*....and yes, I had to look up who said that first: The Bard1
In January, when my father’s cancer continued spreading its coup throughout his body, I began watching season three of the Amazon Prime TV show Upload. After a few dense days of phone calls across oceans about the end of my father’s earthly existence, I needed a distraction from intense and difficult feelings. So, I switched on my go-to distraction method (after chocolate): binge-watching TV. I had watched the first two seasons of Upload during the COVID pandemic when every day was about the fear of death and seeking ways of distracting us from it, and now I was happy to continue where I left off.
The show is set in a not-so-distant, somewhat dystopian future where big tech companies offer the service of uploading people’s identities/selves/brain contents into a virtual afterlife or, rather, an ongoing life. In this scenario, the rich can live on in glamorous virtual settings of their purchased choosing, where they can still phone and connect with the living world; all managed by (working class) people employed by the companies they’ve uploaded with.
The process of ‘uploading’ is gruesome and involves decapitation, but the show is a comedy. According to the sci-fi logic of Upload-land, as long as the upload happens before actual physical death occurs, a person can be ‘saved’ from eternal death by living on in the virtual world. If a body dies before upload, it would presumably lock the person’s identity in the brain, making them truly dead, gone, and all memories forgotten, i.e. inaccessible.
Apparently, our selves/identities exist only in our heads. What happens with our hearts or guts, known to be wise or foolish, there’s little mention. However, the whole morbid process of uploading is ruled by the system of capitalism. The tech companies and their attempts to attract more customers (even marketing to children! No, they dih’unt!) reflect the evil corporations of actual America, where every element of a human’s birth, life, and death is relentlessly viewed for its money-making potential.
Our heroine in the show is an employee whose job is to be a virtual “angel” to our hero, a tech bro who gets uploaded early while uncovering evil plotting involving power corrupting absolutely. A standard tale. They fall in love, and the rest is hopefully not a reflection of any real history. However, the show’s writer, Greg Daniels (of Simpson and Office fame, to name a few), does a good job of inserting scathing social criticism into this absurd yet fun plot. For example, in contrast to rich people, poor people can’t afford to live forever, or if they do get an upload deal, they live limited by their data quota in a half-pixilated hell. But at least they’re not really dead. According to the show’s premise—and our actual society—that would be the worst kind of nothingness.
My favorite supporting character is Luke, a hot military veteran who hacked his way into the rich land level, even though military veterans were given free uploads to a lower level. But later, he ‘lives’ in fear of losing his afterlife because of benefits being stricken for veterans in the real world. This nod to the constant worry of Congress slashing the VA budget was appreciated.
In Season 3, there is only the briefest nod to the question, What is a human person?Not a company entity like the evil corporate overlords that own the human uploads, but a human, the kind that sometimes gets the phrase ‘body, soul and spirit’ tagged on. The show is premised on the idea that a person’s entirety can be digitally summarized in data that can be uploaded. It’s just memory, human or tech. So, what makes us human? What distinguishes us from the animals, plants, and rocks we share so much with? The best answer I’ve heard is Art, Science, and Religion. As good as a beaver is at making dams, that’s not art nor science because that is all the beaver can do. Humans can create art and handicrafts (even dams), learn about the world through science, and practice religion (or spirituality if you’re one of these spiritual but not religious people), even though it would appear to serve no practical purpose. Being creative beyond the givens of the natural world is where humans become truly human. Thinking about our mortality also distinguishes us from our sentient animal brethren.
In a scene where someone dies (violently), our heroine is unmoved; there’s no appropriate action or reaction on her part where people are being gruesomely beheaded left and right in the first stage of being uploaded; everyone is blasé to mildly concerned. If you can upload someone onto a hard drive, death loses some of its value.
But what is really uploadable? I’ve uploaded so many photos to various online platforms in my lifetime that, combined with all the marketing data collected about me from my search history and shopping habits, a version of me already exists online. Some of all that data being mined by tech/marketing companies might reveal snippets of our selves, and the embarrassingly predictable parts (yes, I’m a middle-aged white lady who will click on ads for yoga pants or artisanal eco-jewelry), but the human being as such is not clonable. It’s that “as such” where people seem to disagree if they even bother thinking about it. But can that digital information even begin to encompass the contents of my true self, my soul? The word soul is not mentioned in the show, either.
It is my firm belief that life can be a work of art. Yea, every biography is one. It’s utterly unique and unrepeatable, governed by certain patterns yet ineffable. Much like AI art, whether images or text, cannot be unique or truly authentic because it is based upon already existing “content” (a terrible phrase, but you know what I mean) in the digital context, so too, human selves cannot be cloned, copied or summarized in a data set and thus owned in the sense that the show portrays. Duh, it’s just a TV show—but I mean that seriously. Some people are actively engaged in this pointless battle, denying how the world works. We’ve all heard about billionaires trying to defeat death or the vast sums spent to merge human brains with technology by, for example, implanting chips in our brains to hack or control the human self. All of this is based on ‘we are our brains’ thinking.
