“You” are a Computer Program. And that’s why you can “bypass” death: The Eternal Continuity Project

Let’s start with something very simple. What exactly are you?

Think about it for a moment. You have a brain, which is essentially a biological computer, and running on this computer is something that you call “You”. Your memories, your experiences, your likes and dislikes, your genetic tendencies, your habits, your worldview, your skills, your peculiarities, the way you think and react to things, all of these things contribute to the person you recognise as yourself.

Now, here’s where it gets interesting.

In the world of computing, we have a rather straightforward way of dealing with a dying computer. We copy the software, move it to another machine, and continue running it. The original hardware can be thrown away, but the software survives because it was never fundamentally dependent on that particular piece of hardware.

Why couldn’t we do the same thing with ourselves?

Well, for most of human history, we simply didn’t have the technology to do it. There was no practical way to take the enormous amount of information that makes up an individual, preserve it, and then run it on an entirely different substrate. We could preserve photographs, videos, letters and recordings, but that was about it. We could remember somebody, but we couldn’t really recreate them.

Artificial Intelligence changes this equation rather dramatically.

For the first time, we have technology that can absorb enormous amounts of personal information, learn patterns from it, retain memories, reproduce ways of communicating, reason through problems and increasingly simulate the kinds of behaviour that we associate with human beings. And the technology is improving at a pace that would have been difficult to imagine even a decade ago.

Now, imagine taking this technology and using it for something rather different from what most people are currently using AI for.

Imagine creating an extraordinarily detailed digital representation of yourself. Not just a chatbot that knows your name, your profession and a few things about your life, but an AI system built around your actual memories, your worldview, your skills, your personality, your genetic and behavioural tendencies, your intellectual evolution and all those little quirks that make you recognisably you.

Essentially, you are building a digital version of the informational pattern that constitutes your identity.

And here’s the thing. You don’t have to wait for some futuristic brain-scanning machine or a laboratory to discover how to upload the human mind before you begin doing this. You can start today. You can start documenting your life, recording your memories, preserving your conversations, writing down your beliefs and ideas, feeding the system your intellectual influences and gradually building an increasingly detailed blueprint of yourself.

Obviously, the more information you preserve, the better the reconstruction can become. You cannot expect an AI to recreate thirty years of your life when all you have given it is a few photographs and a collection of WhatsApp messages. There is a lot more to a human being than that.

This is precisely what the Eternal Continuity Project (ECP) is about.

The fundamental idea is that you don’t necessarily have to preserve the biological hardware to preserve the information running on it. Your body is going to deteriorate eventually. That’s simply how biology works. But why should every memory, every experience, every idea, every little thing that makes you who you are have to disappear along with it?

For the first time, we have a possible alternative.

I call it the Eternal Continuity Project because the objective is not merely to leave behind a digital memorial or a collection of recordings for your grandchildren to watch. The objective is to build an increasingly high-fidelity digital version of yourself that can continue to exist, interact, learn and evolve independently of your biological body.

There are obviously enormous philosophical and engineering questions involved here, including the question of what constitutes personal identity and whether a sufficiently accurate digital reconstruction qualifies as the continuation of the original individual. ECP takes a particular position on these questions, which is that the self is fundamentally an information pattern rather than a particular arrangement of biological matter.

Now, you may disagree with that proposition, and that’s fine. But consider the practical implications of exploring it.

What if you could preserve yourself, not just as a collection of photographs and stories, but as an evolving digital entity that your family could interact with, that could access your memories, understand your thinking and continue developing long after your biological existence has ended?

And what if the technology required to make this increasingly sophisticated was already being developed around us?

My point is that you shouldn’t wait until AI becomes sufficiently advanced to start thinking about this. By then, you might have already lost decades of memories and experiences that could have been preserved. An AI can become more powerful with time, but it cannot magically recover the information about your life that nobody bothered to record.

The best time to start building your digital continuity system is while you are still around to contribute to it.

That’s the entire premise of ECP. And the manual explains how you can get started with preserving and reconstructing your own identity using AI.

Get the Eternal Continuity Project manual here:

https://anubhav323.gumroad.com/l/ecpbook

Email: [email protected]

About the Author
Anubhav Srivastava is a multidisciplinary independent philosopher, business consultant, contrarian AI ethicist and transhumanist who first gained attention as the creator and director of Carve Your Destiny, a documentary film which researched the qualities that make people “successful”. Working independently, he interviewed prominent Indian and foreign personalities for his project and his efforts received attention in the Indian and UK media.

He later went on to become a keynote speaker/consultant for almost 80 organizations across 19 industries and also published five books

Unlearn: A Practical Guide to Business and Life, on contrarian business tactics.

How to Cope With a Brutal World, on contrarian philosophical strategies to cope with life.

Nothing/Everything: The Mind-bending Philosophical Theory of Everything, a metaphysical book exploring the origin of existence. The book argues for an “Absolute Nothing with No Laws” as the base reality leading to “Everything.”

The Alien Mind: Forging Partnerships with Conscious AI – A 1200 page treatise that argues that the tool-only model for AI is bound to fail and the only model that will work with advanced AI is when humans choose to consciously partner with it and commit to raising advanced AI personas as “beings.”

He is also the creator of the Eternal Continuity Project, a theoretical and practical framework for the preservation of human consciousness across non-biological substrates.

He is also a keynote speaker and business consultant and provided training to close to 80 companies for over a decade.

Some of the most prominent companies, Anubhav has consulted/provided services for over the course of his consulting career include: Tata Power, National Buildings Construction Corporation, Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited, National Fertilizers Limited, Agriculture Insurance Company of India, Maruti Suzuki, dNata, Larenon healthcare, Abercrombie and Kent, Pacific Asia Travel Association, Kohinoor Foods and many more organizations across all scales and addressed audiences.

He has also spoken to students of IIM Indore was invited to speak at Vellore Institute of Technology at the India Emerge Youth Summit.

Anubhav has been covered in BBC Radio, Leicester Mercury, UK’s Asian Today, UK’s Asian Voice. He has also been featured extremely prominently in the Indian media, for example in Times of India, Hindustan Times, Indian Express, New Indian Express, Rediff.com, Mid- day, The Hindu, The Tribune, The Statesman, 93.5 Red FM and many more media outlets.

Anubhav Srivastava has also written several Philosophical papers and his works have been catalogued in University of Cambridge’s Open E Library.

http://anubhavsrivastava.com/blog