Sir Arthur Sullivan): Call me a cab.
 Sullivan:    You're a four-wheeler, Sir.
 Stranger:    What the devil do you mean by that?
 Sullivan:    I could hardly call you hansom.

 Thus: boswell must be swarthy.  I can't think of him as fair.

Topic  56:  The Omega Point? A likely story
# 13: Jack Sarfatti (sarfatti)      Fri, Aug 14, '92  (00:42)       1 line

 Who was Camille Paglia? Enlighten me please!

Topic  56:  The Omega Point? A likely story
# 14: Richard Lubbock (rcl)      Fri, Aug 14, '92  (09:50)      41 lines

 Paglia, from the heading of James Wolcott's article in Vanity Fair
 Sept 1992:

 "Since the publication two years ago of her slash-and-burn
 manifesto, Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia has been bullying her
 way around the intellectual circuit, ambushing the new feminism--
 and almost single-handedly resurrecting the pop-cult debate. Now
 the woman who compares herself favorably to Simone de Beauvoir and
 Madonna is busy promoting herself as the female role model of the
 next century."

 I reviewed Paglia's book at length in The Idler (Toronto) last
 year. The review confounded and dumbfounded Canadian feminists,
 who vowed a demolition job, but it never arrived. Bits of
 the item got posted on the Well, but I forget where.

 see also on Paglia in the books conf.

 In my July 1992 Idler article "My Right to Hurt Animals" I
 resurrected Hegel's theory of rights--rights are anything you can
 get away with--and justified it by a QM-type argument. Somewhere
 around the middle of it I wrote:

 "Hilbert space looks like a superspace of all possible histories.
 One can speak of a Platonic realm of universal possibility, just
 as Stephen Hawking speaks of a wave function for the whole
 universe. The universal wave function determines, precisely and
 eternally, all the possible branches of evolution; but instead of
 laying down one fixed future it assigns a probability to each of
 many possible futures. I believe, indeed, that all these entities
 amount to the same thing. That wave function, Heisenberg's matrix,
 the Platonic realm, the primordial nature of God, the Tao--are
 alternative names for the same entity."

 Literary hand-waving really, but entertainement all the same.
 Dunno whether the QM part is exactly right.

 I've briefly scanned Mondo 112. A highly Dionysian narrative, in
 tune with the zeitgeist according to Paglia. You'd enjoy the early
 chapters of Sexual Personae. The chapter on Egypt is a
 masterpiece.

Topic  56:  The Omega Point? A likely story
# 15: Jack Sarfatti (sarfatti)      Fri, Aug 14, '92  (14:10)       8 lines

 Very interesting. I think your comparison is accurate. The physics
 is coming to a head. More in a few hours. My discussion with Aephraim
 Steinberg - a brilliant graduate student in Ray Chiao excellent
experimental
 quantum optics group will quickly resolve the issue as to the existence or
 non-existence of Mr. Omega. The great issues of Theology are all subject to
 objective scientific testing. I am curious about the conceptual connections
 between what I am doing and what Paglia is doing to the old Italian
 Futurism. Any intellectual historians out there to enlighten us?

Topic  56:  The Omega Point? A likely story
# 16: Jack Sarfatti (sarfatti)      Fri, Aug 14, '92  (15:49)       6 lines

 see science 274 #155 the existence of Mr. Omega depends upon whether or
 not an asymmetric beam recombiner can be built. It would be a kind of
 electro-optical transistor which would allow to to build quantum telescopes
 using precognitive circuits to talk directly with Mr. Omega in real time.

 By the way Mr. Omega does not violate Occam's razor it sharpens it!

Topic  56:  The Omega Point? A likely story
Topic  56:  The Omega Point? A likely story
# 78: Jack Sarfatti (sarfatti)      Sun, Aug 30, '92  (21:28)      18 lines

 The principle of order in physics is the least action principle for
 dynamics. There is also the minimum entropy production principle of
 Prigogine but that breaks down for large nonlinear deviations from
 thermal equilibrium happen in open systems like us. Then classically
 at least we have order from chaos -bifurcations, strange attractors,
 fractals... So that beauty etc. must be a set of strange attractors in
 the very high dimensional phase space of the complex mental process which
 emerges out of higher level nonlocal spin connections of the living
 quantum biocomputer. We must not forget the quantum potential - the top
 down organizer subject to least action. Not only that least action is for
 real time, for the imaginary time of quantum gravity it may become entropy,
 hence information getting closer to MIND OF GOD as the creator of real
 time in which the ordinary matter exists. Structures in imaginary time
 may really be the Platonic Form space that Penrose writes of in Emperor's
 New Mind that you call Jewel Net. In any case strange attractors at high
 complexity must be the forms of beauty in some sense. Now I do not have
 this all formulated logically yet - not precise like the design of my
 communicator for messages from Omega. I am just channeling at the moment.