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NEW WEBSITE: turingchurch.com was originally published in Turing Church on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Editor note (Giulio Prisco): My friend Nupur Munshi has rescued from internet oblivion and improved our 2015 review of “Demystifying the Akasha: Consciousness and the Quantum Vacuum,” by Ralph Abraham and Sisir Roy. I have also added some thoughts.

Ralph Abraham and Sisir Roy participated in our online conference “India Awakens” in 2017. Roy participated in a video discussion, and Abraham also contributed a video talk titled “The Quantum Akasha” and a paper titled “Theosophy and the Arts” (see the proceedings).

The promised “main conference in Kolkata, February 2018” took place in a very reduced format: I was invited to give a talk titled “Physics and the Indian Spiritual Tradition” at the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture (RMIC), Kolkata, India. Here’s the full video of the talk and Q/A.

A transcript of my talk was published in the December 2018 issue of the Bulletin of the RMIC. Here’s a copy of the transcript.

Later in September 2018 I had the pleasure and the honor of meeting Ralph Abraham face to face in Santa Cruz, California.

See also my updated text below.

Perhaps everything that ever happens, including our thoughts and memories, is stored in permanent “Akashic records,” a cosmic memory field hidden in yet unknown aspects of reality.

In “Esoteric Buddhism” (London, Chapman and Hall, 1885), A.P. Sinnett was among the first to note that early Buddhism “held to a permanency of records in the Akâsa, and the potential capacity of man to read the same when he has evoluted to the stage of true individual enlightenment.”

The term, derived from akasha (ākāśa), a Sanskrit word for ether or space, was popularized in the West by Theosophy writers including Helena Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner. Blavatsky thought of the Akasha as “indestructible tablets of the astral light [with] the impression of every thought we think, and every act we perform.” In modern terminology, we can think of the Akasha as a cosmic memory field that stores permanent records of everything that ever happens in the universe.

In Indian / Hindu philosophy, Akasha is one of the five elements (“panchamabhutas” the five “bhutas” which are the essential block” of everything in Creation including the human body ), the other four being Earth, Water, Fire, Air. Akasha (or Aether, or Space) is more subtle than others yet physical, the imperceptible, eternal all-pervading space that encompasses the whole of existence the “ethereal fluid imagined as pervading the cosmos.”

While science is generally seen in opposition to nonduality, “this book sets out to prove the compatibility of the scientific outlook and the spiritual nonduality of India by constructing a mathematical model of cosmic consciousness,” reads the description of “Demystifying the Akasha: Consciousness and the Quantum Vacuum.”

In the book, mathematician Ralph Abraham and physicist Sisir Roy quote the polymath genius Ervin László:

“A universal information and memory field could exist in nature, associated with the fundamental element of physical reality physicists call the unified field… Honoring an ancient insight, this is the aspect or dimension of the unified field that I have called the Akashic Field.” — Ervin László

Ralph Abraham during his visit to India in 1972 in the Himalayan foothills felt that “novel information seems to come to me in dreams and meditations.” In his lecture at the RMIC (Ramkrishna Mission Institute of Culture, Golpark, Kolkata) in April 02, 2008, he said: “A key idea that is coming to me in this way is the metaphor of vibration, well known in Modern Science in the context of physical systems, sound waves radio waves quantum waves gravity waves etc the vibration metaphor is equally well known in Hindu philosophy in the literature on the Akasha.”

Later, when Abraham visited Kolkata in 2009 for the fourth time, he met Prof Sisir Roy of the Physics and Applied Math Unit (PAMU) of Indian Statistical Institute . “This book is an explanation of our agent-based Model for consciousness, coordinated with classical Indian philosophy. The RMIC (a spiritual and intellectual haven) has been very generous, giving me access to its Research Center for Indology, and thus providing the support very much needed for our book project.” Ramkrishna Mission as such is tirelessly working to uphold Swami Vivekananda's “religion, science and civilization are all unified in the fundamental level and hence one cannot be left out for the other.”

A version of “Demystifying the Akasha” is available online as a free download. Sisir Roy, the author of “Statistical Geometry and Applications to Microphysics and Cosmology” and “Understanding Space, Time and Causality: Modern Physics and Ancient Indian Traditions” (see our review) is a physicist interested in the geometry of quantum space-time near the Planck scale. Ralph Abraham is a top mathematician and maverick scientist who, besides the acclaimed textbook “Foundation of Mechanics” on advanced mathematical physics, wrote about esoteric aspects of mind and physical reality with Terence McKenna and Rupert Sheldrake.

In his preface to László’s “The Connectivity Hypothesis: Foundations of an Integral Science of Quantum, Cosmos, Life, and Consciousness,” Abraham wrote: “When a great grand unified theory will appear it will very likely conform to the prophetic vision of Ervin László.” After “The Connectivity Hypothesis,” László wrote a simplified but thoughtful account of his ideas in “Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything,” and then several related books.

While “Demystifying the Akasha” is a short and compact book, it covers a huge territory including Western and Eastern philosophies and religions, the foundations of quantum physics, and recent advances in quantum gravity theories and the digital physics of discrete space-times. Fully understanding everything requires specialized knowledge of all those fields, but the book is readable and has something for everyone. The references, a careful selection of the best related writings, fill the gaps in the book.

