The Myth Of Digital Immortality

One proposed way for humans to live even after their biological lives expire is "digital immortality," a simulated consciousness run by machine.  The artificial intelligence running the supposedly immortalized person's "mind" could be a scripted program that only acts like it is conscious or it could be a true consciousness tied to electronic machinery.  In either case, popular descriptions are misleading at best.  AI cannot bring eternal life; so-called digital minds do not truly rescue anyone from death of consciousness, no matter how desperately some might look to them as an escape from the specter of death.  Digital immortality is nothing but a myth that holds subjective appeal to some people.

Whether with an inanimate simulation of consciousness (such as a computer program or android that has no actual thought but that seems sentient outwardy) or a genuinely conscious AI that possesses a dead human's psychological characteristics, one truth remains the same: an AI of any kind is not the same as a person's consciousness living past their biological lifetime without the involvement of an afterlife.  There is no such thing as "digital immortality" because a simulated version of a real human's personality, intellect, and will is not their actual mind, no matter how closely it parallels the real consciousness it is meant to imitate.  The person himself or herself does not remain alive in any sense whatsoever even if the simulated representation of their mind is exact.

Artifical intelligence is not a pathway to immortality because it is not eternal life.  A hypothetical transference of a person's mind to a machine body, as logically possible and scientifically implausible as it is simultaneously, could ensure prolonged existence because the actual consciousness is preserved in some way.  Preservation of one's memory after death and true continuation of mental existence have only the most superficial of commonalities beyond the fact that both of them, like all things, fall under the domain of reason, the only thing that renders some things possible and some things impossible in an ultimate sense.  No matter how possible it is for AI to mimic human traits, people who have those same traits are not granted true "immortality" from such things on any level.

True immortality can only be an endless existence of one's consciousness.  No matter how "realistic," subjectively "impressive," or "useful" AI recreation of real personalities is, there is absolutely nothing about it that translates to immortality of any kind.  Being remembered or mimicked by a non-conscious program, conscious machine, or person does not make one live forever, not that the universe that houses the machine is set to exist forever to begin with.  Of course, a fixation on philosophically secondary aspects of AI technology, as opposed to a focus on the nature of consciousness and thought themselves, is a matter of mere science instead of true existentialism or phenomenology.