On April 6 I will give a talk on “The Turing Church of Transcendent Engineering” at the 2012 conference of the Mormon Transhumanist Association.
My talk will be based on a revised version of “Transcendent Engineering.” I will also discuss examples of emerging and not yet well understood science that could be relevant to synthetic realities, resurrection, and “quantum archaeology.”
The transcendent science and engineering of our mind children in the far future is probably not understandable and not even remotely imaginable by us, at this stage of our evolution. Yet, some of our current scientific theories seem to hint at possible scientific foundations for transcendent engineering. I wish to show some glimpses at these foundations, with the caveat that we don’t really understand these things yet… and all that I will say is most likely wrong. Reality can only be even stranger then the weirdest theories.
The conference is open to the public, please register here. For those who cannot attend in person, all talks will be streamed via transfigurism.org, and recorded as well.
Speakers will address the themes of Mormonism, Transhumanism, and Transfigurism, with particular attention to topics at the intersection of technology, spirituality, science and religion.
The image above is part of a beautiful picture taken by Terasem editor Lori Rhodes to illustrate the article. Thanks Lori!
Expanding previous essays, I argue that science may someday develop the capability to resurrect the dead and build (and/or become) God(s), and propose to base a transhumanist religion (or, better, mythology) on this idea.
“If we don’t move into space, if we and our downloads and our art int siblings do not move into space, the entire biosphere is doomed. if we are so foolish as to remain on the planet earth then we and the entire biosphere will be annihilated. Fortunately I don’t expect this to happen, I expect that the human race and its artificial intelligences and downloads will eventually move out into space and ultimately take over the universe.”
“Everything can be reduced to the laws of physics, in particular to the laws of physics which we now know.”
He mentions that we are used to think that Newtonian physics has been superseded by general relativity and quantum mechanics, so we cannot rule out that the physics which we now know will be superseded by new physics, but he thinks general relativity and quantum physics are implied by Newtonian physics.
“Newton was correct!”
“General relativity is really Newtonian mechanics made consistent with the idea that the speed of light is the same for all observers, which is an automatic consequence of maxwell’s equations.”
“As it was proved by the great mathematician Elie Cartan in the 1920s, gravity is curvature for Newton also, and once you combine that with the insights of Enstein and Lorentz then the Newtonian equations automatically become the Einstein equations.”
Ref.: General Relativity As an Aether Theory, arxiv.org/pdf/1007.4572
“Quantum mechanics really is a subset of Newtonian mechanics in its most general form called Hamilton-Jacobi theory, that means there was no scientific revolution in the 1920.”
Ref.: Hamilton-Jacobi Many-Worlds Theory and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, arxiv.org/abs/1007.4566
“We already have a theory of everything.”
“Reality is deterministic.”
“There are parallel universes out there. Many world, many universes, is already built into the laws of physics, was in the laws of physics in the early 19th centuty, physicists would just not admit what their own equation were screaming at them.”
He says that lack holes cannot evaporate because of unitarity, but in an ever expanding universe they would necessarily evaporate, which would violate the laws of physics.
He concludes that it is not possible for the universe to expand forever, it must eventually expand to a max size and then re-contract. but this would also lead to contradictions with thermodynamics. Only one possible re-contraction mechanism is consistent with all the laws of physics:
“Intelligent life manipulating the entire universe, forcing it into a series of patterns that allow this intelligent life to continue to exist.”
“Only this makes the laws of physics mutually consistent.”
“The laws of physics have dictated that we will survive.”
“If the laws of physics are for us, for the biosphere, for the eventual existence of human downloads and the eventual exist of artificial intelligence, what on earth can be against us. Inevitably we will take over the entire universe.”
“As we approach the final singularity, the laws of physics also dictate that our knowledge and computing capacity is expanding without limits. Eventually it will become possible to emulate, to make a perfect copy of, every previous state of the entire universe.”
“We will be brought back into the future, brought back into existence as computer emulations in the far future.”
“Since the computer capacity must by the laws of physics expand without limits as we are going into the final singularity, that means these emulations can also continue to exist forever and also interact with the various versions of themselves.”
“When we emulate basically all possibilities consistent with the laws of physics, we will actually get the particular one of you and I which are actually here in this auditorium.”
“These all possibilities are already there currently. This is called the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, but I claim it is not one interpretation, it is really the only interpretation consistent with the laws of physics.”
In the Q/A
“The expansion of the universe will be turned off by our human download descendants plus our artificial intelligence siblings.”
“The universe cannot expand forever because this would be inconsistent with the laws of physics.”
“What the mathematics is telling us is that actually there are three singularities out there, a final singularity, an initial singularity, and a third singularity, which you can see only if you look at the universe from the multiverse point of view, which connects the other two. So, really you have got three singularities, which, you can show mathematically, are one and the same. So, we have in other words a tri-une God, a God who is three but is one.”
