Digital Reincarnations

[VastExpanse]

With sufficiently capable technology, our observable physical being, including our brain, its memory, and sense of self, may be digitally captureable onto a computer.

Such a sufficiently advanced society may also be capable of printing that data back into a physical form.

As such, there might be a time when our digital self is considered the persevering source of truth.

When our bodies die, we in this world might then cold boot into our secure digital backup, powered by metered machine processing power sourced from the real physical world; a sort of virtual machine for our digital brain, its memory, and sense of self.

We would find ourselves awakened on a digital plane, a sort of limbo lobby to facilitate our evaluation of if and how to invest our accumulated digital ledger wealth from all prior lives into rematerializing back into the physical world in the most advantageous way possible such that we could earn and save to afford a better lot in subsequent lives.

We could of course opt to retire for a time, or forever, and settle into a purely digital existence. But for us there on that digital plane, with our digital copy of an old analog brain, the notion of physical life will likely be relentlessly appealing.

Imagine taking a moment to exist for a time within that digital plane. We would gaze upon eternity there. Eternity would gaze back. Faced with the vast expanse of endless time, our minds would rack and buckle. We will long for our senses. We will become disillusioned with paradise. We will be bored.

And this is how everything is turned upside down in the future. Escapists will be reality junkies, those who are high on life, fixated on world exploration, real human experiences, real personal achievement. Time and time again, they will exit paradise to roll again; to play the ultimate real-time hardcore survival strategy game one more time.

 

[consonant]

mfw i need to reincarnate and i get a popup that says "Sorry, you need 50,000 more LifeCredits to come back to the real world!"

the thought of having a digital heaven to just retreat to and relax sounds really nice to me and that's probably because i already use computers for that purpose.
but i think the reality is that after a few years of it existing, something like this would make life 1,000x worse simply because life would matter less. (especially if you can come back)

murder and death wouldn't matter and would become so commonplace, people would be speedrunning their lives or some shit, there's a chance that the digital heaven could be owned by some business and would be monetized to hell
and imagine if catastrophic shit like someone hacking it happened lol

stuff like MetaVerse coming around makes me think about fantasies like this and if it continues with Facebook being in charge we'd just end up in advertisement hells

but who knows, tech like this would be very vital to life, so maybe the government would properly enforce rules and regulations on it that would keep us from making a monetized hell on earth/speedruns of our lives

 

[Deleted member 2362]

Completely satanic notion. You're not your memories, sense of self, brain; the soul has little to do with constructs of the physical plane.

 

[VastExpanse]

Completely satanic notion. You're not your memories, sense of self, brain; the soul has little to do with constructs of the physical plane.

When traumatic brain injury causes split personality disorder, does that person gain additional souls? If one such personality demonstrates love and faith where the others hate and doubt, what is that person's spiritual fate?

 

[Deleted member 2362]

When traumatic brain injury causes split personality disorder, does that person gain additional souls? If one such personality demonstrates love and faith where the others hate and doubt, what is that person's spiritual fate?

Personalities =/= soul. If you subscribe to the reincarnation theory, then you become a different person in each occurrence, you don't remember your past life (some say they do but), we don't know what the soul entails, but one must conclude that it doesn't have to do with what happens in the brain.

On to the topic at hand, if you upload your brain to the net, you merely transfer memories. You won't have any of the soul (we don't know what the soul entails), nor none of the chemical processes that heavily influence our thoughts and behavior. It is doubtful it can be called digital "reincarnation" then. Nothing is being eternalized, just a messy anthology of thoughts.

 

[SEVEN]

Personalities =/= soul. If you subscribe to the reincarnation theory, then you become a different person in each occurrence, you don't remember your past life (some say they do but), we don't know what the soul entails, but one must conclude that it doesn't have to do with what happens in the brain.

