Resurrection
Resurrection or anastasis is the concept of coming back to life after death. In a number of religions, a dying-and-rising god is a deity which dies and is resurrected. Reincarnation is a similar process hypothesized by other religions, which involves the same person or deity coming back to another body. Disappearance of a body is another similar, but distinct, belief in some religions.
For other uses, see Resurrection (disambiguation).
With the advent of written records, the earliest known recurrent theme of resurrection was in Egyptian and Canaanite religions, which had cults of dying-and-rising gods such as Osiris and Baal. Ancient Greek religion generally emphasised immortality, but in the mythos a number of men and women were made physically immortal as they were resurrected from the dead.
The universal resurrection of the dead at the end of the world is a standard eschatological belief in the Abrahamic religions. As a religious concept, resurrection is used in two distinct respects:
1) a belief in the individual resurrections of individual souls that is current and ongoing (Christian idealism, realized eschatology),
2) a general bodily universal resurrection of all of the dead at the end of the world.[1] Some believe the soul is the actual vehicle by which people are resurrected.[2]
The death and resurrection of Jesus is a central focus of Christianity. While most Christians believe Jesus' resurrection from the dead and ascension to heaven was in a material body, some believe it was spiritual.[3][4][5]
Like the Abrahamic religions, the Dharmic religions also include belief in resurrection and reincarnation. There are stories in Buddhism where the power of resurrection was allegedly demonstrated in Chan or Zen tradition. In Hinduism, the core belief in resurrection/reincarnation is known as saṃsāra.[6]
Aside from religious belief, cryonics and other speculative resurrection technologies are practiced, but the resurrection of long-dead bodies is not considered possible at the current level of scientific knowledge.
Etymology[edit]
Resurrection, from the Latin noun resurrectio -onis, from the verb rego, "to make straight, rule" + preposition sub, "under", altered to subrigo and contracted to surgo, surrexi, surrectum ("to rise", "get up", "stand up"[7]) + preposition re-, "again",[8] thus literally "a straightening from under again".
Philosophy[edit]
Anastasis or Ana-stasis is a concept in contemporary philosophy emerging from the works of Jean-Luc Nancy, Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan.[53] Nancy developed the concept through his interpretation of paintings depicting the resurrection of Jesus Christ.[54] Dwivedi and Mohan, referring to Nancy, defined Ana-stasis as coming over stasis, which is a method for philosophy to overcome its end as Martin Heidegger defined. This concept is noted to be linked in the works of Nancy, Dwivedi and Mohan to have a relation to Heidegger's "other beginning of philosophy".[55] Kohan and Dwivdei that this "overcoming" would construct a new dimension in philosophy.[56]
John Hick argues that the "replica theory" makes the religious doctrine of bodily resurrection somewhat plausible. For example, if a man disappears or dies in London and an exact "replica" suddenly re-appears in New York, both entities should be regarded as the same, especially if they share physical and psychological characteristics. Hick extends this theory to parallel universes, which occupy a different space to our own. He also distinguishes the theory from reincarnation, where a person lives in several successive bodies.[57]
Other scholars reivse the replica theory with the "counterpart theory", where it is believed that God creates a resurrection counterpart to one's current body, which is new and improved. Although it is defined by one's soul and history, it is not identical to the current body, which remains destroyed after death. A useful analogy is to imagine a soul as a programme, a body as a computer and the "series of states" that a soul undergoes as a person's biography. They believe the theory has precedent in scriptures like the New Testament. In addition, it incentivizes people to care about their future.[58]
Technological resurrection[edit]
Cryonics[edit]
Cryonics is the low-temperature freezing (usually at −196 °C or −320.8 °F or 77.1 K) of a human corpse or severed head, with the speculative hope that resurrection may be possible in the future.[59][60] Cryonics is regarded with skepticism within the mainstream scientific community. It is generally viewed as a pseudoscience,[61] and has been characterized as quackery.[62]
Digital ghosts[edit]
In his 1988 book Mind Children, roboticist Hans Moravec proposed that a future supercomputer might be able to resurrect long-dead minds from the information that still survived. For example, such can include information in the form of memories, filmstrips, social media interactions,[63][64] modeled personality traits,[65] personal favourite things,[65] personal notes and tasks, medical records, and genetic information.[66][67]
Ray Kurzweil, American inventor and futurist, believes that when his concept of singularity comes to pass, it will be possible to resurrect the dead by digital recreation.[68] Such is one approach in the concept of digital immortality, which could be described as resurrecting deceased as "digital ghosts"[69][70] or "digital avatars".[71][72] In the context of knowledge management, "virtual persona" could "aid in knowledge capture, retention, distribution, access and use" and continue to learn.[65] Issues include post-mortem privacy,[73] and potential use of personalised digital twins and associated systems by big data firms and advertisers.[74]
Related alternative approaches of digital immortality include gradually "replacing" neurons in the brain with advanced medical technology (such as nanobiotechnology) as a form of mind uploading (see also: wetware computer).[75]
De-extinction[edit]
De-extinction, enabling an organism that either resembles or is an extinct species, is also known as "resurrection biology" and often described as working on "resurrecting" dead species.[76][77][78]
Medical resuscitation[edit]
Modern medicine can, in some cases, revive patients who "died" by some definitions of death, or were declared dead. However, under most definitions of death, this would mean that the patient wasn't truly dead.
