I streamed Transcendent Man, Ray Kurzweil's vanity piece about his quest for immortality last night.  Kurzweil is an interesting cat, perhaps best known for his predictions of The Singularity...

... a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed. Although neither utopian nor dystopian, this epoch will transform the concepts that we rely on to give meaning to our lives, from our business models to the cycle of human life, including death itself.

Some kind of crazy shit is coming down the pike, that's for sure.  Whether it's Singularity or not will depend on whether or not the zombies get us first.


But then really it's six of one, half-dozen of the other, innit?

Of course the very real possibility of a transhuman future is more frightening and fascinating than anything George Romero could dream up.  Sometimes it's easy for us to forget how far along we are, the profundity of the change we are living through right now.  I mean, partly it's the mundane uses to which we put technology (Anthony Weiner anyone?) that mask how much and in what truly fundamental ways we are being changed by it.

Kurzweil thinks we're less than twenty years away from something really big, and while no one else seems to think the tipping point is that close, even his critics see something like the technological Singularity — the emergence of greater-than human intelligence — taking place in a foreseeable future.

Kurzweil would, of course, like to be there to see it.  See, Ray Kurzweil doesn't want to die, and he believes technology holds the key to immortality.  The quest for immortality is, of course, as old as human history. It is wrapped up on the one hand with the pain of losing our loved ones forever, but yet more profoundly with the inability to accept our own demise. 

The inability to conceive of our own death — the opposite of the Cartesian equation "I think therefore I am" is something like "The thought 'I am not' cannot exist at all; because if I am not, then it cannot occur to me that I am not." — is in fact what makes it more or less impossible for us to accept it. 

It's natural, in other words, for Kurzweil to want to live forever, though I'm not sure it'll do him any good.  It hasn't done anyone else any.  He's also very keen to resurrect his father, whose death still resonates. 

In several scenes in Transcendent Man Kurzweil is captured lamenting his father's untimely demise.  In one scene he is shown visiting a storage facility filled with bankers boxes and digging through a trove of utility bills from the forties and fifties his father had filed away. 

"With all of that information I believe an [Artificial Intelligence] would be able to create someone that would seem very much like my father."

And?

I watched a Nova episode on Immortality not too long ago, too, where, among those working on biological immortality (growing new lungs in a test tube and such) the producers opted to include Jason Leigh, whose Project Lifelike was inspired by Star Trek: The Next Generation (a spin-off, no less.)  Project Lifelike seeks to build avatars of us that can learn to interact with others long after we're dead and gone.

Again: point being?

I mean, I don't object to avatars, but what does it have to do with immortality?

Kurzweil's desire to conjure his father using financial ledgers and fading personal memories of him, and Leigh's faith that lifelike avatars equate to a form of personal immortality both reminded me of Stanislaw Lem's Solaris, which explores the horror of that one-sided scenario. 

An inscrutable alien lifeform drives scientists mad by conjuring physical simulacra of their tragic lovers, made entirely of their one-sided memories of them.  The cruelty is compounded as these simulacra, "born" fully formed, become self-aware and begin to understand their origins.  Spoiler alert: there's no happy ending.

Thinking that an A.I. version of ourselves would in any way mitigate our own complete nullification is nothing but another form of denial.  Death is the complete cessation of our subjective experience.  Period.  Thinking that a "back-up" version of ourselves would save us from subjective negation is akin to thinking a lifelike portrait or animatronic waxwork is a version of the subject and not just an object that looks and acts like it.

It's not a warehouse for our subjective experience that we seek in our quest for immortality, but the continuity of our subjectivity itself (although this continuity is itself an illusion). We want to persist in our being, we want to continue becoming, experiencing this moment — now — forever.  We are creatures of habit, after all.

And habits die hard.