SOUL IN A SHELL

Tonight I watched the movie Ghost in a Shell, with Scarlet Johansson playing the lead role as a woman whose brains were transplanted into a humanoid robot. Much of her quest is about retrieving her personal memories prior to the transplant and getting to understand why this happened in the first place.

I wonder if at any time in the future a brain transplant of this kind would become feasible, if any kind. But even to imagine this is a powerful thought which takes me to the age old human fascination with life after death. With a brain transplant, I assume, its actual mortality still prevails. As an individual we may survive longer, but we still die. A living, organic brain thus far is the only vehicle to carry our memories, our feelings, our thoughts, in short: our soul. Perhaps we can transplant it, but we cannot transfer it to another medium without questioning whether such transfer would indeed retain the original living conscience or just another version, or copy of it. The original would be effectively dead.

Perhaps, indeed in the far future, many eras from now, there might be another answer. We stand at its very beginning. At best we can today leave a digital copy behind of our memories and thoughts, our voice even, images and movie clips in whatever format. It is the very thing that I have been building up, in the course of the recent years: the box which I have dubbed “Digital Me”. The box in fact is an external hard drive with some 250GB disk space. I hope to live long enough (I am 65) at least to double the total data stored.

Digital Me contains my life in pictures, home movies, video clips, text documents with notes, articles and books published, professional documents, special files about topics of my interest, in short: a collection of everything about me that will remain accessible (long) after I am gone. If the Egyptian pharaohs had access to similar technology, they would not have built their pyramids. But however far I take this collection of things in my mind, it will never really be a ‘copy’ of me in the fullest sense.

But indeed, in our time we already have come very far in storing and reproducing (printing or projecting) our lives’ memories, far beyond any type of collection in history. Our heirs and descendants might even have too much of it, this almost infinite heritage of (digital) images, movies and memories of our generations. It is for them to decide what to do with it, a time goes by, and perhaps along the lines of new technologies that could bring these memories ‘to life’.

With Digital Me I am doing my bit, or rather: my bytes. And hopefully, there will be those in the future who will enjoy a walk through my digital mind and relive some fragments of ‘me’ as I have enjoyed them alive and kicking.