Turing Church

About

Turing Church is a magazine about science, technology, religion, and spirituality. We publish original articles and reviews of external material at the intersection of sci / tech and spirituality, where science becomes religion, and spirituality becomes technology, to offer readers meaning and sense of wonder, and hope in personal immortality and resurrection, based on science.

The Turing Church is a virtual place of contemplation, discussion and learning, and a community of scientifically minded persons who are also open to and interested in spiritual and religious visions, compatible with science. We are not interested in developing a new, rigid doctrine. We are interested in developing a loose framework of ideas, concepts, hopes, feelings and sensibilities at the intersection of science and religion, compatible with many existing and new frameworks. This is why we call the Turing Church a meta-religion.

In mathematics, “the Turing-Church conjecture states that any computation executed by one computer with access to an infinite amount of storage, can be done by any other computing machine with infinite storage, no matter what its configuration. One computer can do anything another can do. In other words, all computation is equivalent. Turing and Church called this universal computation. Mathematician Stephen Wolfram takes this idea even further and suggests that many very complex processes in the realms of biology and technology are basically computationally equivalent” - Kevin Kelly 2009

Following the Turing-Church conjecture, a human mind can be transferred from a biological brain to another computational substrate (Mind Uploading). Mind Uploading research is ongoing and may achieve practical results in this century, perhaps in only a few decades. Once Mind Uploading technology is available, humans will be able to live indefinitely in non biological bodies and make backup copies of themselves. Future civilizations of uploads will colonize the galaxy and the universe, and perhaps they will be able to resurrect the dead by “copying them to the future”. Perhaps they will be able to create synthetic realities inhabited by sentient minds, and perhaps we ourselves are sentient minds in a synthetic, computationally generated reality.

These considerations are very similar to, and actually indistinguishable from, the promises of many religions, which can then be considered as validated by science. The Turing Church will be a meta-religion: a community without a central doctrine, and uniquely characterized by openness to and common interest in the promised land where science and religion meet, science becomes religion, and religion becomes science. We will provide our members with meaning and sense of wonder, and hope in personal immortality and resurrection, based on science. We will also directly support related scientific research.