h+ Magazine

Has anyone bothered to find out who really wants to be brought back to life in this world as it is now?…assuming it were possible anyways.

Who wants to be brought back to life in a world controlled by the likes of the Tony Blairs and his pals, where Armageddon is just one business deal more happened to have gone wrong, while filling the plush pockets of the elitists.

And, even if this exercise resulted in producing some sort of human life form, would these people even have souls?

Has anyone though that maybe the dead might wish to remain dead? Bringing back dead babies is playing with fire as one of those could grow up and become another Hitler. On the other side it could turn out to be someone good but would it be worth the risk? And also how can you ask the Germany of today as a country to pay money for the resurrection of their crimes in the past? Same with America and their past. I for one know that I wasn’t around when all that happened and believe me, the country is already in debt so I can guarantee that money would be coming out of taxes which means our pockets, the pockets of people who weren’t even born or had any control over those circumstances. I’m usually really open-minded to transhumanist issues and I try and read every new article on here, but I think this is just ignorant.

I’ve always thought that one day we would conquer death for the living, it seems extremely possible and not even in the very distant future at that. I suppose if we could conquer time as well(not sure if that’s possible or not) we could go back and save everyone in history from dying by giving them the same traits as we ourselves have. Won’t happen in my lifetime I’m guessing, but it’s one way for atheist to hope for eternity. Why not make a religion out of it? Given enough time everything that’s possible will happen. If we can conquer time, it’s inevitable that we will..or if we kill ourselves some other race will come along and do it.

I know I know people say “If time travel is possible then where are all the time travelers from the future?” Well it’s obvious that it doesn’t work like that..maybe we have to discover it first..or something..? So lets leave it to the future people and current scientist to work out. I think when the uneducated, like myself, debate on message boards it doesn’t even quite qualify as officially hypothetical, much less theory or fact..its just fun!

To me, the idea of immortality is more terrifying than death. Would you continue to age until your body decomposed and you lay there as conscious dust ? Or if your body maintains whatever age you choose and you live on and on and on and on, and everyone you know and loves dies, and you repeat this loss again and again, wouldn’t one go insane ?
Also I wonder – Does life get it’s meaning from death ?
And as to resurrecting the dead, in movies and folklore it always turns out to be a really bad idea.

when she’s told that DNA is destiny.

If you were to attain immortality and live “forever”, tell me, what will happen to you when the sun goes super-nova and the earth is destroyed? Where will you enjoy your immortality? You know “forever” is a rather long time and things happen.

Sounds alot like Tipler’s Omega Point Theory.

Resurrecting the dead by “copying them to the future” does not require time travel but time scanning: extracting very high resolution information from the past. Time scanning does not create logical paradoxes (think of it as archeology on steroids). Actually I suspect even time travel does not really create logical paradoxes when viewed from an appropriate perspective.

I propose another category, famous dead people from pop culture:

Heath Ledger — he could be in some really cool movies

Dorothy Stratten — She was real hot and it’s too bad her boyfriend went psycho and killed her.

My friend Rob — he died too young

Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix — we could see their farewell tours

Bruce Lee — he’d be making really cool movies with Jackie Chan, 2 old kung fu guys having crazy adventures.

Michael Jackson and Anna Nicole Smith? — better let them rest in peace

Thanks for a great article about Fydorov, and also a very good disscussion. H+ is becoming one of my favorite reads.

You’re not the same person across the span of your life: In terms of physique, intelligence, personality, and health, you are constantly changing and in fact represent several different people across your lifespan. This fact comes into play when contemplating quantum resurrection. Should Ray Kurzweil bring back his father exactly as he was when he was old and suffering at the end of his life? Or should he bring back his healthy, 30-year old father? Or should both be brought back? Or more than two?

Why do you use phrases like “gets out of Limbo”, “wrench free from death”, and “haul them back”? You make it seem (over and over again) like this procedure would be bringing people back from an afterlife.

What a rubbish are you writing about Turing? When he commited suicide, he was 41, not 21. Maybe, you have confused him with Evariste Galois?

