Boldly Going: Tales from the Turing Church Prepares You for the Wild Far Future
In Tales of the Turing Church: Hacking religion, enlightening science, awakening technology, Giulio Prisco has neither written a good science book, nor a good science fiction piece. Instead, he has dared to create something more important: a mind-blowing science theology book. A primer for a far future religion, let’s call it.
Sweeping and bold, Prisco’s book dares to slaughter a few dozen head of sacred cows — don’t worry, they’ll be resurrected at some point in the deep future, Prisco assures us — in science’s prized herd, including reductionism and materialism.
Although, I’ve gone through the book once and, full disclosure, don’t fully understand all the concepts — or maybe even half, if I’m being honest — let me try to give you a summary. Reality is weird. And each day science helps us understand that weirdness a little more. Each day, our technology is also making that weirdness more malleable. Eventually, we’re going to understand a lot more about this weirdness — and we’ll even be able to master it a bit. And then things will get really weird.
Try this on for weird: “Our descendants in the far future will join the community of God-like beings among the stars and beyond, and use transcendent technology to resurrect the dead and remake the universe.”
As a result of this, Prisco tells us that physics and — gasp — metaphysics can and, maybe inevitably will, safely merge. He points out what should be obvious: Science has led us to conversations about entanglement, superposition, nonlocality, etc. — and, well, dammit, we should talk about these things.
Essentially, this is what mystics — and people (with tenure) who understand the profound implications of quantum mechanics — have been saying for a few thousand years.
It’s a sentiment that won’t make him many friends in the science world. Indeed, Robin Hanson, an economist, calls Prisco’s sci-theology, wishful thinking. Hanson recently wrote a somewhat plodding book about a Jetsonian Singularity, called “The Age of Em,” where mankind has mastered the technology of mind emulation — but little else — that allows people to copy their minds and then send those freshly minted mind children — luckily enough for this wishful thinking economist — to work, presumably at Spacely Sprockets or Cogswell’s Cogs.
I suspect similar criticisms will follow.
This leads me to my only issue: I think that Prisco is holding himself back in some ways. I think he hedges against this criticism to not fully embrace the full bloom of his own philosophy. For example, Prisco predicts in the far future — and, this is, like, faaaaaar in the future — that this mastery of the weird elements of time and space are complete and that we and all our cherished friends, family members, and pets will be resurrected.
Here’s the thing that gets me. If time has been mastered in the future, certainly that means that the linear walk we call time right now must be an illusion. And that faaaaaar in the future is right in the eternal now, we just can’t seem to lift that veil.
Prisco’s book, in my opinion, is an attempt to use the combined power of science and spirit, humanity’s most powerful tools, to lift that veil, something that scientists have been loath to do since the Inquisition and other powers of religious dogma tried to keep their own veil kept snuggly shut.
And I realize that Prisco’s wild attempt at unveiling of truth and uniting of science and spirituality in Tales of the Turing Church might be wishful thinking and will be controversial. But, it might also be termed, what I like to call, visionary. Prophetic even.