The authors note that they “have repurposed a mathematical model for the quantum vacuum, originally due to Requardt and Roy, as a model for consciousness,” note the authors. “Demystifying the Akasha” includes the full text of the 2001 article by Requardt and Roy titled “(Quantum) Space-Time as a Statistical Geometry of Fuzzy Lumps and the Connection with Random Metric Spaces.”

Modern quantum physics shows that the vacuum, the simplest configuration of space-time, has a complex dynamic structure. “The quantum vacuum is a seething froth sparkling with elementary particles emerging from nowhere in pairs, and after a very short time, vanishing again as they came,” write Abraham and Roy. A fundamental information field associated with the quantum vacuum is, according to László, “the deepest and most fundamental level of physical reality in the universe.”

Abraham and Roy build a model for the fundamental field based on a “pre-geometry” of dynamic cellular networks — huge graphs with internal dynamics similar to cellular automata — that exist beyond space-time, and from which the geometry of space-time is derived. The pre-geometry “contains all times” and fluctuates in an internal time-like dimension, not to be confused with ordinary time. Ordinary space and time emerge from pre-geometry.

Abraham and Roy don’t intend to propose a “final” unified theory of everything (there is no “final” in science). Rather, they intend to show a template mathematical model of reality, compatible with current scientific knowledge, which includes an Akashic information and memory field. “Our intention is to contribute a theory, more precisely a mathematical model, in which all paranormal phenomena may be understood, including quantum entanglement and the measurement problem.”

It seems very plausible that, as Abraham and Roy argue, future Akashic physics will be able to explain all sorts of “paranormal” phenomena.

In passing, the term “paranormal” is misleading because, if something happens, then it is normal. But “paranormal” is easily understandable: it includes telepathy, remote viewing, precognition, reincarnation and related phenomena that can be physically explained if the mind can extract information from the cosmic Akashic records.

Updated text (Giulio Prisco)

I did some minor edits to the 2015 review:

Akashic field theories are very much related to my own ideas on technological resurrection.

Following Fedorov and the Russian Cosmists, I have often argued that future scientists equipped with “magic” space-time technologies will be able to resurrect the dead by “copying them to the future.” For such a thing to be possible, it’s necessary that the information needed to resurrect the dead — life events, memories, thoughts, and feelings — exists somewhere out there. In other words, there must be an Akashic memory field. Conversely, if the Akashic field exists, future scientists could resurrect the dead by solving the engineering problem of how to read the Akashic records.

This very document is a conceptual example: the original version of the document disappeared from the internet when I repurposed the domain turingchurch.com. But the Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive had an “akashic” backup copy, from which we retrieved the document, which is now live here in an improved version.

Following Abraham, Roy, and László, I honor the ancient Akashic insights and use the term “Akashic physics” for the yet unknown physical theories upon which future resurrection technologies could be based.

If information is conserved in the universe as some experts believe, then the fabric of reality includes Akashic records. Scrambled beyond our current ability to unscramble, yes, but perhaps not beyond the ability of future scientists. They could unscramble Akashic records like we unscramble a hologram.

Other experts are persuaded that information is irreversibly erased from the universe all the time by way of quantum collapse and chaotic dissipation events. I tend to agree with this view, but no big deal. Viable theories of Akashic physics should show that the really important information is safely stored somehow and somewhere.

For example, in Everett’s “Many-Worlds Interpretation” of quantum physics (MWI) the collapse of the wave-function is local to the single branch of the multiverse that our senses perceive, and the apparently lost information is scattered to other branches. Therefore, information is preserved in Everett’s multiverse, which is a possible stage for Akashic physics.

In “The Fabric of Reality,” physicist David Deutsch shows that other times are just special cases of other universes. If the past is a “place” that can be observed, then other times are Akashic records. Important information on the past — including the life events, memories, thoughts, and feelings of everyone who ever lived — is out there and future scientists could search for — and find — ways to retrieve it.

The scientific literature is full of other ideas that could be useful in the quest for Akashic physics.

In the opening quote, A.P. Sinnett was (probably) thinking of spiritual rather than technological means to read the Akashic records, but Robert Pirsig’s words come to mind:

“The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of the mountain, or in the petals of a flower.” — Robert Pirsig

Cover picture from LibreShot. Yes, the fabric of physical reality is like a huge library with permanent records of everything that happens.

The quest for Akashic physics was originally published in Turing Church on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Update: VIDEO — Terasem Space Day, July 20, 2022.

See also my commentary.

Update: Don’t miss the Terasem Space Day Colloquium on July 20! Cultural, philosophical, and spiritual aspects of spaceflight and space expansion. Rick Tumlinson, Riccardo Campa, Elaine Walker, Frank White, Frank Tipler.

The July 2022 Terasem Colloquium, aka Terasem Space Day, will take place as usual on the anniversary of the first human landing on the Moon. Terasem Space Day (July 20, 2022, from 10am ET to 1pm ET, via Zoom) will cover cultural, philosophical, and spiritual aspects of spaceflight and space expansion.

You are invited!

