10. Digital Immortality

Digital immortality has attracted growing attention. Most near-term digital immortality will likely be imitation (digital replicas trained on a person’s data). If consciousness depends on functional organization, survival would require preserving the causal dynamics that generate subjective experience, which puts the identity problem into focus: a system that behaves like a person may still be only a copy. One route that at least conceptually preserves continuity is gradual substrate transition: stepwise replacement or augmentation of neural components with functionally equivalent prostheses while the system remains alive (a Ship-of-Theseus approach), potentially allowing a person to persist as an ongoing process rather than as a scanned snapshot. If such transition ever becomes feasible, radical lifespan extension would stop being only a biomedical project and become a speciation-like socio-technical transition: humans would become biological-technological beings with new forms of mortality (software/hardware failure, governance, resource dependence) and new ethical and legal questions about personhood, rights, and continuity.