
- 264 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
Can you imagine swapping your body for a virtual version? This technology-based look at the afterlife chronicles America's fascination with death and reveals how digital immortality may become a reality. The Internet has reinvented the paradigm of life and death: social media enables a discourse with loved ones long after their deaths, while gaming sites provide opportunities for multiple lives and life forms. In this thought-provoking work, author Kevin O'Neill examines America's concept of afterlifeāas imagined in cyberspaceāand considers how technologies designed to emulate immortality present serious challenges to our ideas about human identity and to our religious beliefs about heaven and hell. The first part of the workācovering the period between 1840 and 1860āaddresses post-mortem photography, cemetery design, and spiritualism. The second section discusses Internet afterlife, including online memorials and cemeteries; social media legacy pages; and sites that curate passwords, bequests, and final requests. The work concludes with chapters on the transhumanist movement, the philosophical and religious debates about Internet immortality, and the study of technologies attempting to extend life long after the human form ceases.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover page
- Halftitle page
- Title page
- Copyright page
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- Chapter 1 Introduction: Journeying into New Worlds of the Dead
- Chapter 2 Beginnings: Online Memorialization and Haunted Social Media
- Chapter 3 The Rise of the Avatar
- Chapter 4 Can the Mind Be Portable? Theories of Mind from Plato to Turing
- Chapter 5 Moving Minds: Transhumanism and the Path to Internet Afterlife
- Chapter 6 Martine Rothblatt and the Virtually Human
- Chapter 7 The Truths of Terasem
- Chapter 8 Dmitry Itskov and the Immortality Button
- Chapter 9 Itskov and Neo-Humanity
- Chapter 10 The (Post)Human Future?
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- About the Author