Digital immortality

Digital immortality (or "virtual immortality")[1] is the hypothetical concept of storing (or cloning) a person's personality in digital substrate, i.e., a computer, robot or cyberspace[2] (mind uploading). The result might look like an avatar behaving, reacting, and thinking like a person on the basis of that person's digital archive.[3][4][5][6] After the death of the individual, this avatar could remain static or continue to learn and self-improve autonomously (possibly becoming seed AI).

A considerable portion of transhumanists and singularitarians place great hope into the belief that they may eventually become immortal[7] by creating one or many non-biological functional copies of their brains, thereby leaving their "biological shell". These copies may then "live eternally" in a version of digital "heaven" or paradise.[8][9]

  1. ^ Farnell, Ross (2000). "Attempting Immortality: AI, A-Life, and the Posthuman in Greg Egan's "Permutation City"". Science Fiction Studies. 27 (1): 69–91. JSTOR 4240849.
  2. ^ Graziano, Michael S. A. (2019). Rethinking consciousness: a scientific theory of subjective experience. New York: W.W. Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-65261-1. OCLC 1084330876.
  3. ^ Parkin, Simon (23 January 2015). "Back-up brains: The era of digital immortality". BBC. Retrieved 7 June 2015.
  4. ^ Rothblatt, Martine (2014). Virtually Human: The Promiseand the Perilof Digital Immortality. St. Martin's Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4915-3291-1.
  5. ^ Sofka, Carla (February 2012). Dying, Death, and Grief in an Online Universe: For Counselors and Educators. Springer. ISBN 978-0-8261-0732-9.
  6. ^ DeGroot, Doug (5 November 2003). "VideoDIMs as a framework for Digital Immortality Applications". Intelligent Virtual Agents: 4th International Workshop, IVA 2003, Kloster Irsee, Germany, September 15-17, 2003, Proceedings (Lecture Notes in ... / Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence). Springer. ISBN 978-3-540-20003-1. Retrieved 7 June 2015.
  7. ^ Cohan, Peter (20 June 2013). "Google's Engineering Director: 32 Years To Digital Immortality". Forbes. Retrieved 7 June 2015.
  8. ^ Lewis, Tanya (17 June 2013). "The Singularity Is Near: Mind Uploading by 2045?". livescience.com. Retrieved 7 June 2015.
  9. ^ Strickland, Jonathan (12 April 2011). "How Digital Immortality Works". howstuffworks.com. Retrieved 7 June 2015.