Beliefs of the Society for Universal Immortalism - Comments by Mike Perry
Reprinted from Physical Immortality, 3rd Quarter 2004

One thing to notice immediately is that the Beliefs assert the existence of the soul, meaning simply (and quite reasonably), what the real essence of a person is. The soul need not be anything mystical or supernatural, and here it isn't, but is informational in nature. In other words, we think personal identity resides in information rather than a specific material object such as the body. In the parlance of my article on resurrection which follows, we are patternists not tokenists. In practice, however, the body is needed, more particularly the brain, because the identity-critical information is captured or encoded in its structure-lose the structure, and you lose the information. For this reason we advocate cryonics as a way to preserve the soul's information starting at clinical death, in hopes that future technology will make it possible to restore the preserved remains, and thereby revive the individual who owned them. In principle the restoration of the original person requires only the information, however, and could proceed even if the original material was lost. This creates the conundrum that duplicate individuals could be created with equal claims to past experiences as well as possessions, one of the things one must deal with in UI. A single individual or soul, in other words, can fission into two or more, though it remains to be seen whether this will be a likely occurrence or have any practical significance in the future.

Another consequence of regarding the soul as information is that, in principle, duplicate bodies of entirely similar structure and functioning could exist. Here one would have to consider the bodies, not as different individuals but as instantiations of one individual, who thereby is in multiple locations at once. Strange as this may seem, it parallels the viewpoint in modern physics that a particle can be in two or more places at once, and more generally, the idea of parallel universes. Indeed the existence of parallel universes, which overall comprise a "multiverse" encompassing all of reality, is taken seriously and becomes a central tenet or working hypothesis of UI. In general, one must expect that oneself is duplicated many times over (infinitely many, actually) in the whole of reality and is never localized to one environment or circumstance. When different instantiations begin to significantly differ, however, the one individual they previously instantiated becomes multiple.

These properties may seem strange and counterintuitive, but accepting them entails no logical contradiction, as far as I have been able to determine, and at the same time offers tremendous advantages for one who is seeking immortality and significant meaning in life. Persons of the distant past could be resurrected, for instance, a topic treated at length in the resurrection article. Another issue considered there is why bother with cryonics at all, if one's eventual resurrection is assured in any case. There are what I think and argue are good and compelling reasons. For the larger picture, though, the Beliefs imply the existence of both a soul and an afterlife, albeit on rational, scientific grounds, something which should appeal to persons seeking to reconcile a seriously religious outlook with a fully empirical one.