My presentation at the Turing Church Online Workshop 2, December 11, 2011

2. Anna Ferrari
March 27, 1929 – December 11, 2001

3. Why are we addicted to Religion?
• Fear of death.
• Wish to see our dead loved ones again.
• Other reasons are much less important.
• Radical life extension and mind uploading offer immortality
(in the sense of indefinite lifespan) but this is not enough.
• A memetically strong religion needs to offer resurrection
besides immortality.
• Of course, we want to offer hope in resurrection based on
science and technology.
• How?

4. A meta research project
• Develop some ideas on how future scientists might resurrect
the dead.
• I mean dead dead, no frozen bodies, no preserved brains, no
mindfiles.
• Quantum Archaeology, entanglement across time, future-to-
past wormholes and this kind of things.
• This is far-future science and tech, but I am persuaded that
contemplating the possibility of future resurrection can make
people happier here and now.
• Turing Church Online Workshop 3, Winter 2012.

5. Some convictions (by ?)
• It’s highly plausible that in the universe there are God-like
creatures.
• 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.’
• In what sense, then, would the most advanced SETI aliens not
be gods?

6. Some convictions (by Richard Dawkins)
• 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...”
• By Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion

7. Two principles
• Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. - Sir
Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law
• There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in
your philosophy. - William Shakespeare, Hamlet

8. The right attitude
• "So will the Universe end in a big crunch, or in an infinite
expansion of dead stars, or in some other manner? In my
view, the primary issue is not the mass of the Universe, or the
possible existence of antigravity, or of Einstein's so-called
cosmological constant. Rather, the fate of the Universe is a
decision yet to be made, one which we will intelligently
consider when the time is right.” - Ray Kurzweil, The Age of
Spiritual Machines

9. Three cornerstones of a transhumanist
religion
• Mind uploading - someday it will be possible to transfer
entire personalities from their original biological brain to
more durable and powerful engineered substrates.
• Time-scanning (aka “Quantum Archaeology”) - someday it
will be possible to acquire very detailed information from the
past. Once time-scanning is available, we will be able to
resurrect people from the past by “copying them to the
future” via mind uploading.
• Synthetic realities - someday it will be possible to build
artificial realities inhabited by sentient life. Perhaps future
humans will live in synthetic realities. Perhaps we will wake up
in a synthetic reality after having been copied to the future.
Or… perhaps we are already there.

10. Uploading, Resurrection, Synthetic
Realities
• Following the Turing-Church conjecture, a human mind can be transferred
from a biological brain to another computational substrate (Mind
Uploading).
• Mind Uploading research is ongoing and may achieve practical results in
this century, perhaps in only a few decades.
• Once Mind Uploading technology is available, humans will be able to live
indefinitely in non biological bodies and make backup copies of
themselves.
• Future civilizations of uploads will colonize the galaxy and the
universe, and perhaps they will be able to resurrect the dead by "copying
them to the future".
• Perhaps they will be able to create synthetic realities inhabited by sentient
minds, and perhaps we ourselves are sentient minds in a
synthetic, computationally generated reality.

11. ‘Supernatural’ and ‘miracles’ in
simulations
• We believe reality is fully understandable and explainable by
science.
• If our reality is a simulation, everything in our universe can be
understood in terms of the physical laws of the higher level
reality in which it is simulated.
• But not necessarily in terms of our reality: The reality
engineer up there, the Transcendent Mind, may choose to
violate the rules of the game.
• The reality engineers cannot violate the laws of their
physics, but they can violate the laws of our physics.
• According to our best scientific understanding, it seems that
the dead stay dead. But if we live in a simulation, the Mind
can copy us to new simulation.

12. Quantum Archeology
• 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."

13. Three starting points (?)
• According to Deutsch, 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
entangled to past systems.
• 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.
• 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.

14. Moravec’s resurrection
• “Is robotics researcher Hans Moravec serious about the possibility of
reconstructing a human being from "clues" left behind on an atomic level? The
answer is "yes.”… Assuming the artificial intelligences now have truly
overwhelming processing power, they should be able to reconstruct human
society in every detail by tracing atomic events backward in time. "It will cost them
very little to preserve us this way," he points out.” - Hans Moravec, interviewed by
Charles Platt, 1995
• “Perhaps we are most likely to find ourselves reconstituted in the minds of
superintelligent successors.” - Hans Moravec, Robot: Mere Machine to
Transcendent Mind
• Note: A processor able to run simulated persons is not a computer, but a person.
Not a mere machine, but a Transcendent Mind.

15. Tipler’s Omega Point
• Intelligent beings of a far future epoch develop the capability
to steer the dynamics of the universe in such a way as to make
unlimited subjective time, energy, and computational power
available to them before reaching a final singularity (Omega
Point).
• They restore to consciousness all sentient beings of the
past, perhaps through a “brute force” computational
emulation of the past history of the universe.
• Our successors may be able to engineer conditions suitable
for the emergence of an Omega Point.
• After death we may wake up in a simulated environment with
many of the features assigned to the afterlife world by the
major religions.

16. Clarke-Baxter’s time scanning
• In “The Light of Other Days” by Sir Arthur C. Clarke and
Stephen Baxter:
• The fabric of space-time is full of micro-wormholes
connecting every point of space-time with every other point
of space-time.
• Scientists develop the capability to resurrect the dead by time
scanning, copying them from their past (our present) and
uploading them to their present (our future).
• Idea: if there are not micro wormholes suitable for time scanning, perhaps we can
make some.
• ‘Quantum Archaeology’ may be able to reconstruct the past via quantum
entanglement across time, or similar weird ideas.

17. Bainbridge-Rothblatt soft uploading
• We can write a lot of high-level information out of the brain as
diaries, blogs, pictures, videos, answers to personality
tests, etc. to create over the years a large database of
personal information (mindfile, see CybeRev and Lifenaut).
• The hope is that some future technology may be able to bring
the information in the mindfile to life as a valid continuation
(from both objective and subjective points of view) of the
original person.
• Future revival tech may include AI and generic models of
human minds (“me-program” that can act as a lower level
layer of firmware and system software for the higher-level
personal information in a mindfile.