Transumanar

New website of the Society for Universal Immortalism

The Society for Universal Immortalism has a new website with a very nice header image. I wish a superlative (this is becoming one of my favorite words) 2008 to all Society members and this year I will try to contribute more.

The Society for Universal Immortalism is a progressive religion that holds rationality, reason, and the scientific method as central tenets of its faith. Universal Immortalists reject supernatural and mystical forces as solutions to the problems that face us. I am a member if the Society, and wish to thank the other members for their stimulating ideas. In particular, I am indebted to R. Michael Perry for the beautiful declaration in his book ”Forever for All”: “To that end, we dedicate ourselves to finding a way one day to bring back all persons who have ever lived, so they can join in our eternal adventure”. This is a very strong idea, which may permit a full reconciliation between the scientific and religious worldviews. Universal immortalists do not propose any specific engineering approach to resurrection, but consider it as an objective that future technology may be able to achieve, someday, based on future scientific advances.

I see Universal Immortalism as Transhumanism “plus something”. This “something” is the resurrection idea: finding a way one day to bring back all persons who have ever lived. Even if Universal Immortalism is scientific speculation (we hope to resurrect the dead using “future magic” based on science and engineering), the resurrection idea is hard to swallow even for many transhumanists. For me, Universal Immortalism is perfectly compatible with transhumanism, and constitutes its logical endpoint. The engineering challenge will be huge of course, but so was the development of agriculture. Universal Immortalists not only hope to find a way one day to bring back all persons who have ever lived, but also intend to be there to make it happen. That is why, at this moment, being a current cryonics suspension member is a requirement to become a member of the Society for Universal Immortalism.

See the full text of The Beliefs of the Society for Universal Immortalism.

Universal Immortalism is an extension of ideas on mind uploading (the concept of downloading the entire contents of the mind into a computer is frequently referred to as mind uploading) - a possible way to bring back all persons who have ever lived may be, once technology has advanced enough, “copying them to the future” by mind uploading performed on a mind that existed in the past.

Besides mind uploading technology, this would require time travel or a technology able to extract information with very high resolution from the past. Time travel seems to introduce logical paradoxes (you go back in time and kill your grandfather before your father was conceived - then you were not born, and cannot go back in time to kill your grandfather). But this “grandfather paradox” goes away, for example, in Everett’s interpretation of quantum physics, and there is no paradox involved in extracting information with very high resolution from the past. So while of course I realize that engineering resurrection will be a huge scientific and technical challenge, I consider it as a possibility that future scientists and engineers may be able to achieve.

Posted by G.P. on 01/04 at 07:32 AM
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