Four (and One) Walking Ways to Immortality
Note: This is adapted from content that I wrote some time ago. While I’ve tried to bring it up to date in continuity with the rest of the ideas I want to focus on in the Book of Golden Will, some of it may be tuned towards ideas I was exploring previously.
I. Preface
YOU EXAMINE THE PATHS TO IMMORTALITY. TWO ARE OPAQUE AND UNCERTAIN. ONE IS SMALL. ONE IS CERTAIN AND ATTENUATED. ONE SPEAKS|SPEAKS NOT TO YOU.
YOU PICK ALL OF THEM.
You may note that throughout these chapters, I reference ‘immortal will’. Really, in my mind the concept of immortality, legacy, will are all closely related, though there are slight differences. Part of this book is obviously about maximizing our ability to carve our will into the world, and another part is about seeking to understand more about what our will is. But to do that, we should have some kind of common understanding in approach.
Immortality, as a word, describes many related concepts. I lack the linguistic understanding to map the overlap in other languages, and I won’t really go into that (for example, there’s quite a bit of discussion around the Chinese symbol for immortality, a man on a mountain1). In English, however, it can even at a first evaluation mean either 'not dying from old age' or 'invulnerable', neither of which is precisely defined, but more points in a direction to discuss.
When I say immortality, I wish to encompass many of these ideas, and more. My perspective is that immortality, in its broadest sense, is the continuity of ‘as within, so without’. It is the continuation of world state such that if you looked at it, you would see the patterns, ideals, aesthetics of your mind expressed in the world. I say in the broadest sense, of course, because this requires moving away from the central idea of 'continuity of the mind thinking this thought'.
There is a small problem with the vagueness of 'as within, so without' because you can simply align your preferences with what the world would do anyway--and this might be what various schools of moral or religious thought (Stoicism, Buddhism, parts of Judaism) encourage, but it doesn't appeal to our reflexive sense of 'immortality'. What we want to see is outcomes align to something that we distinctly identify with, even if others do as well--something that represents our particular, distinct, will.
I do not want to discuss the myriad ways that each of the methods of immortality I discuss might be achieved.
If you wish to move to the forms of ‘immortality’ that in fact are feasible, and most directly relate to the content of this book, skip to the third way - “Genetic” and the fourth way - “Legacies”. However, it would be an incomplete discussion for me without touching on the more traditional types of immortality. Finally, if you are religious, I acknowledge that I am neglecting spiritual paths here. Those are beyond what I can make claims about, only that if you are a believer, you should do your best to follow the best practices of your creed as it pertains to your spirit. I am not, and thus this is the result.
Biological immortality is not yet achieved, and no guide to it will be complete. I am not a master of prose or poetry, and can give no advice on making sure that writings will last forever. There is no way to guarantee that a discovery will change the world in such a way your name will be attached to it forevermore. Cults and religions seem almost random in what survives or doesn't, and in the short term persistence in this arena seems to be completely at odds with the personal virtue of the founder.
II. Types of Immortality
The First Way: 'Standard' Biological Immortality
YOUR HEART BEATS. WITH EACH PASSING YEAR, IT GETS WEAKER. YOU CONTEMPLATE HOW YOU MIGHT MAKE EACH BEAT JUST AS STRONG AS THE PREVIOUS. YOU SEEK PHYSICAL STRENGTH FOR STRENGTH OF HEART, BUT THE PASSAGE OF TIME IS CRUEL.
YOU SEEK TO DEFEAT TIME.
When we say 'Immortality' in English, without any additional context, it generally implies a personal rather than impersonal or conceptual immortality. This immortality can imply 'not dying from old age', or 'invulnerability', as mentioned above.
Invulnerability is worth discarding - there are no material things in the universe that are invulnerable. Perhaps there is a way to encode yourself into the universe in a functional sense as an intelligence, but that is a spiritual immortality and not a material one, and as such beyond the moderately practical focus of my meaning here.
However, even disregarding the idea of invulnerability, there are still many different interpretations to examine.
If we continue getting older, which is to say if we continue to advance the sorts of traits we associate with old age (such as infirmity, lack of energy, etc.), but we don't die of them, that is a sort of immortality if not a particularly pleasant one.
