resurrection and loss in the era of the Internet – Corriere.it

If leaving a little to die, dying to leave a little too much. This explains the variety of resurrection myths of which the Christian Easter is one of the versions we are most familiar with, though we have lost touch with meaning which he had for the first believers. Because like everything, in early Christianity, the resurrection of Christ was the anticipation of an event, the end of time and the resurrection of the body, expected as imminent.

That Christ has truly risen proves that we too, like Lazarus, will be resurrected before long. It hasn’t been like this for centuries. Manzoni wrote again in the Lord who confides / With the Lord he will rise again, but he cited a doctrine rather than (I imagine) expressing a certainty or even just a hope. So, I doubt whether this promise of rebirth, so contrasting with the rest of our opinions around the world, occupies the center of thoughts associated with Easter today.

Nor accidental, I think, that the liturgical fire will focus on the Good Friday procession, which celebrates the passion and death of Christ, which is something that is in no way dissonant with naked reason: a man sacrificed himself for all of us, and died. As for resurrection, another matter, and as far as we are concerned, although in theory the idea of ​​resurrection is the greatest promise conceivable to a mortal, in practice, contemporary humanity does not rely on it, and if anything, has shifted its hope towards apparently more practicable paths, albeit full of contraindications. First of all, in the indefinite prolongation of lifewhich even on a superficial examination looks like aindefinite extension of boredom in an ecologically unsustainable context. Billions of zombies to feed and care for perhaps hundreds of years, and an increase in the average life span of humanity compared to which what we are currently experiencing is trivial.

So what can we hold on to to ease the pain of a total disappearance? Surely not the hope that a pure spirit survives among us. Because what identifies us is the body, and console ourselves by thinking that our spirit, flown away after death, continues to exist, on the one hand, a grammatical blunder, so to speak, since the spirit has nothing organic, therefore it neither lives nor even survives.

On the other hand, it is psychological nonsense, because I have no doubt that the Pythagorean theorem that I am thinking of right now is bound to survive; but I wonder in what the survival of the Pythagorean theorem should comfort me compared to my individual disappearance. The same goes for a topic related toimmortality of the spiriti.e. the one according to which we are all part of one life, and the matter that composes us would be destined to resurrect in other forms and under other species. Even here, thinking that the subatomic particles that make me up when I die can be recycled into apples, bicycles, squirrels, consoles me even less than the survival of the Pythagorean theorem beyond my individual end.

let’s not hide it, the strength of the idea of ​​the resurrection of the body lies in the fact that we are reborn, we ourselves, not the thoughts that we have thought, or the generic particles that make up our bodies. Nor that it is the resurrection of an oxymoronic spiritual body, something like ghosts, visible bodies, but capable (in cartoons) of passing through walls.

Let’s not forget that when Christ reappears to the disciples on Pentecost, eat a fish in front of their eyes to demonstrate that what he recovered after the resurrection was a real body, not a virtual body. I wrote the word virtual, and I guess at this point someone must have thought of a resurrection in the metaverse. All bodies will be resurrected in an aseptic and ecologically sustainable environment, albeit at the cost of high electricity consumption. However, I have the impression that such a resurrection would create little more than an overly busy cemetery, and babelized by a flood of ChatGPT committed to attributing plausible speeches to the owners of virtual bodies, whose real bodies are, however, dead and buried.

However, there is a way to conceive the resurrection of the body which does not fall into science fiction and which respects both the insurmountable value of death and the hope of the resurrection. Because, on the one hand, it is indisputable that mortality constitutes the defining trait of the life of every organism, which lives not as the bearer of some mysterious flow, but as engaged in the longest possible postponement of death through the work of the metabolism. so starting from death that we can understand what life really is; and the clinching argument that there will never be a living automaton is that we will never have a dying automaton, since it will always be possible to repair it, therefore resurrect it. Which, incidentally, suggests that if the resurrection of the flesh were ever to take place, only then would the difference between humans and automatons disappear. And the difference between artificial intelligence and natural intelligence would have vanished not because the former would have caught up with the latter, but because the latter would have assimilated to the former, entering into a rhythm of switching on, switching off and on again typical of light bulbs and mobile phones, not of living organisms and therefore destined to be definitively extinguished.

However, we must not forget that, unlike other organisms, the systematically connected human one with mechanical supplements: technical apparatus, society, culture. As mechanisms, these prostheses of the human possesslike any automaton, the characteristic of going beyond individual finitude.

Technical devices, society and culture put us in contact with forms of life distant, in space and time, from ours, and promise, through institutions and works, to ferry something of us across the river of oblivion . How did Champollion write? I collected, holding my breath so as not to reduce it to dust, a piece of papyrus, the last and only refuge of the memory of a king who, when alive, was perhaps cramped in his immense palace of Karnak. This survival is, so to speak, a resurrection of corpus which offers a sustainable alternative to the resurrection of the body. On the one hand, it does not distort the unique trait of human and non-human life, that is, its destiny as an end without remission. On the other hand, however, exploiting the specific element of the form of human life, i.e. the connection with technical supplements, gives them a mandate not of resurrection, but of survival.

We we leave but something remains, and something authentic, which has nothing to do with a phantasmagoria of zombies dancing in the metaverse. If, in short, those who imagine a few survival of a virtual body they are simply writing the plot of a horror film, there is a non-science fictional use of the web, and of writing in general, to ensure a weak but humane survival, linked to the overall growth of literacy and the possibilities of expression of thought.

In conclusion, the great injustice inherent in the triumph of fame over death was that only a very few were given access to it. There remain the kings (if they have a Champollion), the heroes and those who have acquired that ungrateful form of fame which is infamy; all the others fall into oblivion. But the explosion of writing via the web suddenly multiplies the possibilities of a survival that does not distort its nature the absolutely singular character of living, but it carries something of us beyond death. Let’s think about it, before writing nonsense on social media, because in that case it would be like in the concluding words of Process by Kafka: And it was as if the shame should survive him.