Zoom access coordinates:

CLICK HERE to join the Zoom meeting
Meeting ID: 824 4597 9923
Passcode: 770541

Five stellar thinkers will speak: Rick Tumlinson, Riccardo Campa, Elaine Walker, Frank White, Frank Tipler.

Program

Terasem Space Day Colloquium, July 20, 2022

10am — 10:30am ET: Rick Tumlinson

A leader in the space community on a quest to transform the future — by helping humanity literally rise above its past — Rick Tumlinson helped create the New Space Revolution exemplified by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. We are about to both “Return to the Moon” and throw open the gates to the rest of the Solar System. What happens if WE do it right? Read more…

10:30am — 11am: Riccardo Campa

Riccardo Campa is Professor of Sociology at Jagiellonian University in Krakow and director of the History of Ideas Research Centre of this university. He authored academic papers on the sociological and spiritual
aspects of spaceflight, including “The sociology of lunar settlement” (in the book “The Human Factor in the Settlement of the Moon: An Interdisciplinary Approach,” published by Springer), “A Theory of the Merging Noospheres: Teilhard and Big History” and “Expanding Ecotheology to Embrace the Earth-Moon System,” published in Theology and Science. Read more…

11am — 11:30am: Elaine Walker

Elaine Walker is an electronic musician with a deep interest in visual math, physics, neuroscience, longevity, and the future of humanity on Earth and beyond. She is the author of a nonfiction physics/philosophy book, “Matter Over Mind: Cosmos, Chaos, and Curiosity” (2016). Since the mid 1990s, Elaine has regularly volunteered for the NewSpace community, promoting the idea of humans living in space. Read more…

11:30am — noon: Frank White

Frank White coined the term “Overview Effect” to describe the powerful mind-changing and life-changing impact of seeing the Earth from space, and wrote a series of books starting with the seminal and very influential “The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution” (first published in 1987). He extends James Lovelock’s concept of Gaia, the living Earth, to the whole universe. The universe itself will become a living whole and we are “actively encouraged by larger forces” to expand beyond the Earth and “help the universe become increasingly self-aware.” Read more…

noon — 1pm: Frank Tipler

In his “Omega Point” cosmology and theology, Frank Tipler formulated the concepts of God and the resurrection of the dead in entirely scientific terms. Tipler’s book “The Physics of Immortality” is a must read masterpiece, and “The Physics of Christianity” is a worthy sequel and update. To achieve the Omega Point, we and our post-human mind children must (and inevitably will) expand among the stars and become cosmic engineers. Tipler participated in the first Terasem event on July 20, 2005 (video). Read more…

Here are the videos of the last three Terasem Colloquia, featuring stellar thinkers like Howard Bloom, David Brin, Martine Rothblatt, Max More, and others: 1, 2, 3.

Cover picture from NASA

Terasem Space Day Colloquium, July 20, 2022 was originally published in Turing Church on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Update: full VIDEO recording of the webinar.

On February 9 I will participate in a webinar titled “Spirituality and the Moon,” organized by the Cultural Considerations Working Group of the Moon Village Association.

I hope to see you guys at the webinar! Admission is free, please register via Eventbrite.

The webinar will last approximately one hour.

The webinar will be moderated by Remo Rapetti and Arthur Woods, leaders of the Cultural Considerations Working Group of the Moon Village Association. The group strives “to articulate the cultural benefits of a permanent lunar presence that transcends both technological and spiritual platforms.”

Cover picture and background from NASA (adapted).

Speakers:

Giulio Prisco is a former space engineer and senior manager at European space administrations. In his book “Futurist spaceflight meditations” (2021), Prisco covers spaceflight and human expansion into space, with a special emphasis on cultural and spiritual aspects. Prisco’s thesis is that human expansion into the solar system, starting with outposts on the surface of the Moon and in cislunar space, is a cornerstone of emerging future spirituality. This new spirituality will, in turn, inform human expansion toward the stars.

Catherine Newell is a scholar of religion and science who is particularly interested in the intersections of science, technology, culture, and spirituality. In her book “Destined for the Stars: Faith, the Future, and the Final Frontier” (2019), Newell traces the cultural and spiritual roots of US space exploration programs and argues that they were mainly inspired by a technological and scientific faith that awoke a deep-seated belief in a sense of divine destiny to reach the heavens.

Jorge Mañes Rubio is an artist whose works rethink humanity’s relationship with the universe and all the beings that live in it. As Artist in Residence at the Advanced Concepts Team at the European Space Agency (ESA), Rubio designed a Moon Temple for a future lunar settlement in Shackleton Crater. The Moon Temple wouldn’t be associated with any specific religion. On the contrary, it would be open to everyone, in particular to the fast-growing category of people who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.”

Webinar on “Spirituality and the Moon,” February 9 was originally published in Turing Church on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Happy New Year. I have turned a space explorer in 2022 and this my first post of the year.

I attended the Terasem Space Day Colloquium 2021 on Tuesday, July 20, 2021, the anniversary of Apollo 11, via Zoom. The Terasem Space Day covered spaceflight, geopolitics, future scenarios, space philosophy and culture, and spiritual implications. In particular Dr. Namrata Goswami’s talk and her suggestion that “India is likely to become a space superpower alongside the US and China” has been a pleasant eye opener for obvious reasons.