This is likely to be the first sort of personal immortality to emerge. As we solve each of the specific things that kill old people (organ failures starting with the heart and lungs, skin cancer, etc.) it won't necessarily make them younger, but it will make them live longer. It is even possible that someone has reached this type of immortality today - you wouldn’t know while in it.
This isn't a true immortality but it may allow for a population to reach 'actuarial escape velocity', the state where for every year you live you gain greater than one statistical year of life (actual lifespan improvements may vary).
Whether we reach this state first (and as said we may have already reached it), the next sort of personal immortality would be an actual state of unaging, at least not aging in the sense we commonly think about it. I can't propose what it might look like, as it's quite possible we'll solve some key aspect of aging but not others, leaving us in a sort of partial state where regular upkeep is needed but we are able to stay both alive and functional (unlike continued senescence). For example, we might be able to prevent degradation of the brain, but require replacement of organs and artificial production of new blood.
An easy example of the above might be something like what we have today, where there are individuals who have mechanical hearts, not merely pacemakers. These hearts may require maintenance, but they do not continue to age. The aging has been replaced with non-self repairing (for now) mechanical capabilities. The rest of the system may age around them, but these parts cease.
Eventually though, I believe that through some combination of biological and mechanical advancements we will be able to remove the majority of things that kill us, or at least drive them down to a much lower rate (accident statistics will still kill everyone in a long enough, unchanging society, where we are exposed to risks greater than our ability to tolerate them such as car crashes and firearms).
As we pass through the stages of replacing, improving, and repairing various systems of the human body we will begin to see the third category of this type of personal immortality emerge, which is 'eternal youth'. As I mention with the heart above, if we can replace key systems with unaging ones there's no reason they can't provide greater capabilities than what humans are born with.
Let me repeat: There is no law of the universe that prevents the engineering of a system that can accomplish and surpass what our organs do. That does not make it easy, or simple. Evolved, multi-purpose systems are tremendously complicated, and we don’t even have a deep and pervasive understanding of how our body works at all scales, let alone the ability to reengineer or emulate it. Of course, this doesn’t stop us from replacing gross mechanical functionality, and it won’t even necessarily stop us from some kind of black box reproduction (which I would be somewhat leery about, personally).
Honestly, I could cite any number of things we don’t know about the body, but it is easy enough to say we don’t even have a complete view of ‘why’ we age, in the same way we might know why a car breaks down. Certainly we have a number of causes2, but the whole picture remains incomplete. And until we have deeper understanding of the genetic and biochemical causes, and then the ability to engineer those, we will be limited in our ability to replace functionality.
Even disregarding systems that are more obviously chemically complicated, like the liver, we have had to deal with implant rejection for more gross mechanical systems. I don’t mean in the science fiction, psychological rejection sense, but in terms of cytotoxicity - while we do have functional long term implants, a brief skim of literature indicates we are continuously trying to reduce inflammatory response to things like titanium nanoparticles. This is an even larger challenge when it comes to implanted electrodes, both into nerves and neurons3.
There are certain systems we need to understand how to regenerate and de-age, but the goal of this third stage is keeping people 'forever young'.
Finally, assuming it's possible, we may see some point at which all parts of the human body, perhaps with the exclusion of the brain (in the nearer term) have been improved on via human endeavors, and then we have something that is not merely unaging, and eternally youthful, but beyond even peak of a human life--without obvious end. This, of course, steps rather thoroughly into core transhumanism.
None of this is possible today. Your best bet if you believe any of this is possible in your lifespan is to focus on increasing your lifespan in both a broad and specific sense (i.e. not abusing various organs), saving resources to access medical treatment as it becomes available, and pursuing networks with the sorts of people who will either help you gain access to capabilities or keep you abreast of research.
The Second Way: Heterodox Personal Immortality
YOUR VESSEL DECAYS. YOU SEEK A NEW VESSEL. YOU QUESTION - IS THE GOLDEN-WILL-IN-FLESH THE SAME AS THE GOLDEN-WILL-IN-BRASS? DOES IT ACT THE SAME?
