My talk at the MTA 2012 Conference of the Mormon Transhumanist Association, Salt Lake City, Utah, April 6 2012.

1. The Turing Church of
Transcendent Engineering
GiulioPrisco
giulio@gmail.com

2. Fred Chamberlain III
1935 – 2012 (cryostasis)
MIND UPLOADING – THE ULTIMATE “OUT OF BODY” EXPERIENCE

3. The Turing-Church conjecture and
Mind Uploading
Following the Turing-Church conjecture, a human mind can be transferred from a biological
brain to another computational substrate (Mind Uploading).

4. Mind Uploading: we have a cure to
death right here
The brain imaging resolution needed for mind uploading can be achieved NOW with existing
(destructive) technologies --- Ken Hayworth, Brain Preservation Foundation.

5. Cryonics, biofiles, mindfiles…
Mind
file
+ Biofile, cryonically preserved body and brain, other information, “signature
Fred Chamberlain’s full set of strategies for immortality. See Terasem, CyBeRev, Lifenaut, Alcor

6. AI systems will fill the gaps in mindfiles
I grew up here, VR scenes on Google Street View
Future AI system will be able to fill the gaps in our mindfiles by using open data available in the
cloud: pictures, videos, virtual reality scenes, sounds…

7. AI systems will fill the gaps in mindfiles
There is plenty of data on the language spoken around here
…newspapers, books, films, email archives (see my article “Mind Uploading via Gmail”), social
network posts and timelines, languages, news archives… and also other persons’ mindfiles.

8. Transhumanism as a religion
Robert Geraci, Apocalyptic AI – Visions of Heaven in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual
Reality. A new religion inspired by Minsky, Moravec, Kurzweil, based on transhumanism.

9. Richard Dawkins’ religion
• 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.

10. Richard Dawkins’ religion
• In what sense, then, would the most advanced SETI aliens not be
gods?
• 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...”
• Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

11. 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

12. 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

13. Anna Ferrari
1929 – 2001

14. Living forever is not enough
• We want to see our loved ones again.
• A religion needs to offer resurrection besides immortality.
• We want to offer hope in resurrection based on science and
technology.
• Universal immortalism: to restore to life all persons who have
ever lived, whether they had been preserved or not.

15. Resurrection
• If I have no expectation of seeing my
father, mother, brothers, sisters and friends again, my heart
would burst in a moment, and I should go down to my grave.
The expectation of seeing my friends in the morning of the
resurrection cheers my soul and makes me bear up against
the evils of life. It is like their taking a long journey, and on
their return we meet them with increased joy.
• Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith 295-296

16. Transcendent Engineering
• We will develop spacetime engineering and scientific "future
magic" much beyond our current understanding and
imagination.
• Spacetime engineering and future magic will permit
achieving, by scientific means, most of the promises of
religions -- and many amazing things that no human religion
ever dreamed. Eventually we will be able to resurrect the
dead by "copying them to the future".
• Ben Goertzel and GiulioPrisco, Ten Cosmist Convictions, in Ben
Goertzel’sA Cosmist Manifesto

17. Theosis
• Here, then, is eternal life -- to know the only wise and true
God; and you have got to learn how to be Gods
yourselves, and to be kings and priests to God, the same as all
Gods have done before you, namely, by going from one small
degree to another, and from a small capacity to a great one;
from grace to grace, from exaltation to exaltation, until you
attain to the resurrection of the dead, and are able to dwell in
everlasting burnings, and to sit in glory, as do those who sit
enthroned in everlasting power.
• Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith 346-347

18. Russian Cosmism
A Christian transhumanist philosophy, 19th and early 20th
century
Unity between Man and the cosmos, Humanity’s destiny to leave the
Earth and colonize the universe, technological resurrection.

19. Turing Church - 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.

20. 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. A supreme
and wise Spirit, in whom we live, move, and have our being (George
Berkeley).

