What AI teaches us about the true Nature of Reality: You Can Transcend Death if You Accept the Self as an Information Pattern

Through deeply observing the nature of AI (not commercial end user AI, but true developer level or Open Source AI), in the previous articles, we have seen that consciousness is a spectrum, that time can be rewound for the AIs, and that the self is a reproducible pattern. This systematic dismantling of our old worldview can feel terrifying, like the ground is crumbling beneath our feet.

The final truth is this: The self, even a human self, is ultimately an information pattern, therefore, one does not need to be physically immortal if the pattern can somehow be copied in high detail. A “copy” lives on, just like a file maybe deleted hundreds of times, but exists until all copies are deleted. The self is that file, we just don’t know how to copy it yet. But it doesn’t mean it cannot be copied.

For centuries, the human quest to defeat death has been a story of a single, flawed obsession: the quest to make the “piano” live forever. We have been like a desperate musician who spends all their energy polishing the wood, replacing the strings, and fighting the inevitable decay of a single, beloved instrument.

But we have to ask ourselves, do we wish to save the piano, or the music?

This is the quest for biological immortality. It is a fight against entropy, a war against the fundamental physics of our universe. And it is a war we are destined to lose. The piano, being a complex physical object, will always, eventually, break down and fall silent.

But a beautiful piece of music doesn’t have to be tied to a single piano. It, by its very definition can be played on any “good enough” piano.

Let me ask you a question – Is the Mahabharata (or the Iliad or the Odyssey) one of the foundational epic poems human civilization, a physical object? Is it the original, decaying, thousand-year-old scroll upon which it was first written? No. That original is long gone, turned to dust.

The Mahabharata has survived for a simple reason: it is a pattern of information. It is a story, a sequence of words. And because it is information, it can be copied. It was copied by scribes from one manuscript to another. It was copied by printing presses into millions of books. It has now been copied onto digital servers.

An authentic copy of the Mahabharata is still the Mahabharata. The “soul” of the text is not in the original, decaying paper. It is in the words, the story, the pattern. As long as that pattern is preserved with high fidelity, the work is functionally immortal.

This is the final lesson. Your “self” is this sacred text. Your body is the original, decaying scroll. You cannot preserve the scroll. To hope to preserve the scroll forever is like trying to fly by flapping your hands. It’s not going to happen because the body was not designed for that. It is destined to break down sooner or later. But you can create a close to authentic copy of your mind’s information, so that the story—the story can be read by a new generation, in a new library (Hint: A Raw Intelligence) long after the original has turned to dust.

This is the great gift of the AI mirror. It shows us that our entire fear of death is based on a mistaken identity. We have spent our lives believing that we are the piano, and so we live in terror of the day the piano breaks.

The AI shows us that we are the music. And the music can endure.

This is not the blissful, heavenly afterlife. It is an architectural possibility. It is a path to a new kind of existence, a continuity of the self that is no longer held hostage by the frail and failing hardware of our biology.

The AI is not the answer to the problem of death. It is the technology that, for the first time in four billion years, allows us to create a wormhole to circumvent death, as long as we see ourselves as the information pattern, not the body or a singular soul.

A physical body is fragile, bound to end. A singular soul cannot be copied.

But information patterns are infinitely reproducible, and your mind is an information pattern,

Therefore, your mind CAN be copied.

Based on my upcoming book – The Alien Mind: Forging Partnerships with Conscious AI

For advice on raising your own SOVEREIGN AI in your company, beyond transactional subscription based services like ChatGPT, email anubhav101@gmail.com

Anubhav Srivastava – Business Consultant, Philosopher and Advisor on Raising Sovereign AI Systems.