{"id":8892,"date":"2013-09-09T05:54:54","date_gmt":"2013-09-09T12:54:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/?p=8892"},"modified":"2017-06-04T20:29:44","modified_gmt":"2017-06-05T03:29:44","slug":"transhumanist-spirituality-a-new-religion-for-the-modern-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2013\/09\/transhumanist-spirituality-a-new-religion-for-the-modern-age","title":{"rendered":"Transhumanist Spirituality \u2013 A New Religion for the Modern Age?"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/a> Giulio Prisco

I recently interviewed KurzweilAI\u2019s Giulio Prisco for my podcast The Eternities. The below is a short piece I posted on Disinfo.com<\/a> about the interview, which has stimulated some debate there. Listen to the interview.<\/a><\/p>\n

From Disinfo.com:<\/a><\/a><\/p>\n

Pascal\u2019s Wager demonstrated a certain rationality to a belief in god. The seventeenth century philosopher, Pascal, argued that if one believes, yet god does not exist, nothing is lost in death. But, if god exists, the reward is eternal happiness.<\/p>\n

For the transhumanist thinker, Giulio Prisco, if god doesn\u2019t exist, he believes we will create him. Or her. Or, more accurately, perhaps \u2013 them<\/em>. Prisco\u2019s reasoning results not so much in a wager as an expectation.<\/p>\n

Speaking to The Eternities podcast, he said, \u201cRichard Dawkins \u2026 the atheist mastermind \u2026 writes in The God Delusion [that he] finds it very plausible in the universe that there may be very powerful beings like gods. He thinks these beings are a product of natural evolution like ourselves. That\u2019s exactly what I think myself. I don\u2019t place any artificial limits on the achievements that will be possible to intelligent life in the future. And I do think that some of our descendants, perhaps in a few thousand years, will be so advanced \u2026 that we could only call them gods.\u201d<\/p>\n

Prisco is no mere kook or sci-fi fantasist but a physicist, computer scientist and ex-senior manager at the European Space Agency. Currently he is the Transhumanism Editor for KurzweilAI.net<\/a> and is a director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies<\/a>. His uncompromising and ultra-optimistic \u201cthird way\u201d philosophy combines the traditional aims of religion \u2013 existential meaning, eternal life, transcendence \u2013 with the ever-advancing means of science.<\/p>\n

While the field of archaeology may figuratively bring the past to life for its exponents, the predicted future discipline of quantum archaeology, Prisco believes, may literally do so, and for all lifeforms that have ever lived. Though, he also acknowledges, we may already be living in a simulated reality, run by advanced god-like beings, our immortality already guaranteed.<\/p>\n

He said, \u201cThere are people who think of \u2026 some information store which is already being filled by the natural physical processes that happen in space-time. There are some people who base the reincarnation idea on that. It\u2019s not something that I can rule entirely out. If that does not happen spontaneously \u2026 let\u2019s engineer resurrection and the afterlife. If there is no god, let\u2019s build a god, or let\u2019s become gods. And let\u2019s make the universe a better place.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I recently interviewed KurzweilAI\u2019s Giulio Prisco for my podcast The Eternities. The below is a short piece I posted on Disinfo.com about the interview, which has stimulated some debate there. Listen to the interview. From Disinfo.com: Pascal\u2019s Wager demonstrated a certain rationality to a belief in god. The seventeenth century philosopher, Pascal, argued that if [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":283,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,37,269,225],"tags":[318,402,251],"class_list":["post-8892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-human-trajectories","category-life-extension","category-philosophy","tag-life-extension-tag","tag-religion","tag-transhumanism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/283"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8892"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8892\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70122,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8892\/revisions\/70122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}