X-Message-Number: 906 From: Subject: Please Post Date: Tue, 16 Jun 92 01:08:37 PDT >From Mike Perry Message-Subject-Comment on Message #880 from Steven B. Harris. I'd like to comment on some remarks of Steve Harris in a recent message about recovery of brain information, etc. The remarks: >...whenever I hear of a philosophy that requires that we discard >perfectly good laws of physics and "believe on" faster than light >travel, or backwards time travel, or getting around quantum mechanics-- >well, that's how I know I'm looking at a religion. They don't call it >the Church of Venturism for nothing; there are dark hints that before >they let you into the priesthood you have to believe in universal >technological resurrection <sorry, Mike P., I couldn't resist that>. I >can't say for certain that any religion is bunk--I can only report when >my own willing suspension of disbelief begins to sag, as it does here. There is some truth in what is implied in the above about the Venturist organization and its beliefs or attitudes, and some misunderstanding. There is an organization, now called the *Society for Venturism*, and formerly known as the *Church of Venturism*. It is a "religious" organization in the same sense that a (predominantly) secular organization such as the Unitarian-Universalist Church could be called religious. (Mainly, it is "religious" from the standpoint of certain legal requrements, but not in the sense of requiring a belief in supernatural powers or a world beyond the observable limits). In fact the SFV, as presently constititued, is much like the UUC, except for its promoting of cryonics and the technological conquest of death (and for also being very much smaller, not involved in political activism-from-the-sidelines, etc.). Like the UUC, it has the legal status to perform ceremonies such as weddings that traditionally are associated with "religious" organizations, which is one of its main reasons for existence (another is that it helps legitimize a "certificate of religious belief" to protect a cryonicist against autopsy). It does have a "priesthood" (more properly called a Ministry -- because people who officiate at weddings, etc. need some sort of accreditation), but there is no requirement of belief in a universal technological resurrection to join either the organization as a whole or this subset. (In fact some prominent members of the Venturist organization, e.g. Dave Pizer, who is also a Minister, are highly doubtful about any such belief, and even doubt that the original person can be reconstituted from any amount of "pure information," however extensive.) There *is* however, an order within the SFV called the Order of Universal Immoralism that (doesn't necessarily believe in dogmatically but) takes seriously the possibility of a technological resurrection after obliteration of the original individual. There may be some in this Order who lean toward such notions as backwards time travel, or some other way to recover the "hidden past" and bring this about, but I (who am a member of the Order, and who started it, for that matter) do not take such ideas seriously. As far as I am concerned, there is *no* prospect of recovering the hidden past, and indeed the notion of *the* hidden past is a misnomer because (again in my view, which is shared by some physicists) *loss of information makes the past ambiguous*. Any technological resurrection, as far as I am concerned, would simply amount to the creation of a copy of some person of the past (which I believe is theoretically possible, since such a copy could be specified by a finite description, i.e., a finite string of bits; thus it would be attainable, if by no other means, through pure guesswork). The creator would not necessarily *know* if some particular person had been re-created, but the createe would (in a sense) know. I don't view this sort of resurrection as on a par with cryonic resuscitation (far from it-- I would much prefer the latter, and have been signed up for cryonic suspension for nearly 15 years now, with one organization or another) but think it is a better prospect, nevertheless, than eternal oblivion. (And there is some interesting mathematics involved in trying to make such ideas more rigorous, which I am now working on.) If anyone is interested in the Venturist organization, their address is: Society for Venturism P.O. Box 458 Wrightwood, CA 92397; If you are interested in corresponding specifically about Universal Immortalism you can (besides E-mail) write to me, Mike Perry, 12327 Doherty St., Riverside, CA 92503 (or P.O. Box 8511, Riverside, Ca 92515). Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=906