Religion for the Cosmic Frontier

Speaker 1

Our next speaker will be Giulio Prisco. Giulio is a writer, technology expert, futurist and transhumanist. A former manager in European science and technology centers, he writes and speaks on a wide range of topics. including science, information technology, emerging technologies, virtual worlds, space exploration and future studies. He is especially interested in the convergence of science, technology, and spirituality. Please welcome Julio.

Giulio Prisco

Thank you very much, Lincoln. Well, those who listen to me already know that I don’t always repeat what’s written on the screen. So I’m going to ask you to read the screen and to listen to me at the same time. It’s kind of a double attention effort. This is very high tech. Do I move to the next one in the normal way? Okay, yes. Okay. Can you speak? Yes, I will.

Giulio Prisco

So, looking at today’s world and looking at our society, I realize that we, and by we I mean we living in the Western between brackets developed world. I belong to this group. We have lost two very important things The first is the happiness that comes from the ability to believe in traditional formulations of religion. And the simple example is how to cope with the unhappiness when someone who is close to you dies. The traditional answer to that is that, okay, you don’t have to worry, you don’t have to be so sad because you will meet again all of your loved ones in an afterlife. That’s a very good consolation. Perhaps many of us know too much science to believe in traditional formulations of afterlife life like that. We have kind of lost the ability to suspend this belief.

Giulio Prisco

Another thing that we have lost is the sense of the frontier. Now I see that most of you are Americans here, and this means that your grandfather or perhaps their grandfathers came here to America from somewhere else. And the fact that you are here today means that things worked out well, at least for their descendants. The frontier is somewhere else where you can go. if what is around you is not interesting enough and it’s not good enough for you. when your grandfathers arrived in America, maybe their children went waste, came, for example, here in Utah? So you had always something else where you could go. Unfortunately for many of us today It seems that there is nowhere else where we can go. We have lost this dream of the frontier, but

Giulio Prisco

The new frontiers are the stars. We will go to the stars. We will make wonderful things. We will see wonderful things. And one of the things will happen is that we will find ways to make the promise of religions come true.

Giulio Prisco

For next year, I suggest to make the thumbnail here on the screen a bit bigger. Okay, this is what happened. We will move to the stars. We will meet and merge with extremely advanced beings. Thank you so much. That’s great. The power of technology will enable us to meet with super advanced beings among the stars and perhaps to become super advanced being ourselves. And this is what I call the new cosmic frontier. Oh, my I want it right

Giulio Prisco

When we think of all the things that will happen in the future of our species and the future of the universe, it’s important that we can find the way to think that we ourselves will be part of that. even if these things will happen thousands of years from now, we need to think, at least I need to think, that somehow we will be part of that. will be resurrected in a future where these things will happen. And we here are all transhumanists. We think that technology will create a radically better future, but that will not necessarily happen next year. or in ten years, some of the things that we want to see will need hundreds and thousands of years to happen.

Giulio Prisco

I think in order to make peace with ourselves. We transhumanists must embrace the concept of technological resurrection, and religion should not fight science. It happens so often that religion is against science because it sees science as a threat. On the contrary, science is not a threat to religion I believe that science is the very means by which the transcendence promised by religion will be achieved. So we need new spiritual social movements to say all that, or perhaps older spiritual movements that reformulate their message in a suitable way.

Giulio Prisco

Okay, I like to use very much this image. There is a unicorn, and I like to believe in unicorn. It makes me happy. Being happy makes me a better person. So unicorns can make me and all of you better persons. There is a little problem here. And the little problem is that we have been all over the earth. Don’t forget that there is no frontier anymore. So we have been everywhere and we have never found any unicorn anywhere. This is so bad. So I must be very unhappy, but wait a sec.

Giulio Prisco

Okay. Maybe there are no unicorns here and now, but we can always go somewhere where we can find unicorns, maybe on some other stars. And if there are no unicorns, we can make unicorns ourselves. through biotechnology or virtual reality technology. The bottom line is that if unicorns are something that we want to have in the universe, we can engineer a universe with unicorns. Of course, I’m using the unicorn as a metaphor for all the kind of religious concepts that we would like to believe in. Here is to the unicorns.

Giulio Prisco

And let me come to my most important point. I’ve been talking of Technological resurrection, thousands of years in the future. Now, how is that going to happen? If you ask me the question, of course, my answers. is I don’t have the focused idea. That’s for very future scientists to find out. I can give you a couple of hints, of course, what things that we can think now that may be somewhat reasonably similar to future resurrection technologies.

