In December, 2022, Oliver Misraje published this article in Zine, “The Internet is a Graveyard”. Misraje talks about four case studies in which ghosts have infiltrated the online realm – from AI "reviving" lost loved ones, to immortal memorialization on the internet, the freelance writer reveals the less-than-lively aspects of our generated world. As a philosophy fanatic, the thing that spoke out most to me in this article was Misraje’s final case study, labelled “Future Ghosts”.
Briefly, in the history of philosophy there has been endless back and forth regarding the immortality of the human soul or mind. Essentially, whether or not we exist after we die. And the implications of this reach all the way back to Plato, who claimed that death should be the philosopher’s ultimate goal, so we can more or less finally free our minds from the physical world and become omnipotent/transcendent beings.
But as someone who does consider life a wholly unique and miraculous experience, this cheap acceptance of death does not come easy, and I feel a need to believe that there is something more to the mortal world that we are missing. I think a lot of people would agree with me there.
Misraje explains, in the fourth case study of the article, an old event in 1994 where “techno-pagans” reframed the internet as more than a realm for enhanced globalization and human connection – where the internet becomes a hub for a kind of “magical evocation”. Misraje also connects this to the more recent paper by Melanie Swan, in which she coins the term “cloudminds”: a form of transhumanism (the idea that humans can evolve beyond our bodies and minds), where we have some processing power that is entirely virtual (think crypto-currency, but instead of having monetary value it makes decisions for us). We would be able to upload our minds (our experiences, memories, decisions) to an online database where our own individual knowledge and histories could connect and collectively be used in a kind of uni-mind (credit to Marvel), which could be used to solve much more difficult, large-scale human problems. Apart from completely eradicating the importance of human engineers, though, what does this mean for the rest of us? What might that tell us about life and death?
I’d love to take this in a non-conventional direction, so bear with me. Let’s pretend that the afterlife does not matter, whatsoever. It doesn’t exist, it doesn’t get experienced, it doesn’t affect anyone living or anyone dead. Imagine it as a junk drawer, or a trash bin: out of sight, out of mind. Now, we introduce this cloudmind: instead of our knowledge being carried with us into the trash, we keep a record of all of it, every experience and memory and thought. Everything except our physical bodies and brains would remain in our mortal world, where it could forever be interacted with and investigated. The living can interact with every intangible quality of the dead. Is this what it looks like to achieve immortality?
Short answer: No. Even if we could capture every essence of one person on some sort of virtual hard drive, if we could upload it into a computer so we could “ChatGPT” it, or if we could plug it into some sort of rain-proof, life-sized sex doll, this is not immortality. The essence (for lack of better term) of this being would be trapped in this state of simultaneous existence and non-existence, where it no longer feels or senses the way a human does, it doesn’t interact with its environment or manipulate the objects in its life the way a human does. Regardless of if it ever gains its own consciousness, it’s the same thing as taking a human mind and soul and welding it to a rock instead of a body – think of “Everything, Everywhere, All At Once”.
So, yes, Plato might be proud – we found a way to potentially transcend, to tether a part of human consciousness to an immortal virtual world. But if our consciousness is primarily connected to our human experiences, perceptions, and memories, would you want to be rock? A computer? A ChatGPT?
