>And there were those that believed the Common Task was to resurrect the dead in computer simulations, reconstructed from the histories; others who believed spacetime was a crystal in four dimensions and, with the right instruments, the past could be accessed as readily as we look through a telescope; others whose cosmology was an engineered samsara, where, at the end of time, the end becomes the beginning, and the eternal return becomes our farcical resurrection. Others pushed the responsibility for the Common Task onto the gods: in their unknowable lives, they said, the gods were plotting the construction of heaven and the redemption of all men.
>He wrote of famines and things that were to her as distant in her past as the Mongol invasions had been to him.
>The book opened with the essays of Fedorov, trailed by commentaries written centuries later, called the Letters. In the second part the book moved abruptly, far into the future, to the accounts of the life of Herati of Merv. And by this time two of the promises of Fedorov had been fullfilled: immortality and the settlement of space by the immortals.
>The ancients subdued disease and age, they and their children settled the cosmos, they remade their bodies and their souls by hand. But even the gods could not turn back time, or rescue a mind from ashes. And the irreversibility of death was the central anxiety of civilization, and the central sorrow. In Ctesiphon, where quadrillions lived, death was almost unheard of. The surgeons had conquered suicidality. But the numbers of the dead increase only monotonically.
I'm not sure when this was written, but any new developments in non-equilibrium thermodynamics and/or spacetime theories since then don't change the result. Minds can't be rescued from the past or from "ashes"/decay products.
In this book, old people on earth can volunteer for military service in space. Those that volunteer end up getting their consciousness transferred to a new body, and effectively start a new life.
<<< Nobody on earth has taken utopia as seriously, on an intellectual, spiritual, and practical level, as the Russians. We have the Brits (by way of Sir Thomas More) to thank for the name and a general distrust of the idea, and America may have been founded on some ostensibly utopian notions, but it's the Russians who ultimately took the idea with the seriousness it merits and followed it to its (tragic, in their case) conclusion.>>>
The Russians are a people of fascinating extremes.
On one hand, as this explains, they've taken utopian ideas quite seriously and have always been great innovators in the sciences, the arts, and technology. First orbit, first person in space, designed the Tokamak, could easily have been first on the Moon if things had gone a little different, countless great artists and composers, etc.
On the other hand there seems to be a side of Russia that's cynical and nihilistic. There's a joke I heard once that goes something like "in America you die for freedom, in France you die for your country, in England you die for the Queen, and in Russia you die." Today you seem to have dominant thinkers in Russia like Aleksandr Dugin who believe only a tiny number of humans are worthy of agency and this is, with a lot of sophistry, romanticized. For a large number of Russians to swallow this implies to me a level of cynicism about the potential of the human condition.
Or maybe it's not a contradiction. Maybe the utopianism and innovativeness is a brave stand against the cynicism and totalitarian cults of misery-for-most.
The USA of course has its contradictions, like being simultaneously progressive and reactionary. It's a nation built on both slavery and liberation.
The only way for us to move anywhere is to establish set of motivations. Utopias (as extreme goals) are such grand scale motivations.
Were we, as a society, would be without Russian revolution and its attempt to implement extreme utopia of "happiness to everybody and free of charge here and now". I suspect that modern Europe and US that are social-democratic now (but not centuries later) is a result of that idealistic and utopian push Russians tried to implement ahead of time.
Humanity needs global goals that will motivate us to move further. Global warming fight is OK but not enough I think. Something great like "jump to stars now" and is required, no?
Russian here. Speaking of Dugin, I'm not a fan of his ideas about archaic way of living, and I don't personally know anyone who likes them. I consider him to be a hypocrite who talks the talk but doesn't walk the walk – unlike German Sterligov, who actually lives in a village without modern technology that he founded and built.
However, there's a sad fact about Dugin. He experienced a personal tragedy – his adult daughter was murdered, likely for political reasons. So, while I'm not a supporter of his ideas, I can never judge him for these ideas considering what he went through. Maybe advocating for these ideas is his way of surviving his tragedy.
As a Russian how would you characterize Dugin? Over here he’s usually considered a fascist (which I don’t think is technically accurate, though he is authoritarian) or grouped with neo-monarchist type “trads.”
I’ve always had a dark view of him. His writing gives me a veiled nihilist vibe. He seems like someone who is bitter about something. He lives in a fantasy world and wants people punished if it can’t be real.
Not a unique thing. This is the dark side of many idealists and romantics. The more someone lives in a dream the more they often hate the real world.
I agree that the attempt on his life is sad and I’m sure further radicalized him, though most of his ideas predate that. Who do you think it was? I always had three possibilities: Ukraine, anti war Russians, or the Putin regime itself for some reason.
Maybe this is my cynicism, but I think the USA is not that different from Russia. The few people who have agency are just better at psychology. They are great at making the masses believe that the utopian ideals handed down from up high are their own ideals.
> The Russians are a people of fascinating extremes.
You could say this about most societies. Just pick one of a million dimensions that a culture is likely to be an outlier in and blamo you got a radical society.
For those in LA, there’s a related exhibit at the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Definitely worth checking out if you haven’t been, the whole collection is a delight.
Has some similarity to Tipler's "omega point" hypothesis iin his 1994 book "The Physics of Immortality" [1]. I read this years ago but have recently bought it again to have another look at. It seems to be a PDF on the Internet Archive as well. It was a very wild idea.
I like it. I've read about the original concept by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit priest. This seems to give it a more sci-fi twist, including simulated universes and bringing back the dead.
> According to [Frank Tipler], it is required, for the known laws of physics to be consistent, that intelligent life take over all matter in the universe and eventually force its collapse.