I guess it mostly depends on who pays.
If any individual can pay, then they will probably bring back parents and ancestors (including dead children, etc).
If it’s the state, it will probably have to be some egalitarian method, e.g. moving backwards in time: people born (or dead) on a given year, then the previous, etc. although there will probably be exceptions for historical, national characters.
If it’s charities, they will revive those their institutions are created to help, so it may vary from charity to charity: some will help dead babies, some Holocaust victims, some will focus on famous characters, etc.
If it’s corporations, they will be looking for talents that will have a good roi: great scientists, creative people.

I was talking about Alan Turing and it is true, he was 41 when he died.
A typo slipped in and I’m sorry about that. Thanks for bringing it to
our attention

Hi Ievgen, I find your phrase “what a rubbish are you” to be a bit grammatically awkward.
I’d like to help you out, so you can get it right the next time you comment on my articles..
Proper English would be “what a heap of rubbish” or “what a load of rubbish” or “what a pile of rubbish”
or maybe just a simple “you are rubbish” or “your article is rubbish” etc. There are a lot of possibilities
but “what a rubbish are you” is not generally considered one of them. Thanks again.

Typo corrected.  After the singularity, there will be no more typos and the doors of perception will be cleansed and people will see things as they really are…  nicely spelled and with correct language…

You are welcome, and sorry for my sharp words if they were so.
And by the way, since I have begun… the Russian philisopher’s surname is spelled in English as Fyodorov (the closest to the proper pronunciation), sometimes Fedorov (closer to the original Russian spelling), but never FedErov.
(Yes, I’m a nudnik, I know )

If we live in a deterministic universe, where every “event” proceeds in a predictable way from every previous event, I could see this as being possible. We could eventually create a computer powerful enough to be able to “run the clock backwards” and “rescue” every human mind that ever existed.

However, to the best of our knowledge at present, we live in a universe that is completely random at the smallest scales, order emerging only as we emerge from the quantum realm into the macroscale. This may simply be a result of our incomplete knowledge, but if the universe allows randomness, then restoring an “exact past” is impossible. That randomness would cause greater and greater error as we attempted to “work backwards”, limiting the timeframes we could accurately restore.

This is not to say that such attempts won’t be made, and Ray may even succeed in getting his Dad 2.0, or a close enough limited simulacrum to satisfy him, but I am far less certain we would be able to “resurrect” everyone who ever lived in a “Riverworld” fashion. I think the best we will be able to do is “limited simulacrums” who may be programmed with the entirety of of a past person’s life to the best of our knowledge, but as there are large blank areas in our knowledge of the lives of the overwhelming majority of humanity, such “Sims” would be extremely limited, probably only able to be made of a very few extremely famous and well documented historical figures.

In part, I hope I’m wrong, because I believe every human deserves a life free from want, and freedom to grow and learn to their maximum potential, and if we can restore the entire human race right back to the first “conscious” individuals, then perhaps the pain and suffering and misery they endured to pull humanity out of the muck will be rewarded properly by allowing them to enjoy the fruits of all their hard work.

But on the other hand, a fully deterministic universe would also be one in which “free will” is merely an illusion, and in which we would be able to predict the exact future as well, removing any and every vestige of “meaning” from our lives. If we could precisely determine everything about the future and the past, know that our every action and thought was precisely predictable to infinity, then we are all simply machines, running out a program without any ability to affect the outcomes. And if that is the truth, why would we want to sentence all our ancestors, after all their struggle for free will and self determination, to the knowledge that they are simply gears in the universal machine, trapped to forever perform a pre-written play who’s outcome can never be changed?

So, I suppose the best “compromise” would be a universe in which “past” can be determined to a high rate of precision for a span of sufficient time to encompass the “human race” and thus enable “recovery”, but in which sufficient randomness occurs to prevent the future from being as accurately predicted, i.e. one in which broad trends can be identified with sufficient accuracy to enable the ability for the collective to navigate away from “undesirable” outcomes, but without sufficient “fine graininess” to predict individual behavior beyond long term statistical trends.

This is an important point, we do not want to entertain magical thinking, do we?