At the same time I was reading Gulio Prisco’s book “Futurist Spaceflight Meditations” and later commented on Prisco’s substack newsletter: “Futurist Spaceflight Meditations could be the first (and only) book on Space that would change the way we think and live life. The mysticism and unknown territory of space brought to the comforts of the living room and at the same time a commoner like me compelled and inspired to write on it.”

The author feels “stimulating enthusiasm for spaceflight, both in the practical reality of here and now and in a spiritual, cosmic framework” is what he wants to achieve from his book.

Prisco writes:

“I think that becoming an interplanetary and then interstellar species is our cosmic destiny and existential imperative. I firmly support humanity’s expansion into space as a primary goal.

Incremental technology improvements and streamlined use of resources will open the interplanetary frontier. But for the interstellar frontier, we’ll need better space propulsion technologies.

Future spacefarers could travel among the stars in style. Really in style. Faster than light”.

Prisco explains:

“After Einstein, consensus physics has ruled out the possibility of moving through space faster than light. But space itself can move faster than light, as in the early “inflationary” phase of the expansion of the universe. Empty space is not a nothing, but a something that can be shaped by matter and energy consistently with Einstein’s general relativity. The Alcubierre warp drive [Cramer 2013] would allow “to ‘inflate’ the space in back of a starship… and to ‘deflate’ the space in front of the starship” [Forward 1995], transporting the starship like a surfer carried by a faster than light wave of space”.

Prisco continues:

“In Scramble For the Skies [Goswami 2020], Namrata Goswami and Peter Garretson provide a detailed analysis of current geopolitical aspects of spaceflight. Besides America and China, the authors discuss India and two small nations that have introduced legislation to attract commercial spaceflight operators: Luxembourg and the United Arab Emirates.

The authors are persuaded that India is likely to become a space superpower alongside the US and China. I first found the inclusion of India surprising. But India’s population is younger and growing faster than China’s. India has a vibrant high tech industry and an ambitious space program. I’m very fond of India’s cultural and spiritual traditions [Prisco 2020], and therefore I think this is good. I find the exclusion of Russia surprising, and I wouldn’t write Russia off just yet”. {chapter “Spaceflight Now”}”

My take on the these chosen lines from the book would be that, if faster than light travel is possible, then a new world of fantastic elements and unbelievable stories would be created. We might just venture into untrodden realms of space and even into our past. Traveling faster than light would mean traveling back in time and relive the moments of our lived past in some new adventurous ways!

India emerging as a space superpower would mean that India would make some important decisions going to the Moon and to Mars, and even farther on the interplanetary and interstellar frontier. Think of India’s Lunar Exploration Program, the Chandrayyan Program, the Mars Orbiter Mission, the Mangalayan program, a whopping budget of $1.8 billion, and launching 104 satellites on a single rocket.

What we need today is the harmonious blending of the occidental and the oriental, the scientific and the religious, the spiritual and the rational, said Swami Vivekananda in Chicago at the Parliament of Religions.

I think Prisco’s spaceflight meditations somewhat echo Swamiji’s approach to modern way of living. In his talk on “Physics and the Indian Spiritual Traditions” (video) at the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, Prisco argued that “the compatibility between fundamental physics and the Indian spiritual tradition is becoming more and more evident.” The ideas “envisioned among others by Nikola Tesla, who may have been inspired by Swami Vivekananda, will allow future humans to understand the divine ocean.”

In “Futurist Spaceflight Meditations,” Prisco continues:

“But the road to the stars is full of impediments and roadblocks. We will not advance as fast as we wish. Therefore we must keep our mood strenuous and our drive strong. We need an optimistic spaceflight culture oriented to the future, with energizing visions of interplanetary, interstellar, and cosmic futures. We also need a futurist space philosophy.”

In the meantime I’ll keep up on my meditations for more mystical space explorations!

Cover picture: Mars Orbiter Mission, India, artist’s concept, from Wikimedia Commons.

Exploring Space was originally published in Turing Church on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

REMINDER: subscribe to the newsletter & podcast at turingchurch.com.

The Turing Church newsletter & podcast at turingchurch.com, hosted by Substack, is emailed to all subscribers. I try to keep a frequency of one update per week, more or less: this means that there aren’t exactly seven days between updates, perhaps some more or some less, but I won’t invade your mailbox every day, and I won’t stay silent for a month.

Newsletters and some podcast episodes are snapshots of what is currently on my mind, and cover many topics. I use titles and subtitles to identify the main content. Some podcast episodes are audio-only versions of conversations and interviews posted elsewhere and reused with permission.

Most (by far) of the content is open and free, with occasional posts and podcast episodes reserved to paid subscribers. Please become a paid subscriber if you want to make a small donation. Otherwise, please sign up for a free subscription to receive almost all updates.

The turingchurch.com website is now the main Turing Church hub. I will announce new Turing Church initiatives soon, so stay tuned.

I’ll keep posting longer and stand-alone essays on this website turingchurch.net, with excerpts and links in the newsletter. Of course I’ll continue to post updates to the Turing Church Discord and Facebook groups, and Twitter.

