Mormon Transhumanist Association conference, SLC, April 6

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 will be held on April 6, 2012 from 9 am to 5 pm at the Salt Lake City Public Library in Salt Lake City, Utah.

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.

Previous conferences sponsored by the Mormon Transhumanist Association include the 2010 Transhumanism and Spirituality conference and the 2009 Mormonism and Engineering conference. 

Speakers will address the themes of Mormonism, Transhumanism, and Transfigurism, with particular attention to topics at the intersection of technology, spirituality, science and religion.

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New blog: TECHNOLIBERATION

I have started a new blog at technoliberation.com. It is called TECHNOLIBERATION - news and views for technoprogressive pirates.

In the science fiction novel Distress, Greg Egan defines technoliberation as: "the empowerment of people through technology, and the liberation of the technology itself from restrictive hands."

Main keywords: Pirate politics, technoprogressivism, transhumanism, cosmism. Live-and-let-live, free open society, free open Internet, free open science and technology, occupy, cut the crap, no BS, no BB, no limits, no to corporations, no to nanny-states, no to bankers and bureaucrats, yes to freedom and fun, yes to privacy, yes to science, yes to imagination, yes to emerging technologies for human enhancement, let's upload and go to the stars.

Terasem hangouts

Terasem joiners and friends meet on the 10th of each month, and remote participants can join via Google+ Hangouts. In the picture, the participants in Florida (shown, Martine Rothblatt performing a yoga session), Dan Massey and Alison Gardner from DC, myself from Europe, and a visitor.

These meetings will become even more interesting as the new Extra features in Google+ Hangouts, which combine multi-person video chat with screen sharing and collaboration in Google Docs, are rolled in Hangouts. ReadWriteWeb says: "Hangouts allow users to bring in Google Docs, and smartphone users can use mobile video chat to participate. The addition of screen sharing makes Hangouts a versatile, compelling, free way to conduct remote meetings".

The limit of 10 participants is annoying, but there are interesting news: Hangouts on-air will permit broadcasting hangouts to viewers. Read How Google+ Hangouts will transform traditional TV broadcasting on lostremote.

Interview with venusplusx - Alison Gardner and Dan Massey

I interviewed venusplusx.org polymaths Alison Gardner and Dan Massey on sexual freedom, the occupy movement, transhumanism, the singularity, physics, religion and spirituality, and their forthcoming book. LGBT rights and quantum entanglement in the same talk. Thanks to Khannea Suntzu for filming. Thanks to Hank Pellissier for transcribing part of the interview for the IEET, and join the discussion at IEET | Sexual Freedom - an interview with VenusPlusX.

For this first teleXLR8 show using an interview format I have invited two Renaissance persons interested in everything. All these topics and many others will be explored in forthcoming interviews and talk shows on highly imaginative technologies, science, art, culture and society, hosted by show leaders (to be announced soon), with one or more guests and a selected audience. The videos will be edited and posted online a few days after the shows.

Transcendent Engineering - Terasem Journal of Personal Cyberconsciousness

My essay Transcendent Engineering ha just been published on the Terasem Journal of Personal Cyberconsciousness. A version of the essay is forthcoming in the Transhumanist Reader edited by Max More and Natasha Vita-More.

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.

Read the rest here...

Discussion: you are welcome to join the ongoing conversation on the Turing Church Facebook group and/or the IEET site: Transcendent Engineering - IEET

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.