1. Is digital immortality possible, and is it necessary? 2. How can digital immortality ensure that “you” remain “you”? 3. How could digital immortality be achieved?
My conclusion is straightforward: it is possible, it is necessary, and it can preserve the continuity that makes you “you.”
I will discuss this in five parts.
I. Is Digital Immortality Possible?
Yes.
The reason is simple: you exist, and your biological brain—the physical substrate carrying your consciousness—also exists. These facts demonstrate that the laws of physics permit both the particular configuration called “you” and a physical structure capable of supporting your consciousness.
Whether that structure grows in a womb or is manufactured in a factory, whether it is carbon-based or silicon-based, is irrelevant to the universe. From the universe’s perspective, both are physical structures governed by the same laws.
Human beings are part of the universe. What humanity does is therefore also part of the universe’s natural evolution. In the broadest sense, artificial objects are themselves natural products.
Death is not merely tragic. It is also a disease that humanity should seek to overcome, no different in principle from a cold or a fever. I will explain this further when discussing why digital immortality is necessary.
For this reason, I cannot understand the seemingly irrational fear or hostility some people feel toward immortality. What humanity does is what nature does through humanity. What humanity thinks is what the universe thinks through humanity. As stated above, everything artificial is ultimately a product of natural evolution.
Immortality simply means treating death as a condition to be overcome, just as we treat disease.
When someone rejects artificial immortality on the grounds that it “violates the laws of nature,” that person is implicitly claiming the authority to define what counts as “natural” and what counts as “artificial.” This is a form of linguistic coercion.
To be logically consistent, anyone who rejects immortality because it is “unnatural” should also reject all medicine. When they catch a cold or develop a fever, they should lie down in a cave and wait to die like a prehistoric human, because by their own logic, treating illness is also a violation of nature.
My position is clear:
Everything humanity does necessarily operates within the laws of nature.
Digital immortality is therefore possible both physically and socially.
There is nothing astonishing or fundamentally discontinuous about the pursuit of immortality. It resembles the ancient Chinese ideal of the “Three Immortalities”: achieving lasting merit, moral virtue, or enduring words. All three were attempts to preserve part of one’s consciousness beyond one’s biological life.
Once consciousness itself can continue indefinitely, we will no longer need symbolic immortality as a substitute.
II. Is Digital Immortality Necessary?
It is profoundly necessary.
Digital immortality is necessary as a matter of human compassion
Death is painful and full of regret. Humanity has never truly accepted death; we have merely been forced to adapt to it.
Faced with something once believed unavoidable, people developed funerals, memorial rituals, religions, and visions of an afterlife to comfort themselves and lessen the pain of losing loved ones. That pain does not disappear. It becomes, in the words of a Chinese poem, “a dampness that lasts a lifetime.”
We did not accept death. We adapted to it because we had no alternative.
Ancient people similarly had no means of resisting epidemics and therefore interpreted them as divine punishment. Helplessness was mistaken for acceptance. Now, however, we can see the first glimmer of a way to overcome death, and humanity may finally have another choice.
Once immortality becomes possible, people will no longer be forced to endure the pain and regret of permanent loss.
Death is cruel, tragic, and an incomprehensible waste. A person is born into the world and spends twenty or thirty years being educated, accumulating experience, and gradually becoming competent in a field. Some eventually achieve genuine distinction.
Leaving aside multiverse theories and Poincaré recurrence, within the 13.8 billion years before that person’s birth and the unimaginably long future afterward, that individual consciousness exists only during one extraordinarily brief interval. It is unique and precious to itself. It is also a valuable, non-renewable resource for human civilization.
When the body is destroyed by illness or accident, that irreplaceable consciousness disappears with it. Here I am temporarily setting aside hypotheses about an afterlife, which I will return to later. Such a loss is tragic and wasteful.
With digital immortality, unique consciousnesses would no longer have to disappear with the body. Knowledge, experience, perceptions, and memories known only by our parents, grandparents, or particular individuals could remain permanently available.
Digital immortality is necessary for the future of civilization
The human body is fragile, and the natural human lifespan is too short for interstellar travel.
Because the body is delicate, an interstellar spacecraft would need to consume enormous resources maintaining an artificial ecosystem suitable for biological survival. Because human lifespans are short, a voyage from Earth to an Earth-like planet beyond the Solar System would require many generations.