One thing I love about Substack is the comment system, so please post comments. I reply to all comments, and I would like to move away from Facebook discussions. Nothing bad with Facebook, but there must be alternatives.

Cover picture: logo of the Turing Church podcast.

Subscribe to the newsletter & podcast at turingchurch.com was originally published in Turing Church on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Randal Koene, Max More, Ken Hayworth, Martine Rothblatt, Robert McIntyre, and other participants discussed consciousness and how to preserve consciousness beyond physical death at the Terasem Colloquium on December 10, 2021, via Zoom.

Here is the full video of the Colloquium, with all talks and Q/As:

Susan Schneider was expected to give a talk, but unfortunately she wasn’t able to participate. So in the first 15 minutes I opened the Colloquium, introduced all participants and talks, said something about Susan’s ideas, and offered some thoughts on consciousness and its preservation.

Topics: the nature of personal consciousness and identity (See the dissertation “The Diachronic Self: Identity, Continuity, Transformation” by Max), cryonics, brain preservation (aka cryonics for uploaders), next steps in cryonics and brain preservation, mind uploading, and Terasem’s cyberconsciousness approach (see “The Terasem Mind Uploading Experiment” by Martine).

I think all the consciousness preservation methods discussed at the Colloquium will work, IF enough information relevant to personal identity is captured and stored in a form that some kind of future ultra-tech can use to reconstruct the original person.

Of course the question is what and how much information is sufficient. The possibility to compress large audio and video files to a small fraction of their original size suggests that lots of information can be discarded without losing information that is worth keeping (of course, the concept of “worth keeping” is application dependent).

In a Q/A with Robert (2h 32min in the video), Martine makes an analogy with the sound track of a movie:

“Is the sound track the same as the movie? No. Is the sound track the guts of the movie? Kind of yeah!”

If I had to choose between watching a movie without sound and listening to the sound track without images, in many cases I would choose the sound track because it would give me a better understanding of the movie. Yet, the sound track amounts to a small part of the information in the full movie, and can be further compressed to a small fraction of its original size without losing what is really worth keeping.

Of course static data is not enough: as emphasized by both Randal and Max, conscious awareness is a physical process that can only happen in a suitable physical substrate. In Randal’s words, “Subjective experience is a process, not a momentary state.”

Ken remains persuaded that the mainstream neuroscience establishment has a moral obligation to embrace human brain preservation for future mind uploading, and is uniquely qualified to take the lead. I praise Ken’s scientific integrity, but I don’t think this will happen. Not a chance in hell. Far too many mainstream neuroscientists are still persuaded that, in Ken’s words, “people that believe in mind uploading are crazy, and death is good.”

I think it will be up to small fringe groups to promote and advance these technologies from the lab to the fabric of society. I think at this moment, and in the foreseeable future, the human brain banks discussed by Ken and Robert (Robert is actually running a human brain bank and his talk focused on operational issues) need to protect themselves from the establishment.

Here are the slides I used for my opening presentation:

If you are curious about my own take on consciousness and its preservation (slides 10–13), see my book “Tales of the Turing Church.”

If you are curious about Terasem, see “Terasem: My interpretation.” Note that recent organizational changes have merged the old CyBeRev project into LifeNaut.

Watch the videos of the previous two Terasem events in December 2020 and July 2021, both focused on space. The next event, scheduled for July 20, 2022, will be again focused on space. 2022 will be the 50th anniversary of the LAST time humans walked on the Moon. This is sad, but it is also a reminder that we must get started again on the road to the stars, and this time permanently and forever.

Pictures: Zoom screenshots of Martine Rothblatt and Max More, with other participants.

Terasem Colloquium, December 10, 2021: VIDEO and impressions was originally published in Turing Church on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

UPDATE: Terasem Colloquium, December 10, 2021: VIDEO and impressions.

The Terasem Colloquium on December 10, 2021, 10am to 1pm ET via Zoom, will feature a stellar lineup of speakers: Susan Schneider, Randal Koene, Max More, Ken Hayworth, Martine Rothblatt, Robert McIntyre. The topic: What is consciousness, and how to preserve it beyond physical death?

You are invited!

CLICK HERE TO ENTER THE COLLOQIUM (ZOOM).

10am — 10:30am ET: Susan Schneider

Susan Schneider is the founding director of the Center for the Future Mind at Florida Atlantic University (FAU). She writes about the nature of the self and mind, especially from the vantage point of issues in philosophy, AI, cognitive science and astrobiology. In her recent book, “Artificial You: AI and the Future of the Mind,” she discusses the philosophical implications of AI, and, in particular, the enterprise of “mind design.”

Title of the talk: Consciousness preservation: a Skeptic’s Guide

UPDATE: unfortunately Susan won’t be able to participate. So in this time slot I’ll open the Colloquium, introduce all participants and talks, and offer some thoughts on consciousness and its preservation.

