Quantum Archaeology

I have often used the almost equivalent term "Time Scanning", but I see that more and more people are using "Quantum Archaeology". A short definition:

Quantum Archaeology is a set of hypothetical far future technologies that, presumably through the application of yet undiscovered quantum effects, will permit reconstructing past events up to any desired resolution in space and time. In particular, Quantum Archaeology will permit reconstructing the life, thoughts, memories and feelings of any person in the past, up to any desired level of detail, and thus resurrecting the original person via "copying to the future."

See this discussion on the KurzweilAI Forum. or search the Forum. QA is frequently discussed there, and Forum member eldras maintains an excellent Quantum Archaeology page with references.

A practical analogy for QA:

A few weeks ago I wiped clean an old website of mine (I deleted everything, html and php pages, and the entire mysql database). Only yesterday I realized that I had deleted the only existing copy of an article that I wrote in 2005 jointly with one of my favorite SF writers. The article was dead, and with no backup copies anywhere. I was really mad.

Then today I thought that perhaps the (Holy?) Ghost in the Machine (Internet) had made a backup copy of the article. I found a copy on the Internet Archive, incomplete but good enough as a starting point for reconstruction (resurrection).

So I have resurrected the article. It has taken some work, but here it is, and I think some people here may like it:

Shadows and the concept of self
By Giulio Prisco and Richard L. Miller

We die, and if we have no backup copies (e.g. a chemically preserved brain, a frozen body, a mindfile) our death is irreversible.

Or is it?

Perhaps the machinery of the universe creates backup copies, and if our descendants (or aliens, or AIs) find our backup copies, they will be able to resurrect us.

How? Some preliminary thoughts:

1) Other times are special cases of other universes (other branches of the MWI multiverse). If quantum entanglement extends across time, then it should be possible to find present systems correlated to past systems.

2) In the MWI there is no collapse of the state vector that irreversibly discards information. This should imply that information is preserved in the multiverse.

3) Reversible computing is the most energy-efficient form of computing, because only destroying information requires energy. If reversible computing is the most energy-efficient form of computing, it makes sense to think that the universe does reversible computing, and all information lost is available in "hidden output registers" that we could eventually find and read.

My talk on Transhumanism and Religion, Manhattan College, Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 4pm

I gave a talk on Transhumanism and Religion at Manhattan College, Thursday, October 13, 2011. Thanks to Robert Geraci for organizing the talk, and thanks to all participants for the great questions and comments.

Slides of the talk:

Transhumanism and Religion

View more presentations from Giulio Prisco

Magical thinking

What the fuck is wrong with magical thinking? It is what got Columbus to America.

This has been my first reaction to the article What’s the Likelihood of the Singularity? Part One: Artificial Intelligence, by Alex Knapp on Forbes.

I define magical thinking as imagination applied to overcoming obstacles that are very difficult (or impossible) to overcome according to current science and common sense. Science and common sense used to say that you cannot fly and you cannot talk to people far away, but magical thinking gave us the telegraph, the telephone, air travel, the Internet, mobile phones and Facebook. And I am confident that someday before the end of the century magical thinking will give us brain implants, telepathy and mind uploading. There are many comments to the Forbes article by transhumanist friends (notably, some very cogent comments by Ben Goertzel) who insist that transhumanism is not magical thinking. Well, I think it is - magical thinking in its purest and noblest form, the kind of magical thinking that has taken us from caves to the Moon, and will take us to the stars and beyond.

Note on mind uplaoding: The second part of the article What’s the Likelihood of the Singularity? Part Two: Uploading the Brain is just out. I will just make one comment at this moment: denying the possibility of mind uploading is crude dualism, because it assumes that carbon biology has some mystical property that science will never be able to explain and engineering will never be able to replicate and improve. With this attitude, we would be still living in caves. I will to comment to both articles and I have just created an account on Forbes.