I certainly don’t believe in a religious afterlife — and I don’t think either the phrase “haul them back” or “wrench free from death” indicates that I am referring to one. Perhaps I should not have used the word “Limbo” — since there is indeed a Christian Limbo – a “magical” place that I was not referring to. “Limbo” today often indicates a transitional place, a waiting place, and that’s how I intended it to be understood. BUT – the author of the Resuscitative Resurrection notion – Nicolai Fedorov – was indeed a Russian Orthodox Christian, and he didn’t see anything incompatible between resurrecting the dead and religion, in fact, he regarded it as his spiritual duty to promote resuscitiation. Thanks for your comments

I doubt it’s possible to recreate the deceased in any meaningful way. Simply resurrecting old genes and attempting to indoctrinate the resulting new humans into behaving or thinking like we believe their clone/predecessor would have is unlikely to be fruitful, either to the clone or to the person hoping to gain by the resurrection. A personality is a lot more than mementos and the perspectives of a third party; it is genetics plus a lifetime of experiences often too distant or trivial for even the person himself to remember, let alone for a new human being to accurately emulated based on third party sources (if that new human really wanted to in the first place – questionable). If we’re to admit that it’s not the *same* person, then why bother with the genes? Just build a construct – organic or otherwise – and cause it to behave in a way the ressurectionist feels is appropriate. If that happens to be like his perception of a dead relative or celebrity, more power to him.

Supposing for a moment that it *were* possible though, I imagine the priority will be based entirely on who wants it bad enough to pay for it. It certainly will take a substantial amount of effort, at least in the near term, to bring back a single person using Kurzweil’s suggested method; someone will first have to gather and organize all the evidence of prior existence. Whomever is most willing and able to do that, or most willing and able to pay someone else to do so for him, is likely to be first in line. Given that it’s simply a piece of technology, demand will naturally lead to the rapid growth of the industry and the technicians necessary to provide services. If there’s no time limit on resurrection, there’s no real reason to rush either. If I’m immortal, and it takes 4 years to train a resurrection technician and supply him with necessary equipment, and all the current ones are booked up or asking higher rates than I’m willing to pay to bring back dear old dad, logically I simply wait 4 years, or 8 years, or however many it takes to provide a glut of technicians and drive the cost down. It’s not like the clock is ticking.

We could create new humans that looked like them – that had similar genetic predispositions to cancer, etc – but would not be them because we can’t know all the environmental (some pre-birth) and psychological factors that played a part in who they became by the time they died.

A new man grown in a modern environment would not be the same man as one that lived though the Civil War, WWI & WWII even if he had identical DNA.

And if we could? People tend to have an unrealistic and overly romanticized vision of history.

A modern day Joan of Arc would be unlikely to have the same effectiveness as she had in her own day. Could you imagine the population of France dying to support somebody who claimed a god was talking to them today?

What do you do with somebody like Robert E. Lee who while recognized as smart and talented even by his enemies was clearly on the wrong side?

Many past personalities from history were monsters. Caesar set representative government & pure science back 2,000 years. He also took the Romans to war under false pretenses. The tribes in Gaul were not murdering Roman women & children. Working men & women didn’t care about the gods of Egypt. Gaul had gold. Egypt had grain. Rome was broke and hungry due to massive government mismanagement, corruption and cronyism. Far from being the pseudo-Christ popular history makes him out to be, Caesar was the Dick Cheney of his day and should be treated as such.

Ghangis Khan?

What if somebody was a good person but had a religious or philosopical objection to being reincarnated?

Maybe he meant to say  What a rubbish R.U.

R.U.

Thank you Hank for this linguistic support. As you surmised, I’m not a native speaker, so any assistance is received with gratitude. And sorry again for being rude, if I was.

We all have lost somebody, and we all would like if we could bring them back. But, to me it seems like a religion. This is more like a wishful thinking.

It seems that we could achieve better results if we focus on developing a time machine, no matter how impossible it looks like. I think that it would be easier to twist time and space than to bring dead people to life or to create people that would be exact copies of passed ones, or whatever.

Don’t let this become a religion.

This article is completely Idiotic and CLEARLY borders the line of self-defeating extreme Liberalism.