10:30am — 11am ET: Randal Koene

Randal Koene is a computational neuroscientist whose professional efforts have focused on neural interfaces, neural prosthesis, and the functional reconstruction of neural tissue since at least 1994. Koene introduced the multi-disciplinary field of whole brain emulation and is lead architect of the scientific roadmap with which its technological development is promoted. He is a principal member of the University of Oxford working group that convened in 2007, which produced the first roadmap toward whole brain emulation (a term Koene proposed in 2000). In the decade since then, Koene has striven to advocate for the importance of the technology and the science, and identified accelerators for the development of neural interfaces, neural prostheses, and brain emulation.

11am — 11:30am ET: Max More

Max More is a strategic philosopher recognized for his thinking on the philosophical and cultural implications of emerging technologies. His contributions include founding the philosophy of transhumanism, authoring the transhumanist philosophy of extropy, and co-founding Extropy Institute, an organization crucial in building the transhumanist movement since 1990. He is the Ambassador and President Emeritus of Alcor Life Extension, after serving as CEO and President from 2011 to 2020.

11:30am — noon ET: Ken Hayworth

Kenneth Hayworth has a PhD in Neuroscience and specializes in developing electron microscopic imaging techniques for comprehensively mapping synaptic connectivity. Hayworth is also the president and co-founder of the Brain Preservation Foundation which advocates for the development of a medical preservation procedure that can provably preserve those ultrastructural and molecular features of the brain which modern neuroscience theories suggest encode long-term memory.

Abstract: A central tenet of neuroscience is that everything that makes you a mentally unique individual is encoded into the physical structure of your brain. Today’s aldehyde fixation techniques, compatible with indefinitely long-term storage, do a fantastic job preserving all of this structure including the key features which define neuronal function and which encode long-term memories: dendritic morphology, synaptic connectivity and ultrastructure, ion channels and receptor proteins. Neuroscientists routinely perform 3D electron microscopy and super resolution fluorescence microscopy on fixed animal brains to map these features. Ambitious projects are now being seriously considered that seek to map whole, intact mammalian brains with such techniques. Given this context, I am proposing that the neuroscience community create a new brain bank that will store intact human brains in a manner compatible with today’s best ultrastructural and molecular imaging techniques This is in anticipation of a far future in which neuroscience has both succeeded in understanding the brain at a computational level and developed the expertise to simulate a preserved brain based on such ultrastructural and molecular mappings.

noon — 12:30pm ET: Martine Rothblatt

Martine Rothblatt is a technologist responsible for several satellite communications systems and new medicines. She is also an advocate for cyber consciousness via robots and cognitive software. Her most recent book on cyber consciousness is “Virtually Human: The Promise and Peril of Digital Immortality.”

Title of the talk: The Lifenaut Approach to Creating Cyber-Consciousness.

12:30pm — 1pm ET: Robert McIntyre

Robert McIntyre is CEO of Nectome, dedicated to making neuroscientifically validated preservation available to humanity. He believes that with sufficiently good preservation it is possible to retain the memory engrams of an individual for later restoration. Robert invented Aldehyde-Stabilized Cryopreservation (ASC) a way to preserve whole brains for greater than 100+ years and which won the Brain Preservation Large Mammal Prize in 2016. Over the last year Robert has run a human brain bank focused on implementing ASC in realistic post-mortem human cases. See “The case for glutaraldehyde: structural encoding and preservation of long-term memories” or this talk Robert gave at the Long Now Foundation for more information.

Title of the talk: What I learned running a rapid-response human brain bank.

Watch the videos of the previous two Terasem events in December 2020 and July 2021, both focused on space.

Cover picture from Pxhere.

Terasem Colloquium, December 10, 2021 was originally published in Turing Church on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I have been reading an advance copy of “The Simulated Multiverse: An MIT Computer Scientist Explores Parallel Universes, The Simulation Hypothesis, Quantum Computing and the Mandela Effect” (2021), by Rizwan Virk. The book will be published on October 15.

The book follows and elaborates upon Virk’s previous book “The Simulation Hypothesis: An MIT Computer Scientist Shows Why AI, Quantum Physics and Eastern Mystics All Agree We Are In a Video Game” (2019).

I reviewed “The Simulation Hypothesis” and gave it five stars. See also my book “Tales of the Turing Church” [*]. For those unfamiliar with the simulation hypothesis, it is the idea that our reality is a simulation computed in a higher level of reality. In simpler words, the world is some kind of game universe and we are characters in the game. Virk’s book traces the history of the simulation hypothesis and outlines its implications.

Reviewing “The Simulation Hypothesis,” Ben Goertzel said that the simulation hypothesis is “mostly bullshit,” but interesting and valuable nonetheless “as a pointer toward other, deeper ideas.” The universe could be embedded in a broader universe, “thus being in some sense a ‘simulation’ of this greater containing space,” said Ben. I agree (I almost always agree with Ben), and I have sketched possible bridges between the simulation hypothesis and my view of reality [*].

Analogies with computer games help make sense of issues in fundamental physics, such as the limit speed of light, quantum entanglement, and quantum collapse. For example, it doesn’t make much sense to waste resources to compute something that nobody is looking at. Better to compute it just in time when somebody is looking. But perhaps this is more than an analogy and the universe is really some kind of computer game? In a simulated universe, time travel to the past is a rewind of the simulation to a previous state.