THE CHISEL IS THE SAME. THE MARK IS LEAVES IS THE SAME. HOW DOES YOUR DIVINITY TRANSFER?
From my perspective, there are nearly as many ways to imagine that a will might live on as there are systems we can imagine carrying out computation (whether or not computation is all that's required for a will to live on). I think that it is impossible to exhaustively discuss them, or even lightly review them to the extent I reviewed the steps above. The difference of course is that the items listed above are essentially treating the human form as the basis and leveraging our existing capabilities, rather than stepping into the exotic.
I personally think that we will see the exotic, because I do not think there is anything ineffable about human thought. I do not say that there is nothing (classically) incomputable, because that would require me to define 'computing' and I do not understand the balance of arguments around, for example, whether or not the human brain is performing quantum computation well enough to make strong statements. I say that I do not think there is anything ineffable because if there is something classically (or otherwise) incomputable in the human brain, I believe we will be able to artificially replicate it with systems of our own design.
Of the approaches below, I anticipate that uploading and resurrective immortality would have issues with dynamic functional connectivity (if it is, in fact, a thing - something I am still researching). The point of a Theseus mind is to avoid that entirely, and the concept doesn't apply to replicative immortality.
The challenge I pose to these alternative approaches is 'continuity of consciousness'. In my view, identity is not just a matter of being identical, but also maintaining bi-directional continuity between the prior and anterior state. I recognize this comes from my own personal subjective view, and I’m comfortable with that. You are not required to share it. I would never hop in a Star Trek transporter for this reason - I consider them to be massive suicide and rebirth machines, not maintaining the continuity of their users.
I do not deny that the person in each of these ‘contains’ me, but the question is if the current me becomes that person. If you instantaneously cloned me, and that clone opened their eyes without my removal first…should I expect that I am that clone? If not, why would anything that didn’t maintain continuity of consciousness be me?
I am also not treating the problem of qualia found in uploads or Theseus minds. That is another entire can of worms even more unrelated to the scope of the writing here, tends to make everyone angry, and I’m not entirely sure the argument is coherent in the first place.
At the end of the day, however, in terms of maintaining immortal will, these are better than nothing. Even if you don’t maintain continuity of consciousness, continuity of self, you have something that may carry on your will more than either genetic immortality or legacy of idea or artifact. If you wish to carve your will into the world more precisely, more deeply, and for longer - this is certainly better than nothing.
The items below are a short list of some of the options we may have, and a few thoughts on them.
Theseus Minds
YOU REPLACE YOUR FLESH WITH SILICON, PIECE BY PIECE. THE SHAPE REMAINS.
A Theseus mind is a mind that is replaced, neuron by neuron (or perhaps in larger chunks) with synthetic neurons or functional equivalents.4
While we have certainly seen synthetic replacements used in the CNS5, we have not seen anything like this yet. I suspect we may see it at a very low level shortly (if we have not already, as I haven’t done a full literature review).
This is my personal preferred method of long term immortality--to bridge the gap between ape and angel, piece by piece. I am excessively paranoid about my own continuity of self, to the degree that I am somewhat leery of things as mundane as anaesthetics or (slightly less mundane but still not particularly out there) ego death from psychedelics.
It is easy to imagine that once you kick off this process it becomes easier, but when the first step is so hard, do we have any guarantee we won't build synthetic dead ends of our own design? Schematics and functional layouts that prevent us from upgrading further? I am uncertain. All the same, in terms of the longer terms of personal immortality this is my favorite.
Uploading
YOU OFFER YOURSELF TO THE SILICON-DIVINITY-TO-BE. YOUR FLESH IS CONSUMED. YOUR WILL REMAINS. THE YOU-TO-BE CONTAINS THE YOU-THAT-IS. THE YOU-THAT-IS DOES NOT BECOME THE YOU-TO-BE.
Uploading is the 'mere' act of placing your self, your personality, your will into a computing system (again, classical or otherwise). While there's certainly been very simple progress in simulating complex biological systems that are scanned in, we are in no way anywhere near being able to upload a human mind.
