Technological Resurrection
Technological resurrection is the use of technology to restore a dead person to life. Technologies include medical resuscitation techniques, preservation processes such as genealogy and cryonics, and speculative future capabilities like brain emulation and quantum archeology. The use of technology is not mutually exclusive with faith in God, as illustrated by theists who esteem technology to be an expression of God's grace or a means by which God works through humanity.
This is a list of articles that Lincoln Cannon has written about technological resurrection. A full archive of all articles that Lincoln has published since 2005 is also available. You may also search for articles and other content that's available on any of Lincoln's websites.
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How to Raise the Dead
This is an edited transcript of my presentation at the 2019 Conference of the Mormon Transhumanist Association. At the conference last year, I told you that I didn’t know how to raise the dead. That might not have been entirely true. It’s true that I don’t know how to do ... -
Cryonics and Transhumanism Are Hope for Life
Infamously, cryonics is in the news again. The Brain Preservation Foundation announced that a research group has successfully preserved a pig brain at a research-grade level of detail. A startup, Nectome, announced that it’s aiming to sell brain-destructive connectome preservation. And of course, all-too-predictably, such news is provoking frothy-mouthed bio-conservatives ... -
Why Is Resurrection Necessary?
“Why is resurrection necessary in the plan of salvation?” A friend asked me this question at church. In the Mormon tradition, we talk about God having a plan of salvation. And we understand resurrection to be a necessary part of that plan. But why? Why couldn’t or wouldn’t God create ... -
Mormon Bodies and Mind Uploading
Mormonism is relatively unique among world religions in its regard for bodies. Where most major religions consider bodies to be temporary or inhibitive, Mormonism considers bodies to be eternal and empowering, and potentially divine. This provides strong common ground with physicalist philosophies generally, and particularly with Transhumanism. Even the radical ... -
7 Reasons Cryonics Is Compatible with Mormonism
Occasionally I hear (or hear of) Mormons contending that cryonics (low-temperature preservation of a legally-dead body for resuscitation when new technology might cure the cause of death) is incompatible with our faith. Yet, to the contrary, those who revere the Bible have reason to trust that resuscitation, by cryonics or ... -
Are We Living in a Family History Simulation?
Last time I posted, we imagined that one of the things we might do with vast computing resources in the future is run highly detailed family history simulations, to the point of enabling the characters with artificial intelligence and fully immersive consciousness. If something like $150 could purchase more computing ... -
Future Technology for Family History Simulations
Technology, and particularly computing, is essential to family history. Without it, we could still tell family stories to our children. But we certainly couldn’t substantiate those stories from billions of historical records into millions of family trees, as web applications like FamilySearch and Ancestry.com do today. In the 1960s, Intel ... -
Quantum Archeology and the Resurrected You
At a recent conference on transhumanism and spirituality, I spoke on Transfigurism and proposed the following thought experiment: Imagine a posthuman historian. Using the tools of quantum archeology, she traces backwards through time and space from effects to causes. Sampling a sufficiently large portion of her present, she attains a ... -
Why Should Theists Learn How to Resurrect the Dead?
On the “Mormon Transhumanist Association Response” website, Vblogger, who is a Mormon, questions why Mormon Transhumanists think we should try to use science and technology as means for transfiguration and resurrection to immortality. He demonstrates that the scriptures teach that God has already transfigured or resurrected persons in the past. ... -
A Missionary's Practical Faith in Resurrection
Today, while looking through old journal entries, I came across the following passage, written when I was a missionary for the LDS Church: “He is God. He is a plurality of beings on the cutting edge of reality. He is the dictator of truth and the guardian of truth. He ... -
Resurrection is the Natural Consequence of Genealogy
Will universal resurrection of the dead be the natural consequence of increasingly detailed genealogical work? Do the thought experiment: Historian A sets forth a basic representation of a past person Historian B improves on A’s work, providing a more detailed representation of the past person Other historians repeat #2 indefinitely ... -
We Should Resurrect the Dead
In Sunday School today, we discussed Mormon ideas and doctrines related to the salvation of the dead. The focus, as usual, was on the contemporary practice of performing religious rituals, such as baptisms, on behalf of dead persons (by proxy, with no corpses involved, of course). The primary value I ...