I think “The Simulation Hypothesis” is a great work of popular scientific speculation with spiritual implications. Virk says, and I agree, that the simulation hypothesis “bridges the gap between religion and science in ways that weren’t possible before,” and “may just be the answer that provides a single framework, a coherent model that brings together science and religion.”

This is, I believe, something that today’s world very much needs. I never miss a chance to emphasize that the simulation hypothesis, inspired by technology, is essentially equivalent to religion.

In “The Simulated Multiverse” Virk elaborates upon his previous book and introduces a very intriguing twist: it’s not just one timeline that is simulated, but many.

If you prefer to read the book without spoilers, stop at the picture below and think of “The Garden of Forking Paths” by Borges.

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If you don’t mind spoilers, keep reading.

It’s a multiverse, stupid

Far from living in a single universe, “we live in a complex, interconnected network of multiple timelines,” Virk says. He outlines alternative multiverse concepts that have been proposed by physicists, including the multiverse of inflationary cosmology and the higher-dimensional multiverse of string theory, then zeroes in on the “Many Worlds” quantum multiverse of Everett & co.

Virk explains these concepts in a simple, straightforward way that everyone can understand. Of course, the level of detail is coarse and there are some omissions and some imprecise explanations, which is the price to pay for readability. No doubt some pedantic scientists will criticize Virk, but my message to them is, first write a good science book for the masses, and then feel free to speak.

And this is a good (a very good) science book for the masses. Along the way, Virk touches related topics in physics, information theory, cellular automata, evolutionary computing, and quantum computing.

This book is full of references to popular culture, especially to science fiction books, films, and TV shows. Again, some critics will say that this is a minus, but to me it is a plus.

Philip Dick is the hero of this book. In a legendary speech given in 1977 at a science fiction convention in Metz, titled “If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others” (the text of the speech is published in the collection “The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings”), Dick painted a vivid picture of simultaneous realities that start and stop, split and recombine.

Dick suspected that agents operating beyond time intervene in history to spin-off new timelines, kill unwanted timelines, and merge timelines. If a timeline is stopped and merged into another, some persons stranded in the new timeline could retain some memories of the old one. Dick said that he was one of these persons, and some of his novels were based on memories from other timelines.

This could explain why, at times, significant numbers of people seem to remember a different history (“Mandela effect”). Perhaps they remember another timeline?

Virk translates Dick’s intuitions into the language of contemporary physics and computer science. “The universe spawns multiple timelines as multiple processes that are each exploring slightly different paths,” says Virk. The universe is constantly “creating multiple timelines, branching and merging and pruning.”

Why? Because the universe is “looking for better outcomes,” just like our evolutionary computing simulations explore networks of alternative paths to find good paths, where “good” depends on the purpose of the simulation. The good paths are retained, but the others are pruned because it doesn’t make sense to waste computing resources on useless computations.

Why doesn’t the universe just choose the best path instead of computing many paths? Because there’s no way to predict the outcome of a path without running the computation (computational irreducibility), and therefore the universe runs the computation for many paths.

In Everett’s quantum multiverse, everything that could happen does happen in one or another timeline. But in Virk’s cost-effective simulated multiverse, unwanted timelines are pruned and only good timelines are retained. So Virk ends up with the same “thin multiverse” concept that I sketch in my book [*] (see here and here).

What about you and me? We could be like the bots in World of Warcraft, non-playing characters (NPC) fully controlled by the simulation algorithms. But we could also be like the real players that run their characters in World of Warcraft or other role-playing games (RPG). If we are NPC bots we have no real free will (we only have a delusion of free will), but if we are RPG players we do have at least some free will. And perhaps “we are the Programmers, to some extent, all making choices.”

The last chapter of the book outlines spiritual and religious implications of the simulated multiverse theory. According to Virk, the metaphors used by religions should be updated, and the simulation hypothesis is the latest update. Some religious groups like the Mormon Transhumanist Association, Virk says, are already reformulating their theology in the simulation framework.

Read both of Virk’s books. The simulation metaphor is a product of our time, and will likely seem naive in the future. But this is true of all metaphors. I have argued that, beyond its naive aspects, the simulation hypothesis is a coherent and useful mental picture of reality that allows science-minded people to hope in life after death [*]. So if the simulation hypothesis floats your boat, hold it in your mind as a complement to (or a replacement of) traditional religion.

Q/A with Rizwan Virk

I contacted Virk and asked him a couple of questions:

GP: You mention the New God Argument of the Mormon Transhumanist Association, which is explicitly based on a simulation framework. Could this lead to a reformulation of Christianity? Should it? What about Islam?

RW: Well the major religions, in this case we are talking about Christianity and Islam, have always adapted and incorporated local beliefs, such as local saints across Europe or south Asia. There have also been splinter groups and new branches when they came to new lands (LDS [Mormons] and the many evangelical sects being a primary example in North America). Religions in general have always adopted new technologies as tools, ranging from the printing press to the radio to the TV to the internet, though it is often the newer sects that are more open to experimenting with technologies, then those are taken up by the mainstream part of the religion usually years later. You can see it in online prayer groups over zoom and prayer apps and even virtual reality churches, though these are relatively new.

