Hi I'm new here so i'll cut and poste something that isn't riddled with dyslexia for which I apologise in advance in future posts, if there is a future:
This is going to get wiped from wiki & it's a pity to waste it:
Quantum Archeology - also known as quantum information retrieval, is a controversial and emerging idea about information retrieval in transhumanist and futurist philosophy written and debated about (see 'Notes' below) at universities and in books and on forums like Ray Kurzweil's MINDX. One of it's most acute theories describes a possible method for raising the ancient dead using advancing statistical quantum calculations by treating a person as a data set at a defined point of spacetime and seeking to accurately describe that point - then reconstruct them.
It anticipates coming process technologies usually called hypercomputing that include, but are not limited to quantum computing, nanocomputing, and light speed computing and it attempts to look at resurrection issues in terms of information manipulation, in a world that has post-human level intelligence (assumed to occur at more than 10^17 flops (Hans Moravec).
It first surfaced in 2002 in discussions about Tipler's The Physics of Immortality and Steven Wolfram's A New Kind of Mathematics, using the forecasting ideas of new statistics, ideas from fiction and with a focal point called the Omega Point by Pierre Teilihard De Chardin, a Jesuit priest, and Tipler, a professor of mathematics.
Supporters include Frank Tipler and opponents Robert Ettinger, and it was discussed at the Pentagon sponsored AI@50 in the USA in 2006.
The idea was inspired by Asimov's Foundation trilogy where Hari Seldon makes aggregate probabilistic predictions using psychohistory across thousands of years.
The basis of psychohistory is the idea that, while the actions of a particular individual could not be foreseen, the laws of statistics could be applied to large groups of people and used to predict the general flow of future events.
Quantum Archeology does it backwards, ie uses statistical methods to determine the past at quantum level detail, instead of the future.
It is well written about under specialist headings as information theory, and the resurrections of the dead is one of the most bizarre applications of quantum forecasting.
The idea advances that it is possible to reconstruct the exact states of any event (philosophy) of spacetime, enabling the resurrection of any person, including the memories of any person, when no phsyical part of them is remains extant. Is is based on the view that the cosmos is entirely subject to law and past movements are therefore definable and reconfigurable.
Asimov used the analogy of a gas: in a gas, the motion of a single molecule is very difficult to predict, but the mass action of the gas can be predicted to a high level of accuracy -known in physics as the Kinetic Theory.
Quantum archeology is the opposite of psychohistory and is an attempt at ideating method to prepare for the science of how those predictions are made, including methods like sampling(probability) and is in its infancy.
It assumes the cosmos is a determinist system and it therefore follows it is possible to describe any history with enough processing power leading to resurrection by future techniques.
Frank J. Tipler immediately supported the idea in 2003 and his letter was published on MINDX, although he saw raising the dead as three dimensional resurrectees as unnecessary because computer simulation will be the same thing.
"You are indeed correct that this is possible because the current universe has limited complexity....the complexity of the visible universe today is bounded above by 10^{123} bits of information. It is indeed correct that the 2nd law of thermodynamics applies to the universe as a whole. In fact, the Second Law is essential in the proof that the laws of physics REQUIRE the computer capacity of the universe to increase without limit."
Like archeology which is able to reconstruct objects from ancient times using surviving fragments, knowledge about similar objects, and probabilities, quantum archeology assumes future computing power like quantum computers will enable this by back tracing, using laws of cause and effect with emerging mathematical and statistical methods.
There are always more variables in the cosmos than there were is history allowing enough information to be gathered to reconstruct any historical event down to the quantum particle. The universe is becoming increasing complex and any group of variables should plot backwards to a time when there are fewer events.
Everett's Many World's Theory implies that many future worlds will have only a few common ancestors. Moreover, a s time advances, the number of events in the cosmos multiplies allowing checking of back tracing from different variables to common roots. Therefore enough variables will exist at any future time to resurrect any past event in infinite or near infinite worlds.
Quantum Archeology further holds that no event in the cosmos can be non-determined, just complex, and makes no special conditions for human beings or any observers.
The idea was first discussed on line in the kurzweilai forums in 2002, where it was initially regarded as a pseudoscience, but began to be taken seriously and received endorsement from eminent scientists like Frank J. Tipler and written about (see Notes below) as quantum resurrection.