> During that collapse, the computational capacity of the universe diverges to infinity, and environments emulated with that computational capacity last for an infinite duration as the universe attains a cosmological singularity.
> With computational resources diverging to infinity, Tipler states that a society in the far future would be able to resurrect the dead by emulating alternative universes.
> Tipler identifies the Omega Point with God, since, in his view, the Omega Point has all the properties of God claimed by most traditional religions.
This seems like a technological reification of christianity.
Putting aside the obvious semantic issues of resurrecting dead flesh (which version of the person are you allegedly bringing to life?), if I were resurrected, I would be extremely unhappy.
Opt for cremation then, no one's bringing you back after that. Depending on where you live, brain-only cryonics might be a similar price or cheaper. In case you want to try the other way. In that case you have a somewhat better chance of picking "what version", and they might even take that as your preference for a particular point in time in the case they're using another information recovery process (e.g. some Tipler thing.)
Neither option is actually reliable for the direction you want, cheap/"free" cryonics is even sketchier than usual, and someone might be able to pull a version of "you" from your writings and genetics. Probably doesn't count though.
26 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 76.1 ms ] thread>And there were those that believed the Common Task was to resurrect the dead in computer simulations, reconstructed from the histories; others who believed spacetime was a crystal in four dimensions and, with the right instruments, the past could be accessed as readily as we look through a telescope; others whose cosmology was an engineered samsara, where, at the end of time, the end becomes the beginning, and the eternal return becomes our farcical resurrection. Others pushed the responsibility for the Common Task onto the gods: in their unknowable lives, they said, the gods were plotting the construction of heaven and the redemption of all men.
>He wrote of famines and things that were to her as distant in her past as the Mongol invasions had been to him.
>The book opened with the essays of Fedorov, trailed by commentaries written centuries later, called the Letters. In the second part the book moved abruptly, far into the future, to the accounts of the life of Herati of Merv. And by this time two of the promises of Fedorov had been fullfilled: immortality and the settlement of space by the immortals.
>The ancients subdued disease and age, they and their children settled the cosmos, they remade their bodies and their souls by hand. But even the gods could not turn back time, or rescue a mind from ashes. And the irreversibility of death was the central anxiety of civilization, and the central sorrow. In Ctesiphon, where quadrillions lived, death was almost unheard of. The surgeons had conquered suicidality. But the numbers of the dead increase only monotonically.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man%27s_War
Russian cosmism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cosmism
On one hand, as this explains, they've taken utopian ideas quite seriously and have always been great innovators in the sciences, the arts, and technology. First orbit, first person in space, designed the Tokamak, could easily have been first on the Moon if things had gone a little different, countless great artists and composers, etc.
On the other hand there seems to be a side of Russia that's cynical and nihilistic. There's a joke I heard once that goes something like "in America you die for freedom, in France you die for your country, in England you die for the Queen, and in Russia you die." Today you seem to have dominant thinkers in Russia like Aleksandr Dugin who believe only a tiny number of humans are worthy of agency and this is, with a lot of sophistry, romanticized. For a large number of Russians to swallow this implies to me a level of cynicism about the potential of the human condition.
Or maybe it's not a contradiction. Maybe the utopianism and innovativeness is a brave stand against the cynicism and totalitarian cults of misery-for-most.
The USA of course has its contradictions, like being simultaneously progressive and reactionary. It's a nation built on both slavery and liberation.
The only way for us to move anywhere is to establish set of motivations. Utopias (as extreme goals) are such grand scale motivations.
Were we, as a society, would be without Russian revolution and its attempt to implement extreme utopia of "happiness to everybody and free of charge here and now". I suspect that modern Europe and US that are social-democratic now (but not centuries later) is a result of that idealistic and utopian push Russians tried to implement ahead of time.
Humanity needs global goals that will motivate us to move further. Global warming fight is OK but not enough I think. Something great like "jump to stars now" and is required, no?
However, there's a sad fact about Dugin. He experienced a personal tragedy – his adult daughter was murdered, likely for political reasons. So, while I'm not a supporter of his ideas, I can never judge him for these ideas considering what he went through. Maybe advocating for these ideas is his way of surviving his tragedy.
I’ve always had a dark view of him. His writing gives me a veiled nihilist vibe. He seems like someone who is bitter about something. He lives in a fantasy world and wants people punished if it can’t be real.
Not a unique thing. This is the dark side of many idealists and romantics. The more someone lives in a dream the more they often hate the real world.
I agree that the attempt on his life is sad and I’m sure further radicalized him, though most of his ideas predate that. Who do you think it was? I always had three possibilities: Ukraine, anti war Russians, or the Putin regime itself for some reason.
You could say this about most societies. Just pick one of a million dimensions that a culture is likely to be an outlier in and blamo you got a radical society.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_J._Tipler
> According to [Frank Tipler], it is required, for the known laws of physics to be consistent, that intelligent life take over all matter in the universe and eventually force its collapse.
> During that collapse, the computational capacity of the universe diverges to infinity, and environments emulated with that computational capacity last for an infinite duration as the universe attains a cosmological singularity.
> With computational resources diverging to infinity, Tipler states that a society in the far future would be able to resurrect the dead by emulating alternative universes.
> Tipler identifies the Omega Point with God, since, in his view, the Omega Point has all the properties of God claimed by most traditional religions.
Putting aside the obvious semantic issues of resurrecting dead flesh (which version of the person are you allegedly bringing to life?), if I were resurrected, I would be extremely unhappy.
Neither option is actually reliable for the direction you want, cheap/"free" cryonics is even sketchier than usual, and someone might be able to pull a version of "you" from your writings and genetics. Probably doesn't count though.