Universal Immortalism: transhumanism plus hope
The Society for Universal Immortalism is a progressive religion that holds rationality, reason, and the scientific method as central tenets of its faith.
I am a member if the Society, and wish to thank the other members for many stimulating ideas and discussions. 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 it was for 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.
The full text of ”The Beliefs of the Society for Universal Immortalism” begins with: “We have a soul and it is informational in nature”.
Michael Perry is mentioned in the 1994 Wired article ”Meet the Extropians”, which was the first introduction to transhumanism for me and many other transhumanists:
Mike Perry, overseer of the 27 frozen people (actually, 17 are frozen heads, only 10 are entire bodies) submerged in liquid nitrogen at minus 321 degrees Fahrenheit (Cold enough for you?) at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a cryonics outfit in Scottsdale, Arizona, gave a talk saying that, contrary to appearances, genuine immortality was physically possible.
“Immortality is mathematical, not mystical,” he said.
Perry, with a PhD in computer science from the University of Colorado, might well think so. A rather gaunt figure, a little rumpled and slightly stooped, he’d worked out a scheme whereby if you make enough backup copies of yourself, then everlasting life can be yours forever, always, and in perpetuity.
He explained: some of the more submissive immortalists - non-Extropian immortalists, in other words - had worried about the possibility of their lives being terminated by accident, murder, or some other such form of radical unpleasantness. The way to get around that in the future, said Perry, would be to download the entire contents of your mind into a computer - your memories, knowledge, your whole personality (which is, after all, just information) - you’d transfer all of it to a computer, make backup copies, and stockpile those copies all over creation. If at some point later you should happen to suffer a wee interruption of your current life cycle, then one of your many backups would be activated, and, in a miracle of electronic resurrection, you’d pop back into existence again, good as new.
Universal Immortalism is an extension of Perry’s 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.
A possibility that future scientists and engineers _may_ be able to achieve. If it does not prove incompatible with some fundamental physical law. If our species does not destroy itself before. If, instead of falling prey of superstition and religious fundamentalism, we continue our journey towards more and more knowledge and mastery of reality. There are no buts (universal immortalism can _not_ be thought of as a bad thing), but there are many ifs. We are not selling certainties, but we are offering hope. Hope permits happiness, and hope can provide the drive and energy to do something to take today’s reality closer to the reality we wish to inhabit. The Society for Universal Immortalism has only 10 members as I am writing this -this has something to do with the fact that a cryonic suspension agreement is a current membership requirement- and is very far from taking over the world, but I often think that the vision of our tiny and unknown society of ten members could be _exactly_ what billions of people on this little blue planet need, if only we could find effective ways to communicate its beauty.
Posted by G.P. on 02/24 at 10:03 AM