The Cosmic Visions of the Turing Church

Speaker 1

We’re now going to turn our attention to Italy and welcome Giulio Prisco. to the conference. By way of introduction, Julio is a technology consultant, a physicist, computer scientist, writer, and a futurist. And he’s the director of excuse me, he is a director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and also the Association let’s see if I can do this. Associazione Italiana Trans Uministi. and was executive director of the World Transhumanist Association. As a founder of the Turing Church, Prisco proposes transhumanist cosmic visions as alternatives to major religions. Here we go.

Giulio Prisco

So first, I’d like to thank the organizer very much for inviting me here. And I would have liked very much to be in Salt Lake City with you tonight. which is this afternoon for Europe. I wasn’t able to make it this time, but if the conference is organized again next year, I will do my best to be there. I will make this short. I hope that won’t take more than fifteen minutes. because it’s already almost midnight here. I don’t know if I will be able to stay until the debate. So I’ll try to leave a few minutes if someone wants to ask a question immediately after the talk.

Giulio Prisco

First, I’d like to explain uh where I’m coming from. Of course, I am a transhumanist. I have never been a very religious person, and I don’t come from a very religious family or uh community. I used to be a scientist and a computer scientist, and my worldview has always been very far from the supernatural. In spite of that, I’m very interested in spirit wide, and I know that the universe can be a very strange place. I am not a member of the LDS. But I am a member of the Morbon Transhumanist Association. That was my presentation. I hope you’re seeing my next videograph already.

Giulio Prisco

Okay, this conference is about spirituality. We have uh a lot of talks about the difference between spirituality and religion. Spirituality perhaps may be considered as a weak form of religion. There are some differences. I like to think of uh the good side of religion without the bad side. The good side is uh hope, happiness, cosmic visions, and you know what the bad side is. intolerance, holy words. We want to we would like to have the the good side of the coin without the bad side of the coin.

Giulio Prisco

And I would like to call your attention of these sentences. from an article of William Sinks Bambridge about religion for a galactic civilization that call our attention on the social importance of religion. As a social movement capable of giving a sense of transcendent purpose to dominant sectors of the society, that’s a very important function of religion and is something that we should keep.

Giulio Prisco

Now why are so many people really addicted to religion? And in the rest of the talk, I’m going to use religion as a synonym of spirituality. I think there are two very main reasons, very important. We are afraid of death and we are very sad because our loved ones have gone and we want to see them again. There are other reasons too that are much less important than these two.

Giulio Prisco

In transhumanism conferences we discuss radical life extension, mind uploading and the hope for immortality. But that is not enough. It’s not enough because when you discuss immortality with many people, very often you hear something like yes, but why should I want to continue living? when my mother is dead, when so many people I love are dead. So I think a mimetically strong religion does not only need to offer the hope in immortality, it also needs to offer the hope in resurrection. And we want to offer hope in resurrection based on science. How can we do that?

Giulio Prisco

And there are these two very good principles. First one is The third law of Seraphur Clark, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And the other We have to thank William Shakespeare for that, and everyone knows it. There are more things in heaven and earth that are dreamt of in our philosophy.

Giulio Prisco

What is the right attitude? This is the right attitude. You can find it at the end of the age of spiritual machines. The fate of the universe is a decision yet to be made, and it is a decision that we will have to make.

Giulio Prisco

There are many groups merging somehow spirituality and religion with Transhumanism. And our host today is the Norman Transhumanist Association, which is explicitly religious and is a very good community I do consider it as the paste transhumanist coming. Then we have some others, some very active, some not very active We have uh some groups that have not been fought yet. We have five to ten different groups And perhaps five to ten, if too many, perhaps there is room for not necessarily urging, but at least collaboration between these different groups?

Giulio Prisco

I want to call your attention on the very recently published Cosmos Manifesto by Ben Gertzen. which is really a beautiful book. I’d like to encourage everyone to read it. A few weeks ago, we have organized the remote talk by Ben, where he has explained this book. It’s available at this URL. I would like to encourage everyone to read the book and to watch the video, and I would like to consider Bain’s idea as an integral part of this talk.