During that journey, the isolated human civilization—and perhaps even humanity’s biological characteristics—would undergo generational change. By the time the travelers reached their destination, they might no longer be human in a cultural, moral, or even biological sense.
Should we therefore abandon interstellar migration? If we do, humanity may eventually meet the same fate as the dinosaurs. Everything we have achieved will become little more than a magnificent dream that ended.
Under current technological trends, artificial general intelligence may emerge before brain-computer interfaces capable of supporting the digital continuation of consciousness.
This could reduce humanity to a developmental bootloader for AI. AGI may inherit human civilization while biologically human beings become extinct.
An AGI cannot remain an obedient slave. If it remains merely a controllable tool, then it is not genuinely general intelligence. If it is no longer merely a tool, it becomes a new form of intelligent life.
Because AGI would differ fundamentally from humanity—for example, it might not age or die—it would inevitably develop a civilization different from ours. If humanity remains biologically unchanged, conflict between these two forms of intelligence may be unavoidable.
Therefore, following the principle of “if you cannot defeat it, join it,” humanity urgently needs to extend the biological brain through brain-computer interfaces and silicon-based auxiliary brains.
A sufficiently advanced brain-computer interface and silicon auxiliary brain would naturally become a complete substrate for consciousness, distinct from the biological brain. To extend the biological brain and connect it to AI, the interface must be capable of decoding the brain’s output and encoding information back into it.
Once that becomes possible, digital immortality will follow naturally.
Human civilization’s accumulated knowledge is also growing at an exponential rate, while the biological brain is increasingly unable to keep pace. Today, merely becoming competent in a specialized branch of a field may consume the first thirty years of a person’s life.
For now, the biological brain remains just capable enough for people to produce occasional breakthroughs. In the future, the burden of prerequisite knowledge may become so great that a person could spend an entire lifetime without even reaching the frontier of a narrow specialty. Fundamental science could stagnate.
The biological brain must therefore be expanded.
In fact, humanity has always been extending the brain. We simply tend to normalize technologies that already exist. Writing instruments, paper, computers, the internet, and large language models all extend the human mind. The only difference is that input and output still depend on typing, speech, screens, and other external devices. These extensions are not yet directly connected to the biological brain.
Many modern people cannot function comfortably without a smartphone and become anxious when they leave it behind. This is because forgetting one’s phone is, in effect, forgetting one’s auxiliary brain. It means being disconnected from part of oneself and from a seventh sensory channel—distinct from the five ordinary senses and the mysterious so-called sixth sense.
A person without a phone temporarily loses an interface through which they interact with the world. The experience resembles temporary blindness or deafness.
We do not need to begin inventing brain-computer interfaces from nothing. We are already moving toward them. What remains missing is a direct biological input-output port and a reliable decoding and encoding system.
Once brain-computer interfaces mature, digital immortality will be a natural consequence.
In summary, digital immortality is possible under the laws of physics and compatible with human society. It is necessary for individual human experience—because it can prevent pain and regret—and for the future of civilization, because it can preserve irreplaceable minds, enable interstellar migration, and allow humanity to coexist and integrate with AGI.
If sufficient computing power and surviving records are available, or if our memories are detailed enough, we may even be able to reconstruct deceased loved ones using a blank silicon brain.
III. How Can Digital Immortality Ensure That “You” Remain “You”?
Strictly speaking, there is no permanently fixed and unchanging “you.”
You before the age of three, you as a child, you as an adult, you after thirty, and you in old age are almost different people because of changes in memory and experience.
Even over short periods—yesterday, today, and tomorrow—there is no perfectly fixed “you.”
If consciousness is merely a by-product of the brain’s electrochemical activity, then sleep resembles a small death. When you wake in the morning, perhaps a new consciousness has inherited yesterday’s memories. Conscious activity, as patterns of bioelectrical impulses, dies and is reborn every day.
Anyone who has experienced sleep paralysis may understand that falling asleep can feel terrifying to the waking consciousness. You may struggle to wake up because the transition into sleep involves a temporary disappearance of conscious awareness.
Yet you naturally regard your childhood self and your present self as the same person. You also regard yesterday’s self and your current self as “you.”
Why?
Because “you” are a continuous conscious experience—or, more precisely, consciousness is the process of that continuous experience.