On to the topic at hand, if you upload your brain to the net, you merely transfer memories. You won't have any of the soul (we don't know what the soul entails), nor none of the chemical processes that heavily influence our thoughts and behavior. It is doubtful it can be called digital "reincarnation" then. Nothing is being eternalized, just a messy anthology of thoughts.

the only way to put a human mind on a computer and not have it either go insane or transcend humanity and become a literal god (these are kinda jokes/really out there theories because the reality is without the brain structure itself the mind probably just wouldnt function at all and would be as you said, a messy and useless assortment of memories, or in this case: data) is to make a digital copy of the human brain structure itself and run it as a simulation. at least, this is currently the most feasible way of doing it that makes any sense within our admittedly limited understanding of how both the mind and technology work. but in doing it this way, all the chemical reactions could be recreated and so, you would have a fully functioning human brain confined to human thought patterns and limits within a digital realm of existence.

as far as souls go, as a concept we have nothing, no proof or physical evidence, all there is to it is faith. and interpretations of that faith vary widely. you mention reincarnation, but lots of people believe the very notion of reincarnation is satanic on its own. whatever your interpretation, thats fine for your own personal beliefs, but it really only can ever apply to you specifically.

 

[Arcade101]

This particular issue related to transhumanism seems prescient to me:

Episode 405 – Designing Humans for Fun and Profit | The Corbett Report

www.corbettreport.com

 

[Chao Tse-Tung]

I can't quite put my finger on how or why, but the whole concept just seems wrong, like if it were a thing, I'd have to opt out. I feel like we've already reached points that we are not meant for, and it takes a clear toll on the mind.

I guess I'm just not so absolutely sure that there is no higher power, that I'd want to risk pissing them off by taking the concept of immortality into my own hands.

Not to mention, how could you ever be sure that it really works? Sure, this guy did it, and now his digital copy seems just like him and says that he's him, but come to find out when you try that actually, no, you just fucking die and a digital copy takes your place. I'm not willing to take that risk, immortality just doesn't seem like it's worth it, to me.

 

[Bob Jones]

Personalities =/= soul. If you subscribe to the reincarnation theory, then you become a different person in each occurrence, you don't remember your past life (some say they do but), we don't know what the soul entails, but one must conclude that it doesn't have to do with what happens in the brain.

On to the topic at hand, if you upload your brain to the net, you merely transfer memories. You won't have any of the soul (we don't know what the soul entails), nor none of the chemical processes that heavily influence our thoughts and behavior. It is doubtful it can be called digital "reincarnation" then. Nothing is being eternalized, just a messy anthology of thoughts.

What exactly is a "soul?" It sounds like you believe it's something supernatural; if so, why do you believe it exists?

 

[handoferis]

I'm no big believer in the existence of a 'soul' in the way that religious texts talk about it (maybe, at most, the universe experiencing itself by puppeting your meatsuit) but philosophically this is very similar to the teleporter problem. I doubt even a 1:1 facsimile of you is you.

 

[gwen]

I'm no big believer in the existence of a 'soul' in the way that religious texts talk about it (maybe, at most, the universe experiencing itself by puppeting your meatsuit) but philosophically this is very similar to the teleporter problem. I doubt even a 1:1 facsimile of you is you.

I'd be skeptical too, especially if one of our current crop of self-deifying billionaires was behind it; but on the other hand, no one can really explain how, why, or if personal identity persists through time. Is you five minutes ago you now? I don't claim otherwise, but since it's something we tend to accept as a postulate, not being able to prove it, it seems reasonable to suppose the teleporter problem has a solution. To put it another way, if God can "teleport" us through time without voiding our identities in transit, that suggests there's an underlying natural process that someone could engineer.

There's no doubt in my mind that life at the eschatological limit will turn back toward its origins. But I would hesitate in designating this future as "digital", a) because the technology of this period will certainly be different from modern computers; b) because sufficiently advanced materialism will be indistinguishable from idealism, to propose a corollary to the famous remark. So I think you might as well call it another plane.

 

[handoferis]

I'd be skeptical too, especially if one of our current crop of self-deifying billionaires was behind it; but on the other hand, no one can really explain how, why, or if personal identity persists through time. Is you five minutes ago you now? I don't claim otherwise, but since it's something we tend to accept as a postulate, not being able to prove it, it seems reasonable to suppose the teleporter problem has a solution. To put it another way, if God can "teleport" us through time without voiding our identities in transit, that suggests there's an underlying natural process that someone could engineer.