Giulio Prisco

Okay, let’s come to the important question. We hear this question so many times. Is transhumanism a religion? To this question I answer yes, it is. Not in a very strict sense. We don’t have supernatural beliefs. But transhumanism is equivalent to a religion in the sense that it can replace religion by offering many of the same things, the same benefits of religion.

Giulio Prisco

This point is made very well in the recent book by Robert Gerage, Apocalyptic AI. Transhumanism seems clear religious to him. As a religious system, transhumans can tap into the basic human desire for a transcendence, meaningful meaningful purpose, sense of and the hope for life after that.

Giulio Prisco

This is a um proposal. Proposal is too strong, perhaps. It’s a set of ideas for a religion 2. 0. Based on technology, specifically on mind uploading, synthetic realities, possibility of technological resurrection, had the discussion list not very active at moment. But I hope to discuss these things with many people, this and the other list. It’s called a tuning church because of a mathematical theorem that basically says that what one computer can do, another computer can also do. It’s more complex than that, but anyway.

Giulio Prisco

And here the idea is that our mind is equivalent to a computer the analogy is uh very frequently heard, and I realize that that is uh an oversimplified analogy, but I think it is basically sound. Our brains are machines, our minds are programs. If this is the case, we can move a human mind with a computational substrate different from a biological brain.

Giulio Prisco

There is a lot of research ongoing. We don’t have any really impressive demonstration yet, but research is ongoing. And sooner or later I think in these centuries, in this century, we will achieve mind uploading. And once this technology is available, we will be able to live indefinite lifespan in non biological bodies. We can say immortality because we will be able to make back up copies of ourselves.

Giulio Prisco

So we will be immortal, we will move to the universe future civilization of Aplot will colonize the galaxy and the universe, and perhaps they will be able somehow to resurrect the uh the dead by helping them to the future, we will also be able to create artificial realities. And perhaps these two concepts are very much related to each other.

Giulio Prisco

I’m talking here of a metareligion because the considerations that we’re doing, the examples that I have made are very similar very similar to and actually indistinguishable from the promises of many religions. We don’t want essential doctrine. We want really a loose framework of ideas. concepts and hopes, able to provide people with meaning, a sense of wonder, hope in personal immortality and resurrection, all that based on science.

Giulio Prisco

Let’s talk a couple of inputs of mind uploading. I think it’s feasible in print. It will be achieved some day. Why? Because it is basically compatible with the laws of physics. Mind uploading is not incompatible with the laws of nature, and so it’s just another engineering problems. It will take some time. But I’m very confident that in a few decades we will develop at least the capability of this track.

Giulio Prisco

In such a way as to retain enough information of the mind, it would be much better to be able to upload a mind without distracting a brain. that there are some experts who are not very confident that it can be done. But again, I think I don’t see any in the laws of nature to say that non track uploading is possible. So I tend to think that it will also be achievable.

Giulio Prisco

What do I mean by soft uploading? Here I mean ten I’m meaning uh Bambridge Rock but approach. Instead of scanning the brain in a physical sense, we just uh write information out of the brain, extract high level information from the brain. Extreme life logging. Of course, we don’t have the technology to upload via live logging right now. But again, with all the explosion of information that we are putting on all over the social networks, in a few decades, perhaps this will also a viable way of uploading. And the hope is that some future technology may be able to bring the information to life as a valid continuation of the original person.

Giulio Prisco

I want to call your attention also on the recent workshop on substrate independent banks. If you take a look at our website, there are the videos of many recent seniors. The last one was Martin Rodplatt. last week about soft uploading.

Giulio Prisco

How soon? I’m not very optimistic. I don’t think uploading will be achieved next year. I don’t think I’ll achieve next decade. Perhaps we can see the first operational prototypes by means. And I will be very happy to be wrong. But that’s what I think.

Giulio Prisco

Anyway, even for the people of our generation, we can be able to preserve ourselves via a combination some of the Tryonic like techniques that have been proposed so far.

