Eternal Life, Maybe

David Goldman, writing at PJ Media, makes an interesting point. Some of the same secular folk who scoff at the Judeo-Christian concept of a God-granted immortality of the soul nevertheless believe that such immortality is possible through technology, and they're excited by the prospect.

He introduces his thoughts by referencing the belief of ancient elites, particularly in Egypt, that they'd live forever:

What was the upshot of Egyptian idolatry? The ruling elite wanted to live forever, and enslaved my ancestors to build grand tombs in which their mummified bodies would migrate to another life, surrounded by their wealth and some conveniently dead servants. A remarkably large part of Egypt’s economic output fed the fantasies of the Pharaohs, at which we laugh today.

The desire for eternal life is not new, and hardly unique to Jews or Christians. Neanderthals buried their dead with grave gifts. Gilgamesh, the Babylonian hero, set out to find eternal life. The pharaohs built pyramids with [Jewish] sweat and blood.

Contemporary secular elites are too sophisticated for such superstitious nonsense. Their belief in eternal life relies on advances in technology, but it turns out to be at least as "faith-based" as some traditional views:

Today our progressive opinion-makers ridicule the concept of an eternal God and a world to come, but they believe that we soon will upload our minds to the Internet where our consciousness will continue intact.

We laugh at the idea that the blessed would spend eternity strumming harps while seated on clouds, but enlightened opinion now believes that we shall maintain our conscious minds in Google’s cloud. Add to this a robotic body, and supposedly we can live forever. A lot of Silicon Valley billionaires take this seriously.

According to Wikipedia, mind uploading may potentially be accomplished by either of two methods: Copy-and-transfer or gradual replacement of neurons. In the case of the former method, mind uploading would be achieved by scanning and mapping the salient features of a biological brain, and then by copying, transferring, and storing that information state into a computer system or another computational device.

The biological brain may not survive the copying process. The simulated mind could be within a virtual reality or simulated world, supported by an anatomic 3D body simulation model. Alternatively the simulated mind could reside in a computer that is inside (or connected to) a (not necessarily humanoid) robot or a biological body.

That is not science, but science fiction. The urge to escape death, though, remains as powerful today as it was when Moses confronted Ramses.

A tech startup now offers a method to preserve the chemical arrangement of your brain until such time as it can be uploaded, with the minor side-effect that you will have to die in the process.

It's not uncommon to hear materialists declare that they're satisfied with the one life they have and have no desire to live on forever. What they apparently mean is that they have no desire to live forever if that means that they must come to terms with God. If eternal life can be accomplished otherwise, then they're all in.

If they're promised that they can bypass God and find eternal life through technological advances they'll grab hold of that shred of possibility like a drowning man grasping at a piece of flotsam.

There's more in Goldman's article, but this, I think is noteworthy. Comparing our modern elites to the ancient pharaohs who expended huge quantities of both money and human life to achieve immortality for themselves he writes:

Our new pharaohs believe in methods to achieve immortality as silly as the old ones. And they entertain such fantasies for the same reason: They want to make themselves into immortal gods who have no more constraint on the satisfaction of their appetites than the rapacious, concupiscent and murderous gods of ancient paganism.

Well, as long as none of it involves God.