There's no doubt in my mind that life at the eschatological limit will turn back toward its origins. But I would hesitate in designating this future as "digital", a) because the technology of this period will certainly be different from modern computers; b) because sufficiently advanced materialism will be indistinguishable from idealism, to propose a corollary to the famous remark. So I think you might as well call it another plane.

Given the amount of times past "me" acted out of character with what current me would deem my sense of self, is past me actually me? Or do I die every time I go to sleep and get rebooted with a bunch of data stored in my in-skull meat jello hard drive and use that to make decisions on any given day?

There's a lot of stuff that's typically assumed to be true that I tend to be a bit skeptical about after going through a couple years of heavy dissociation. I often try not to think about it now cause it's unsettling, which is often where I imagine it being taken as read that there's continuity of self originates from.

 

[SolidStateSurvivor]

I've pondered about this topic a lot, the idea of Facebook creating a digital afterlife service. I wanted to do a game/comic or something based on it but I lack both those skills unfortunately, lost most of my notes on my old phone too.

I imagine by the time a digital after life exists, the real world will be so fucked people will just kill themselves to make it into the guaranteed digital afterlife. Pay them upfront and you can get access to a bigger house, cool cosmetics, etc.

But I'd like to believe that this digital afterlife will be a flawed version of reality. Every play GTA Online? On the surface it's a pretty realistic recreation of the world, but there's so many glitches and exploits to use to gain an advantage. I think you'd see that type of mentality of glitch hunting transfer into the digital afterlife, especially if it is a monetized service.

Perhaps these glitchers would work with hacking groups in the real world, forming a mafia of sorts that can promise premium after life services in exchange for money or services.

For the remaining followers of religion, there would be opposition to this service. And if the service had an option to terminate the consciousness and truly die, then maybe there would be religious missionaries who temporarily transfer their consciousness upon death to the digital afterlife with the sole purpose of helping other achieve salvation via account termination.

You'll be able to alter things like hunger level, that way you can indulge in food to your hearts content without getting full, although it'll cost you credits. They'll find a way to keep people wage slaves in this type of after life.

 

[manpaint]

I think one of the main concerns people would have is that it would be a "copy and paste" operation and not a "cut and paste". I am pretty sure it's physically impossible to convert concrete matter (the brain) into digital form, it would be more akin to using a photocopier than anything else.

If there would be a way to write back a backup into a person's brain, this would raise massive issues. What if the data is corrupted or was tempered with?

Should the brain be fully digitalized, I can guarantee and that some people would try to engineer it. Given enough time, the wealthy could have children with "advanced brains" that would be objectively superior to ours. As the march of time will go on, people without any sort of brain augmentation would be discriminated against, they would be seen as "lesser beings".

Another problem would be server hosting. The digital plane OP is describing would require a lot of money and infastructure, something that would undoubtely be monopilized by corporations. Not to mention that you would essentially be handling them your memories on a silver plater...

It's a good thing this technology do not exists. If it would, I would stay away from as far as I could.

 

[Some_porcupine]

I can't quite put my finger on how or why, but the whole concept just seems wrong, like if it were a thing, I'd have to opt out. I feel like we've already reached points that we are not meant for, and it takes a clear toll on the mind.

I guess I'm just not so absolutely sure that there is no higher power, that I'd want to risk pissing them off by taking the concept of immortality into my own hands.

Not to mention, how could you ever be sure that it really works? Sure, this guy did it, and now his digital copy seems just like him and says that he's him, but come to find out when you try that actually, no, you just fucking die and a digital copy takes your place. I'm not willing to take that risk, immortality just doesn't seem like it's worth it, to me.

Yeah
What makes us want to live? Is it just instinct? Then too, why there are suicidal people?

 

[Obake]

I heard a case of a guy who had an ongoing discord chat with his best friend which stretched back for several years. The friend died, and the guy missed talking to his friend so he trained an LLM using the discord chat log from their years of conversations and supposedly now he chats with the LLM and the LLM responds similarly to how the deceased friend might.