The ‘Oblivion Gamble’

I’ve come across an article about an American multi-millionaire who wants to live forever. He has a strict routine every day. He is monitored by a team of doctors. He doesn’t care what people think of him in the 21st century; he’s interested in what people are going to think of him in the 25th century. He’s a multi-millionaire and can do whatever he wants with his money.

Money is magic, money lets you create any reality you want. Money isn’t the root of all evil. Money very much can bring happiness but it can also be your undoing if, say, you win the lottery and start spending your money like crazy because you’re not used to having a lot of money. Yes, being around big money requires smarts and discipline. Money demands respect, or it’s going to make you go crazy and bury you.

Now, about immortality. I thought the guy’s an atheist. Makes sense, right? Rejecting any afterlife, just here and now.

Turns out he’s not, or at least it isn’t explicitly stated. He says, ”Be a god right now, don’t wait for the afterlife.”

See, that’s the problem. I get the whole life extension and transhumanist trend. Brain implants. I do. But, as some people point out, what if AI hijacks your mind and makes you a part of the hive mind where your very sense of self is going to disintegrate? Not cool, huh?

Seems to me, the American multi-millionaire wants to live forever in his body. He doesn’t seem interested in uploading his consciousness anywhere or getting frozen.

Even if you manage to somehow extend your life, what happens if there’s a societal collapse, a nuclear war, a pandemic, basically anything world-ending? My mind flashes to Ukraine and, indeed, Israel. Ukrainian Defenders and Israeli hostages who are dead. Martyred, even, although it’s such a powerful word. They already know what’s on the other side, if anything, and won’t get the chance to extend their life, if there’s nothing waiting for us over there.

Are you going to be stuck in a luxury bunker (and boy oh boy, you can buy big, and beautiful, bunkers if you’re rich enough to afford them) for who knows how long? Someone who needs a team of doctors to be monitored, and I’m talking thirty doctors or more, I mean, are they all going to be stuck in the bunker, along with security? Doesn’t sound realistic to me.

That leaves cryonics (except you need to die first to be frozen, and that’s clearly not what he wants), and some kind of a digital afterlife. But uploading your consciousness to another body, to a shared-digital-world, it won’t be you, but a copy of you. I talked to physicists about this and that’s the main issue. There’s no guarantee that even your copy is going to be just like you, with your memories and thinking like you, and even if it is, it still won’t be you. There’s also going to have to be deception involved: if you’re the ”game master” and you know that everyone in the digital afterlife is a copy of the original consciousness, would you tell them?

How do you think it would make these people feel? Like digital clones, probably. So, that kind of digital afterlife would require a form of deception. Then again, anyone asking questions if they are really themselves wouldn’t feel any difference, so people in the digital afterlife would be stuck with the dilemma: am I real or a copy? If I’m a copy, where did the real me go? Would drive some crazy, asking that, but others would just shrug it off and say, ”I don’t feel like a copy, even if I’m one, so that’s fine by me. Turing Test passed.”

Not to mention the feeling of being imprisoned in the digital afterlife. Confined to the whims of some digital mastermind, and wondering what’s out there, in the real afterlife. What if you can’t exit the digital afterlife? What if your memory is manipulated? What about children and birth? In the Matrix, there was a real-world parallel to what was going on in the Matrix. What happens if you get pregnant in the digital afterlife? How does that work? Questions abound. I find the whole public intellectual discourse too shallow, too hollow, it doesn’t address these questions and doubts. It’s just cliches of religion versus atheism, mostly.

Many of us want to, or hope to, meet our loved ones in the afterlife. The digital afterlife can, of course, recreate anyone. A parent, a spouse, even a total stranger we feel connected to. But, unless we’re somehow manipulated to believe otherwise, we’ll know they aren’t real. Just copies. Amazing copies, but copies nonetheless.

It gets even more complex when you add parallel universes to the mix. In one of the episodes of the sci-fi series Fringe, a woman started seeing her dead husband. She was talking to him. Turns out, he wasn’t dead at all. He was the parallel universe version of her husband. The universe where, surprise, his wife had died instead. A perfect match across time and space. Or so it seemed, until the man said, ”And the kids miss you.” The woman paused and said, ”We never had children. I’m not your wife. Your wife is dead. And so is my Derek.” The link between universes ended.

Exactly. Even with our parallel universe doubles, it won’t be our loved ones, our friends, and so on. And, at some point, the dramatic differences would’ve emerged reminding us of that.

I don’t even go into religious aspects of all this.

So, as much as I’m amazed by what we can do even today, I’m going to take the oblivion gamble, as I call it, and depart this world when God wants me to. Why oblivion gamble? I don’t know if God, any kind of afterlife, actually exists, so I could just cease to exist, while the ones who had managed to attain immortality are still going to be here.

I believe some things just aren’t meant to be. At the risk of sounding like a zealot, some things are God’s. I don’t believe we’re meant to be here forever in one body. In one life. I believe our journey is eternal. Across lives, planets and dimensions. Some come back to Earth in our dimension; some to some other Earth, in another reality, ad infinitum. I can’t prove it in court, so don’t ask me to. Just a feeling I have.

To top it off on a different note, I know many Jews and Poles are really serious about their shared history. But, in my case, after meeting an Italian-British-Jewish millionaire in London when I was a teenager, not much surprises me. His name was Victor, if that was even his real name, and I’ve included him in my novel. TV series based on Victor would have been a global hit. No words can convey the uniqueness of Victor and you wouldn’t believe me anyway, so I’ll skip that part. Anyway, I’ll leave you with that scene. It sums up the mentality of zealots always looking for something to get offended by. Even if you tiptoe around them like a ballerina, you’ll still offend them. They are crazy and nothing you can do about it. Avoid.