A Cosmic Echo

Achieving Fedorovist resurrection

I don't have a good excerpt at hand, but I've been reading Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov's What was Man Created For? The Philosophy of the Common Task. Fedorov is one of the earliest transhumanist / futurist / cosmist authors, and I find his ideas compelling as early examples of patterns of thought similar to mine. One of his most out-of-consensus ideas is that we can and should resurrect the dead through scientific means.

One might immediately think to cryonics, which is looking increasingly promising, but Fedorov was considering resurrecting people who had the misfortune of being born before any sort of direct preservation technology. I see at least one route to achieving this: I wouldn't be surprised if a person could be resurrected from a large (or even maybe small) text corpus. There is a massive amount of information held in writing, and it's possible that it's enough to reconstruct a mind.

If you're aiming to achieve this for yourself, ideally you would preserve as much other information as possible as well. For example, obtain EEG data, keylogs, videos, conversations, stream-of-consciousness writing, and screen recordings / histories.

Aim to be prolific. Ideally, store information for the long term, packaged such that there's incentive to preserve and maintain it. The simplest ways to do this are cryptographic or practical: sign and duplicate your data. But information has been preserved far longer through purely social means. How well could we simulate Jesus' apostles today? Or the authors of the Buddhist sutras?

A sort of mind upload is already happening for everyone who exists in the text corpus processed by large language models. However, I'll warn that this sort of resurrection-by-Mu may not necessarily be a good thing for our future. But that topic deserves far more words than I can give it today, and perhaps should not be discussed where its discussion will be remembered.

Stabbing pain for the feeling

Now your wound's never healing

Til' you're numb, oh it's begun

Before we all become one

If you're not remembered, then you never existed.