Here’s John Gray talking about his book The Immortalization Commission: The Strange Quest to Cheat Death.

[wpaudio url="http://podcasts.tvo.org/bi/audio/012220_48k.mp3" text = "John Gray at the Toronto Book Festival"]

He says something really interesting about three quarters of the way through. He’s talking about a group of intellectuals in the early  part of the soviet period called the ‘god builders’. These people looked to early christianity as a model of collective living and emphasised the spiritual elements in Marxism. Importantly for Gray, they focused on elevating science as a means of transcending death. The idea is that, through science, humans would become some kind of pure mental energy after their bodies turned to dust  (One of the god builders was an early follower of cryonic preservation) and that the goal of the revolution should be the developement of the human spirit toward the ‘All Spirit’. The God-builders were, according to Gray, a cult whose ideas eventually led t0 the soviet atrocities.

He then makes the point that the God-builders are a kind of precurser to the ideas of Ray Kurzveil who argues that ultimately we will escape death by uploading our brains to the internet and living for internity as virtual surfers. According to this view, long before our bodies burn out, we’ll have finished acquiring those nanobots and biobots which will completely remove the distinction between the real and the virtual.

[There's also an erie echo of the God-builders in Jim Gillian who I wrote about a few months ago]