Re-Engineering Re-Incarnation, with Michael La Torra

My late lamented friend Mike LaTorra left us a few days ago. Mike was a brave explorer of the land where technology meets spirituality. Read about him in Chapter 5 of my “Tales of the Turing Church” (2020).

I first met Mike in person in London and Oxford in 2004. We participated in the first in-person board meeting of the World Transhumanist Association (now Humanity+), organized by the late lamented Peter Houghton.

See also this short video with highlights from the meeting.

We were also co-founders and board members of the related Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET). In 2020 Mike was accused of ideological noncompliance, and strongly pressured to resign.

I must say that some of Mike’s positions seemed excessive to me as well, but I interpreted this as a perfectly understandable reaction to other excesses that were, and continue to be, culturally fashionable.

Reviewing old exchanges with Mike I see that I wanted to resign in protest immediately with a strong public letter, but then I said “I will not resign immediately, it will be fun if […] tries to kick me out.” However, another incident in 2021 was too much and I resigned as well.

After the London and Oxford meetings I met Mike again several times in the 2010s in Utah, at the annual conferences of the Mormon Transhumanist Association (MTA).

Then we co-organized a conference called India Awakens, the main promoter of which was Nupur Munshi. The Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture (RMIC) in Kolkata accepted to host the conference in February 2017. Unfortunately we weren’t able to raise the money needed to bring all speakers to Kolkata. Instead, we hosted online conversations with the speakers in a light, minimalist Virtual Reality (VR) space, and published the video proceedings of the online-only conference. The conference took place in a reduced format in February 2018: I gave a talk titled “Physics and the Indian Spiritual Tradition” (video, slides, transcript published in the Bulletin of the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture) at RMIC. The RMIC and MTA generously sponsored the event.

Mike’s talk at India Awakens (video, slides) was titled “Re-Engineering Re-Incarnation.” I’m republishing the audio in the hope that today’s technology generates a better transcript (which is the case indeed) and also, of course, as a tribute to Mike.

In this 2014 picture of Mike in Utah we see both the props of everyday reality and the far magic majesty of the mountains. Mike, who believed this life in everyday reality is not all there is, is in the mountains now. I’ll look for him in the mountains when my time comes.