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).

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