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Letters
Letters
Techno(non)immortalization • The Abyss ‘Twixt Mythos & Logos • Abortion and Blind Spots • On Rorty • Freedom For Capitalists! • Hegel Goes West • Freedom From Hegel! • Freedom From Freedom! • The Truth About Post-Truth • Happiness and Responsibility!
Techno(non)immortalization
Dear Editor: I enjoyed the Tallis in Wonderland article on ‘Technoimmortalization’ in Issue 128. The good professor wrote excellent good sense in his usual elegant style. However, was the subject really worthy of Professor Tallis’s detailed critique? He’s considering the idea that one day techniques might be available for the essential personal information in my brain to be uploaded onto a computer or something similar. But when I’m dead, I’ll still be dead, won’t I? The fact that some computer or something somewhere thinks it’s me wouldn’t alter that fact, would it?
I first encountered this problem over fifty years ago while watching Star Trek. Captain Kirk would be beamed up; and I thought, Captain Kirk on the planet he needed to be beamed up from has just died, and can have no experience of the post-beaming life of the new copy of Kirk, with his reconstituted body and reconstituted memories.
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