Atheistic theories of immortality

[openspace4life]

According to Mr. Wright, my tenth-grade social studies teacher, religion provides people with answers to three important questions: Where did we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going? The last question is particularly important, since the answers given are usually used to counteract the fear of death. Belief in an afterlife or resurrection is probably most of what makes religion so attractive to so many people. So if the science-based Church of Gaia/Earthseed is ever going to get anywhere, it will probably need to include one or more of these concepts:

1. Species immortality.
   
   Source: Octavia Butler, E. O. Wilson, and others.
   
   How it works: Individuals may die, but the preservation of our species is worth fighting for. Lauren Olamina, the main character of Butler's Earthseed books, makes a case for this in Parable of the Sower by describing interstellar colonization as a way of going to a "heaven [that] really exists, and you don't have to die to reach it." At the same time, of course, it puts humanity's eggs in more than one basket and thereby protects us from extinction. In The Future of Life, Wilson gives us the Gaia side of the coin, stating that "a sense of genetic unity, kinship, and deep history . . . are survival mechanisms for ourselves and our species. To conserve biological diversity is an investment in immortality."
   
   Pros: Fits in well with the Church's tenets and requires much less wishful thinking than the other options.
   
   Cons: Most people won't see this as true immortality. Also, interstellar travel is really hard to do, and most non-science fiction fans won't care much for the concept no matter how it's pitched.



2. Living on in memory.
   
   Source: The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier.
   
   How it works: A sociologist I once met named Sal Restivo claims that consciousness is a property of social networks rather than single brains. If this is true, then death of a single person doesn't destroy a consciousness; perhaps whatever part of the social consciousness belonged to that person is redistributed across the minds of those who remember them.
   
   Pros: Like the Gaia concept, this theory is based on the idea of a living web that surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds humanity and the biosphere together.
   
   Cons: It probably doesn't work. Restivo himself doesn't believe it, because at death a person's social links to others are cut (or as Mal Reynolds puts it in an episode of Firefly, "Everyone dies alone.") Even if you did live on in people's memories, it wouldn't be much of a life, considering how fragmentary and easily distorted such memories usually are. For best results, you'd have to become famous and write a very detailed autobiography before you die.



3. Biological immortaility.
   
   Source: Many. Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy is one good source.
   
   How it works: There is no fundamental reason why an organism can't keep fighting off entropy indefinitely, as long as there's an energy source available. The causes of aging may soon be understood; one likely candidate, the gradual loss of repeating telomere segments at the ends of chromosomes, is already under heavy investigation.
   
   Pros: This is the simplest solution on my list, requiring no wacky theories or hyper-advanced technologies.
   
   Cons: At first, anti-aging treatments will probably be hideously expensive. Then there's the overpopulation problem: people may well keep on having babies long after the need for reproduction to continue the species has evaporated.



4. Uploading.
   
   Source: Arthur C. Clarke in 2001, Charles Stross in Accelerando, Dennis Danvers in The Circuit of Heaven, and others.
   
   How it works: At some point in the future, technology may allow us to transfer our minds into digital form. We could inhabit robots or, better yet, move out of reality entirely and into a computer-generated world of our own design.
   
   Pros: A virtual reality really is heaven, in the sense that your environment can become whatever you want it to be. Plus we can become a lot smarter once we escape the limitations of our brains.
   
   Cons: Again, the cost may be an obstacle at first. The biggest objection, though, is that the nature of consciousness isn't really known, so it might be lost even if the transition process is very gradual (for example, nanobots replacing each neuron of your brain with an electronic component that does the same thing, one by one). Then there are computer viruses, power failures, and according to Stross, the danger of self-directing digital corporations that may outcompete us economically and then eat our minds to steal the intellectual property they contain.



5. Quantum immortality.
   
   Source: Based on the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Fictional depictions include Greg Egan's novel Permutation City.
   
   How it works: Put Heisenberg in the box instead of his cat. The atomic pile has a 50-50 chance of triggering the device that will kill him, but from his point of view that outcome is impossible, because he can't observe it. Put another way, there are two universes splitting off from the decision point, and since Heisenberg can't exist as a quantum observer in the universe where he's dead, he has to follow the branch in which he survives. Since quantum mechanics underlies the whole universe, this can be generalized to any situation where a quantum observer might die.
   
   Pros: Everyone lives forever, even if they aren't rich or famous.
   
   Cons: After 120 years old or so, you'll have to be kept alive by a string of increasingly unlikely coincidences, and there's nothing to prevent other people from dying in the universe you're observing, so things will likely get both lonely and really bizarre fairly quickly.



6. Anastasis #1: time travel.
   
   Source: Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter in The Light of Other Days, and others.
   
   How it works: In the future, when immortality is cheap, time travel is invented and humanity decides to go back and rescue every human who ever lived, bringing them into the future from the moment just before they died (or sometimes a little earlier).
   
   Pros: You get to see the future.
   
   Cons: There are good reasons to think that time travel of this sort will turn out to be impossible. Plus, this would require silliness like instant replacement of your grandma with a realistic dummy while you're watching her on her deathbed.



7. Anastasis #2: resurrection.
   
   Source: Charles Stross in Accelerando, Wil McCarthy in To Crush the Moon, and others.
   
   How it works: People are recreated using brain scans or sometimes just anecdotes from people who knew them, autobiographies, etc.
   
   Pros: Um, resurrection is cool?
   
   Cons: Lack of continuity. Even if you did get your brain scanned, there's no guarantee that the consciousness that inhabits the new body will be the same one that inhabited the old one. If you didn't get your brain scanned, the recreated version definitely won't really be you.



8. Anastasis #3: the universal computer.
   
   Source: Charles Stross in Accelerando.
   
   How it works: According to a character named Pamela, the universe may be only "a simulation in some ancient history engine's panopticon, rerunning the sum of all possible origins of sentience, a billion trillion megayears down the line. Death will be like waking up as something bigger, that's all."
   
   Pros: If our universe is a simulation, that means it has some kind of purpose. Take that, nihilists!
   
   Cons: It's a really weird concept, and who knows what Pamela means by "something bigger?" Then again, it's not as if other religions are particularly clear about that either...

Comments

Life lives on!!

[(Anonymous)]

The thing that is super-cool about me is the same thing that is super-cool about you. It's the emergent property called "life."

If I am self-aware, I can observe my body as it does things ... so I am not my body. If I am more self-aware, I can observe my mind as it thinks thoughts ... so I am not my mind. If I am emotionally aware, I can observe my feelings as I have them ... so I am not my feelings. If you trace it all the way back as far as you can, I am that which observes (i.e., life). The precious part of me is life itself!

Once I make a visceral connection that says "the life in you is the same as the life in me", the survival of my physical body and its mind no longer have quite the same urgency that they once possessed. This has been my personal experience with fear of death. I no longer fear the death of the Brandon-body so much because I am not the Brandon-body. I am life, and life will almost certainly continue on past the death of the Brandon-body.

I don't really see this concept captured in your list of possibilities.

Perhaps we could take this list into a workspace in the SolSeed group where we could further refine it together? Warm Regards,
Brandon

Re: Life lives on!!

[scifiben.livejournal.com]

I would call your theory an expanded and more metaphysical version of species immortality. My personal experience of consciousness leads me to believe that I am my mind, and to some extent my body as well. But we can agree to disagree...no need to establish a firm definition of "mind," since no prior religion has really defined "soul" as far as I'm aware!

Ben Sibelman