The book “The Truths of Terasem” is “the bible of the Terasem Movement.”
“It provides the answers to why life is purposeful, death is optional, god is technological and love is essential.”
See also the Truths of Terasem podcasts with transcripts, by Fred and Linda Chamberlain, with 101 episodes that elaborate at length upon the short and somewhat cryptic Terasem book.
In 2012 I wrote a post titled “Let a thousand turtles fly, in the quest for joyful immortality,” with my own outline and interpretation of Terasem.
Terasem supports cryonics. It also supports, via its LifeNaut and CyBeRev projects, the emerging science and technology of “cyberconsciousness.”
In “Virtually Human” (2014), Martine Rothblatt anticipates advanced cyberconsciousness “software, called mindware, that will activate a digital file of your thoughts, memories, feelings, and opinions — a mindfile — and operate on a technology-powered twin, or mindclone.”
I love all these things and I look forward to see further developments. However, in my personal interpretation, I don’t emphasize cryonics and cyberconsciousness. I emphasize the aspects of Terasem outlined below, which are very central to my worldview.
Terasem firmly supports human expansion into outer space. At the 5th Annual Workshop on Geoethical Nanotechnology on July 20, 2009, Martine emphasized the importance of the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11:
“It reminds us of the imperative to move outwards — we must get religiously fanatic about galactic colonization.”
Galactic colonization, spreading to the cosmos, is the ultimate objective for which, according to Martine, cautious approaches might prove too restrictive.
About personal and cosmic consciousness, the opening of “The Truths of Terasem” states that:
“Consciousness waves people the way the ocean waves water. In both cases, each wave is just one aspect, one perspective, one transient manifestation, of the underlying oceanic, or collective consciousness, reality.”
My late lamented friend Dan Massey (see Chapter 9 of my book [*]) summarized Terasem’s cosmic vision as:
“The Terasem notion of a technodeity, constructed through human action and culminating at ‘the end of time,’ or some other definite but undefined occasion in the future, with the power to reach back through time and across space to force the actions that finally lead to its full emergence, constructed from the collective consciousness of all universe creatures, is certainly a good start. This provides a vision that we shall all then become fully functioning personalities of a supreme, finite deity.”
Terasem is open to the possibility that the dead (even those who did not leave preserved bodies, brains, or mindfiles behind) will eventually be resurrected by means of exotic future science and technology. We can find hints at this concept in “The Truths of Terasem,” for example:
“Souls of our ancestors come back to life when we emulate their lives and their environment… Physics includes immortality per Dyson’s Eternal Life Postulate (1979) and Tipler’s Universal Cyber-resurrection Theorem (1989).”
Here is a the video of the talk given by Frank Tipler at the First Annual Workshop on Geoethical Nanotechnology, produced by Terasem, on July 20, 2005.
In the introduction, Martine says:
“[Frank] laid out a very clear and comprehensible roadmap for the possibilities of immortality, not grounded in religion or in spiritualism, but in solid math and physics… a lot of the stories… that religions and faiths have brought us are not inconsistent with the bottom-line, if you will, of the physical reality.”
[*] My book “Tales of the Turing Church: Hacking religion, enlightening science, awakening technology” is available for readers to buy on Amazon (Kindle | paperback).
Please buy my book, and/or donate to support other Turing Church projects.
Cover picture taken by the author at a Terasem event in 2011.
