Immortality transformed: mind cloning, transhumanism and the quest for digital immortality

Abstract

This article explores the transhumanist effort to achieve digital immortality through the technology of mind cloning. Drawing upon the writings of Martine Rothblatt, one of the leading proponents of the Transhumanist Movement in the United States, it asks: how is this effort both similar to and different from other attempts our species has made to achieve ‘symbolic immortality’? Can Lifton and Olson’s concept of symbolic immortality adequately account for the transhumanist attempt to live forever in digital form? Or, is this effort predicated upon very different ontologies and conceptions of what it means to be human? By placing the transhumanist quest for digital immortality within a comparative perspective, this article hopes to enrich our understanding of the transhumanist project and develop a better sense for how it is reproducing and reconfiguring the way human beings deal with enduring existential dilemmas. The article concludes by considering how the transhumanist attempt to achieve digital immortality articulates with Bauman’s discussion of modern and postmodern ‘life strategies’ for ameliorating death anxiety. Whereas Bauman proposed that modern strategies involve ‘deconstructing mortality’, and postmodern strategies involve ‘deconstructing immortality’, I argue that the transhumanist strategy is better conceptualised as a quasi-modern attempt to reconstruct immortality through technological means.