Abstract

Immortality can be understood in many ways. The remembrance of somebody by the bereaved
might be said to be one kind of eternal life. Fame might be another. Yet, none of these ways
fulfills the original desire for continuation of personality and consciousness. On the
consciousness level there are technically enabled possibilities of immortality as well. It might be
possible to telepathically network consciousness between a number of individuals. Many
individuals thus creating a pool of consciousness. When one of the individuals dies the
experiences of that individual will live on in the collective. Similarly, it may be possible to
upload personality to computers and network the uploaded personalities. For these kinds of
scenarios the question becomes whether the individual who wants to be immortal will be
drowned out by being only one small drop in a sea of collective consciousness. Ontological
question abound. What if personalities are uploaded to computers, but not networked. Would that
be human life as we know it and want it? What about the original self being left over in the
mortal coil? What if you make successive uploads? Copies of the self would be made, but
the you you would presumably remain corporally bound. Cloning may be another way to retain
identicality, whilst still losing continuity of the self. Would not the ultimate consequence of our
mastery of nature and technology mean that each individual would retire into an own virtual
world – meaning that ‘Every Man is an island’?

Keywords
Virtual World Collective Consciousness Eternal Life Physical Clock Endless
Number
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process
is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm
improves.
URL AS SOURCE : https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-19093-8_17