Eric Steinhart, “Your Digital Afterlives: Computational Theories of Life after Death” (Palgrave Macmillan)
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What is digital theology and how does it redefine life after death?
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Hello and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figor, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. And I'm co host of the channel along with Robert Talise, professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books in a broad range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Eric Steinhart, Professor of Philosophy at William Patterson University. His new book Your Digital Afterlives Computational Theories of Life After Death is just out from Palgrave MacMillan. What is life after death? Many people may seek an answer to the question by looking to a traditional religion, such as Christianity or Buddhism, and offering its view of an afterlife.
In Your Digital Afterlives, Steinhardt presents and defends the core tenets of digitalism, a computational theology that comprehensively transposes and updates long standing philosophical and theological concepts. concepts, principles, and arguments about the self, the universe, and the nature of divinity into the conceptual framework of computer science. The result is a new way of thinking about the nature of life and the nature of death, and therefore about the question of life after death. In Steinhart's version of digitalism, everything is a computation. There is no such thing as judgment in the Christian sense. Your soul is simply a program that will rerun on a progression of superior computers.
Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Eric Steinhardt, are you there?
I am
here. Uh, welcome to New Books in Philosophy.
Well, it's great to be here. Thanks for uh having me. Thanks for letting me talk about my new book.
Well, I am uh really interested in in hearing more about this uh digital theology. Um so in order to kind of introduce the whole project itself before we get into the details, um think a good thing to do might be to tell us a bit about, you know, how the book came to be, your interest in it, and, you know, in general, what motivates digital theology?
Uh what motivates digital theology is a kind of frustration with a lot of contemporary philosophy of religion. And uh most of that is centered on a lot of really old categories, which I think are just not defensible. and they don't need to be defended. So a lot of it is centered on, you know, Cartesian dualism, sort of substance dualism, or on concepts of the divine. uh or and related concepts, the holy, the sacred, and so forth, that just aren't really defensible anymore. Uh, you know, Abrahamic traditions and things like that. And so I I think that computer science and information sciences and other formal sciences provide us now with lots of new conceptual tools that uh enable us to develop
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is digital theology and how does it redefine life after death?
0:00–10:39
2
How does Steinhart define a “digital ghost” and what role does our online data play?
10:39–19:58
3
What is the philosophical answer to the persistence of the self over time?
19:58–28:09
4
How does the book explain death in computational terms?
28:09–34:59
5
What is the relationship between the soul, mind, and body in this framework?
34:59–42:59
6
How does the theory account for intrinsic value and logical depth?
42:59–50:59
7
What role do “local gods” or engineers play in the digital afterlife?
50:59–58:46
8
How does determinism fit with free will and future projects in digitalism?
58:46–1:07:20
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from New Books in Philosophy
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