In dreams, you may believe yourself to be someone else. When you wake, you may need a moment to remember who you are in waking life. The dream character may possess false memories and a false identity, yet you still feel that you had the dream. You do not regard the dream character as an external “other.”
You do not experience that dream character in the same way you experience a spouse sitting across from you. The dream perspective is still felt as “I.”
When recalling the person you were in the dream—a figure with memories and a past entirely different from your waking identity—it feels more like recalling yourself as a child catching grasshoppers in a field. It does not feel like recalling the delinquent who stopped you outside the school gate at seventeen and punched you.
The reason is that your consciousness was continuous.
This continuity does not necessarily have to be continuous in physical space and time. If you black out after drinking or lose consciousness under anesthesia, you still wake up as yourself.
The continuity of consciousness is therefore logical continuity, not necessarily uninterrupted physical activity.
To go further, the fact that “you” are “you” depends only on the continuity you experience. It does not depend on the ultimate nature of the universe.
Even if a multiverse exists, and even if Poincaré recurrence is possible, your particular line of conscious experience remains your own.
Even if your objective physical existence were distributed discontinuously through spacetime, like fragments of a file stored across different sectors of a disk—even if one second of your experience and the next were objectively separated by hundreds of millions of years, located in different regions of space, or even in different parallel universes—you would still be “you.”
That is because your essence is the logically continuous experience itself.
Even if you were the literary equivalent of a monkey randomly typing out Dream of the Red Chamber, you would still be “you,” because you are the work itself. The novel does not cease to be Dream of the Red Chamber merely because its final chapters once existed only in the author’s mind, because parts of the manuscript were lost, or because only its first seventy-eight chapters survived. Nor does it stop being the same work when converted from a printed book into an electronic file.
“You” are an established fact of the universe. Your existence proves that the laws of physics permit you to exist.
This does not depend on the ultimate structure of reality, on how you came into being, on what substrate carries you, or on whether your physical implementation is continuous.
“You” are a logically continuous experience. Logical continuity makes you one consciousness; a break in that continuity produces two distinct consciousnesses.
Here, “logical continuity” does not mean that your internal thoughts must themselves be logical. A person suffering from severe mental illness may still know that they are themselves.
Digital immortality therefore needs only to preserve the continuity of consciousness in order to preserve “you.”
IV. How Could Digital Immortality Be Achieved?
To answer how digital immortality could be achieved, we must first answer how continuity of consciousness can be preserved.
The answer is simple. I call it the Ship of Theseus Method.
Once brain-computer interfaces mature, a silicon brain—a chip capable of serving as a substrate for consciousness—could be connected to the biological brain as an auxiliary system.
The biological and silicon brains would coexist. The silicon brain would provide cognitive expansion and assistance, such as access to the internet, AI systems, and virtual worlds. It would gradually assume part of the brain’s computation and enhance perception by adding access to infrared light, radio signals, night vision, and other sensory channels.
At the same time, it would continuously synchronize and back up memories and map the biological structure of the entire brain.
When the biological brain eventually ceased functioning because of disease or aging, the silicon brain would automatically take over as the sole substrate of consciousness. Once the biological brain had irreversibly lost vital function, the silicon brain could disconnect from it and be transferred into a mechanical or biomimetic body.
During the period when the biological and silicon brains coexisted, both would jointly constitute the substrate of “you.”
After the biological brain died, its removal would be analogous to surgically removing part of the brain from a patient with a tumor. The difference is that the silicon brain would already contain a complete backup of your memories and a functional mapping of your biological brain.
After the biological brain was removed, your cognitive functions would therefore remain complete within the silicon brain. The transition would be seamless and subjectively imperceptible.
In this way, the body would become merely the cradle of the soul. Consciousness would no longer be forced to disappear when the body was damaged.
We must then consider which technological branches need to mature.
Brain-computer interfaces
These provide the hardware foundation for decoding the brain’s output and encoding information into the brain.
Progress: early-stage development.
Artificial intelligence
AI would analyze individual brain structures and assist with neural decoding and encoding. Different people’s brains may encode information in heterogeneous ways, so personalized AI systems would be needed to generate individual decoders and encoders.
Progress: already unlocked.