Both articles are inspired by an article by Charlie Stross on Three arguments against the singularity. The article is very interesting and written by someone who understands these things much better than Knapp. I just left this comment:

Charlie, I am more optimist than you on the feasibility of and timeline for strong AI and mind uploading, but I am probably closer to your cautious assessment than to the wild optimism of, say, Kurzweil. I think both technologies will be developed someday because they are compatible with our scientific understanding of reality, but not very soon.

In reply to: "I can't disprove [the Simulation Argument], either. And it has a deeper-than-superficial appeal, insofar as it offers a deity-free afterlife... it would make a good free-form framework for a postmodern high-tech religion. Unfortunately it seems to be unfalsifiable, at least by the inmates (us)."

My question is, what is wrong with this. Some persons function better _in this life_ if they can persuade themselves to contemplate the possibility of an afterlife compatible with the scientific worldview. They become happier and better persons, help others, and try to make the world a better place.

In other words, the pursuit of personal happiness without harming others. Charlie, what the fuck is wrong with this?

Read Charlie's reply and many other interesting comments on Charlie's blog.

Now also the third article of Knapp's series is out: What’s the Likelihood of the Singularity? Part Three: A Simulated World. There is an interesting discussion on quantum mechanics, of all things. My last comment:

According to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, the universe does not compute things that nobody is observing, but leaves them in a undetermined state to be defined only when somebody actually observes them. This makes sense from a computational perspective (why waste useful resources to compute useless things?) and this is why we use the same strategy in our own synthetic worlds like World of Warcraft. So, without stretching the analogy too far, I rather consider quantum mechanics as suggestive evidence in favor of a simulation theory.

Turing Church working group

Image credits

At this moment the Turing Church is a closed working group at the intersection of science and religion. See http://turingchurch.org/ (login required). If you are in general agreement with the ideas in this blog (see the article on Ten Cosmist Convictions) and wish to participate in the working group, send me an email.

Cosmist Manifesto: Discussion on resurrection

Ben Goertzel has invited readers to comment his excellent Cosmist Manifesto. I look forward to seeing the text published as a book, and I will post many comments. There is an interesting discussion on technological resurrection going on in the comment thread of the post Ten Cosmist Convictions (Mostly By Giulio Prisco), please contribute. My first comment:

Many rationalists have knee-jerk reactions when the idea of technological resurrection of the dead is mentioned. Perhaps because they made a big effort to free themselves from religious superstition and are afraid of falling back into religion. But here we are talking about science and technology, not religion.

I consider the resurrection of the dead as a very remote possibility that may, or may not, be developed by future engineers.

May or may not, and how? We just don't know enough. Perhaps by quantum entanglement to the past as Ken suggests (it is known that other times are special cases of other MWI branches), or perhaps by other means. Perhaps those information patterns are dispersed that were our loved ones, as Samantha suggests, or perhaps the unfolding computation which is our reality is reversible up to a certain degree. Perhaps we will be able to acquire sufficient information from the past to "copy the dead from the past to the future", or perhaps not.

In passing note that, if our reality is a simulation running in a higher level of reality, there are conceptually simple resurrection mechanisms (the sysop can copy a pattern to another simulation). This is also a possibility that cannot be ruled out.

I prefer not to try formulating more precise speculations, and limiting myself to contemplating the idea that, perhaps, our universe may be compatible with resurrection of the dead, and our descendants may be able to achieve it. And as a student of science, I don't think resurrection is incompatible with our current knowledge of how the universe works.

All religions have developed the idea of resurrection, and it is simple to understand why: it is one of those ideas that help people getting through the night. It certainly helps me getting through the night, as I don't really expect to see engineered immortality (through biotechnology or mind uploading) in my lifetime.

And getting through the night is what really matters. As William James said, we should feel free to believe in unproven or even unprovable ideas, especially when this belief helps us finding meaning and achieving goals in our actual lives.

Please comment Ben's post Ten Cosmist Convictions (Mostly By Giulio Prisco), not this one.