Giulio Prisco

We are all familiar with mind uploading. Well, it basically means that you make a copy of your mind to a computer file. There are a couple more a conceptual end, the technological details took over, but we are going to get a full presentation about mind uploading from Randal Kuhn in the afternoon. So let’s assume the feasibility of mind uploading. You need to have access to the brain that you want to copy. which may be easy if you have the brain. It may be a bit more difficult if you don’t have the brain, for example, if the brain to copy something that doesn’t exist anymore because its owner died thousands of years ago. It seems like a difficult problem. How to solve that problem?

Giulio Prisco

We don’t know now, but there are scientists. who work in uh the remotest uh fringes of theoretical physics, who imagine that may be some kind of like uh a information link between different regions of space-time, so that from here and now you can access information of what happens somewhere else. And in other times thousands of years ago, this is the concept that many people refer to as time scanning or sometimes quantum archaeology by using some very weird quantum effects that we cannot describe now, but we know from studying quantum physics that the universe is much stranger. than what our intuitive models say. We can access information, we can access very high resolution information from the past. That’s what I hope our descendants will find out, how to make happen. And so with the information recovered from here, you can recover the information that was in this brain, you can upload it to this computer file and resurrect the owner of that brain to the present here and now.

Giulio Prisco

Now if you ask me how long do you think we will need to develop that kind of technology, my intuitive answers will be we will need hundreds or probably thousands of years. But there are some science fiction novels. For example, I do recommend that you read the The Light of Other Days, written by Stephen Baxter with the collaboration of Arthur C. Clarke. They imagine the development of time scanning and the restoration technology. in only a couple of centuries from now. And for those who haven’t read the book, I recommend to read. So I don’t give you any spoilers. I will not tell you exactly what technologies they will use. But if you read the book, you will find that it m it makes some kind of sense, and they may even be correct. I don’t really expect to see resurrection technology in two hundred years, but you never know. Maybe I’m too pessimist and I’m wrong.

Giulio Prisco

Of course, we have to mention those who had very similar ideas before. That’s basically what Nikolai Fyodorov said. He said in the language of his time. So what he said may seem a little bit naive to us today, but the concept is the same, that science will find ways to resurrect the dead. I recommend that you read this book. It came out last year. It’s a very good explanation of the philosophy known as Russian cosmism. And if you can find it, I recommend that you watch a film. which was aired by the BBC in twenty ten by George Carey. The film was called Knocking on Haven’s Door. is a history of Russian cosmism and the influence that it had on the development of science and especially space program in Russia and the former Soviet Union. I think you can find it on the Tolerant side. Oh my, I shouldn’t have said that, perhaps. Okay,

Giulio Prisco

I wish to invite you to read I won’t read aloud this beautiful word. by our friends William Bembridge in an article of two thousand nine called Religion for a Galactic Civilization. It’s actually Religion for a Galactic Civilization two point zero, because it was inspired by an article by Bambridge in nineteen eighty two. What he’s saying here is that we need the reformulations of religions that will help us to move, to start moving on our journey toward the the cosmic frontier. I hope everyone has had the time to read.

Giulio Prisco

So a few years ago, here I and a few others started organization called Order of Cosmic Engineers to implement something similar to the new spiritual movement described by Bill Bambridge in the article. And we had a lot of interesting discussion for a few years. Now, the thing didn’t go anywhere basically because there were too many of us. There were too many very motivated people who were fighting about exactly what to write in a first description of our ideas. And when you have many people together, you always have someone who wants to put uh one idea in and maybe is not so excited by some of the other ideas. So at the end you have many, many, many discussions, interesting in themselves, but in the end that nothing gets done because too many cooks spoil the soup. And this that I call prophecy by commit doesn’t really seem to work.

Giulio Prisco

I’m too pessimist, perhaps. because Ben Goerzel says that the prophecy by commit is exactly what we should do, and we should build new spiritual movements by crowdsourcing their development to as many persons as we can reach. It’s very difficult to do. The examples of new religion visions that we had seen in the last few decades normally come from one individual. And the first example that comes to mind is Martin Rothblatt’s Terraceme movement, which is a very coherent new formulation of spirituality. And you have a very coherent new religion also in Ben Goertzl’s Ecosmist Manifesto. Also, in Mike Perry’s book, it’s really too bad that Mike is not with us today. It seems he had some conflicts. in agenda.

Giulio Prisco

There’s also a new transhumanist religious book came out last year by a British gentleman called Dirk Berur. The book is called The Praxis. And I recommend to read it. It’s a very small book. You can read that in one hour, and it says the important things. Now here I have left many things out because the list is of new religious movements that have Been developed in the last couple of decades. But of course, if I wanted to extend to the past, there is a very simple example that comes to our mind and that everyone here is familiar with. which is the example of Joseph Smith, who created, and everyone correct me if I’m wrong, a new religion basically by himself. Since I was not raised in the church, I’m not very familiar with Joseph Smith, but I try to familiarize myself with his work by reading what I can find. And the impression I always had is that Joseph Smith was a real revolutionary. He said things completely different from what the people around him said. And yet yesterday Yesterday, talking to a friend, I said something like, Well, if Joseph Smith was alive today, he would be probably excommunicated from the Mormon Church. Okay, I won’t I don’t I don’t really want to go to detail on that. Let’s discuss that later and move to other things.