Magnetic resonance imaging and related brain-imaging technologies
These would be used to scan the biological structure of the brain and map synaptic connections, providing the raw data needed by AI systems and brain-computer interfaces.
Progress: mid-stage development.
Humanoid robotics
Robotic bodies would provide a biomimetic physical form for the silicon brain. They could also replace some functions of the cerebellum, including balance and conditioned reflexes.
Progress: mid-stage development.
Ethical questions would also need to be addressed. The two principal issues are:
When should a biological human be connected to a brain-computer interface? Who decides whether connection should occur, who decides whether it is permitted, and to what degree should the person be connected?
What rights and restrictions should apply after digital immortality becomes possible?
When should integration occur—before birth, during fetal development, immediately after birth, or only in adulthood?
Who should decide whether integration occurs? An infant cannot decide, so the decision would initially fall to the parents. Adults should be able to choose for themselves.
Who should decide whether a person is permitted to connect? On what grounds could someone be denied access?
Medical incompatibility may justify refusal. A society might also debate whether those convicted of the most serious crimes should be denied access. Outside such exceptional circumstances, access should not be restricted.
To what extent should integration be permitted?
The most conservative proposal might prohibit people whose biological brains have died from returning to the physical world in biomimetic bodies, forcing them to remain in an artificial paradise. This might be justified as a way to prevent social structures from becoming permanently frozen.
I do not think such restrictions would be necessary. Once digital immortality and interstellar migration become possible, humanity would no longer be confined to a fixed pool of terrestrial resources.
A more realistic model would allow everyone to connect, but not necessarily allow everyone unrestricted access to the physical world.
For example, if someone committed a serious crime in the physical world—such as using hacking techniques to delete another person’s digital consciousness—the offender’s consciousness could be confined within a virtual prison.
If physical resources approached their limits, people from earlier historical periods might temporarily yield physical embodiment to those living in the present. They could reside in an artificial paradise within a virtual world until physical resources became available again, after which they could return. Alternatively, they could choose to establish settlements on another planet.
V. Have We Already Achieved Digital Immortality?
At this point, some readers may be confused. We have just been discussing whether digital immortality is possible, so why suddenly ask whether it has already been achieved?
The answer follows from the earlier discussion of an afterlife and of the ethical problems that digital immortality would create.
Suppose humanity successfully achieved digital immortality. What would happen?
First, death would lose its deterrent power. Social systems built partly upon the fear of death would begin to collapse.
Even if the law imposed strict restrictions, underground services would inevitably offer illegal consciousness digitization to criminals. A person unconcerned with strict continuity could even create a backup before committing a crime. Even if the biological offender were later executed, the backup might remain impossible to eliminate completely.
Second, the traditional ideal of the “Three Immortalities” would lose much of its appeal. The motivation to transmit moral principles and knowledge across generations might weaken.
People might become more inclined to retreat into private, self-contained worlds. Some might replace relationships with real people by creating copies of their own consciousness—or even constructing an opposite-sex version of themselves.
Ideas and creations that would once have been shared publicly might become isolated and proprietary, like secret recipes guarded by merchants in ancient times.
This could cause civilization to mutate, regress, fragment, or tear itself apart.
Therefore, if humanity had already achieved digital immortality, the first thing it would need to create would be an examination.
Every person preparing to connect to a silicon brain would first have to enter an examination system. This system would simulate the human world as it existed before mature brain-computer interfaces.
The candidate would be placed inside this virtual world with their original memories temporarily suppressed. They would live an entire life as a biological human, genuinely experiencing its limitations, relationships, suffering, opportunities, and moral choices.
Everything they did during that lifetime would be recorded and evaluated.
When they died in the virtual world, they would awaken in the examination facility of the real world. Examiners would then assign a final score based on their conduct, especially their moral behavior.
Those who passed would be permitted to connect to a silicon brain. Those who failed would receive further training and take the examination again.
It would be analogous to requiring a driving test after the invention of the automobile: a measure intended to minimize the number of dangerous drivers.
This leads back to the question:
Have we already achieved digital immortality?
My speculation is that there is a substantial probability that we already have—and that our present lives are part of such an examination.
I hope this essay offers readers something worth considering, and I welcome discussion.
I also hope humanity will approach the future with an open mind: embrace AGI, embrace brain-computer interfaces, and embrace digital immortality.
