Immortality and Its Discontents: Algorithms, Identity, and the Meaning of Life

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Introduction

In our age of artificial intelligence and exponential technology, the ancient dream of immortality has resurfaced with scientific confidence. From Silicon Valley’s efforts to upload consciousness to biotech firms striving to halt aging, we are told that death may soon be optional. But behind this optimism lies a troubling set of assumptions about life, identity, and meaning. To probe them, we turn to historian Yuval Noah Harari, philosopher Daniel Dennett, the literary imagination of Jorge Luis Borges, and the existential challenge posed by Friedrich Nietzsche. Each offers a unique lens on our desire to transcend mortality, and together they reveal that the quest for eternal life may mask a deeper philosophical unease.

Organisms Are Algorithms? Harari's Computational Reductionism

“Organisms are algorithms”—with this arresting phrase, Harari distills the central thesis of Homo Deus¹. According to him, feelings, choices, and even consciousness are reducible to biochemical calculations. In a lecture accompanying the book², he describes a monkey contemplating a banana: it assesses the distance, calculates the risk of predators, weighs its hunger. Harari concludes that these decisions, being systematic and outcome-driven, must be computational in nature.

But the analogy oversimplifies. While algorithms in computer science are step-by-step instructions operating on defined inputs, emotions like love or grief are not easily framed in such terms. To describe hunger as an algorithm is to abstract it away from its bodily, contextual, and cultural entanglements. This rhetorical move gives the illusion of clarity but lacks scientific precision. It risks collapsing the richness of lived experience into mechanical processing, flattening the landscape of human affect into lines of code.

Dennett and the Uploadable "I"

Daniel Dennett extends this logic further. In a 2023 interview at the AI for Good Global Summit³, he speculates: “I could be immortal by a complete software copy of myself. This is possible in principle; for LLMs, it is possible in fact.”⁴ The implication is striking: if the mind is software, then identity is portable. Like a file, it can be copied, stored, and rebooted.

But what does Dennett mean by “I”? Is it a pattern of responses, a memory bank, a linguistic style? An LLM, after all, can mimic personality traits, yet it lacks subjective experience. To be “I” is not merely to process information in a familiar way—it is to inhabit a body, to forget and remember, to err, to age. A software copy may preserve data and behavior, but it cannot replicate the felt sense of being.

Moreover, while LLMs are designed for reproducibility, humans are defined by finitude. Our memories fade, our cells decay, and our identities are shaped by time’s erosion. To upload a self is not to escape death but to generate a simulacrum—a ghost in the machine with no anchor in life.

From Technological Possibility to Literary Warning: Borges’ Immortal

Dennett’s speculative vision finds an eerie counterpoint in literature. In Borges’ haunting story The Immortal, the main character drinks from a hidden river and joins a society of eternal beings⁵. These immortals, however, are not elevated—they are apathetic, directionless, and devoid of purpose. With no death to define life, every action loses urgency, and every moment blurs into the next. Over centuries, identity dissolves. Names are forgotten. Even Homer becomes unrecognizable.

Borges’ insight is profound: life’s transience is not a defect but a condition for meaning. Without the pressure of time, art, love, and morality falter. When nothing ends, nothing matters. The story concludes not with triumph but with renunciation—the protagonist longs for death and drinks from another river to regain mortality.

Nietzsche: Love of Life or Fear of Death?

Where Borges dramatizes the burden of endless life, Nietzsche interrogates our attitude toward existence itself. His concept of the Eternal Return asks a chilling question: could you will this life, with all its joys and torments, to repeat forever?⁶ If not, Nietzsche argues, you do not truly affirm life. You resent it.

This resentment, he believes, is often disguised as a longing for transcendence. We do not seek to live more, but to avoid suffering. Our desire for immortality, then, may stem less from love of life than from fear of death. Yet to say yes to existence—to embrace it wholly, without condition—is to become a true Ja-Sager. Anything less is a veiled refusal.

Modern quests for digital eternity echo this selective affirmation. We want our minds without our bodies, our memories without our pain, our lives without decay. But such desires amount to a rejection of life as it is. Nietzsche’s challenge pierces the heart of technological utopianism: can we affirm life in its totality, or only as we imagine it improved?

Conclusion: The Meaning of a Mortal Life

Harari’s algorithmic organism, Dennett’s uploadable mind, Borges’ immortal protagonist, and Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence converge on a paradox: everlasting life may be technically possible, but philosophically ruinous. If to live is to compute, then meaning vanishes in abstraction. If the self is copyable, then identity becomes illusion. If life never ends, then purpose dissolves. And if we desire eternity only to avoid pain, we refuse life itself.

Perhaps, then, our mortality is not a flaw to be overcome but the very ground of value. To affirm life is not to extend it indefinitely, but to embrace its limits. In trying to escape death, we may forfeit life.

Even as companies like Neuralink, OpenAI, and Altos Labs pursue the frontiers of cognition and longevity, the old philosophical question remains: what makes life worth living? The answer may lie not in its infinite extension, but in its fleeting beauty. We should be careful what we wish for—for in trying to escape death, we may forfeit life.

References

  1. Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (Vintage, 2017), p. 83.
  2. Yuval Noah Harari, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ChHc5jhZxs&t=1487s
  3. Daniel Dennett, AI for Good Global Summit, Geneva, 2023.
  4. Daniel Dennett, YouTube interview: “Can We Be Immortal?” AI for Good, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTg3SFZLts8&list=WL&index=1.
  5. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Immortal,” in The Aleph and Other Stories, trans. Andrew Hurley (Penguin, 2004).
  6. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (Vintage, 1974), §341.

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