Immortality, Biology, Computers

Abstract

There is a remarkable story, Immortal [1], left by the remarkable Argentinean writer, Jorge Luis Borges. In that story, Joseph Cartaphilus of Smyrna, after a long and arduous voyage had reached the City of the Immortals. Wandering through the labyrinthine palace which was the City, Joseph was overwhelmed first by the impression of breath-taking antiquity, then by the impression of the interminable, of the atrocious, and finally by that of the ‘completely senseless’. The palace ‘abounded in dead-end corridors, high unattainable windows, portentous doors which led to a cell or pit, incredible inverted stairways whose steps and balustrades hung downwards. Other stairways, clinging airily to the side of the monumental wall, would die without leading anywhere, after making two or three turns in the lofty darkness of the cupolas’. And so on. In this palace built by immortals for the immortals, nothing seemed to make any sense, nothing served any purpose—but, let us note, each detail there was a shadow, a memory of forms conceived in the cities inhabited by mortal beings, and this could express and brandish its absurdity by blatantly defying the ends for which it was originally invented.

A free man thinks nothing less than of death, and his vision is a meditation not of death, but of life Baruch Spinoza, Ethics