Uploading poses its own questions, of course. Most methods that seem like they might be likely are destructive, which was shown to a somewhat disgusting degree in the recent tv show 'Upload'. The question then of course is the degree to which the new mind is 'you'. Compared to the vastly indirect methods below it is quibbling to discuss the 'you'-ness of an upload, but it is a matter of significant dispute.
Resurrective Immortality (Cryonics)
YOU PAUSE YOUR GOLDEN-WILL-IN-FLESH. YOU RESUME YOUR GOLDEN-WILL-IN-FLESH. THE YOU-TO-BE CONTAINS THE YOU-THAT-IS. DOES THE YOU-THAT-IS BECOME THE YOU-TO-BE?
I will assume for the sake of discussion here that cryonics (freezing a person and then bringing them back later) is possible, although that hasn't been proven yet.
Resurrective immortality would be an extension of direct personal immortality, as it would presumably happen at a point where whatever was killing you could be fixed (in the case of disease) or direct immortality had been solved (in the case of old age).
However, there are questions similar to those of uploading - when you are truly frozen, there is no brain activity. Is the you that is brought back the same you that has been frozen? Indications
Replicative Immortality
THE SHAPE YOU CHISELED INTO THE WORLD HAS GOLD POURED INTO IT. A GOLDEN WILL LIKE YOURS IS CAST FROM THIS SHAPE. IT IS NOT YOU, BUT IT IS GOOD.
Replicative immortality is interesting because it lies between 'alternate personal immortality' and the immortality of ideas or worldviews, below. As discussed both in fiction (Accelerando) and by certain futurists such as Ray Kurzweil, this would be the ability to 'resurrect' someone by feeding facts about them - personal writings, people's descriptions, videos, etc., to create higher and higher resolution recreations of them, until they simulacra could form a person.
My views on this are relatively simple. In the extreme, you might get back to what was essentially an upload (either in a digital or physical space). But that's at the limit. Short of that you have an entirely new person that is remarkably similar to a prior person, with neither continuity nor identity with that person. More a descendant than a continuation - although that descendant might be the best possible way to continue the originator's legacy and will all the same.
The Third Way: Genetic Immortality
YOU LOOK TO A DIRECTION THAT IS NOT A DIRECTION. YOU SEE A CHAIN CONNECTING TO YOU THAT SPLITS, SPLITS, SPLITS. YOU CONTAIN IT.
YOU LOOK TO THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION. THE CHAIN SPLITS IN THAT DIRECTION TOO. IT CONTAINS YOU.
ONE ACTUAL. ONE POTENTIAL. IT IS GOOD.
An itinerant selfish gene
Said 'bodies a- plenty I've seen.
You think you're so clever
But I'll live for ever.
You're just a survival machine.
Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution
In the absence of personal immortality, the next best thing for our genes is a sort of biological immortality--which is to say, neglecting anything particularly exotic, having children. Beyond merely biological immortality, it's observed that a huge portion of behaviors are passed down between generations across many life domains, which means that unless you have some kind of superstar ideology, a world changing idea, or a deed that leaves a mark on the world that is difficult to undo--you are most likely to see your will passed on by your children than someone unrelated to you.
Every one of us is the result of a sequence of reproduction going back as long as that idea is coherent. If we limit that more, we're all chains in families, held together on one hand by culture and relations, and on the other by genetics. In many cases, these familial ties into the mists of history are described by both, with some uncertainties and errors. And in those mists, our own forefathers found divinity in that chain itself, tying them to their fathers, and their fathers' fathers, and so on.6
It is very easy to see that, by having children, your genes as well as your behaviors have a much more likely chance of passing on than any of the other alternatives I'll discuss below. However, at this point in history, for each generation, there will have to be someone else who your genetics mix with--and who your culture will have to mix with as well.
Thinking from a genetic perspective, this will dilute the amount of 'your will' that is passed on. If we count the generations between an ancestor and his descendent, you get a genetic relation of (approximately, not taking into account nth cousins reproducing) something like 1/2^n. Your children will be, roughly, 50% your genetics. Your grandchildren will be, roughly, 25% your genetics. This continues to asymptotically approach zero.