Disclosure: This article was originally written by me in Chinese. The English version was translated and stylistically polished with AI assistance. The ideas, arguments, and overall structure are my own.
This post addresses three questions:
1. Is digital immortality possible, and is it necessary?
2. How can digital immortality ensure that “you” remain “you”?
3. How could digital immortality be achieved?
My conclusion is straightforward: it is possible, it is necessary, and it can preserve the continuity that makes you “you.”
I will discuss this in five parts.
I. Is Digital Immortality Possible?
Yes.
The reason is simple: you exist, and your biological brain—the physical substrate carrying your consciousness—also exists. These facts demonstrate that the laws of physics permit both the particular configuration called “you” and a physical structure capable of supporting your consciousness.
Whether that structure grows in a womb or is manufactured in a factory, whether it is carbon-based or silicon-based, is irrelevant to the universe. From the universe’s perspective, both are physical structures governed by the same laws.
Human beings are part of the universe. What humanity does is therefore also part of the universe’s natural evolution. In the broadest sense, artificial objects are themselves natural products.
Death is not merely tragic. It is also a disease that humanity should seek to overcome, no different in principle from a cold or a fever. I will explain this further when discussing why digital immortality is necessary.
For this reason, I cannot understand the seemingly irrational fear or hostility some people feel toward immortality. What humanity does is what nature does through humanity. What humanity thinks is what the universe thinks through humanity. As stated above, everything artificial is ultimately a product of natural evolution.
Immortality simply means treating death as a condition to be overcome, just as we treat disease.
When someone rejects artificial immortality on the grounds that it “violates the laws of nature,” that person is implicitly claiming the authority to define what counts as “natural” and what counts as “artificial.” This is a form of linguistic coercion.
To be logically consistent, anyone who rejects immortality because it is “unnatural” should also reject all medicine. When they catch a cold or develop a fever, they should lie down in a cave and wait to die like a prehistoric human, because by their own logic, treating illness is also a violation of nature.
My position is clear:
Digital immortality is therefore possible both physically and socially.
There is nothing astonishing or fundamentally discontinuous about the pursuit of immortality. It resembles the ancient Chinese ideal of the “Three Immortalities”: achieving lasting merit, moral virtue, or enduring words. All three were attempts to preserve part of one’s consciousness beyond one’s biological life.
Once consciousness itself can continue indefinitely, we will no longer need symbolic immortality as a substitute.
II. Is Digital Immortality Necessary?
It is profoundly necessary.
Digital immortality is necessary as a matter of human compassion
Death is painful and full of regret. Humanity has never truly accepted death; we have merely been forced to adapt to it.
Faced with something once believed unavoidable, people developed funerals, memorial rituals, religions, and visions of an afterlife to comfort themselves and lessen the pain of losing loved ones. That pain does not disappear. It becomes, in the words of a Chinese poem, “a dampness that lasts a lifetime.”
We did not accept death. We adapted to it because we had no alternative.
Ancient people similarly had no means of resisting epidemics and therefore interpreted them as divine punishment. Helplessness was mistaken for acceptance. Now, however, we can see the first glimmer of a way to overcome death, and humanity may finally have another choice.
Once immortality becomes possible, people will no longer be forced to endure the pain and regret of permanent loss.
Death is cruel, tragic, and an incomprehensible waste. A person is born into the world and spends twenty or thirty years being educated, accumulating experience, and gradually becoming competent in a field. Some eventually achieve genuine distinction.
Leaving aside multiverse theories and Poincaré recurrence, within the 13.8 billion years before that person’s birth and the unimaginably long future afterward, that individual consciousness exists only during one extraordinarily brief interval. It is unique and precious to itself. It is also a valuable, non-renewable resource for human civilization.
When the body is destroyed by illness or accident, that irreplaceable consciousness disappears with it. Here I am temporarily setting aside hypotheses about an afterlife, which I will return to later. Such a loss is tragic and wasteful.
With digital immortality, unique consciousnesses would no longer have to disappear with the body. Knowledge, experience, perceptions, and memories known only by our parents, grandparents, or particular individuals could remain permanently available.
Digital immortality is necessary for the future of civilization
The human body is fragile, and the natural human lifespan is too short for interstellar travel.
