The Datafication of the Soul: Interrogating Digital Immortality [Editorial]

Abstract

[From introduction] The human desire to survive death is not new. Religious traditions, philosophical systems, memorial practices, and popular culture have long offered ways of imagining continuity beyond biological life, whether through heaven, reincarnation, ancestral presence, symbolic immortality, or cultural remembrance (Bhargava; Cave; Iglesias et al.; Lifton; Nairn; Nairn and Matthews). What is changing, particularly in the age of artificial intelligence, is the form that such continuity is imagined to take. That is to say, the afterlife is no longer only a theological or metaphysical question; it is increasingly becoming a technological, commercial, and datafied one. Today, digital immortality raises questions about whether the self can be preserved through information (Savin-Baden et al.), whether personality can be inferred from digital traces (Meese et al.), whether a voice or likeness can stand in for a person, and whether mourning can be mediated through responsive systems rather than static memorials (Xie).