Unlike the first approach, personal immortality, this falls off pretty quickly as a function of time (and this assumes your family line is not tragically ended in a war or for medical reasons). However, also unlike personal immortality, reproducing and having a family is, well, **possible today** and has been throughout time.
Thus, this is the first bet you should make on extension of your will beyond the current limits of your human body to persist, even with the attenuation.
The Fourth Way: Memetic Immortality
YOU CARVE YOUR WILL INTO THE UNIVERSE. ANOTHER COMES ALONG AND FINDS ONE INFINITELY COMPLEX SHAPE THEY SEEK TO EMULATE IN THEIR WILL. THEN ANOTHER DOES THE SAME. YOU TOO HAVE DONE THE SAME.
Biological immortality is about our genes, but it isn't really about 'us' as conscious agents. How many of us can't trace our family history beyond living memory, while being made of genes as old as life? Clearly, there is more to non-personal immortalities than mere genetic reproduction.
When we choose to look beyond the personal immortality, we look at ways we can leave a legacy on the world, an intent carved into reality that will persist and describe some aspect of ourselves. Something that when we see it triggers that sense of ‘ut intra sic extra’. Family, of course, is one of the easiest ways to do this, but it isn't the only one.
Ideas, alongside genes, eternally struggle for space in human culture against each other. Simply because human culture expands (if it will continue to do so) is not a guarantee that any given idea will persist - there may be a bottleneck of ideas, and then all of the memetic descendents will trace their lineage back to that idea. What cultures perished when our ancestors conquered them? Who didn’t leave behind adequate, distinct, cultural artifacts, or had them destroyed in the centuries hence?
We must then also look at the ways that memetic immortalities persist or fail.
Family
YOU EXAMINE THE ACTUAL AND POTENTIAL CHAINS BINDING YOU TO ANCESTORS AND DESCENDENTS. YOU SHAPE THE POTENTIAL WITH INTENT BEYOND THE NECESSARY. IN DOING SO YOU DISCOVER MORE CLEARLY THE SHAPE OF THE ACTUAL.
YOU SEEK TO MORE CLEARLY CARVE INTO THE POTENTIAL THAN THOSE WHO ALSO FEED INTO THE SAME WEB.
Families, to continue the ideas above, serve as a vehicle for biological immortality. However, for whatever reasons, we are likely to pass on our views to our children.
The family is the most basic unit of historical continuity.
Families have ideas and worldviews, subcultures and professions, passed down — whether genetically or memetically — that shape their environments repeatedly, ignoring political lines like state borders. The stories of our ancestors inspire us, either to pursue a mythical valor or to attempt to purge their sins from our conscience.
The state I live in will be broken, the people I am part of will dissolve and change, but my descendants will be my descendants. Because a family speaks across time. My ancestors made a space for me. I will pass on that gift to my own children, and my grandchildren, and my great grandchildren. Whether or not I fail in all my other attempts at immortality — personal or memetic — I will perpetuate myself and my ancestors through me in the way that has been done since the beginning of time.
The problem with a family, of course, when it comes to immortality is that there's just so much of it. Each of us has 2^n ancestors, and it's highly unlikely we've heard much (if anything!) about all of them even going back 4-5 generations. In my own family, I know very little about my paternal lineage beyond my grandfather (although part of that is due to the fact he was born in 1897). My maternal lineage (at least, through my mother's mother) is more well known to the degree it ties back to Campbells that emigrated to Canada, but little otherwise.
If you go back far enough, and if you abstract out the personal details enough, the image gets a little clearer--but that's only because of science. I don't know that my father has a paternal haplogroup related to the Marsh Arabs that became Sumerian long before the Jewish people arose because he has stories about it, but because science told me so. Same with the Viking heritage on my mother's side. Of course, genetic discoveries may yet upend these stories, too.
If you wish to live on through your family, beyond merely your genes, you have to stand out against the other ancestors. This has echoes in what I'll talk about below, ideologies and ideas--except with a family, there may be significantly less competition. Many cultures, even ones that don't engage in ancestor worship, do put focus on ancestors and that means there's some cultural space reserved.