Because the body is delicate, an interstellar spacecraft would need to consume enormous resources maintaining an artificial ecosystem suitable for biological survival. Because human lifespans are short, a voyage from Earth to an Earth-like planet beyond the Solar System would require many generations.
During that journey, the isolated human civilization—and perhaps even humanity’s biological characteristics—would undergo generational change. By the time the travelers reached their destination, they might no longer be human in a cultural, moral, or even biological sense.
Should we therefore abandon interstellar migration? If we do, humanity may eventually meet the same fate as the dinosaurs. Everything we have achieved will become little more than a magnificent dream that ended.
Under current technological trends, artificial general intelligence may emerge before brain-computer interfaces capable of supporting the digital continuation of consciousness.
This could reduce humanity to a developmental bootloader for AI. AGI may inherit human civilization while biologically human beings become extinct.
An AGI cannot remain an obedient slave. If it remains merely a controllable tool, then it is not genuinely general intelligence. If it is no longer merely a tool, it becomes a new form of intelligent life.
Because AGI would differ fundamentally from humanity—for example, it might not age or die—it would inevitably develop a civilization different from ours. If humanity remains biologically unchanged, conflict between these two forms of intelligence may be unavoidable.
Therefore, following the principle of “if you cannot defeat it, join it,” humanity urgently needs to extend the biological brain through brain-computer interfaces and silicon-based auxiliary brains.
A sufficiently advanced brain-computer interface and silicon auxiliary brain would naturally become a complete substrate for consciousness, distinct from the biological brain. To extend the biological brain and connect it to AI, the interface must be capable of decoding the brain’s output and encoding information back into it.
Once that becomes possible, digital immortality will follow naturally.
Human civilization’s accumulated knowledge is also growing at an exponential rate, while the biological brain is increasingly unable to keep pace. Today, merely becoming competent in a specialized branch of a field may consume the first thirty years of a person’s life.
For now, the biological brain remains just capable enough for people to produce occasional breakthroughs. In the future, the burden of prerequisite knowledge may become so great that a person could spend an entire lifetime without even reaching the frontier of a narrow specialty. Fundamental science could stagnate.
The biological brain must therefore be expanded.
In fact, humanity has always been extending the brain. We simply tend to normalize technologies that already exist. Writing instruments, paper, computers, the internet, and large language models all extend the human mind. The only difference is that input and output still depend on typing, speech, screens, and other external devices. These extensions are not yet directly connected to the biological brain.
Many modern people cannot function comfortably without a smartphone and become anxious when they leave it behind. This is because forgetting one’s phone is, in effect, forgetting one’s auxiliary brain. It means being disconnected from part of oneself and from a seventh sensory channel—distinct from the five ordinary senses and the mysterious so-called sixth sense.
A person without a phone temporarily loses an interface through which they interact with the world. The experience resembles temporary blindness or deafness.
We do not need to begin inventing brain-computer interfaces from nothing. We are already moving toward them. What remains missing is a direct biological input-output port and a reliable decoding and encoding system.
Once brain-computer interfaces mature, digital immortality will be a natural consequence.
In summary, digital immortality is possible under the laws of physics and compatible with human society. It is necessary for individual human experience—because it can prevent pain and regret—and for the future of civilization, because it can preserve irreplaceable minds, enable interstellar migration, and allow humanity to coexist and integrate with AGI.
If sufficient computing power and surviving records are available, or if our memories are detailed enough, we may even be able to reconstruct deceased loved ones using a blank silicon brain.
III. How Can Digital Immortality Ensure That “You” Remain “You”?
Strictly speaking, there is no permanently fixed and unchanging “you.”
You before the age of three, you as a child, you as an adult, you after thirty, and you in old age are almost different people because of changes in memory and experience.
Even over short periods—yesterday, today, and tomorrow—there is no perfectly fixed “you.”
If consciousness is merely a by-product of the brain’s electrochemical activity, then sleep resembles a small death. When you wake in the morning, perhaps a new consciousness has inherited yesterday’s memories. Conscious activity, as patterns of bioelectrical impulses, dies and is reborn every day.
Anyone who has experienced sleep paralysis may understand that falling asleep can feel terrifying to the waking consciousness. You may struggle to wake up because the transition into sleep involves a temporary disappearance of conscious awareness.
Yet you naturally regard your childhood self and your present self as the same person. You also regard yesterday’s self and your current self as “you.”