Most advanced versions of such capabilities may include a method/system under development reported in 2019, 'BrainEx', that could partially revive (pig) brains hours after death (to the degree of brain circulation and cellular functions).[79][80] It showed that "the process of cell death is a gradual, stepwise process and that some of those processes can be either postponed, preserved or even reversed".[81] A similar organ perfusion system under development, 'OrganEx', can restore – i.e. on the cellular level – multiple vital (pig) organs one hour after death (during which the body had prolonged warm ischaemia).[79][82] It could be used to preserve donor organs but may also be developed to be useful for revival in medical emergencies by buying "more time for doctors to treat people whose bodies were starved of oxygen, such as those who died from drowning or heart attacks".[79]
There is research into what happens during[83][84] and after death as well as how and to what extent patients could be revived by the use of science and technology. For example, one study showed that in the hours after humans die, "certain cells in the human brain are still active".[85][86] However, it is thought that at least without any life-support-like systems, death is permanent and irreversible after several hours – not days – even in cases when revival was still possible shortly after death.
A 2010 study notes that physicians are determining death "test only for the permanent cessation of circulation and respiration because they know that irreversible cessation follows rapidly and inevitably once circulation no longer will restore itself spontaneously and will not be restored medically".[87] Development of advanced live support measures "including cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and positive pressure ventilation (PPV)" brought the interdependence of cessation of brain function and loss of respiration and circulation and "the traditional definition of death into question"[88] and further developments upend more "definitions of mortality".[89]
Hypothetical speculations without existing technologies[edit]
Russian cosmist Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov advocated resurrection of the dead using scientific methods. Fedorov tried to plan specific actions for scientific research of the possibility of restoring life and making it infinite. His first project is connected with collecting and synthesizing decayed remains of dead based on "knowledge and control over all atoms and molecules of the world". The second method described by Fedorov is genetic-hereditary. The revival could be done successively in the ancestral line: sons and daughters restore their fathers and mothers, they in turn restore their parents and so on. This means restoring the ancestors using the hereditary information that they passed on to their children. Using this genetic method it is only possible to create a genetic twin of the dead person. It is necessary to give back the revived person his old mind, his personality. Fedorov speculates about the idea of "radial images" that may contain the personalities of the people and survive after death. Nevertheless, Fedorov noted that even if a soul is destroyed after death, Man will learn to restore it whole by mastering the forces of decay and fragmentation.[90]
In his 1994 book The Physics of Immortality, American physicist Frank J. Tipler, an expert on the general theory of relativity, presented his Omega Point Theory which outlines how a resurrection of the dead could take place at the end of the cosmos. He posits that humans will evolve into robots which will turn the entire cosmos into a supercomputer which will, shortly before the Big Crunch, perform the resurrection within its cyberspace, reconstructing formerly dead humans (from information captured by the supercomputer from the past light cone of the cosmos) as avatars within its metaverse.[91]
David Deutsch, British physicist and pioneer in the field of quantum computing, formerly agreed with Tipler's Omega Point cosmology and the idea of resurrecting deceased people with the help of quantum computers[92] but he is critical of Tipler's theological views.
Italian physicist and computer scientist Giulio Prisco presented the idea of "quantum archaeology", "reconstructing the life, thoughts, memories, and feelings of any person in the past, up to any desired level of detail, and thus resurrecting the original person via 'copying to the future'".[93]
In their science fiction novel The Light of Other Days, Sir Arthur Clarke and Stephen Baxter imagine a future civilization resurrecting the dead of past ages by reaching into the past, through micro wormholes and with nanorobots, to download full snapshots of brain states and memories.[94]
In religions[edit]
Both the Church of Perpetual Life and the Terasem Movement consider themselves transreligions and advocate for the use of technology to indefinitely extend the human lifespan.[95]