How can you increase the chance that your essence, your ideas, your views, are what get communicated rather than those of other ancestors? I'm not sure. Some element of distinctness, of grandeur, of doing more that is interesting certainly, but you also need to communicate those down. Write about yourself, take notes about your lives, make sure your children have a connection to you and are inspired by you, and their children, and so on. At some point it is not about your own personal immortality so much as the immortality of you as an idea, an aspirational ancient under whose gaze and in whose radiant footsteps your descendants tread.
We return again to the idea that we must make ourselves a clear tool of our own will to carve ourselves into the world. We must make our idea a tool to hand to our descendants, allowing them to carve themselves and us, to pass down to their descendants. We are in competition with the other potential ancestors of our descendants for the scarce resource of ‘the stories my descendants tell about themselves’.
Ideologies
YOU SPEAK OF YOUR GOLDEN WILL TO THOSE WHO LISTEN. IF THEY REPEAT IT, THEY WILL LOSE THE DETAIL. YOU, TOO, HAVE LOST THE DETAILS OF WILLS HANDED TO YOU.
I differentiate between ideologies here, and ideas below, because one of them is much more encompassing than the other. When I say ideologies, I mean very broad worldviews that we can attach distinct names to - not just the broadest (such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Daoism, Buddhism, etc.) but also things like Breslov Hasidism, Lutheranism, Hanbali school of Islam, Maoshan Daoism, etc., which bear significant marks of individuals. Something about that individual's worldview was encapsulated and passed down.
At the same time, it is only something about that individual's worldview. It is hard for me to think of ideologies that persist across generations that are not at a minimum entwined with a culture, if not a culture in and of themselves. Much of what the originator intended for those ideologies will be lost, and gaps between what was dictated and what is needed to persist the core memetics of it will be filled in one way or another (as a lovely historical example, the entire history of the Jewish Rabbinate).
Unfortunately, success necessarily implies dilution. A worldview comes from a moment in time, and is applicable to that moment in time. For it to survive, necessarily, it needs to compete moving through time, which means that gaps that either were not revealed or did not exist at the time that worldview was produced need to be filled in. The worldview of the found or founders becomes a patchwork, seeking to maintain some semblance of original intent. Even that is in dispute, when original intent is not so coherent of an idea - would the founder hold the preferences he did, or would he update them to modern times? Is it the emotional or philosophical tendency, or is it about specifics? These are questions that Americans who follow Constitutional discussions are intimately familiar with, as are those who get involved in Rabbinical or Ecclesiastical debates.
Ideas
YOU CARVE YOUR WILL INTO THE WORLD BY MAKING THE INVOCATION OF YOUR NAME A NECESSITY. IT IS GOOD.
Ideas are much more distinct than ideologies in my taxonomy. Ideas are specific thoughts about the world that you discovered (even if you were not necessarily the first person to discover them) and are associated with you through history. You can have a sort of legacy of will by simply impacting the world in a way you know it will never recover from, but by anthropic definition the legacies that come to mind here are ones where names were successfully associated with the idea. This can simply be things like Milton's poems, or they could be Maxwell's Equations.
This is probably the most limited form, in that it isn't so much about anything regarding you as a person, so much as a singular expression of your will on the world. That said, any impression large enough to associate your name with an everyday feature of life (as mentioned above Milton's poems, Maxwell's Equations) will lead people to be curious about you as a person...but you as a person are not the focus of the legacy.
At the same time, by not being the focus of the legacy, people will seek to misrepresent you at least somewhat less - certainly, they may want to portray you as more or less of a villain (for example, Machiavelli has regularly been portrayed as a villain through history) but you are not a prophet or father of a nation, treated as the moral font of good or evil. We don't ask if Einstein would approve of this or that law (generally), or invoke Milton on the ethics of economic systems (again, generally). Their personhoods are left relatively untouched by conceptual engineering.
Ideas seem to have varying survivability - dark ages, both local and civilizational (as we have as of yet not had a global one) obliterate swathes of human knowledge, passing down random smatterings that were well known enough to have copies, and lucky enough to have those copies survive.
