But now suppose that someone forms a general theory about such explanations themselves. Suppose that they introduce a higher-level concept, such as ‘human rights’, and guess that the introduction of that concept will, for a given class of moral problems like the one I have just described, always generate a new explanation that solves the problem in the utilitarian sense. Suppose, further, that this theory about explanations is itself an explanatory theory. It explains, in terms of some other strand, why analysing problems in terms of human rights is ‘better’ (in the utilitarian sense). For example, it might explain on epistemological grounds why respect for human rights can be expected to promote the growth of knowledge, which is itself a precondition for solving moral problems.
If the explanation seems good, it might be worth adopting such a theory. Furthermore, since utilitarian calculations are impossibly difficult to perform, whereas analysing a situation in terms of human rights is often feasible, it may be worth using a ‘human rights’ analysis in preference to any specific theory of what the happiness implications of a particular action are. If all this were true, it could be that the concept of ‘human rights’ is not expressible, even in principle, in terms of ‘happiness’ — that it is not a utilitarian concept at all. We may call it a moral concept. The connection between the two is through emergent explanation, not emergent prediction.
I am not especially advocating this particular approach; I am merely illustrating the way in which moral values might exist objectively by playing a role in emergent explanations. If this approach did work, then it would explain morality as a sort of ‘emergent usefulness’.
In a similar way, ‘artistic value’ and other aesthetic concepts have always been difficult to explain in objective terms. They too are often explained away as arbitrary features of culture, or in terms of inborn preferences. And again we see that this is not necessarily so. Just as morality is related to usefulness, so artistic value has a less exalted but more objectively definable counterpart, design. Again, the value of a design feature is understandable only in the context of a given purpose for the designed object. But we may find that it is possible to improve designs by incorporating a good aesthetic criterion into the design criteria. Such aesthetic criteria would be incalculable from the design criteria; one of their uses would be to improve the design criteria themselves. The relationship would again be one of explanatory emergence. And artistic value, or beauty, would be a sort of emergent design.
Tipler’s overconfidence in predicting people’s motives near the omega point has caused him to underrate an important implication of the omega-point theory for the role of intelligence in the multiverse. It is that intelligence is not only there to control physical events on the largest scale, it is also there to choose what will happen. The ends of the universe are, as Popper said, for us to choose. Indeed, to a large extent the content of future intelligent thoughts is what will happen, for in the end the whole of space and its contents will be the computer. The universe will in the end consist, literally, of intelligent thought-processes. Somewhere towards the far end of these materialized thoughts lies, perhaps, all physically possible knowledge, expressed in physical patterns.
Moral and aesthetic deliberations are also expressed in those patterns, as are the outcomes of all such deliberations. Indeed, whether or not there is an omega point, wherever there is knowledge in the multiverse (complexity across many universes) there must also be the physical traces of the moral and aesthetic reasoning that determined what sort of problems the knowledge-creating entity chose to solve there. In particular, before any piece of factual knowledge can become similar across a swathe of universes, moral and aesthetic judgements must already have been similar across those universes. It follows that such judgements also contain objective knowledge in the physical, multiverse sense. This justifies the use of epistemological terminology such as ‘problem’, ‘solution’, ‘reasoning’ and ‘knowledge’ in ethics and aesthetics. Thus, if ethics and aesthetics are at all compatible with the world-view advocated in this book, beauty and tightness must be as objective as scientific or mathematical truth. And they must be created in analogous ways, through conjecture and rational criticism.
So Keats had a point when he said that ‘beauty is truth, truth beauty’. They are not the same thing, but they are the same sort of thing, they are created in the same way, and they are inseparably related. (But he was of course quite wrong to continue ‘that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know’.)
In his enthusiasm (in the original sense of the word!), Tipler has neglected 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 resurrecting us if Tipler is right.