Turing Church online workshop

On Sunday, December 11, we explored the convergence of religion with highly imaginative future science and technologies in the Turing Church online workshop 2 in teleXLR8, a 3D interactive video conferencing space.

Videos of all talks are now available online.

The Turing Church, a working group on science and religion, holds an annual open workshop on the intersection of science and spirituality in the light of the Singularity.

After the opening presentation of organizer Giulio Prisco, Institute of Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET) bioethicist James Hughes outlined some popular (and conflicting) opinions on the nature of consciousness and personal identity, discussed in his recent article Contradictions of the Enlightenment: Liberal Individualism versus the Erosion of Personal Identity and Brent Allsop discussed how to “eff the ineffable” nature of consciousness, presenting the Consciousness Survey Project  at his open survey system Canonizer.com. 

According to Martine Rothblatt, who presented Terasem as a “Transreligion” open to everyone, including atheists, we will colonize the universe, and we will do so much sooner if new religions offer us a way to believe that “it is our manifest destiny to do so.”

Remi Sussan discussed future religions and mythologies as tools to stimulate creativity, and suggested that games can be an important part of future religions. Dan Massey outlined a grand vision of love as a powerful force in an intelligent universe, and concluded with practical advice on how to live with compassion on our little planet. Andrew Warner gave a talk on the “cybernetic sublime,” a neologism he coined to describe the phenomenon of religious transhumanism from the perspective of religious studies.

Tulane University physicist and cosmologist Frank Tipler, author of The Physics of Immortality and The Physics of Christianity, believes we will expand into the universe and use sophisticated space-time engineering technologies to steer it toward an Omega Point. There, sentient life will have an infinite subjective “experiential” time ahead and use its ever expanding knowledge and computational resources to resurrect the dead of the past.

Resurrection, via future “quantum archaeology” technologies, was also covered by Lincoln Cannon, while Alcor’s Mike Perry discussed resurrection within the framework of known science.

In a pre-recorded video talk, Terasem’s Fred and Linda Chamberlain, the founders of Alcor, outlined the Bainbridge-Rothblatt strategy of preservation of personality via mindfiles. Ben Goertzel in Hong Kong also contributed a pre-recorded video talk on the connection between science and spirituality, today and in the future.