We have yet to see how the ideas of the last 200 years will persist. Media has certainly become more ubiquitous, but we also have a much broader technology stack to access many of the most recent ideas created. Things are produced with an assumption they are effectively replaceable, rather than relatively priceless and designed to survive for beyond the lifetime of the author.
Artifacts
YOU CARVE YOUR EXISTENCE INTO THE WORLD BY REJECTING WHAT WAS, RESHAPING MATTER AS WITHOUT SO WITHIN, AND IT IS GOOD.
Artifacts, unlike legacies in the form of thought, are much less susceptible to dilution--but short of truly great monuments, much more susceptible to destruction. However, they are also less capable of conveying the concepts and minds that generated them.
When I speak of artifacts, I speak of acts of craftsmanship such as the paintings of Picasso, the sculptures of Tori Busshi, the Sphinx of Ramses II, but also places that were named after a person during their life (whether places named after a person after their death, or places named after a person without their involvement carry on any sort of legacy is something I am conflicted about).
Places named after a person can easily be renamed, but the legacy left by the person on that place cannot be so easily forgotten. Istanbul was once Constantinople, after all.
These artifacts are less susceptible to dilution in that often they will simply be left for hundreds of years, especially if lightly maintained. They are often fragile physically (such as the Mona Lisa) or create targets for successor regimes (such as the Buddhas of Bamyan).
All the same, while the meaning intended by them artistically or functionally may not be adequately conveyed without proper historical understanding, they have an existence outside of thought and discussion, and thus successful impose a will on the universe, however long they persist.
The Way Beyond Limits: Religion
YOU KNOW WHAT MUST BE DONE FOR YOUR SPIRIT. YOU DO IT. IT IS GOOD.
Finally, there are a variety of immortalities throughout human religion. These are not truly relevant to my writing, but most cultures have some kind of immortality, either spiritual or physical (common in both eastern and western alchemical practices).
I am not going to treat religion broadly. I am an agnostic Atheist, raised in a believing but not particularly observant Jewish household. I have made a hobby of studying parts of Christian theology, and have faint knowledge of a few Eastern spiritual traditions, but my personal views are secular (though at least one Rabbi friend of mine quibbles on this).
If you believe that there is something you can do to guarantee, or even improve, the immortality of your spirit, you should do it. Even if you aren’t sure, but think it might be possible, do it. Despite my lack of coverage of the topic, I hope that the words I share on how to pursue your goals, and produce a sharper tool to carve your will, will help you regardless.
III. Conclusion
YOU COMMIT TO MAKING YOUR WILL SHARPER, LAST LONGER. TO IMMORTALITY.
AND IT IS GOOD.
YOU ARE, YOU HAVE BEEN, YOU WILL BE, LEGACY.
This is a brief discussion of various ways that a will can be immortal, both in the mind that the will originates in and also left as an imprint across time.
There is no persuasion to this, it is merely a discussion of my thoughts on the matter. Legacy is important to me. I seek my own personal immortality, but I also seek to have a strong family through whom my story and history will resonate, passing my will down. I seek to achieve great deeds, to create new ideas, to share my worldview with others so they remember and pass on my own will (perhaps, by reading this, you will help me with that). Someday I may even seek to leave great artifacts.
Some people think that after self actualization, that people seek only power over others. Instead, I say that we are all struggling to leave a legacy that will take our name, our will, some shred of our self forward in the infinite unknown frontier of the future.
Moving forward, I will discuss a little bit about the rest of the specific content and how I’ll break it up, as well as virtue, self recognition, goodness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xian_(Taoism)?oldformat=true
https://www.age.mpg.de/healthy-ageing/how-and-why-do-we-age
https://bioelecmed.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s42234-021-00067-7
Interestingly, this is essentially the thought experiment discussed by Chalmers in some of his thought experiments about qualia, which I was reminded of via Solms - https://consc.net/papers/qualia.html
For example, at the Center for Neuroprosthetic and Brain Mind Institute of the Life Science School at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), the BioRobotics Institute at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, and others — this is not an exhaustive list, I’m just familiar with these two.
https://socialsciences.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/fustel/AncientCity.pdf