The Myth of a Virtual Eternity

I know people are excited about the future prospects of technology. And Technology is advancing at an accelerated pace, which could mean that true AI (Artificial intelligence) is likely within the horizon of your lifespan, and with that comes the ability to transfer all of your experiences and memories onto a theoretically infinite platform, or in plain language, to transfer yourself into a “living” avatar whose life could theoretically spans millennia. To coin a phrase, “The Millennials could be the first generation to live virtually a millennium”.

However, is this a true statement looking at the marketplace by today’s standards? Or even a true philosophical statement on what constitutes life?

By Todays standards, the market is fast paced, and broad. Therefore, the technological platform you use today may be obsolete in ten years, or unsupportable by the current operating system, rendering your virtual life on the web, a forgotten archive.

An example of this might be that you are a virtual resident on Virtual Heaven 3.0, that runs the EOS (Eternity Operating System) 10.5 and the next EOS upgrade announces that we are no longer supporting Virtual Heaven 3.0, and that you must move to a Virtual Heaven 4.0 or greater platform to continue your afterlife. If you are a resident of low standing on Virtual Heaven 3.0, you may not have the financial resources, or contact to a live entity to facilitate this move to a higher platform, and are thus regulated to a future of archival, which is then ignored until even your archive may be lost and  forgotten in the future.

Even if this is possible in the future, is it really a life? Or just a shadow of a former life?

Consider this: Let us say that the technology to do this is available today, and you decide to start the process while you are still living. The question becomes, is the person created on the Virtual Heaven Platform really me? Does it make the same decisions I make? Does it experience things as I would?

I think the answer would be no. Because, what the virtual life experiences would be different, then your real life. Its life would be controlled by decision analogs that were set at the start of the experience, and all decisions are based on past decisions. As you went through life conscious of your own mortality, the virtual you would not have that same emotional context (if true emotions could be created in a virtual world, and not just programed as random events). its life would be linear, while yours would be more chaotic. And your decision analog is always evolving (and not always in a positive way). While the virtual life could evolve its decision analog, it would be more logical. It may become its own viable entity, but you would cease to recognize it as yourself.

That is why I think there will be a new classification of person in the future. One would be the organic person that lived out their life in an organic world, and a virtual person, which lived its life in an electronic and preordained world. Therefore, the organic person and electronic person will become split at creation, to never reemerge as a single entity again. Therefore, a false premise on the promise of an electronic eternity.