Textual Immortality
David and I got into this talk on how technology will bring us to a point of serious disorientation, and how a Christian (or religious/moral) framework can help ground all the turbulence. At some point I made the point that I think it’s important to die. I believe that some kind of soul-flight is the main climax of consciousness. I don’t believe in the Christian eternal afterlife, but in a 3-minute moment of time dilation that is, in essence, an eternity—1,000 lifetimes. As so while I never want to be literally immortal, I want literary immorality. All the text of my life establishes a moral foundation for a text-based replica to outlive me and interact with and hopefully guide future generations, whether it’s 10 or 10 million people. Books already fill this function, except now books are agentic and interactive.