When We Are No More: How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future

Digital data are completely dependent on machines to render them accessible to human perception. In turn, those machines are completely dependent on uninterrupted supplies of energy

Our ancestors, on the other hand, communicated through language and gesture, song and dance. They led rich interior lives, creating ideas, images, and wholly imagined realities that shaped their interior worlds just as deftly as their tools made clothes to keep them warm and huts to shelter them.

The eerie certainty we have of existing as separate creatures in a world full of things that are not us, our ability to create abstract symbolic representations of our mental states and use language to communicate these interior states of mind—all

In use, they are placed within the environment of the present moment and that use becomes an intrinsic part of memory itself—the

Yet quite abruptly and without warning, at the beginning of the twenty-first century we embarked on a vast natural experiment, rendering obsolete our forty-thousand-year project to cheat death by using objects to hold the contents of our minds.

“The new genome in a fertilized egg is not the new person nor even an encoded version of the person; it is the archive of information that the developmental clock will use to form a new and genetically unique body from the descendants of one fertilized egg cell.”

What we call creativity is the use of mental content in contexts wildly unrelated to its source.

And it was not a technical innovation that set us on the present course, but an idea. That was the radically transformative idea that the universe and all that exists is no more and no less than the material effect of material causes.

No creature is able to process enough information in real time to react appropriately to events as they transpire.

in 1997