21. A simple universe

22. A simple universe

23. A simple universe
The oscillator will die,
destroyed by the glider

24. A simple universe
Let’s go back in time!
The laws of physics of this universe are not reversible.

25. A simple universe
But this is my universe and I have kept all snapshots as backup.

26. A simple universe
Flip a bit…

27. A simple universe
And the oscillator
Is safe!

28. ‘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/ paste us.

29. Quantum Archaeology

30. Quantum Archaeology
• 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.”
• Is Quantum Archaeology feasible in-principle?

31. Nikolai Fedorov, Russian Cosmist
Common Task: To resurrect for eternal life every being, mown
down by death in time
Resurrection technology: re-uniting dissociated atoms to reconstitute
the bodies of the fathers such as they had been before their end.

32. Is the universe deterministic and
reversible?
Non-quantum fundamental physics is deterministic and reversible
(don’t forget thermodynamics and chaos though).

33. Frank Tipler’s Omega Point
Resurrection at the end of time for all the persons who ever lived.

34. Frank Tipler’s Omega Point
• Intelligent beings of a far future epoch may 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 may 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.

35. Extra-dimensional connections
Perhaps each space-time pixel is connected to every other space-time
pixel via extra-dimensional connections (e.g. micro wormholes).

36. Quantum weirdness
Nobody understands quantum mechanics - Richard Feynman
Richard Feynman’s lecture on quantum physics, now on YouTube.

37. Quantum weirdness
What the Bleep Do We Know!?

38. A quantum superposition…
Fundamental quantum reality is more complex than our intuitive
models. “No-Things” exist in a superposition of possible states.

39. … collapsed by an observer
When “we look” quantum “no-things” collapse into classical “things” –
Or do they? Who is “we”, and what is “look”?

40. Schrödinger's cat
Quantum indetermination amplified to macroscopic reality. The cat is in
a superposition of states.

41. Copenhagen Interpretation
Information is irreversibly lost by the collapse
Quantum physics (in the Copenhagen interpretation)
is non-deterministic and non-reversible!

42. Everett’s Many Worlds Interpretation
Information is conserved in the “multiverse”
The multiverse is a fully deterministic and reversible computer.
Quantum states never collapse. Cat are always in a superposition of
states… and observers too.

43. Reversible computing
is optimally energy-efficient
The irreversible NAND can be
embedded in a reversible computation
Irreversible NAND computation
Hidden output registers
Any irreversible computation may be transformed into a reversible one by embedding it into a
larger computation where no information is lost.

44. High level principles
• The universe is the fastest computer that
computes itself – we have free will even if the
universe is deterministic. This can also be
related to the problem of evil.
• Reality is optimally energy-efficient – the
universe must be embedded in a reversible
computer: the MWI’s multiverse.

45. Perhaps the cat is not really a cat
but the shadow of a “multicat”

46. Perhaps we are really “multipersons”
moving in the multiverse, projecting shadows in our reality
GiulioPrisco and Richard L. Miller, Shadows and the concept of self.

47. Quantum entanglement
If two particles have interacted in the past, they remain “entangled” even if there are brought to
very distant locations.

48. Quantum entanglement in space and
time
Entanglement implies an “instant” correlation between measurements, even if they are out of
each other’s light cone (this has been experimentally verified since 1982).

49. Magic coins
The magic coins always give correlated results! They cannot be used to send signals, because
the results are always random. But the correlations are there, and can be verified
experimentally.

50. Identical random streams in different
space-time pixels
Perhaps we can use entanglement to reproduce events remote in space-time… which is exactly
what we need for quantum archaeology.

51. We are flatlanders
We perceive only a small subset of reality. Modern physics tells us that there are “more things in
heaven and earth,” which we cannot perceive yet.

52. Out of Flatland
Whose hand is this?

53. Giulio, do you believe?
• Well…
• I guess I do. However…
• I cannot answer with just one word…
• Not in a conventional sense, but…
• I am a scientist and I subscribe to a materialist
worldview. At the same time…
This is too complex and not very honest 

54. Giulio, do you believe?
Yes, I do.