Digital Immortality

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Henriques, Julian F.. 2019. Digital Immortality. In: Steve Goodman; Toby Heys and Eleni Ikoniadou, eds. AUDINT—Unsound:Undead. Falmouth: Urbanomic Media Ltd, pp. 161-164. ISBN 9781916405219 [Book Section]

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The idea of digital immortality is not new. The word digital has remained the moniker for “the latest technology” for three decades. We are technophiliacs because, as Freud might tell us – besides our own shit – technology is the one thing we make ourselves. Human kind – men in particular – have always tended to fall in love with their creations. This has been the case from the Greek myth of Pygmalion’s most beautiful ivory statue, to the marvel – again scatological – of Jacques de Vaucanson’s defecating mechanical duck of 1739. This perhaps was the inspiration for Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s bold proposition of Man a Machine published in 1748. The philosophical claim that we are ourselves actually only machines was of course made by Rene Descartes almost exactly a century earlier, in 1637.

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