Giulio Prisco

Let’s move about how to bring our ideas to the market. Yes, we are a handful of enthusiasts who preach to the converted in obscure corners of the Internet. We don’t want to see any of that anymore. When I can hear When I come here next year, I want to see this auditorium full. How many people can fit? Like a couple of hundred fifty, something like that. Okay, three hundred. I want to see three hundred people sitting many, many people standing and many people standing outside waiting for the Mount to come in. Because our ideas are really beautiful, they can give you happiness. So that’s why we must offer our ideas to people, because they can make the world A happier and better place.

Giulio Prisco

Let me make the example of the Raelians. Many of you will be familiar with them. For the others, I recommend to read the excellent book. By Michel Hubeck. I recommend to read it in the original French if you can. The translation is not as good as the original. It’s a very good description of what happens in the world of Ryle and perhaps a good description of why, perhaps the very irrational aspects of Ra’elianism are exactly what makes it appealing. So basically they say similar things to what we say, but on top of that they superimpose a layer of you Foster and the extraterrestrial who created humanity and will come here sooner or later, and that’s why we must build an embassy for them. Okay, perhaps these are the things that make Raelianism appealing for tens of thousands of people, but perhaps we shouldn’t give up yet. We have not been too smart at marketing so far. but we can teach ourselves how to do better marketing.

Giulio Prisco

There is this recent new book. Ecosmic vision, human purpose and transhuman potential, ecosmic vision for our future evolution. Can those who have read the book raise hand, please? Just Mike? Okay, that makes two of us. It’s a great book. He thinks that we should engineer our successors. He’s talking of combinations of biotech. and artificial intelligence technology. So we should create in the lab a new humanity that will take our place on the ladder of cosmic evolution. It’s a great book. I really recommend that. You can see my review of the book on the website of the Institute of Ethics and Emerging Technologies. And there is a link where you can buy it.

Giulio Prisco

Creating our replacement is not betraying nature. On the contrary, it is exactly what we should do. is extreme worship of nature, is what nature has done so far and very good, and the proof we are the proof because we are here. So that is what we should continue to do. There is only one problem. The problem is that this dazed vision may seem emotionally cold. even if it’s very beautiful. So what we need is a warmer, more emotionally appealing reformulation of the same idea. And this is the reformulation that I suggest. This is my vision. I understand that is also the vision of many people here. So I think the time has come to say it loud and clear. Let’s skip.

Giulio Prisco

this beautiful sentence of Arthur C. Clarke. I think we are familiar with that. Of course, in traditional religion, we have the same concept, the MTA is a very good example. The MTA is the best example so far, but there are ideas to create a Christian Transhumanist Association as well. And I’m very much interested in that. Do I have two more minutes?

Giulio Prisco

Do you guys find anything very strange here? I think you do. Something doesn’t seem right. Why? Because cosmology is not geography. Just read what is there. it doesn’t make too much sense to mix very high level things with very low level things, because these are things that live in two different universes. And for an example, well, you can find my review of the book Physics of Christianity by Frank Tiebler. I will not go into detail. Just Google me, Frank Tipler, Physics of Christianity. He’s mixing cosmology with geography. The mountains are not the star.

Giulio Prisco

This is my cosmology. I will let you read that. Hello, Natasha. Good to see you here. And especially, I want to call your attention on the last two points. But I don’t think I have enough time, and I want to come to something more important than that, so that we will discuss this later. Besides cosmology and geography, we have some kind of zoning norms.

Giulio Prisco

Yes, I’m a smoker, so my place is here. There are things that I also eat very salty thing. There are things that we are not supposed to do. Here, you guys have a thing about coffee. That’s an advice for you, Randall. You’re looking for a coffee before. Next time you come to Salt Lake Seat, you bring your own coffee. is often the only things too. This seems uh something not too serious, but when we come to some restriction of uh what sex is allowed and with whom, and all religions have these kind of things. These are things that can make the life of many people less happy than it should be.

Giulio Prisco

In conclusion, I think that if we want to really persuade people that our cosmic vision of a transcendent future for humanity enabled by science is beautiful, and they should listen to us. I think we should learn how to formulate our ideas by focusing on the technology part. The stars are beautiful. are above us and are much more beautiful and much more interesting than the things that lie under the stars, which is today’s world. And I don’t think I have any time left, so I wish to thank you very much. No times for questions, I guess.

Speaker 3

So thank you very much, Biggie.