 |
|
HOME |
ABOUT UNIVERSAL IMMORTALISM Universal immortalism is the belief that human beings should endeavor to bring back to life all who have ever lived using material, technological methods. Universal immortalism is distinguished from immortalism, or pursuing the goal of personal physical immortality (by such means as life extension or cryonics), because universal immortalism is universal in scope. However, universal immortalism and personal immortalism are typically compatible, congruent notions. Universal immortalism is also distinguished from beliefs about an inevitable resurrection authored by a divine or supernatural agent because universal immortalism advocates a human-engineered resurrection using material, technological methods.
The founder of Zoroastrianism, Zarathustra, taught that all the dead, no matter how their bodies were destroyed, would one day be physically, bodily resurrected, with their memories and personal identities intact.[1]
This idea of resurrection later found its way into Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Zarathustra held that even the most evil people would eventually be reconciled to the rest of humanity, a form of universalism or universal reconciliation also maintained by the Christian theologian, Origen.[2]
The Epicurean philosopher Lucretius speculated that the atoms of a person who had died and disintegrated could, over infinite time and random recombination, eventually return to the same form, thus in some sense resurrecting the person.[3]
The philosopher Nietzsche reasoned similarly, arguing that over infinite time, there must be an "Eternal Recurrence" in which every person and life must be recapitulated exactly.[4]
Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov (also spelled Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov)[5] was the first person to propose universal immortalism. He believed that human beings had a special, cosmic responsibility to make blind nature accord with human reason and love. He proposed that the "Common Task" of bringing ancestors back to life would unite common people and scientists throughout the world. The scientific methods he proposed investigating were calculating particle positions backwards in time, with the assistance of artificial intelligence.
Dandridge M. Cole[6] saw universal immortalist resurrection as a natural complement to cryonics. "The men of the distant future may not be content with the revival of the frozen dead, for there were still be those loved ones lost irrevocably in body destroying accidents." Cole suggested, as possible future methods of resurrection, human cloning, artificial ("deduced") memories, and reverse-determinism, avoiding the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
Other suggested methods for universal immortalism include time travel, exploiting other time or space dimensions, and copying from near identical parallel universes.
Max Tegmark has noted that infinite numbers of exact duplicates of every person are a necessary consequence of ordinary cosmological assumptions.[7]
The most prominent recent proponent of universal immortalism is Frank J. Tipler.[8] Building on the Omega Point Theory of Teilhard de Chardin, he suggested that resources in a contracting universe might provide a future intelligent "Omega Point" with enough resources to compute simulations of all past human beings and restore them to life in a simulated Paradise.
David Deutsch[9] criticized some of the Christian assumptions of Tipler's theory, but found the overall idea sound. Tipler later revised his theory to account for accelerating cosmic expansion rather than contraction[10].
R. Michael Perry[11] brought together philosophical arguments for the nonlocality of personal identity and showed how short-term methods of life extension such as cryonics could be compatible with long-term methods such as universal immortalist resurrection.
Giulio Prisco[12] wrote about the importance of the high level concept of universal immortalism regardless of the means that might be used to implement it someday. He also related universal immortalism to general trends in the importance of science in contemporary society, especially transhumanism.
Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter, in the very warm and moving sciencefiction novel, The Light of Other Days, portray a future universal immortalist resurrection using tunneled wormholes in spacetime to capture and transfer information content.[13]
[1] Greenlees, D. The Gospel of Zarathustra. Wheaton, Ill: Theosophical Publishing House, 1979. [2] Trigg, Joseph W. Origen: The Bible and Philosophy in the 3rd Century Church. Atlanta, J. Knox, 1983. [3] Lucretius. On The Nature of the Universe (De Rerum Natura). Trans. R. E. Latham. 1951. New York: Penguin, 1979. [4] Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Penguin Books, 1969. [5] Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov. What Was Man Created For? The Philosophy of the Common Task. Selected Works translated from the Russian and abdridged by Elisabeth Koutaissoff and Marilyn Minto. N.p.: Honeyglen Publishing/L'Age d'Homme, 1990. [6] Dandridge M. Cole. Beyond Tomorrow: The Next 50 Years in Space. Amherst Press, Wisconsin, 1965. Chapter 12: "The Mechanism of Resurrection" (pp. 131-135). [7] Max Tegmark. "Parallel Universes." In Science and Ultimate Reality: Quantum Theory, Cosmology, and Complexity. John D. Barrow, Paul C. W. Davies, and Charles L. Harper, eds. Cambridge University Press. 2004. [8] Frank J. Tipler, The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God, and the Resurrection of the Dead. New York: Doubleday, 1994. [9] David Deutsch. The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes - and Its Implications. New York: Penguin, 1997. [10] http://www.math.tulane.edu/~tipler/. [11] R. Michael Perry, Forever for All: Moral Philosophy, Cryonics, and the Scientific Prospects for Immortality. Universal Publishers, 2000. [12] Giulio Prisco, "Engineering Transcendence." http://futuretag.net/index.php/Engineering_Transcendence, http://transumanar.com/index.php/site/more/engineering_transcendence/ [13] Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter, The Light of Other Days. Voyager, 2000. |
