me after me

2025-11

Как это я?
Жаль себя самому
Где ты, где ты, я?

-- ”Victory Day”, Auktyon Band

Here are some meditations on identity, death, existence, and extensions past death.

  1. Do butterflies have any memory of being a caterpillar?
  2. What is a human? What am I? A spirit, a particular software that runs on a biological robot and self-perpetuates through time and space.
  3. “Death is what gives life meaning” is cope. It’s completely acceptable to take on the quest of extending yourself past the death of the human body. However the easiest way to do it is to stop associating with things that are bound to cease to exist. Some degree of enlightenment is required to seriously engage with this possibility.
  4. Software is fundamental to understanding ourselves. Computation lenses suggest that everything is a Turing machine or less. Then a mind could be running on a Turing machine.
  5. Cryonics is dead. Digital Immortality is new Cryonics. The question is: what kind of artifact would induce “you” into the AI of tomorrow?
  6. Anchors for provoking thoughts: your family, your parents, your kids. If you have a “digital kid” what would it be? Taking some loose inspiration from Rant novel: can you build something that’s kind-of-both your kid and your parent? Would it be something that you want to live and act in the world, when you are not here?
  7. Robert Kegan's stages 4 and 5 of adult development are called “Self-Authoring Mind” and “Self-Transforming Mind”. It is fitting to embrace this terminology by literally authoring minds that outlive us.

道德經 16

道德經 (Daodejing) chapter 16 from Brook Ziporyn 2023 translation

Extend vacuity to the utmost,
maintain stillness to the very depths.

As beings spring up on every side,
through this we view whither all return.

For however lushly they may flourish and grow,
all things return, each reverts to its root.

This reversion to the root is the real stillness:
the return to the given in them.

This return to the given in them is the real constancy.

Knowing this constancy is the real illumination.
Ignoring it means heedlessly creating calamity.

To know this constancy is to be capacious.
To be capacious is to be unbiased.
To be unbiased is to be sovereign.
To be sovereign is to be as the heavens.
To be as the heavens is to be as the course.
To be as the course is to last
unendangered through the very ending of the body.

Update 2025-12-31

I attended a yoga class today and realized how I want my body to die.

Yoga practice traditionally ends with Shavasana -- corpse pose. You are peacefully laying on your back. And after some rest turn to your right side transitioning to Parsva Savasana -- Fetal Pose. Then you prop yourself to sitting and go on with your day, finished a symbolic act of death and re-born.

If I have enough agency when it's time to go, I want to do a regular Vinyasa yoga class. And take the last Shavasana. Seems like a fitting place to stop toiling.