Digital Immortality: Transhumanism in the Case of ‘Altered Carbon’

Abstract

Humans have always been a desire for immortality. Due to the technological developments, this desire has turned into a part of future fictions from the mythological story, and the beliefs of "it's possibility" have moved beyond being fantastic. The concept of trans-humanism has emerged as the product of such a belief. This process is inevitable and deserved in Transhumanism, which expresses the process that takes place until the "posthuman" phase, where the physical and mental limitations of human beings are exceeded, machine-human convergence phased out the need for a body form. In this study, the predictions for the future of mankind of transhumanism which represents a radicalized dimension of humanism, were discussed on the basis of the "Altered Carbon" series. This series, whose story tells a future time which human mind could be digitally transmitted to artificially produced different bodies, allows the question of the threats of the techno-cultural atmosphere that digital immortality could be possible as transhumanism desires. The ten-episodes in the first season of the series that debuted at the beginning of 2018, was analyzed in terms of the philosophical arguments such as "what mean of being human is", "how ethical norms associated with being human will evolve" and sociological considerations about "how societal values such as equality, freedom and justice will transform while humans develop physically and mentally". © Peter Lang AG 2019.