“Christianity can be experimentally confirmed.”
The other speakers, James Hughes, Martine Rothblatt, Remi Sussan, Lincoln Cannon, Brent Allsop, Dan Massey, Mike Perry, Andrew Warner, Fred & Linda Chamberlain, and Ben Goertzel, gave great talks. The full videos of all talks and Q/A sessions are available online. The Workshop explored transhumanist spirituality and “Religion 2.0″, the convergence of science and religion, highly imaginative future science and technologies for resurrection, emerging science and technologies for immortality, social and memetic engineering. It was held on December 11, 2011, the 10th anniversary of the death of my mother, and I cannot think of a better memorial.
I could not deliver my own talk because my Internet connection was vary bad (it has been very bad for a few weeks after a power surge that must have damaged something in the router). The slides of my presentation are below.
The Turing Church Online Workshop 3 will be held in the winter of 2012 and focus on the elusive concepts of time scanning and resurrection by copying-to-the-future, often called Quantum Archaeology.
The Workshop will explore transhumanist spirituality and “Religion 2.0″, the convergence of science and religion, highly imaginative future science and technologies for resurrection, emerging science and technologies for immortality, social and memetic engineering.
The technical implementation of the Workshop will be managed by teleXLR8 using the OpenQwaq VR technology. There are a limited number of seats available for those who wish to attend. On Sunday November 27 and Sunday December 4 at at 9am PST (noon EST, 5pm UK, 6pm Continental EU) there will be meetup and practice sessions for speakers and participants.
"Whether we ever get to know them or not, there are very probably alien civilizations that are superhuman, to the point of being god-like in ways that exceed anything a theologian could possibly imagine. Their technical achievements would seem as supernatural to us as ours would seem to a Dark Age peasant transported to the twenty-first century. Imagine his response to a laptop computer, a mobile telephone, a hydrogen bomb or a jumbo jet. As Arthur C Clarke put it, in his Third Law: 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.' The miracles wrought by our technology would have seemed to the ancients no less remarkable than the tales of Moses parting the waters, or Jesus walking upon them. The aliens of our SETI signal would be to us like gods . . . In what sense, then, would the most advanced SETI aliens not be gods? In what sense would they be superhuman but not supernatural? In a very important sense, which goes to the heart of this book. The crucial difference between gods and god-like extraterrestrials lies not in their properties but in their provenance. Entities that are complex enough to be intelligent are products of an evolutionary process. No matter how god-like they may seem when we encounter them, they didn't start that way. Science-fiction authors . . . have even suggested (and I cannot think how to disprove it) that we live in a computer simulation, set up by some vastly superior civilization. But the simulators themselves would have to come from somewhere. The laws of probability forbid all notions of their spontaneously appearing without simpler antecedents. They probably owe their existence to a (perhaps unfamiliar) version of Darwinian evolution..."
Of course, I completely agree with Dawkins and these are precisely the arguments that we use in support of a new transhumanist spirituality or, if you like, religion. See for example my own presentation at the Transhumanism and Spirituality Conference 2010, titled "The Cosmic Visions of the Turing Church".
Yesterday I gave a talk on The Cosmic Visions of the Turing Church at the Transhumanism and Spirituality Conference 2010. The conference explored the intersection of religion, science, spirituality and technology, from a transhumanist perspective. Transhumanism advocates the ethical use of technology to expand human capacities, and observes that if our rapid technological evolution continues to accelerate then humanity will become a new species before the end of the 21st century.
Abstract: Following the Turing-Church conjecture, minds can be uploaded from biological brains to other computational substrates. Mind uploading research may achieve practical results within decades. Given the technology, humans may live indefinitely, colonizing the universe, and resurrecting the dead by "copying them to the future". Perhaps they will create synthetic realities inhabited by sentient minds; perhaps we are in a synthetic reality. These considerations parallel the tenets of many religions. The Turing Church will be a meta-religion, without central doctrine, characterized by common interest in the promised land where science and religion meet, science becomes religion, and religion becomes science.
I guess the talk can be summarized in one sentence (Slide 4): "A memetically strong religion needs to offer resurrection besides immortality."
I talked remotely to the audience at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and to those who watched the live stream of the conference. I wish to thank the organizers for setting up the live stream, this should be done for all conferences. The live stream worked very well (perhaps the quality was a bit too high for those with slower Internet connections) and I was able to watch the talks and participate in the lively discussion via chat and Twitter.
The slides of my presentation are embedded below and available on Slideshare.
At the end of the presentation I showed the short movie CA Resurrection: "If we live in a simulation, the Mind can copy us to new simulation. This is illustrated by the short movie "CA Resurrection", which I made with a Game of Life program. The protagonist pattern is doomed to certain death by interaction with an environment that, except in very carefully controlled conditions, is very unfriendly to the stability of patterns (sounds familiar?), but is copied before death and restored to life in a friendlier environment."
