Eric Steinhart, "Your Digital Afterlives: Computational Theories of Life after Death" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)

Summary

What is life after death? Many people may seek an answer to the question by looking to a traditional religion, such as Christianity or Buddhism, and offering its view of an afterlife. In Your Digital Afterlives: Computational Theories of Life After Death (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Eric Steinhart presents core tenets of digitalism, a theology that transposes philosophical and theological concepts, principles, and arguments about the self, the universe and the nature of divinity into the conceptual framework of computer science. By defending the idea that everything is a computation, Steinhart, who is professor of philosophy at William Paterson University, defends a new way of thinking about the nature of life and the nature of death, and thus about the question of life after death. In his version of digitalism, there is no such thing as judgment in the Christian sense; your soul is simply a program that will rerun on a progression of superior computers.

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Carrie Figdor

Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa.

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