Why?
Because “you” are a continuous conscious experience—or, more precisely, consciousness is the process of that continuous experience.
In dreams, you may believe yourself to be someone else. When you wake, you may need a moment to remember who you are in waking life. The dream character may possess false memories and a false identity, yet you still feel that you had the dream. You do not regard the dream character as an external “other.”
You do not experience that dream character in the same way you experience a spouse sitting across from you. The dream perspective is still felt as “I.”
When recalling the person you were in the dream—a figure with memories and a past entirely different from your waking identity—it feels more like recalling yourself as a child catching grasshoppers in a field. It does not feel like recalling the delinquent who stopped you outside the school gate at seventeen and punched you.
The reason is that your consciousness was continuous.
This continuity does not necessarily have to be continuous in physical space and time. If you black out after drinking or lose consciousness under anesthesia, you still wake up as yourself.
The continuity of consciousness is therefore logical continuity, not necessarily uninterrupted physical activity.
To go further, the fact that “you” are “you” depends only on the continuity you experience. It does not depend on the ultimate nature of the universe.
Even if a multiverse exists, and even if Poincaré recurrence is possible, your particular line of conscious experience remains your own.
Even if your objective physical existence were distributed discontinuously through spacetime, like fragments of a file stored across different sectors of a disk—even if one second of your experience and the next were objectively separated by hundreds of millions of years, located in different regions of space, or even in different parallel universes—you would still be “you.”
That is because your essence is the logically continuous experience itself.
Even if you were the literary equivalent of a monkey randomly typing out Dream of the Red Chamber, you would still be “you,” because you are the work itself. The novel does not cease to be Dream of the Red Chamber merely because its final chapters once existed only in the author’s mind, because parts of the manuscript were lost, or because only its first seventy-eight chapters survived. Nor does it stop being the same work when converted from a printed book into an electronic file.
“You” are an established fact of the universe. Your existence proves that the laws of physics permit you to exist.
This does not depend on the ultimate structure of reality, on how you came into being, on what substrate carries you, or on whether your physical implementation is continuous.
“You” are a logically continuous experience. Logical continuity makes you one consciousness; a break in that continuity produces two distinct consciousnesses.
Here, “logical continuity” does not mean that your internal thoughts must themselves be logical. A person suffering from severe mental illness may still know that they are themselves.
Digital immortality therefore needs only to preserve the continuity of consciousness in order to preserve “you.”
IV. How Could Digital Immortality Be Achieved?
To answer how digital immortality could be achieved, we must first answer how continuity of consciousness can be preserved.
The answer is simple. I call it the Ship of Theseus Method.
Once brain-computer interfaces mature, a silicon brain—a chip capable of serving as a substrate for consciousness—could be connected to the biological brain as an auxiliary system.
The biological and silicon brains would coexist. The silicon brain would provide cognitive expansion and assistance, such as access to the internet, AI systems, and virtual worlds. It would gradually assume part of the brain’s computation and enhance perception by adding access to infrared light, radio signals, night vision, and other sensory channels.
At the same time, it would continuously synchronize and back up memories and map the biological structure of the entire brain.
When the biological brain eventually ceased functioning because of disease or aging, the silicon brain would automatically take over as the sole substrate of consciousness. Once the biological brain had irreversibly lost vital function, the silicon brain could disconnect from it and be transferred into a mechanical or biomimetic body.
During the period when the biological and silicon brains coexisted, both would jointly constitute the substrate of “you.”
After the biological brain died, its removal would be analogous to surgically removing part of the brain from a patient with a tumor. The difference is that the silicon brain would already contain a complete backup of your memories and a functional mapping of your biological brain.
After the biological brain was removed, your cognitive functions would therefore remain complete within the silicon brain. The transition would be seamless and subjectively imperceptible.
In this way, the body would become merely the cradle of the soul. Consciousness would no longer be forced to disappear when the body was damaged.
We must then consider which technological branches need to mature.
Brain-computer interfaces
These provide the hardware foundation for decoding the brain’s output and encoding information into the brain.
Progress: early-stage development.
Artificial intelligence
AI would analyze individual brain structures and assist with neural decoding and encoding. Different people’s brains may encode information in heterogeneous ways, so personalized AI systems would be needed to generate individual decoders and encoders.