Critics of the theory include Professor Robert Ettinger, who thinks there may be some special property of a human body not knowable by mapping.
Another criticism of the theory is that entropy causes irretrievable information loss at death and therefore resurrection would breech the second law of thermodynamics.
Quantum archaeologists retort that entropy does not imply abstract chaos but presently unmeasurable complexity.
Religious objections include the belief human beings operate by different laws to the rest of the universe which was a challenge made to Everett's Many Worlds Theory.
Another objection is that a computer-aided resurrection may not produce the same real person. Cyonics founder Professor Robert Ettinger in 2007 wrote on quantum archeology:
"...it may eventually be possible to simulate as large a portion of spacetime as desired, to any desired degree of accuracy. But that does not necessarily mean that a simulated person would be alive in our sense, i.e. capable of having subjective experiences....In extreme brevity, because the map is not the territory. A simulation is a description of a thing and not the thing itself."
Some philosophers have criticized transhumanism on the grounds that it is an attempt at a religion since both posit immortality, resurrection description of the universe, and through the Simulation Argument, a creator, but transhumanist's absence of of a subjective valuation system for Man except as an object, is dangerous.
Extropians rebuff this by asserting the theory is intensely humanist and values Man so much it attempts a survival strategy for the dead as well as the living.
Debates occur about the nature of identity such as those discussed in The Prospect of Immortality, and by the philosopher Professor Derek Parfit; the computing capacity needed, and the social and legal difficulties of raising the dead.
Moore's Law and other trends published by Kurzweil indicate when there will be enough processing power to achieve simulations complex enough to map out a world, and it is expected that a 200 Qubit quantum computer may be able to do this (30 Qubits would match todays supercomputer, and D-Wave Systems claims to have built a 16 Qubit system).
It is assumed that singularity technology and Artificial General Intelligence will be required to model enough of the local universe to simulate any human being and many futurists including Vernor Vinge and Ray Kuzweil expect that by 2030.
[edit] See Also
[edit] Notes
& sources dealing with the topic by other names
1964 "The Future of Man" Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Omega Point theory) ISBN 0-385-51072-1
1993 "The Coming Technological Singularity", Verner Vinge. Symposium held at NASA Lewis Research Center (NASA Conference Publication CP-10129)
1995 "The Physics of Immortality" Prof Frank J Tiper. ISBN 0333618645
1998 "Time and history in quantum tunneling" in Superlattices and Microstructures, Volume 23, Number 3, March pp. 823-832(10) A.M.Steinberg
2000 Sub-Poissonian photon statistics of higher harmonics: quantum predictions via classical trajectories Jirí Bajer et al 2000 J. Opt. B: Quantum Semiclass. Opt. 2 L10-L14 doi:10.1088/1464-4266/2/3/102
2002 "Psychohistory" (A tool for Historical Prediction) by Christos Z. Konstas ISBN : 960-7928-72-5.
2003 "Are You Living In a Computer Simulation?" Nick Bostrom. Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 53, No. 211, pp. 243-255.
2005 "The Singularity Is Near" Ray Kurzweil ISBN 0-670-03384-7.
2005 Quantum Archeology Wed 7 Dec Vlatko Vedral Manchester Theoretical Physics Group SCHUSTER COLLOQUIUM. (see also eg Vlatko Vedral deposited papers Los Alamos http://xxx.lanl.gov/find/ on quantum information recovery (same principle as quantum resurrection).
2006 "Information recovery from black holes" by Vijay Balasubramanian, Donald Marolf, Moshe Rozali in General Relativity and Gravitation pub by Springer Netherlands ISSN 0001-7701 (Print) 1572-9532 (Online) Issue Volume 38, Number 11 / November
2006 "A Beginner's Guide to Immortality:" Extraordinary People, Alien Brains, and Quantum Resurrection by Clifford A. Pickover ISBN-13: 9781560259848.
2007 New Scientist article on C.A. Pickover's book (above) Nov 17th.
2007 "The Never-Ending Days of Being Dead: Dispatches from the Front Line of Science" Faber and Faber by Marcus Chown ISBN: 057122055X
2008 "How much of one-way computation is just thermodynamics?" Janet Anders, Damian Markham, Vlatko Vedral, Michal Hajdušek January 21st, arXiv:quant-ph/0702020v1
Psychohistory.org
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