Abstract
Recent advances in technology have brought humanity to a unique point in history where theodicy is no more just a religious matter but also a matter of science and technology. Ray Kurzweil offers a non-religious Singularity theodicy of this-worldly subjective immortality (the survival of the soul after the dissolution of the body) with three strategies: the freezing strategy in cryonics, the cloning strategy in genetics, and the transference strategy in information technology. I argue that three challenges need to be met for the Singularity theodicy to be successful. The first challenge is related to the technological plausibility of human brain scanning and whether one can scan unconsciousness without making it into something other than unconsciousness. Based on the philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead and Derek Parfit, I offer the second criticism that the non-identity problem arises, due to personal identity being a temporal seriality of experiences between the biological person and the unloaded data. Lastly, even if intelligent patterns become immortal in the Singularity, this would not be what Christianity has called the immortality of the soul.
Highlights
Since the term “theodicy” was coined by the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, the effort to answer questions of natural disasters, moral evils, and human finitude has been commonly referred to as theodicy (Leibniz 1952)
Even if intelligent patterns become immortal in the Singularity, this would not be what Christianity has called the immortality of the soul
I suggest that in his interpretation of the transference strategy as the most feasible strategy of this-worldly subjective immortality, Kurzweil needs to address three additional problems: the technological plausibility of scanning human unconsciousness, the philosophical issue of personal identity, and the theological issue of human soul having her origin in God
Summary
Since the term “theodicy” was coined by the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, the effort to answer questions of natural disasters, moral evils, and human finitude has been commonly referred to as theodicy (Leibniz 1952). Recent projects on technology and death to relate human beings to a larger complex network-like ecosystem or social network of computers are called a “theodicy of networks” (Kera 2013) This form of theodicy is an attempt to gain personal immortality by assimilating the dead to the universe with the help of software, hardware, and biotechnologies. I suggest that in his interpretation of the transference strategy as the most feasible strategy of this-worldly subjective immortality, Kurzweil needs to address three additional problems: the technological plausibility of scanning human unconsciousness, the philosophical issue of personal identity, and the theological issue of human soul having her origin in God
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