There will be a sort-of life after death, initially for a select few but eventually for just about everyone, thanks to the digitization of everything. This fascinating BBC video clip (just 2 or 3 minutes long) starts by talking about how good we are getting at making digital actors for movies, but ends with a glimpse of a very near future in which schoolchildren will be able to talk to famous, but dead, people as though they were there in the classroom with them.
It might seem… indeed, it might be… that this is just a meaningless artifact of science and technology; that these “resurrected” beings are artificial and not really alive. But “artificial lives” are very much a part of research and development in an esoteric branch of artificial intelligence/cognitive science known as “Alife” studies. When one factors in complexity and emergence to the development of alife creatures and communities, there is, in the scientific theories and philosophies to which I subscribe (and have briefly described in this previous post), at least the possibility of a quantum leap into a new phase space in which these beings have consciousness and free will.
Will they be moral? What might they deduce about the universe? Will they believe in God? Will they be true resurrections?
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