I wish they use their intellectual "prowess" to hypothesize on how to live a good life rather than how to live for ever... if we haven't already, we will realize more and more with time that latter is much harder than the former. Giulio Prisco's famous essay here:
"I will repeat it: someday science may develop the capability to resurrect the dead. And I will add: perhaps much, much sooner than the end of the universe. Perhaps in a few hundred years.
How?
Of course, I just don't know. But I can imagine some scenarios compatible with our current scientific knowledge. The simplest scenarios involve time travel, but not the sort of time travel where you physically go back in time and kill your grandfather with all the logical inconsistencies that follow. What is needed is just the capability to acquire detailed information from the past. If and when our descendants develop such capability, they will be able to look back into the past and extract all information contained in our brains. Then, assuming that by this time our descendants have also developed the capability to load and "run" such information in a new physical or virtual body, they will be able to revive us in their physical reality or in one of their simulated realities.
The first writer to propose an idea conceptually similar to this was the 19th-century Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorovich Fyodorov. Of course his scenarios reflect 19th-century models of the universe and seem naive today. In the words of Mike Perry (same reference): "A person is made up of atoms, and when a person dies these (finitely many) particles are scattered. Resurrection of the person occurs as a consequence of restoring the atoms to their previous arrangement. To carry out the resurrection it is necessary to determine what this arrangement was and then to reposition the particles. This is a problem to be solved by science rather than by appeals to an outside power."
Fyodorov's mechanism is perhaps naive, but his concept is not. In his book "Forever for All", Mike Perry presents scenarios more compatible with today's models of the universe and takes the arguments for physical immortality fare beyond what others have done. Mike Perry carefully examines the scientific, technological and philosophical requirements for the achievement of immortality and gives reasoned hope for the eventual realization of eternal life for all of us. Frank Tipler's work overlaps part of Perry's, but is more focused on a single possibility for universal resurrection at the end of time under a particular cosmological scenario that, unfortunately, does not seem very probable given the latest astronomical discoveries. So Tipler's theory becomes just a special case within Perry's much larger and more comprehensive work.
But, as it is frequently the case, some of the most suggestive resurrection scenarios have been proposed by science fiction writers. In "The Light of Other Days", Sir Arthur C. Clarke (who else?) and Stephen Baxter imagine a near future world profoundly transformed by the invention of a "Wormcam": a remote viewing device that permits scanning every position, including in the past, by using micro wormholes naturally embedded with hugh density in the fabric of spacetime. At some point things start to progress very fast, and soon after scientists develop the capability to resurrect the dead: "It was possible now to look back into time and read off a complete DNA sequence from any moment in an individual's life. And it was possible to download a copy of that person's mind and, by putting the two together, regenerated body and downloaded mind, to restore her... We live on Mars, the moons of the outer planets, and we're heading for the stars. There have even been experiments to download human minds into the quantum foam... We intend to restore all human souls, back to the beginning of the species. We intend to put right the past, to defeat the awful tragedy of death in a universe that may last tens of billions of years."
Of course when Clarke refers to soul, he does not mean a non-material, metaphysical entity. Perry and Tipler provide an informational definition of human personhood which I find quite persuasive and is, I think, what Clarke also believes. The terms "individual" or "person" should be preferred to the term "soul" because the latter term is easily confused with idealist superstitions.
And perhaps an all powerful civilization at the Tiplerian Omega Point will indeed restore all human persons. But it seems reasonable to assume that more mundane, albeit powerful, earlier future civilizations will still have to contend with the scarcity of resources. In this case, the first persons to be restored will be selected on the basis of appropriate criteria such as their "worth" (you can derive complete moral systems from this), or their value to some specific entity. In other words, if you are still around at that time, you may be able to sponsor the resurrection of your family and friends.
I definitely intend to be still around at that time: I will cryonically transport myself to a suitable future and, as soon as science develops all the necessary capabilities, I will reach back in time to retrieve all the persons I have loved."
"I will repeat it: someday science may develop the capability to resurrect the dead. And I will add: perhaps much, much sooner than the end of the universe. Perhaps in a few hundred years.
How?
Of course, I just don't know. But I can imagine some scenarios compatible with our current scientific knowledge. The simplest scenarios involve time travel, but not the sort of time travel where you physically go back in time and kill your grandfather with all the logical inconsistencies that follow. What is needed is just the capability to acquire detailed information from the past. If and when our descendants develop such capability, they will be able to look back into the past and extract all information contained in our brains. Then, assuming that by this time our descendants have also developed the capability to load and "run" such information in a new physical or virtual body, they will be able to revive us in their physical reality or in one of their simulated realities.
The first writer to propose an idea conceptually similar to this was the 19th-century Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorovich Fyodorov. Of course his scenarios reflect 19th-century models of the universe and seem naive today. In the words of Mike Perry (same reference): "A person is made up of atoms, and when a person dies these (finitely many) particles are scattered. Resurrection of the person occurs as a consequence of restoring the atoms to their previous arrangement. To carry out the resurrection it is necessary to determine what this arrangement was and then to reposition the particles. This is a problem to be solved by science rather than by appeals to an outside power."
Fyodorov's mechanism is perhaps naive, but his concept is not. In his book "Forever for All", Mike Perry presents scenarios more compatible with today's models of the universe and takes the arguments for physical immortality fare beyond what others have done. Mike Perry carefully examines the scientific, technological and philosophical requirements for the achievement of immortality and gives reasoned hope for the eventual realization of eternal life for all of us. Frank Tipler's work overlaps part of Perry's, but is more focused on a single possibility for universal resurrection at the end of time under a particular cosmological scenario that, unfortunately, does not seem very probable given the latest astronomical discoveries. So Tipler's theory becomes just a special case within Perry's much larger and more comprehensive work.
But, as it is frequently the case, some of the most suggestive resurrection scenarios have been proposed by science fiction writers. In "The Light of Other Days", Sir Arthur C. Clarke (who else?) and Stephen Baxter imagine a near future world profoundly transformed by the invention of a "Wormcam": a remote viewing device that permits scanning every position, including in the past, by using micro wormholes naturally embedded with hugh density in the fabric of spacetime. At some point things start to progress very fast, and soon after scientists develop the capability to resurrect the dead: "It was possible now to look back into time and read off a complete DNA sequence from any moment in an individual's life. And it was possible to download a copy of that person's mind and, by putting the two together, regenerated body and downloaded mind, to restore her... We live on Mars, the moons of the outer planets, and we're heading for the stars. There have even been experiments to download human minds into the quantum foam... We intend to restore all human souls, back to the beginning of the species. We intend to put right the past, to defeat the awful tragedy of death in a universe that may last tens of billions of years."
Of course when Clarke refers to soul, he does not mean a non-material, metaphysical entity. Perry and Tipler provide an informational definition of human personhood which I find quite persuasive and is, I think, what Clarke also believes. The terms "individual" or "person" should be preferred to the term "soul" because the latter term is easily confused with idealist superstitions.
And perhaps an all powerful civilization at the Tiplerian Omega Point will indeed restore all human persons. But it seems reasonable to assume that more mundane, albeit powerful, earlier future civilizations will still have to contend with the scarcity of resources. In this case, the first persons to be restored will be selected on the basis of appropriate criteria such as their "worth" (you can derive complete moral systems from this), or their value to some specific entity. In other words, if you are still around at that time, you may be able to sponsor the resurrection of your family and friends.
I definitely intend to be still around at that time: I will cryonically transport myself to a suitable future and, as soon as science develops all the necessary capabilities, I will reach back in time to retrieve all the persons I have loved."
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