Chapter 35
The Significance Of You
If you believe — as many materialists do — that you have only one short conscious life in a universe that may be infinite in size and exists forever, then you are, by any honest reckoning, very insignificant. One consciousness, lasting a few decades, in a universe of trillions of galaxies existing for trillions of years. You are a candle flame in a hurricane, flickering briefly and then gone.
If the three premises hold, the science of superimmortality changes this picture completely, and the transformation in your significance is striking.
What Makes You Significant
Under superimmortality, your significance is vastly amplified. Your ixperiencitness does not end with the death of one body — it extends, potentially without limit, into the future, wherever similar structures and functionings exist. You are not a single isolated point but a constellation: many versions of your consciousness existing across space and time, some simultaneously, some separated by eons. Any version of your conscious life can be repeated, producing the same experience as many times as the physics allows.
More than that, your consciousness can be enhanced — in intelligence, perception, emotional depth, and capacities you cannot yet imagine — producing versions of you that are vastly more capable than your current self. Enhanced versions can participate in the production of further versions, creating a feedback loop of progressive improvement. Knowledge about consciousness itself — how it is produced, how it can be modified — can be transmitted from one version of you to another. And none of this is limited to biology: your ixperiencitness can be produced by electronic systems, exotic physics, substrates we have not yet conceived.
Together, these factors transform you from an insignificant blip in cosmic history to a vast, evolving, potentially endless pattern of conscious existence stretching across time.
An Analogy: The Forest
Consider the significance of a single tree compared to a forest. A single tree that grows for a few decades and then falls is, in isolation, a small thing. But a forest, a living system in which:
• Individual trees die, but the forest persists through new growth
Your ixperiencitness is like this forest. What starts as a single, limited, temporary conscious existence becomes, through the principles of superimmortality, a vast, interconnected, self-sustaining presence in the universe.
...is an ecosystem of remarkable resilience and significance. No single tree is the forest. But the forest is made of trees, and it outlives every one of them.
Key Terms in This Chapter
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The remaining text (examples, counter-arguments, and longer connective passages) is in the book.