 We'll now hear from Mike Perry. Mike has been active in transhumanist related work since the 1970s and has worked at Alcor Foundation, which is a leading cryonics organization, since 1987. He's written a book, Forever for All, about the possibilities of attaining immortality and resurrection of the dead through scientific means. He holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Colorado and is currently exploring mathematical approaches to the problems of personal identity and resurrection. Okay, can everybody hear me? Well, I'm going to be talking about the possibility of, okay, is that all right? Can you hear me? I'm going to be talking about the possibility of resurrecting the dead through technology. And I hope everybody will find it interesting whatever your theological orientation or whatever you think about cosmology or whatever. And this idea goes back a long ways. It's nothing particularly original. The Russian philosopher Nikolai Yoderov developed a theory of resurrection in the 19th century based on his understanding of physics at the time. He imagined the Newtonian universe and thought that just as you could map the motion of planets and retro-dict ancient solar eclipses and so on, if you could, in the future we should be able to track the motions of individual atoms and to arbitrary accuracy and thereby we could determine their positions 500 years ago and in that manner we could put the atoms back in the right places for the people that were living back then so we could resurrect these people. And anyhow, the advent of quantum mechanics with its uncertainty principle seems to throw a lot of cold water on that idea. And it doesn't look like you could actually do such a mapping that would allow you to retro-dict history. There are those who have come up with something they call quantum archaeology which in effect seems to be saying well maybe you can do that after all and maybe you can get back every bit of information and position of every atom in history and you could just put those atoms back in the right places and get back the people or you didn't want to mess around with individual atoms you might just work with information and maybe you could upload the people into the right future computational devices so they could resume their consciousness that way. Well anyway, I happen to be a skeptic of that sort of possibility and I will also include things like the idea that we might be in a computer simulation in which the states of computation have already been saved by the supreme programmer in such a way that you could get back all the data you need that way. And I would like to talk about another possibility entirely from all of that that I call parallel recreation and it says in effect that you just have to put up with some loss of information and you can't get it back in any straightforward sense and yet I still claim in some reasonable sense you could resurrect the dead and by resurrecting the dead I'm really talking mainly about in the first place getting a description of each person down to the level of brain structure and so on. So it's mainly as I see it an informational problem and once you have the information some people worry about whether if you use that to construct a body and that body was a copy of the original but not the original does that matter. From my point of view it doesn't matter so suspend your disbelief a little bit if it matters to you. Anyway so as I said quantum archeology would sort of cut the Gordian knot but I don't want to turn it off. So basically what do you do if you can't get back that information what are you going to do and well in a sense you will get it back but the answer to really whether you can do it or not depends on your world view and I want to introduce a certain idea that I think that reality in my view is under determined. What does that mean? It really means that more well let me just jump to something else first and then I'll get back to the reality thing. A certain important property for this resurrection idea is the multiverse. So I'm assuming there are multiple universes and these multiple universes cover all the possibilities so there are universes where there are people just like you folks with somebody just like me standing here among all the many other possibilities and essentially infinitely many of all of that. So that turns out to be useful to rationalize the approach I'm going to describe and in this in the multiverse I assume that all finite histories happen over and over in all their variations and that word finite is highlighted because it does make a difference. Some people raise objections about if you're going to talk about infinite histories you might not have enough worlds to cover all the possibilities so all we need is finite histories. Maybe that's too minor a point for most of you to bring up but anyway it should be the case that in all these multiple universes you get all the variations of the finite histories so there are histories just like ours as far as we know and other histories where certain battles were won by the opposition or somebody else other than what our books say who are books say won the battles and other histories where the human race didn't evolve but an intelligent race of birds evolved on planet earth and you can go on from there. So there's lots of variations out there and like I say under determinism more than one theory fits the facts so the theory I'm going to present is not the only possible theory of reality and I'm not claiming that all of them allow for resurrection all I'm saying is that the one I offer I think will fit observations at least I don't think it can