 We'll now hear from Mike Perry on Christian Atheist Universal Immortalism. Michael Perry has been active in cryonics and has had cryonics arrangements since the 1970s. He has worked at Alcor Foundation, a leading cryonics organization since 1987. He has written a book, Forever for All, about the possibilities of attaining immortality and resurrection of the dead through scientific means. Cryonics features prominently even though it may not be strictly necessary. He holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Colorado and he is currently exploring mathematical approaches to the problems of personal identity and resurrection. Welcome. Okay, glad to be here today. I am going to try to present a religious philosophy that may not appeal to everybody, probably want to appeal to everybody here. I hope you can hear me okay. Alright, it sounds like an echo to me, but anyway, it does appeal to some of us, the kind of people who don't believe in the supernatural, but are not happy with thinking that life ends with a grave and that kind of thing either. We don't want to think of religion as just nonsense. So anyhow, it's a combination of what is called Christian atheism. You can look it up on the internet with something else I'll get to in a moment. Christian atheism may seem like a contradiction in terms, but actually it's a reasonable philosophical position. It says that there's no personal God, there's no supernatural, but the Christian ethic is perfectly valid. Enlightened brotherly love is the approach that we ought to use in our relations with others using the golden rule. And so it's a sort of philosophy of how to live well in this life interacting with other people. And I think some people have found it a satisfying substitute for the traditional Christianity or other religions, but I don't happen to be one of those people myself. And the main reason is that it's still basically death is an honest Christian atheist or most the usual type of person like this will have to admit that, you know, life ends after a few decades and that's it. And so you just have to make the most of this life. And you work it that way. If you talk to people like that about things like cryonics, we used to think that they would be, their eyes would light up and they would really be interested in this idea, but usually they're not interested in it. Anyway, I am one of these people that is interested in immortality. And since, like I say, I don't believe in the supernatural, I think it must happen through our own efforts or in some kind of technological way. So anyway, Christian atheism might be a good start on a religious philosophy, but it just doesn't go far enough. And so we come to something that I call universal immortalism. I talk about this in my book forever, overall. And I don't claim to be the originator of these ideas. They have been kicking around for a long time. Fyodorov was an early promoter of this kind of thinking. But once again, you have enlightened brotherly love as your guiding principle for interactions with others. But you also have scientific immortalism, which is the idea that the problem of death can be solved scientifically. Admittedly, it's a hard problem, but there are a number of approaches. I will get to that shortly, some of these. And also something that I usually goes under the name of universalism. Traditional Christianity used to disturb me because it isn't Christian universalism, but some souls are condemned to eternal torment, or a softer version is called annihilationism, where they're not tormented and they're not tortured forever, but they just die and that's it. The ones that aren't saved with universalism in the end, everybody is saved. And it's justified on normal, ordinary theological grounds by saying that loving God is so powerful and so full of love that somehow you will find a way to redeem everybody, though it might take a while for some beings. So really universal immortalism does incorporate universalism. And of course we're combining the two. Someone earlier talked about an idea of God where it's not a being, but a kind of principle, and I think he said it very well, and I can't equal that in my talk. I don't have time or preparation for it, but basically you could see God as not a being, but a principle enlightened brotherly love, or agape, or Holy Spirit, not the Holy Spirit, but Holy Spirit. So it would be a pervading feeling that we care about each other. We're trying to benefit ourselves, but others too, in a position that you could call enlightened self-interest. So enlightened brotherly love, there's a little glitch here. That's supposed to be an equivalent sign, but it didn't come through. Enlightened brotherly love is more or less equivalent to enlightened self-interest if you consider the scale of eternity, and that's what I'm interested in. It's seriously that life should be eternal and we should be immortal. So that's a principle that is consistent with Christianity and universal immortalism. So who was Jesus? Why would somebody like me, like I say, I don't believe in the supernatural, I think Jesus was another human being, but still he was a pretty incredible human being. He was a pioneer transhumanist and mortalist. You could call him an apostle of brotherly love, the Son of God in a metaphorical sense at least. So I can see an advantage in having your philosophy center around this one person, even though you could imagine developing universal immortalism on another planet that has a totally different civilization and different people in it, and no one person is absolutely critical to it, but still there might be something, and I think there would be something of value to consider the things Jesus said. What did he say? Among many things that he said that are very worthwhile was to heal the sick and raise the dead. And he didn't say things like, well, you can't really raise the dead yourself, but you call on the higher power to do it. He just plain said raise the dead. And I think as our technology develops, we should take that more seriously. So I'll say a little more about that later. And again, Jesus was a human being. And I see that, you know, I don't believe in supernatural. I don't believe in anything that seems to violate laws of physics. I don't think literal resurrections of the dead have happened already. Resurrection was a faith event once, but eventually it will be for real. And you know, we need to take that seriously. The crucifixion confirms the humanity of Jesus. He was a human being. He really did suffer on the cross, I think. And it also justifies our questioning of early dogmas and things. Jesus seemed to be questioning some things when he was asking why God had forsaken him on the cross. And I suppose that's subject to many different interpretations, but we are justified, I think, in questioning any kind of position that just doesn't seem to jive with what scientific observations seem to be telling us. Again, raising the dead, I think, can literally happen, and it's up to us to work out how we should do it. Two minutes to go, all right? I've already covered this point. Universalism means that all sentient beings should gain salvation and a future life in which they will be able to grow indefinitely. And I really mean all to the cats and the dogs and the fleas of item. It's up to us to work out the details on that, and I certainly can't do it in a minute and a half. But for now, there's also cryonics, which is one kind of intervention against death that I'm obviously a promoter of. I probably won't have time to do much more here, but I have a theory of resurrection that is not based on quantum archaeology. It's another approach entirely, well, it's another approach. I call it mini-bodies for one of another term. It's based on the idea that information really is lost, and you're not going to be able to tease it out of the historical record. But when that happens, I think that you can justify the position that the actual historical timeline has become ambiguous. So in other words, there's not a unique historical timeline. If you resurrect one timeline worth of beings, they are truly authentic beings that in some sense really did feed into our present, even though this one resurrection is not unique. But it is real, and we will have to, we can adjust to that. I think, again, cryonics I think is an expression of enlightened brotherly love and enlightened self-interest if pursued properly. So maybe I should stop here if there's any time for questions. Thank you. I'm not sure if I have time for questions, but I don't hear, you've got a question. How does your universal immortalism tie in with tiplerism? I would say that it's pretty consistent with it, but tipler seems to be tied down to a certain physical theory. And this can adapt to different possibilities in the future. And also, tipler has never expressed any interest in cryonics, and I'm a strong proponent of it.