[ExI] Afterlife? – my very first post to the Extropians list, 1999

Giulio Prisco giulio at gmail.com
Fri Sep 28 14:01:05 UTC 2012


Afterlife? – my very first post to the Extropians list, 1999
http://turingchurch.com/2012/09/27/afterlife-my-very-first-post-to-the-extropians-list-1999/

Today I found by chance an important bit of personal history: my very
first post to the Extropians list, on December 6, 1999. It is
interesting to see many of the ideas which I have been thinking and
writing about in these 13 years already covered in that first post.

I used to go by gammapi at newsguy.com at that time, in the stone age
of the Internet. This is the post, with some uncorrected typos:

----

Afterlife? http://lucifer.com/exi-lists/extropians.4Q99/3294.html

I am 42 years old and wish to think that some part of me will live
forever. I have an even stronger wish to think that my loved ones will
live forever.
This deep wish to believe in an afterlife is quite common if not even
universal. It contributed to the origin of religion (ref. Max More’s
essay “Transhumanism: towards a futurist philosophy”).
I am reasonably confident that the first uploading experiments will be
performed during my lifetime. At the same time I do not think that
uploading will be an operational technology in useful time (that is,
in time to live forever or at least a very long time by having my
“self” and memories transferred somewhere else).
Cryonics may be an answer: have yourself frozen up until uploading
becomes an operational technology and that’s it. But some of my loved
ones would not accept it as it would go against their beliefs, and
even worse some are dead already. So at least from my point of view
uploading and cryonics are not an answer to the deep wish to believe
in an afterlife.
Why not considering afterlife as a goal? Imagine a future thanshuman
civilisation, spread over the galaxy, with a mastery of space-time
sufficient to reach “somehow” into the past and record “somehow”
selves and memories of human beings. Back to the future, these could
be uploaded to whatever physical structure is used those days as a
vehicle for human consciousness.
So the basic concepts of religion would become: God exists, we will
evolve into it; Heaven exists, it is where God lives, A concept of
“Purgatorium” could also be formulated in this framework as some
personalities might need re-engineering before “Heaven”. Even more
interesting, the ethical/moral values of “God” are exactly the same
that our own civilisation will develop.
I am sure these ideas have been explored by thinkers (Theilard?) and
discussed on the Extropian list. Any good references? By the way this
is my first posting to the list, I look forward to discussing
interesting things.
----

Indeed, I have discussed very interesting things on the Extropians
list (now ExI-Chat) since then. For me and many others the list has
been one of the main sources, perhaps the main source, of food for
thought and awesome sense of wonder. Even more important, I have made
a lot of great friends on the list. I hope to stay in touch with them,
well, forever.

I received some interesting replies to this first post. Anders
Sandberg (thanks Anders for having been the first to welcome me to the
list) mentioned Universal Immortalism and Frank Tipler’s Omega Point
theory, and Charlie Stross mentioned Moravec’s simulation theory.

I was interpreting transhumanism in this sense in 1999, and I remember
thinking of Extropy as a beautiful and powerful “new religion” for the
new millennium (in the sense of an alternative / replacement for
traditional faith-based religions, able to provide the same sense of
wonder and meaning). Since then I have studied the writings of Tipler,
Moravec and many others, refined my own thinking, and enjoyed the
ongoing discussion with a small but growing group of like-minded
“spiritually-oriented transhumanists.”




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