Frank Tipler

Frank Tipler is a mathematical physicist who argued in The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead (Doubleday, 1994) that physics itself supplies a resurrection. His Omega Point argument holds that a universe collapsing in a particular way allows information processing to diverge to infinity at the final instant, and that a computer at that limit has the capacity to reconstruct every conscious being who has ever lived and run them indefinitely.

The claim about what a sufficiently large computer could do is the part that connects to this site. If the information about a person’s organisation can be recovered and executed, then on Tipler’s premises that person exists again. This is a substrate independence claim dressed in cosmology, and it is the same claim that whole brain emulation makes with scanning hardware rather than with a boundary condition of the universe.

The cosmology is contested. Tipler’s boundary conditions are not the ones contemporary cosmology accepts, and critics treat the divergence of processing as a property of the assumed model rather than a discovery about the universe. He also does not give an account of how organisation produces experience. He assumes that a faithful reconstruction is that person. The Cosmist position fits, since the destination is conscious life unbound from Earth and from biology, but the physics is the weak part of the argument and should be read as such.

Known for. The Physics of Immortality (1994) and the Omega Point argument for the resurrection of every conscious being

Coverage on this site

• Tipler's Omega Point Claimed Physics Could Resurrect Every Dead Person April 2025

Related researchers

• J. D. BernalBirkbeck College, University of London. Ireland, 1901 to 1971The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1929), the Bernal sphere space habitat, and X-ray crystallography of proteins Cosmist1 article
• NF Nikolai FyodorovRumyantsev Museum library, Moscow, from 1878The Philosophy of the Common Task, and space settlement as an obligation owed to the dead Cosmist1 article
• KT Konstantin TsiolkovskyKaluga, Russia. Self taught, and a schoolteacher for most of his working lifeThe theory of cosmic eras, and the claim that mind ends in a radiant form Cosmist1 article

Frank Tipler is listed with the other cosmists, who hold that mind is not bound to the planet or the biology that produced it. The positions themselves are set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers. The argument that mind can leave the planet that produced it is covered on Project Consciousness to Orbit.