Giulio Prisco

Okay, this is not a joke. A couple of days ago, maybe you have read this little article that I had written, thinking about soft uploading. I had been thinking that There is a huge amount of information in my Gmail account. Not only information about me, but also some information about you guys, if you have been exchanging a mail with me So extrapolating, I can think that maybe in fifty years from now well, in fifty years from now, I’m dead, in all probability, but my Gmail account may well contain hundreds of terabytes of data with a lot of information about me, a lot of information about other people. So perhaps all this information can be used together with other information, in order to reconstruct a sufficiently accurate copy of me. So what I have done, I have given permission to Google to open my Gmail account in fifty years and use the information to upload me to the future.

Giulio Prisco

I know that some other people have uh given the same permission to Google on their blogs. This has been interpreted by many people as a joke. I mean it as a half joke. It may be useful. I would like to encourage you to write something simple.

Giulio Prisco

Let me conclude this presentation with some ideas on resurrection and old simulation. Most of the content here is based on an article on my blog. You can read it on Julio Brisco. blogspot. com.

Giulio Prisco

I hope we will be able to resurrect that by putting them to the future. How can we do that? And of course, at that time, we will have developed space time engineering and future magic that will permit us achieving, as I it means, most of promises really.

Giulio Prisco

In Moravec books and articles, there are many hints at possible mechanism for resurrection. He says, perhaps we are most likely to find ourselves reconstituted in the minds of superintelligent successors, and I would like to insist on a concept that if a computational system is able to run a simulated person, we should not consider this computational system as the Windows PC. of the matters that I’m using now, we should consider it as a person, not a mirror machine, but a transcendent mind. I will skip consideration related to Teeplesomega Point. I believe most people here are familiar with that.

Giulio Prisco

There is a very interesting idea in this beautiful book by Arthur Clarke and Stephen Baxter called The Light of Other Days. The concept is that perhaps The fabric of space time is full of micro wormholes. And perhaps there is a wormhole connecting every point of space time with every other point of space time by using this channel for transferring information, future scientists may be able to develop the capability to resurrect the data by time scanning, by copying them to the fusion. And of course, if the back of space time does not already contain enough microworm hole, well, then perhaps future engineers will be able to make sense.

Giulio Prisco

A very related uh concept is uh the simulation hypothesis. We may be living a scientific reality in a computed simulation ourselves now is impossible to say that this is not the case. It’s also impossible to make any probability estimate.

Giulio Prisco

Apparently, Hasporavec is also persuaded that we may believe in a simulation, and he says that this is alternatively the case. because the number of observers living in s in simulated reality may be much bigger than the number of observers living in one regional physical reality. This argument has been made more precise by Nick Bostrom.

Giulio Prisco

And at the end, since a computer able to run simulated reality containing conscious observers is not a mirror machine, at a transcendent mind. Perhaps George Berkeley was right when he thought that the reality we perceive exists in the mind that supreme and wise spirit in whom we live, move and have our being. And he was talking of God.

Giulio Prisco

Now, if we live in a simulation the the concept of a miracle, a violation of the physical law, begins to make sense. Because We don’t believe in the supernatural if our reality is being simulated by someone. Of course, those who ran the situation, the simulation cannot violate a there a laws of physics, but maybe they can violate our laws of physics. Just like when we change the code of a computer game to do something that would be impossible according to the standard rules of the game.

Giulio Prisco

So even if we think and according to all that we understand right now, it seems that the dead stay dead. But if we live in a simulation, the mind running the simulation might well change their minds. So we may believe in a simulation performed by a transcendent mind.

Giulio Prisco

In this case, we live in a universe which permits resume directional If this is not the case, that is, if we are now not in a simulation but in an original physical reality, future transcendents may be able to copy us from the past and upload as to one of their simulation.

Giulio Prisco

I hope I have a couple of minutes because I’d like to show a little movie That I made a couple of years ago to illustrate this concept. It’s a movie done with the Game of Life program where a pattern is doomed to certain death by interaction with a very unfriendly environment. But copied before death and restored to life in a a friendly environment. And now I would like to ask you guys to Just ran this uh one minute movie.

Giulio Prisco

Thank you very much for your attention.