The New God Argument [link] is one attempt by a sub-group to adapt to the awareness of technology and the simulation as a metaphor in our lives. I think for a lot of younger people, the idea of living in a simulation will make more sense than angels with wings or a bodily resurrection or the afterlife, so I think as a matter of course, they will incorporate these beliefs into their framework. Otherwise, as technologies get pervasive in our lives, other countries may see the same thing that happens in the US, where “spiritual but not religious” is actually the fastest growing category. The simulation approach (more specifically the RPG version) allows traditional religions an opportunity to “catch up” with modern believers and non-believers.

GP: What concept of life after death do you offer those who need one?

RW: Well in the RPG version of simulation, you think of our current life as only an avatar that is running through a shared multiplayer game. In this model, the “player” has always been outside the simulation. It becomes a question of unhooking, like Neo did in the Matrix, and the “afterlife” in this view is the soul ending this game. I don’t claim to give specifics of what the players look like, but I get the sense that they can play this game or other games and that there is a lot of knowledge and wisdom that we are denied while in the game, that will make sense when we “wake” up. Or we might be rewarded by playing other “games” which are much less controversial and easier than the current Earth-based game complete with its struggles and setbacks. Different views of the afterlife presented in different religions may just be another layer of simulation depending on a person’s beliefs and mental states.

[*] My book “Tales of the Turing Church: Hacking religion, enlightening science, awakening technology” is available for readers to buy on Amazon (Kindle | paperback).

Please buy my books, and/or donate to support other Turing Church projects.

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Cover picture from Wikimedia Commons, picture from Wikimedia Commons..

Book review: The Simulated Multiverse, by Rizwan Virk was originally published in Turing Church on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Editor’s note: In this article (edited) first published in the turingchurch.com website ànd the India Future Society website, Nupur Munshi writes about Durga, Goddess of victory of good over evil, and the Durga Puja celebrations as “an inspiration to work with conviction, to learn and conquer the evil and succeed.”

Mother Durga, the epitome of Shakti and spiritual power is worshipped in India as a symbol of good over evil. Goddess Durga fought and defeated the demon Mahisasura in a battle signifying that good will always prevail over evil. We seek Her blessings to guide us in our venture to uphold this idea that of “durgotinasini” implying to destroy all evil.

I quote Swami Paramananda of the Ramakrishna Order of Monks, “In this world we are so busy trying to eliminate evil.We seek to make people better, to bring greater happiness into their lives. But what will bring them greater happiness?What will give them power to counteract evil ? It is life which overcomes death” (“Reincarnation and Immortality”).

The above mentioned quote answers my good friend Robert Geraci’s interaction with the audience trying to understand what I meant by “evil” at the Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Apocalypse in Bredford, London, where he quoted me from this article. I also recommend to read Prof. Geraci’ s book “Temples of Modernity: Nationalism, Hinduism, and Transhumanism in South Indian Science.”

I almost stumbled upon Turing Church, an online working group on modern cosmic vision, spirituality, Artificial Intelligence, space technology, way back in 2014. I immediately enrolled myself as a working member.

Ours is an attempt to win over death and hope of (technologically) resurrected life by re-creating the past through a scientific process called ancestor simulation or quantum archaeology to bring back the dead to life. Death and decay by all means is evil and to fight it out in a battle is our duty.

Turing Church founder Giulio Prisco in an interview to the Humanity+ magazine said that this is not an attempt to substitute God but rather an effort to actually build one to fulfill all the promises of religion. Space time engineering and future magic will permit achieving, by scientific means, many amazing things. Eventually we will be able to resurrect all dead sentient beings by copying them to the future.

Prisco is quite enthusiastic to work in India. “Science and technology are key parts of the Turing Church vision. On the contrary (apparently), Eastern thinking emphasizes a whole range of spiritual concepts, from Yoga to reincarnation through the power of special enlightened non-ordinary states of consciousness over matter, which seem difficult to reconcile with the scientific framework of Western thinking… future science may reveal deep connections between Western and Eastern modes of thought about reality.” (Turing Church Intro for India Awakens).

I was also inspired to write a short essay to commemorate this bonding; I compiled some of Tagore’s songs and poetry in support of his Cosmist beliefs. (Turing Church and its Eastern Connection) .

Autumn (the month of “Sarat” in the Indian calendar) is the time for us to welcome Goddess Durga. Ma Durga, as we fondly call her, is the female embodiment of creation, power and peace. We are at awe to witness the Devi’s majestic fight with the Demon Mahissasura with her ten power packed arms each carrying a weapon of positive moral and spiritual energy. Hence, Durga Puja serves as an inspiration to work with conviction, to learn and conquer the evil and succeed.

I, a woman myself, bow to the Mother, that resides in all beings in the form of wisdom, power and compassion, to bless me with courage and strength as I move on with my colleagues in Turing Church in our endeavor to bring back all those who have left us… for an eternal life together.

II Yaa Devi Sarvavuteshu II

“Namastashy namastshayee namastshayee”

Cover picture: Courtesy Shivmandir Puja, Kolkata, 2019.

Good triumphs over evil was originally published in Turing Church on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.