Hmmm… This obviously whimsical speculative enjoyable article really brings out the prissy fascist twat (in the British sense of the word) in some self-certain hardnosed realist types. Death to the imagination! All power to the reductive twats!!

this is Hank, the author, and your definition of the article as “self-defeating extreme Liberalism” is mysterious to me – I don’t see how you arrived at that categorization. Your capitalization of CLEARLY indicates a personal devotion to clarity, so I’m hoping that you can provide more info to explain your POV. Thanks. Personally, I categorize the notion of Resuscitative Resurrection as “Optimistic TechoUtopian.”

I wouldn’t say that it is idiotic. It’s OK to bring a different point of view on things. Well, you concluded that it is idiotic after this point of view was submited and it’s OK too. (-:

No matter how worthless it seems, I think it is good to discuss it. I don’t think that this article has much to do with reality, but discussing it can lead us to a clearer understanding of ourselves and our capabilities. I don’t agree with what’s been said in the article, but I give a thumb up to the author for giving us something to think of, to agree or disagree.

But like I said it in the previous comment, don’t make it a religion. That would be idiotic (-:

For starters: Socrates, Plato, Copernicus, Isaac Newton, Leonardo DaVinci and Albert Einstein.

Fair enough, but those phrases (and, to me, the whole article) made it seem like we would actually be bringing people back, when in fact we would just be creating a new representation of them.

When a person’s neurons stop functioning that’s it for that person’s consciousness (as far as we know at least, who knows, perhaps when we can finally completely digitally replicate a person’s brain we will actually find out that we are not creating two separate but identical consciousnesses, but merely expanding one consciousness that can control and communicate with both of its forms). That’s all I’m really trying to say.

However, to the best of our knowledge at present, we live in a universe that is completely random at the smallest scales, order emerging only as we emerge from the quantum realm into the macroscale. This may simply be a result of our incomplete knowledge, but if the universe allows randomness, then restoring an “exact past” is impossible. That randomness would cause greater and greater error as we attempted to “work backwards”, limiting the timeframes we could accurately restore.

You assume that a deterministic universe is somehow easier to simulate. It doesn’t have to be, once you consider chaos effects. In order to simulate any other state of the Universe in time, we must be able to measure the state of any particle in it with INFINITE precision at any one moment, which is by definition impossible to achieve. Otherwise the error would increase exponentially the farther in time we wished to simulate.

The Universe is a quantum computer, and therefore can be simulated by a quantum computer (provided the initial conditions are known). This has been proven theoretically, by David Deutsch, by expanding Turing’s proof of universal computation to quantum computers. The only catch is that, in order to recreate the past as it happened in our Universe, we must simulate the entire Multiverse that quantum theory describes. Of course, I’m assuming that the Many-Worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is the the correct one, and it does indeed appear to be (a more in-depth discussion on why it is so in David Deutsch’s book “The Fabric of Reality”). I think that we may need a physical computer that can perform an infinite number of steps in order to be able to bring back the people we lost, and while as crazy as this sounds it doesn’t contradict any physical law, I think it will take a very long time (yes, even with the exponential explosion of intelligence provided by a singularity) to reach such kinds of capabilities of harnessing the computing power of the entire Universe (or maybe even Multiverse).

Ray’s idea of recreating the people we love from memories is something I don’t like, almost disturbing to a degree. Sure, we may create AIs that can totally fool us, but they will never be the original persons, just some machines that keep us company. The real goal should be to simulate the originals back into existence, along with the entire universe/multiverse.

Time travel to the past (our past) is pretty much impossible due to paradoxes, and the laws of physics seem set up in such a way so as to preserve causality and conserve information. We will most probably never find a way to time travel into the past. Our best bet is to simulate the universe.

Of course you realize that it is thus entirely possible that we are that “simulated universe’ with each “human consciousness” extracted at the moment of death to “reality/Heaven” where it lives forever in the ultimate utopia of technological knowledge?

*giggle* Just call me Val, the Demon-goddess of the Church of the Cyber-Succubus. All Glory to the DoMatrix! Believe in the DoMatrix and she will deliver you from your SIMS!

Now seriously, thank you, that was a interesting response, I will have to investigate some of those references.