An ethnographic exploration of technoscientific immortality Immortality has long been considered the domain of religion.
Whose life will be extended? Will these technologies be available to all, or will they reproduce racial and geopolitical hierarchies? As human life on earth is threatened in the Anthropocene, why should life be extended, and what will that prolonged existence look like?.
On Not Dying interrogates the social implications of technoscientific immortalism and raises important political questions.
Immortalist projects go beyond extending life, confronting dualism and cosmic alienation by imagining (and producing) informatic selves separate from the biological body but connected to a cosmic unfolding.
Immortalism today, Farman argues, is shaped by these historical and culturally situated tensions.
As secularism denies a soul, an afterlife, and a cosmic purpose, conflicts arise around the relationship of mind and body, individual finitude and the infinity of time and the cosmos, and the purpose of life.
Based on an ethnography of immortalist communities-those who believe humans can extend their personal existence indefinitely through technological means-and an examination of other institutions involved at the end of life, Abou Farman argues that secular immortalism is an important site to explore the tensions inherent in secularism: how to accept death but extend life; knowing the future is open but your future is finite; that life has meaning but the universe is meaningless.
On Not Dying is an anthropological, historical, and philosophical exploration of immortality as a secular and scientific category.
With recent rapid advances in biology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence, secular immortalists hope for and work toward a future without death.
But immortality projects have gained increasing legitimacy and power in the world of science and technology.
An ethnographic exploration of technoscientific immortality Immortality has long been considered the domain of religion
