Death & Immortality

This is a relatively new area of my research, so there are fewer papers and publications to share. However, much of my thinking in this area has to do with the nature of immortality and the continuity of the self in a resurrected or virtual immortal life.

Articles / Chapters

Do Digital Immortals Dream of Offline Afterlives?

SecondDeath: Experiences of Death Across Technologies, edited by Alger San Pinillos, Vincent Costa, & Jordi Vallverdú, pp. 45-60. Dordrecht: Springer (2025).

The aim of this paper is to argue that it is not possible for a person to live an indefinitely long life as a digital immortal. To argue for this, I show that there is an insurmountable problem from the digital immortal’s perspective. If the digital immortal is an exact replica of a mortal, then the entirety of the digital mind will be directed toward offline content, e.g., from big events like birthday parties, weddings, and the birth of one’s children to the more mundane such as what the embodied mortal had for breakfast on 22 June 1987. The possibility of digital immortals living a person’s life indefinitely means that the digital immortal is able to conceive of and understand the content of the mortal’s embodied mind. To conceive of and to understand the content of a mortal’s embodied mind the digital immortal must know what it is like to be an embodied mortal. However, the digital immortal cannot conceive of what it is like to be an embodied mortal because the experience would be so transformative that it would be irrational to consider it (cf. Paul, Transformative Experience, 2014) and because it would have to conceive of its own offline afterlife, which is something well beyond its capacity. Just as we cannot conceive what it’s like to be immortal because of its highly transformative experience (cf. (Ulatowski, 2019), digital immortals would be similarly perplexed by an offline afterlife. Our digital döppelganger would have no way of knowing what meaty embodied lives are like. The pollyannaish view of living forever as a digital döppelganger gives rise to the realisation that our functionally equivalent digital replica would be filled by memories, experiences, and other content of which it cannot possibly conceive.

What Is It Like To Be Immortal?

Diametros 16(62), pp. 65-77 (2019).

The idea of an eternal and immortal life like the one we lead now seems quite appealing because (i) it will be sufficiently like our own earth-bound life and (ii) we will have the same kinds of desires we have now to want to live an eternal life. This paper will challenge the view that we have a conception of what the conscious experience of an immortal is like, regardless of whether we might want to live it. Given that for us to conceive of an immortal life we must project onto it our own view of what it is like to live our own life and given that an immortal life may not be anything like the life we live, we cannot conceive of what it is like to be immortal.