There’s even a political party in Germany called The Party for Biomedical Rejuvenation Research, dedicated to the abolition of age-related death. Yes, they want the state to fund anti-aging research and for everyone to live forever. They even have an unironical FAQ section where they address such things as:
Worries and objections regarding the abolition of age-related death bear no relation to the suffering caused by aging today. If people stay young and healthy forever through rejuvenation medicine and no longer die from aging, they will theoretically live indefinitely, or until they succumb to another cause of death, such as an accident. Of course, new problems may arise from this revolution. However, every invention and exploration of new approaches carries opportunities as well as risks. We believe that societal risks should not prevent us from developing rejuvenation medicine that can solve the humanitarian problem of aging. Instead, we should be open to the challenge of solving future societal problems that might accompany rejuvenation medicine and engage in more discussion about them.2
Putting the hubris aside that they think modern science can undo what is essentially a feature, not a bug of human existence (the unspoken word, death), they admit that maybe, if we change the entire ecosystem of human life on this planet, it might cause a few side effects.3
Not to mention that literature has already dealt with the topic of people living longer or even forever (all the vampire stories, Tuck Everlasting, The Picture of Dorian Gray, etc.) and it doesn’t go well or without devil’s deals. Who would want to outlive their loved ones? The point of life is not to exist physically forever but with our loved ones, peers and compatriots. Anyone who has been single for a while can tell you the lack of joy in what would be Instagrammable experiences when you have to do them alone.
Why are people so afraid of bodily death? If that’s all you know and profess to exist in the material world, then its end is truly a loss. A total loss. There’s a lot at stake.
Another guilty pleasure and distraction means of mine is Reddit. Being able to read people’s thoughts as they go there to think out loud, I’m often astounded, in both positive and negative ways. Recently, someone posed the question: why can’t we reverse physical death? There were basic scientific explanations from the very smart people of Reddit, but only one person went into the metaphysical territory, writing:
For Sci-Fi purposes, you could probably repair all the physical damage and bring a person back to life, we just can’t because we can’t repair brain damage. It’ll definitely start to get into that weird area of the whole soul concept, though. Like, if we digitally copy the entire brain, grew a new body, and put the copy back with the whole past life intact, I say that’s a clone, not the original. If you repair a dead brain in the old body, is it still the same person?
These are serious, profound questions. Ones our current society doesn’t seem to have an answer for outside sci-fi speculation. We can seek elsewhere though, that’s where a science of the spirit is called for. Enter, Anthroposophy. I am aware that talking about spiritual stuff can be like pooping in the pool these days, so here’s some humor from my dad’s bathroom comic-board, and then if you still feel like reading carry on below.
My father is a follower and practitioner of Anthroposophy, the spiritual philosophy and system for understanding the history of the evolution of consciousness on the cosmic and human levels. It was created/discovered/founded by Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian mystic/scientist/philosopher who lived 1861-1925. There’s karma and repeated earth lives; there are angelic hierarchies; there’s a cosmic Christ; there’s something for everyone! Full disclosure: I also appreciate this cosmology, system, and view of the world.
My father has repeatedly mentioned various aspects of anthroposphy in processing his death, such as that he will be born into the spiritual world, where he will be surrounded by his teachers, friends, and family who have gone before him, and after an initial period of cleansing his soul of its earthly qualities (good and bad) he will continue upwards into the celestial spheres before eventually returning to earth for a new incarnation (with the usual stop in the River of Forgetfulness) where we shall all meet again. I find this view comforting to a degree. It doesn’t make the grief less, but it gives it a more concrete context for what feels like such a permanent negative event. Also, the standard condolences of just saying, “He’ll be with God now” to someone grieving doesn’t cut it for me.
Back to the initial theme of how much of a human’s life can be uploaded to the technosphere. In the anthroposophical worldview (system, etc.), memory is stored in our etheric or ‘life’ body, which also dissipates back into the greater cosmic life body of the world where all memories are stored. The individuality lets go of or returns, so to speak, their borrowed portion, extracting from it the lessons and abilities it acquired over the course of an incarnation on earth. The memories are stored forever in the Akasha Chronicle. This Sanskrit word means “primordial spatial substance,” and it is a supra-sensory record of all events going back to primordial times. No need to worry about them being lost on a hard drive like the show Upload portrays, everything that ever happens is being recorded. It has to be for the laws of karma to be put into effect (evidence of good and evil!). But most of us earthlings don’t have the right software—to continue the tech analogy—to access the Akasha chronicle. We are not initiates like Rudolf Steiner, capable of plugging into the flow and checking in on our deceased loved ones, or what really went down with Cleopatra, or say, Jesus Christ. Steiner certainly gives some tips on how to develop our clairvoyant abilities, but meanwhile, I find it both comforting and sobering to take his words here seriously:
“…Gradually, everything that we acquired and assimilated into our etheric body in the course of our life becomes a part of the spiritual world. … Every thought, every idea, every feeling we develop, however hidden it remains, is of significance for the spiritual world. For when the coherence is broken by our passage through the gate of death, all our thoughts and feelings pass with our etheric body into the spiritual world and become part and parcel of it. We do not live for nothing.”
Rudolf Steiner, Lecture: “How the Dead Influence the Living” Berlin, 9 November 1916
All is not lost when we die, so it does matter how we live. Our etheric body carries our memories, unique to each of us, and when we pass over the threshold of death, we gift our biographies to the spiritual world—which is not limited by time or space, and are thus available to all of humanity, and the spiritual hierarchies, for time eternal.
https://verjuengungsforschung.de/haeufig-gestellte-frage
There would have to be a lot more “accidents” to control an out-of-control population growth, for example, that comes to mind randomly when pursuing such a line of thought. Also, why have babies, knowing they’d grow up fighting for ever sparser resources? And what about the injustice of people who died before the benefits of eternal life? It’s all absurd.