“Big Tech’s Futile Attempt to Kill Death”:
The Silicon Valley immortalists, too, are Lockeans to a person. They do not want to be remembered; they want to be remembering. They are so certain that the matter of what a person is is so thoroughly settled that we can simply move on to other theoretical questions that confront us in our quest for immortality.
The commitment to substrate-neutrality is almost as widely accepted as Lockean personal identity, but not so widely as simply to be assumed true. A person, in this reigning metaphysics of Silicon Valley, is a special kind of substrate-neutral code that has the peculiar property of being aware of its own existence. Technology, they believe, can enable us to manipulate that code, to improve on it, and perhaps when the time comes, to transfer it out of a failing mortal coil and into a more robust vessel. Their idea of what a person is, and of what immortality might be, is entirely shaped and limited by the philosophy of liberal individualism: an opportunity to keep on “living one’s best life”, and if possible, of doing so in one’s own apartment.
[T]hose who can afford to be early adopters get to set the terms by privately trialling interventions, while public institutions are nudged to ratify a vision in which the extension of time becomes a status object.