For a naturalist life after death is achieved by the impact we have on the people whose lives we’ve touched and by the things we leave behind.
We continue to exist in the minds of those who consciously remember us, such as those in our own family, and in our extended family, among our colleagues at work and in our community. It is also likely that our lives will affect others who may not even have known us. Imagine how a teacher can impact their students shaping how they behave in relation to others.
Personal attributes and ideas, sayings, expressions, stories, and jokes we told are among the memories we leave behind. We may also be remembered by the things we build and create including large things like houses, smaller things like book shelves, by our writing, and by our virtual foot print as well, such as websites we may have built or contributed to.
We are increasingly able to leave behind evermore vivid records of our lives. The black and white photos of our grandparents and great grandparents were a major stride forward compared to portrait paintings affordable to a relative few. But those one dimensional images convey very little compared with the ubiquity of high resolution video that document so many moments of our lives today.
And the record that young adults today will leave is hardly an end point. In the near future a human might leave behind a personal digital twin or a legacy avatar that became familiar with them over the course of their lifetime so that after their life it can serve as a digital representation of them with whom their descendants could be “…consulted, commiserated and joked and argued with.”[1]
To many of our contemporaries this idea may sound either impossible, or undesirable. But we should keep in mind that there are so many of our commonplace every day experiences – like sharing a zoom call on a smart phone – that would have been essentially unimaginable to most people just a few generations ago.
[1] You Can Now Live Forever. (Your AI-Powered Twin, That Is) https://www.freethink.com/articles/digital-twin-ai