I get in a car accident on a busy highway. My car catches on fire and slowly I burn. The trauma is too much. My lungs cease their slow rhythmic pace and I fade into black. I will have no chance to insert more coins. There is no restart button, no save or check point where I can resume my progress. If I have no soul, then I blink out of existence and my body decays in a box of wood in the ground. If I have a soul, then only the dead know where I will go. There is one fact of life us gamers take for granted; in our favorite hobby, we are the masters over death. We have been crushed, burned, eaten, and killed in countless ways. Does the thought of not being able to restart scare you?

Usually when someone dies, people will say kind words at their funeral and an obituary will be written of them in the paper. Perhaps if they are famous they will live on in pop culture or exist in dusty history books. In the past there was little chance that you would be remembered outside of your loved ones when you die. However, with the advent of the Internet, most of us will leave a digital footprint when we leave this world. Your blog posts, your forums have most likely been imprinted on server tape somewhere. If not deleted from servers, these digital memories of your physical self will be preserved in perfect condition. To get a sense of this phenomenon check out MyDeathSpace.com, a site dedicated to highlighting and remembering MySpace users who have passed away.

What if instead of leaving digital memories after you died, you existed digitally? This mode of thought has been the subject of science fiction, but there are some humans who want to be more than human, and are commonly referred to transhumanists. Common transhuman passions range from cryogenics, to genetic modifications of intelligence, to the creation of sentient AI. However, one idea intrigues me the most because it relates to my passions as a gamer.

There is a theory that if one had a computer powerful enough to scan and record the mapping of a person brain, one could capture all the synapses and various connections that allow our brain to function. The map of the person's brain could then be reconstructed on the computer, emulating the all the functions of that brain. No one really knows what would happen if a successful copy of the brain was made. Would it begin to function? If it was conscious, then who would be the real you; the in the physical world, or the one on the computer? If it was conscious, would you exist in a digital world, able to transfer across networks, able to improve your brain's code?

Not only would this present complex ethical situations, but there would be the possibility of your existence extending to the end of the universe as long as you were not deleted. I do not think the type of technology to even try such an experiment will exist in my lifetime, but I would like to know what it would feel like to exist digitally. Would we be free of death? Maybe that is what heaven is....

For now, we can rely on video games to let us escape death, but who knows, maybe our kids will be literally hanging out across the interwebs. If you want to know more about transhumanism...Google it; there are ton of resources available. I would like to thank my brother, Tristero for introducing me to the topic of the singularity and eventually transhumanism.