Terasem
Terasem
Central hub for posts related to Terasem, including Terasem Colloquia and my interpretation of Terasem
I have been collaborating with Terasem for many years, and I formally joined in 2011 (video). This post is a central hub for my posts related to Terasem.
See the book “The Truths of Terasem.” There’s an online version at terasemfaith.net.
“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, by Fred and Linda Chamberlain, with 101 episodes that elaborate at length upon the short and somewhat cryptic Terasem book.
Terasem Colloquia
Terasem Colloquia are held twice a year in July and December, via Zoom. The theme alternates between spaceflight and neuroscience/consciousness studies. I have been co-organizing and managing Terasem Colloquia since 2020. Here’s a list of Terasem Colloquia since 2020:
Terasem Colloquium, July 7, 2024. Theme: Old and new radically optimistic futurisms including Italian futurism, Russian and modern cosmism, extropy, and e/acc. Speakers: Riccardo Campa, Ben Goertzel, Robin Hanson, James Pethokoukis, Max More. VIDEO (YouTube). My commentary.
Terasem Colloquium. December 14, 2023. Theme: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine consciousness. Speakers: Ben Goertzel, Stefano Vaj, Mika Johnson, Blake Lemoine, Bill Bainbridge, Vitaly Vanchurin. VIDEO (YouTube). My commentary.
Terasem Space Day Colloquium. July 20, 2023. Theme: long-term perspectives on human space expansion, and the intersections of human space expansion with highly imaginative, far-out concepts in science, philosophy, and politics. Speakers: Christopher E. Mason, Stellar Magnet, Clément Vidal, Todd A. Drashner & Trond Nilsen, Max More, Tom W. Bell. VIDEO (YouTube). My commentary.
Terasem Colloquium. December 14, 2022. Theme: 50th anniversary of the last day astronauts have been on the Moon. Speakers: Michelle Hanlon, Giuseppe Reibaldi, Marlène Michèle Losier, Adriano Autino, Keith Henson, Frank White. VIDEO (YouTube). My commentary.
Terasem Space Day Colloquium. July 20, 2022. Theme: cultural, philosophical, and spiritual aspects of spaceflight and space expansion. Speakers: Rick Tumlinson, Riccardo Campa, Elaine Walker, Frank Tipler. VIDEO (YouTube). My commentary.
Terasem Colloquium. December 10, 2021. Theme: what is consciousness, and how to preserve consciousness beyond physical death. Speakers: Randal Koene, Max More, Ken Hayworth, Martine Rothblatt, Robert McIntyre. VIDEO (YouTube). My commentary.
Terasem Space Day Colloquium. July 20, 2021. Theme: spaceflight, geopolitics, future scenarios, space philosophy and culture, and spiritual implications. Speakers: Namrata Goswami, Cometan, Steven Wolfe, Natasha Vita-More, Rachel Lyons. VIDEO (YouTube). My commentary.
Terasem Colloquium. December 10, 2020. Theme: transpartisan approaches to the intersection of space expansion, emerging technologies, and human rights. Speakers: Howard Bloom, Giulia Bassani, Stellar Magnet, Philippe van Nedervelde, Gabriel Rothblatt, David Brin. VIDEO (YouTube). My commentary.
Terasem Journals
The Terasem Journals include The Journal of Geoethical Nanotechnology and The Journal of Personal Cyberconsciousness. See terasemjournals.org.
Terasem gatherings
Every month on the 10th I participate in a monthly Terasem gathering online (Zoom, 10am ET) with other “joiners.” I would love seeing you there! Feel free to write to me if you want to join Terasem and participate, and I’ll introduce you. Terasem is small but growing, with a great potential to do good.
Terasem: my interpretation
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 “Tales of the Turing Church”) 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.”
17 years later, speaking at the July 2022 Terasem Colloquium, Frank gave a related talk that was not only a lecture but also a great performance. He gave an introduction to his Omega Point theory and hinted at an ongoing experiment that could not only validate the theory but also open a theoretical door to interstellar spaceflight.