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Having written a bit on the subject, I was glad to see NYT writer Jim Holt take on the topic of “scientifically verified immortality.” He writes about those who, “while secular in outlook, still pine after immortality,” mentioning William James’s interests here. (For a fascinating piece of intellectual history, check out the extraordinary series of Ingersoll Lectures on immortality James helped inaugurate.) Here’s a provocative bit of Holt’s piece:

In his 1994 book, “The Physics of Immortality,” Frank J. Tipler, a specialist in relativity theory at Tulane, showed how future beings might, in their drive for total knowledge, “resurrect” us in the form of computer simulations. (If this seems implausible to you, think how close we are right now to “resurrecting” extinct species through knowledge of their genomes.)

I think such ideas are part of a larger ideological effort to get people to identify “themselves” as the pattern of thoughts and actions that constitute their characteristic response to the world. The proposed translation of persons into words, numbers, and algorithms, and the presumed fixation of those formulae into a robot, is the real aim here. Though I disagree with him on many things, William Dembski has a nice account of the motivations behind such a view: Read More »Scientifically Verified Immortality