The Fabric of Reality David Deutch

part of the Popperian lesson about what the growth of knowledge must look
like. If the omega point exists, and if it will be created in the way that Tipler
has set out, then the late universe will indeed consist of embodied thoughts
of inconceivable wisdom, creativity and sheer numbers. But thought is
problem-solving, and problem-solving means rival conjectures, errors,
criticism, refutation and backtracking. Admittedly, 
in the limit (which no one
experiences), at the instant when the universe ends, everything that is
comprehensible may have been understood. But at every finite point our
descendants’ knowledge will be riddled with errors. Their knowledge will be
greater, deeper and broader than we can imagine, but they will make
mistakes on a correspondingly titanic scale too. {8}
Like us, they will never know certainty or physical security, for their survival,
like ours, will depend on their creating a continuous stream of new
knowledge. If ever they fail, even once, to discover a way to increase their
computing speed and memory capacity within the period available to them,
as determined by inexorable physical law, the sky will fall in on them and
they will die. Their culture will presumably be peaceful and benevolent
beyond our wildest dreams, yet it will not be tranquil. It will be embarked
upon the solution of tremendous problems and will be split by passionate
controversies. For this reason it seems unlikely that it could usefully be
regarded as a ‘person’. Rather, it will be a vast number of people interacting
at many levels and in many different ways, but 
disagreeing. They will not
speak with one voice, any more than present-day scientists at a research
seminar speak with one voice. Even when, by chance, they do happen to
agree, they will often be mistaken, and many of their mistakes will remain
uncorrected for arbitrarily long periods (subjectively). Nor will the culture ever
become 
morally homogeneous, for the same reason. Nothing will be sacred
(another difference, surely, from conventional religion!), and people will
continually be questioning assumptions that other people consider to be
fundamental moral truths. Of course, morality, being real, is comprehensible
by the methods of reason, and so every particular controversy will be
resolved. But it will be replaced by further, even more exciting and
fundamental controversies. Such a discordant yet progressive collection of
overlapping communities is very different from the God in whom religious
people believe. But it, or rather some subculture within it, is what will be

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resurrecting us if Tipler is right.
In view of all the unifying ideas that I have discussed, such as quantum
computation, evolutionary epistemology, and the multiverse conceptions of
knowledge, free will and time, it seems clear to me that the present trend in
our overall understanding of reality is just as I, as a child, hoped it would be.
Our knowledge is becoming both broader and deeper, and, as I put it in
Chapter 1, depth is winning. But I have claimed more than that in this book. I
have been advocating a particular unified world-view based on the four
strands: the quantum physics of the multiverse, Popperian epistemology, the
Darwin-Dawkins theory of evolution and a strengthened version of Turing’s
theory of universal computation. It seems to me that at the current state of
our scientific knowledge, this is the ‘natural’ view to hold. It is the
conservative view, the one that does not propose any startling change in our
best fundamental explanations. Therefore it ought to be the prevailing view,
the one against which proposed innovations are judged. That is the role I am
advocating for it. I am not hoping to create a new orthodoxy; far from it. As I
have said, I think it is time to move on. But we can move to better theories
only if we take our best existing theories seriously, as explanations of the
world.

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