yet be overturned scientifically and actually I don't think it ever will be. And as an example of what I'm talking about that actually there's some important questions that can't be resolved by a unique theory that fits the facts I'll just say consider whether a person survives sleep or not. When you wake up is it really you or a copy of you? Is it continuity of consciousness? Is that a requirement really to have the same person? Well it depends on how you want to define a person that's all it is you can define a person in such a way that it really is a requirement and so you're just dead if you so much as doze off. That's not the way I like to look at it myself though. And in fact it goes to show you that you can choose the theory you like to a certain extent and you might even say reality is malleable to a certain extent. Okay so thinking like that I've already been to this. What kind of an outlook on reality would I want to use for arguing that resurrections are possible? Roughly speaking I call it informational realism. I'm not really prepared to argue this at length today but information is what is really there and even solid matter could be seen as sort of a virtual effect if you want to push things far enough. So that actually has some interesting consequences. And I've already introduced the idea of the multiverse and saying that there are copies of you and me at least I think so all distributed around reality as a whole. So you say well I wonder which one of those I am and where is here? And what I would say is well using an informational point of view it doesn't really make sense to say where you are. We're neither here nor there. We are every place that exact copies of us are found. We're distributed all over all these copies. And one other thing to say is that where you are distributed is not exactly where I'm distributed. So if I look at you I can only I can see your face but I can't see what's behind that face. And so I'm distributed everywhere that I see a face that looks just like that one. But all those faces can have different things behind them. So in other words the person might have different memories and so forth but I can't detect that. So my instantiations are distributed wherever I would see everything that looks just like what I'm seeing but yours are going to be different. You'll see every guy that looks like me but it won't be the same. Those guys won't have the same thoughts in their head either. That's an important point for some for you know I'll get to it later. Okay. Okay. So how are we going to do resurrection? I propose that we do informed yes work. We want to recreate people that we can think of as historical people. So the people we create should not have memories and such that contradict our historical records. We personally create we consistent with all the records. But if we limited ourselves just to that just to the minimal fill in of information in somebody's brain that would fit the records we would leave out way too much to reasonably say we resurrected people because you know a few hundred years back there are probably many people that aren't even found in any records and maybe you could find a DNA fragment or something. So you aren't really going to resurrect people like that. And so it is necessary, it would be necessary to fill in extra information. And what I would say is that you could make different choices but you would of course I would imagine doing a resurrection project a whole, wow I'm using up a lot of my time, do a whole project like for your imagine. So a lot of people that have mutually consistent memories that you would create a timeline cohort that way. And one possible resurrection, one possible timeline cohort and you might specially bond with that. But I wouldn't say that you couldn't do others but that one would actually be an authentic resurrection of people that actually lived. And I'm going to have to, I was going to demonstrate a coin toss but I'm out of time right now. You toss a coin and erase the information before you look at it and you can toss it again and in some sense you get back that information because you've actually got two possibilities but throughout the multiverse both of those possibilities pop up again. All right. So anyway, there is a couple of people I especially want to resurrect or my parents. That's their wedding picture from 1946. And well you'd have very many bits to resurrect which you fill in information that fits all the surviving records and what you get is a version of them that's authentic. It's not a version where they're way over here and I'm way over here because remember we're neither here nor there. So I think that's probably the best you could do unless there really is something like quantum archeology or a supreme programmer or something like that. So if those things happen, fine. I don't have to worry as much. But even if they don't, there's something else you have to go on. I could make the point. Have I got time? I think that to create this timeline cohort of everybody who ever lived in one version would, for the information storage it would take nothing worse than a nine mile wide asteroid sized object to hold all the information so it should be feasible in the future. One last point to make is I'm a cryonist and I'm hoping that I won't even have to go through this resurrection. I see this as a backstop. I also think that if you can choose cryonics and you come back earlier you can do more good and you can help with the resurrection rather than just being a beneficiary of it. It's better to be a benefactor than just a beneficiary. So think about that. Looks like I got 15 seconds.