How may expertise ship immortality? Contemplate the tüktüïe, a carved wood object, used among the many Sakha individuals of north-eastern Siberia, and believed to host the spirits of deceased family members following a ritual switch on the time of demise. These objects don’t start to stroll and speak after the spirit strikes into them, nor might they ever be anticipated to go the Turing check. But they’re handled in each means as animate entities, and as perpetuating the identification of the relation lodged in them.
In reality, units for preserving private identification past demise develop into fairly widespread internationally’s cultures, and infrequently extraordinarily low-tech. But whereas many cultures share with the Sakha the idea that identification could be transferred into one other object, not one of the non-Western examples we all know of declare that the article harbours the consciousness of the deceased particular person – that the article turns into the brand new node from which the particular person seems out on and experiences the world.
All such examples is perhaps held, by sceptical outsiders, to be solely symbolic of the previous particular person, not equivalent with them; they assist hold the particular person near the ideas of those that see the souvenir, however don’t facilitate that very same particular person’s personal enduring ideas. So they may not be stated to supply the form of immortality Woody Allen was eager for when he wrote: “I don’t need to reside on within the hearts of my countrymen; I need to reside on in my condominium.”
Right here, probably unconsciously, Allen dedicated himself to a philosophy of non-public identification that was most famously expressed by John Locke in his “Essay Regarding Human Understanding” of 1690: “Consciousness all the time accompanies considering, and ’tis that, that makes each one to be, what he calls self.” No acutely aware thought, in different phrases, means no enduring selfhood. Or, conversely, no immortality with out the survival of consciousness.
The Silicon Valley immortalists, too, are Lockeans to an individual. They don’t need to be remembered; they need to be remembering. They’re so sure that the matter of what an individual is is so totally settled that we are able to merely transfer on to different theoretical questions that confront us in our quest for immortality. Amongst these is what philosophers of thoughts name “substrate neutrality”: can our consciousness be transferred from an natural substrate of neurons to a silicon substrate of chips, and even, in precept, to a substrate of suitably organized toilet-paper rolls and rubber bands? In that case, consciousness is substrate-neutral.
The dedication to substrate-neutrality is sort of as broadly accepted as Lockean private identification, however not so broadly as merely to be assumed true. An individual, on this reigning metaphysics of Silicon Valley, is a particular form of substrate-neutral code that has the peculiar property of being conscious of its personal existence. Know-how, they imagine, can allow us to govern that code, to enhance on it, and maybe when the time comes, to switch it out of a failing mortal coil and right into a extra strong vessel. Their concept of what an individual is, and of what immortality is perhaps, is totally formed and restricted by the philosophy of liberal individualism: a chance to maintain on “residing one’s finest life”, and if doable, of doing so in a single’s personal condominium.
[Further reading: How to live forever]
Aleks Krotoski’s fascinating new guide penetrates deep into the guts of the Silicon Valley inflection of this now-centuries-old philosophy. It exhibits the cultural practices motivated by that philosophy to be actually no much less unusual than the usage of a tüktüïe for housing a useless relative’s soul. Krotoski’s vignettes and character sketches quantity to an indication of the thinker Bruno Latour’s declare that “now we have by no means been trendy”. Removed from it, in reality: the personalities, firms and devices which can be imagined to be on the vanguard of modernity typically develop into formed by profoundly irrational beliefs, and pushed by fantasies little totally different from what we’d as soon as have heard from a medieval alchemist seeking the elixir of youth.
Krotoski isn’t that all for cross-substrate consciousness switch, the place our natural embodiment is traded out wholesale for a extra sturdy, but completely alien, materials kind. In need of that, there’s a huge spectrum of hybrid applied sciences – implants, prostheses and apps – which can be reworking us into cyborgs at a quickening tempo: not fairly natural, and never fairly silicon, however a little bit of each. And all of those new applied sciences operate because the central nodes inside nice swirls of knowledge, which in flip feed the brand new ideology of what’s rightly known as “the quantified self”. In a distinctly Twenty first-century perversion of the Socratic crucial to “know thyself”, Silicon Valley habitually interprets this commandment not, as Socrates did, as the decision to organize for demise, and even to recognise that life itself has all the time been a form of sickness. Relatively, as we speak self-knowledge is the type of factor you possibly can arrive at by preserving an in depth watch in your blood-sugar fluctuations all through the day, or through the use of a sleep app to watch your loud night breathing.
To this extent, the metaphysics of Silicon Valley may finest be regarded as the elevation of wellness to one thing like a transcendental precept. Socrates thought demise itself was a remedy for the illness of life; the brand new immortalists arrange the eradication of demise as the final word function of all these actions pursued underneath the banner of “life-maxxing”. On this means, having what as soon as would have been conceived merely as “good well being” – residing a great life for simply so long as nature permits, and not – is now subordinated to the metaphysics of immortality. Intermittent fasting, antioxidant smoothies, olive oil from a shot glass: all of this turns into the ritual dimension of a brand new church of everlasting life.
Krotoski’s guide is at its finest when it rises above the wellness rituals themselves and appears squarely on the metaphysics that animates them: the conviction that the human is decomposable into variables that computation and chemistry can optimise. The creator’s reporting round that conviction – its origins in grief and concern, its transmutation right into a public liturgy of confidence – is completely compelling.
Krotoski’s remedy of Bryan Johnson, the enterprise capitalist and tech entrepreneur – and immortalist par excellence – who has been identified to have interaction in contests along with his personal teenage son to see whose nocturnal-erection monitor was giving greater numbers, captures the quasi-religious tone of the scene: sermons, merch, an viewers moved by a promise that computational mastery and self-tracking could make demise elective, or at the least deferrable. Krotoski’s juxtaposition of this conceit with the oldest literary counsel now we have – Gilgamesh’s lesson that mortality is what constitutes life, and that human which means is borne not by self-perpetuation however by works and by love – provides the guide the crucial construction and weight it wants: not as an apologia, however a philosophical check of a brand new creed on the cusp of deifying its personal innovations.
The guide’s most important declare is that “immortalism” will not be primarily a matter of eccentric biohacking however of political theology. Essentially the most influential actors should not complement peddlers however techno-fundamentalists with the means and can to rework governance round their pursuits. In the long run, the guide’s indictment will not be that longevity analysis is fraudulent, however that the motion’s metaphysics licenses an upside-down distribution of information and mortal threat: those that can afford to be early adopters get to set the phrases by privately trialling interventions, whereas public establishments are nudged to ratify a imaginative and prescient through which the extension of time turns into a standing object.
What extra good fruits of the historical past of Lockean liberalism might there be than to seek out the self itself remodeled into a standing object one may purchase for oneself – or, higher, a subscription that one may resolve to increase. The historical past of metaphysics and the historical past of political philosophy converge right here with dazzling symmetry: within the Twenty first century, it’s consciousness itself that continues to be the good no-man’s land for tech firms to beat, and for us to hunt to win again, both individually, by paying for it (Silicon Valley’s most well-liked mode), or collectively, by preventing for it.
The Immortalists: The Dying of Dying and the Race for Everlasting Life
Aleks Krotoski
Bodley Head, 320pp, £22
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[Further reading: Jon Fosse’s war on convention]