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Digital Afterlives

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The Palgrave Handbook of the Afterlife

Part of the book series: Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion ((PFPR))

Abstract

Digitalists base their thoughts about reality on concepts taken from the sciences of information and computation. For digitalists, these sciences are prior to the physical sciences. Digitalists emphatically reject substance metaphysics. They are neither materialists nor idealists nor dualists. They have their own novel definitions of bodies, minds, lives, and souls. They talk about digital universes running on digital gods, and they regard nature as a recursively self-improving system of computations. They endorse digitized theories of resurrection and reincarnation. But they also argue for deeper and more mathematical approaches to life after death. All these digital ideas are naturalistic. They are consistent with our best sciences

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Digitalism is inspired by the classical digitalists, namely, Ed Fredkin, Hans Moravec, Frank Tipler, and Ray Kurzweil.

  2. 2.

    The inverse of uploading is promotion (Moravec, 1988: 152–3; Bostrom, 2003: 254). While uploading transfers a person from hardware to software, promotion transfers a person from software to hardware. The philosophical issues are the same.

  3. 3.

    Scanning in discussions of uploading is destructive; this is not the same as scanning in Parfit’s “branch-line” teleportation example (1985: 199–201).

  4. 4.

    The classical digitalists often discuss persistence (Moravec, 1988: 116–20; Tipler, 1995: 227–40; Kurzweil, 2005: 383–6). Their discussions of persistence are most compatible with four-dimensionalism (see Steinhart, 2014: ch. 2).

  5. 5.

    One estimate of the complexity of the body comes from Sagan (1995: 987). He says the human body contains about 1014 cells; but each cell encodes about 1012 bits of information; hence the body contains about 1026 bits. Another estimate comes from quantum mechanics. Moravec (2000: 166) uses quantum mechanical principles to show that any body contains at most about 1045 bits.

  6. 6.

    The classical digitalists all reject mind-body dualism. Moravec says “mind is entirely the consequence of interacting matter” (1988: 119; 2000: 121–4). Tipler rejects dualism: “a human being is a purely physical object, a biochemical machine completely and exhaustively described by the known laws of physics” (1995: 1). Kurzweil rejects dualism (1999: 55–65; Kurzweil, 2002: 191–4). He says that consciousness “does not require a world outside the physical world we experience” (2002: 214).

  7. 7.

    Leibniz identifies perfection with quantity of essence (Leibniz, 1697; Rutherford, 1995: 23). But the quantity of essence of some thing is its harmony, which is proportional to order and variety (Rutherford, 1995: 13, 35). Hence perfection is proportional to both variety and order (Monadology, sec 58; Rescher, 1979: 28–31). Thus the best universe-plan (the best cabinet) maximizes both variety and order (Principles of Nature and Grace, sec. 10; Discourse on Metaphysics, secs. 5–6).

  8. 8.

    For example, suppose a cabinet contains biographies A and B. Their improved versions are A1, A2, B1, and B2. But these improvements are designed together to ensure mutual compossibility. Hence there are eight improved cabinets {A1, B}, {A2, B}, {A1, B1}, {A2, B1}, {A1, B2}, {A2, B2}, {A, B1}, {A, B2}.

  9. 9.

    Hartshorne argues that an unsurpassable person is as absurd as an unsurpassble number (1965: 27; 1984: 7). Rather than depicting God as an unsurpassable person, he depicts God as an unsurpassable series of self-surpassing persons (1948: 20). Digitalists depict God as an unsurpassable hierarchy of self-surpassing computers.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, William Paterson University, Wayne, NJ, USA

    Eric Steinhart

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  1. Eric Steinhart
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Correspondence to Eric Steinhart .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Philosophy, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom

    Yujin Nagasawa

  2. University of Gothenburg , Göteborg, Sweden

    Benjamin Matheson

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Steinhart, E. (2017). Digital Afterlives. In: Nagasawa, Y., Matheson, B. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the Afterlife. Palgrave Frontiers in Philosophy of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48609-7_13

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