dw2

Like it or not, humans are becoming as gods. Where will this trend lead?

How about the ability to bring back to life people who died centuries ago, and whose bodies have long since disintegrated?

That’s the concept of “Technological Resurrection” which is covered in the recent book of the same name by Dallas, Texas based researcher Jonathan A. Jones.

The book carries the subtitle “A thought experiment”. It’s a book that can, indeed, lead readers to experiment with new kinds of thoughts. If you are ready to leave your normal comfort zone behind, you may find a flurry of unexpected ideas emerging in your mind as you dip into its pages. You’re likely also to encounter considerable emotional turmoil en route.

The context

Here’s the context. Technology is putting within human reach more and more of the capabilities that were thought, in former times, to be the preserve of divine beings:

• We’re not omniscient, but Google has taken us a long way in that direction
• We’re not yet able to create life at will, but our skills with genomic engineering are proceeding apace
• Evolution need no longer proceed blindly, via Darwinian Russian roulette, but can benefit from conscious intelligent design (by humans, for humans)
• Our ability to remake nature is being extended by our ability to remake human nature.
• We can enable the blind to see, the deaf to hear, and the lame to walk
• Thanks to medical breakthroughs, we can even bring the dead back to life – that is, the cessation of heart and breath need no longer herald an early grave.

But that’s just the start. It’s plausible that, sooner or later, humanity will create artificial superintelligence with powers that are orders of magnitude greater than anything we currently possess. These enhanced powers would bring humanity even closer to the domain of the gods of bygone legends. These powers might even enable technological resurrection.

Some details

In more detail: Profound new engineering capabilities might become available that can bridge remote sections of space and time – perhaps utilising the entanglement features of quantum physics, perhaps creating and exploiting relativistic “wormholes”, or perhaps involving unimagined novel scientific principles. These bridges might allow selected “copying” of consciousness from just before the moment of death, into refined bodies constructed in the far future ready to receive such consciousness. As Jonathan Jones explores, this copying might take place in ways that circumvent the time travel paradoxes that often feature in science fiction.

That’s a lot of “mights” and “maybes”. However, when contemplating the range of ideas for what might happen to consciousness after physical death, it would be wise to include this option. Beyond our deathbed, we might awaken to find ourselves in a state akin to paradise – surrounded by resurrected family and friends. Born 1945, died 2020, resurrected 2085? Born 1895, died 1917, resurrected 2087?

The book contains a number of speculative short stories to whet readers’ appetites to continue this exploration. These stories add colour to what is already a colourful, imaginative book. The artistic license is grounded in a number of solid references to science, philosophy, psychology, and history. For example, there’s a particularly good section on Russian “cosmist” thinkers. There’s a review of how films and novels have dealt with similar ideas over the decades. And the book is brought up to date with a discussion of contemporary transhumanists, including Ray Kurzweil, Ben Goertzel, Jose Cordeiro, and Giulio Prisco.

Futurists like to ask three questions about forthcoming scenarios. Are they credible (as opposed to being mere flights of fantasy). Are they actionable, in that individual human actions could alter their probability of occurring. And are they desirable.

All three questions get an airing in the pages of the book Jonathan Jones has written. To keep matters short, for now I’ll focus on the third question.

The third question

The idea of technological resurrection could provide much-needed solace, for people whose lives otherwise seem wretched. Perhaps death will cease to be viewed as a one-way ticket to eternal oblivion. What’s more, the world might benefit mightily from a new common quest to advance human capability, safely, beyond the existential perils of modern social angst, towards being able to make technological resurrection a reality. That’s a shared purpose which would help humanity transcend our present-day pettiness. It’s a route to make humanity truly great.

However, from other points of view, the idea of technological resurrection could be viewed as an unhelpful distraction. Similar to how religion was criticised by Karl Marx as being “the opium of the people” – an illusory “pie in the sky when you die” – the vague prospect of technological resurrection could dissuade people from taking important steps to secure or improve long-term health prospects. It might prevent them from:

• Investigating and arranging cryonics support standby services
• Channelling funds and resources to those researchers who may be on the point of abolishing aging
• Encouraging the adoption of health-promoting lifestyles, economic policies, and beneficial diets and supplements
• Accelerating the roll-out of technoprogressive measures that will raise people around the world out of relative poverty and into relative prosperity.

Finally, the idea of technological resurrection may also fill some minds with dread and foreboding – if they realise that devious, horrible actions from their past, which they believed were secret, might become more widely known by a future superintelligence. If that superintelligence has the inclination to inflict a punitive (hellish) resurrection, well, things gain a different complexion.

There’s a great deal more that deserves to be said about technological resurrection. I’m already thinking of organising some public meetings on this topic. In the meantime, I urge readers to explore the book Jonathan Jones has written. That book serves up its big ideas in ways that are playful, entertaining, and provocative. But the ideas conveyed by the light-hearted text may live in your mind long after you have closed the book.

PS I’ve addressed some of these questions from a different perspective in Chapter 12, “Radical alternatives”, of my own 2016 book “The Abolition of Aging”.