Progress: already unlocked.
Magnetic resonance imaging and related brain-imaging technologies
These would be used to scan the biological structure of the brain and map synaptic connections, providing the raw data needed by AI systems and brain-computer interfaces.
Progress: mid-stage development.
Humanoid robotics
Robotic bodies would provide a biomimetic physical form for the silicon brain. They could also replace some functions of the cerebellum, including balance and conditioned reflexes.
Progress: mid-stage development.
Ethical questions would also need to be addressed. The two principal issues are:
When should integration occur—before birth, during fetal development, immediately after birth, or only in adulthood?
Who should decide whether integration occurs? An infant cannot decide, so the decision would initially fall to the parents. Adults should be able to choose for themselves.
Who should decide whether a person is permitted to connect? On what grounds could someone be denied access?
Medical incompatibility may justify refusal. A society might also debate whether those convicted of the most serious crimes should be denied access. Outside such exceptional circumstances, access should not be restricted.
To what extent should integration be permitted?
The most conservative proposal might prohibit people whose biological brains have died from returning to the physical world in biomimetic bodies, forcing them to remain in an artificial paradise. This might be justified as a way to prevent social structures from becoming permanently frozen.
I do not think such restrictions would be necessary. Once digital immortality and interstellar migration become possible, humanity would no longer be confined to a fixed pool of terrestrial resources.
A more realistic model would allow everyone to connect, but not necessarily allow everyone unrestricted access to the physical world.
For example, if someone committed a serious crime in the physical world—such as using hacking techniques to delete another person’s digital consciousness—the offender’s consciousness could be confined within a virtual prison.
If physical resources approached their limits, people from earlier historical periods might temporarily yield physical embodiment to those living in the present. They could reside in an artificial paradise within a virtual world until physical resources became available again, after which they could return. Alternatively, they could choose to establish settlements on another planet.
V. Have We Already Achieved Digital Immortality?
At this point, some readers may be confused. We have just been discussing whether digital immortality is possible, so why suddenly ask whether it has already been achieved?
The answer follows from the earlier discussion of an afterlife and of the ethical problems that digital immortality would create.
Suppose humanity successfully achieved digital immortality. What would happen?
First, death would lose its deterrent power. Social systems built partly upon the fear of death would begin to collapse.
Even if the law imposed strict restrictions, underground services would inevitably offer illegal consciousness digitization to criminals. A person unconcerned with strict continuity could even create a backup before committing a crime. Even if the biological offender were later executed, the backup might remain impossible to eliminate completely.
Second, the traditional ideal of the “Three Immortalities” would lose much of its appeal. The motivation to transmit moral principles and knowledge across generations might weaken.
People might become more inclined to retreat into private, self-contained worlds. Some might replace relationships with real people by creating copies of their own consciousness—or even constructing an opposite-sex version of themselves.
Ideas and creations that would once have been shared publicly might become isolated and proprietary, like secret recipes guarded by merchants in ancient times.
This could cause civilization to mutate, regress, fragment, or tear itself apart.
Therefore, if humanity had already achieved digital immortality, the first thing it would need to create would be an examination.
Every person preparing to connect to a silicon brain would first have to enter an examination system. This system would simulate the human world as it existed before mature brain-computer interfaces.
The candidate would be placed inside this virtual world with their original memories temporarily suppressed. They would live an entire life as a biological human, genuinely experiencing its limitations, relationships, suffering, opportunities, and moral choices.
Everything they did during that lifetime would be recorded and evaluated.
When they died in the virtual world, they would awaken in the examination facility of the real world. Examiners would then assign a final score based on their conduct, especially their moral behavior.
Those who passed would be permitted to connect to a silicon brain. Those who failed would receive further training and take the examination again.
It would be analogous to requiring a driving test after the invention of the automobile: a measure intended to minimize the number of dangerous drivers.
This leads back to the question:
My speculation is that there is a substantial probability that we already have—and that our present lives are part of such an examination.
I hope this essay offers readers something worth considering, and I welcome discussion.
I also hope humanity will approach the future with an open mind: embrace AGI, embrace brain-computer interfaces, and embrace digital immortality.
Disclosure: This article was originally written by me in Chinese. The English version was translated and stylistically polished with AI assistance. The ideas, arguments, and overall structure are my own.