Posthuman, postrights?

Project LifeLike refers to the efforts to create a ‘realistic avatar supported by an intelligent engine capable of online learning’. In essence, this means the encoding of the intelligence of presently living individuals in order to preserve the persons’ epistemological structures beyond their ontological death. To do this, the team must distil those ‘humanistic’ elements that are deemed essential to the human experience, and thus this process reconfigures the very concept of the original itself. Hence, I argue that Project LifeLike constitutes an epistemological cooptation of the ontological project of life, whereby the technological apparatus of the body is effaced in favour of the epistemic projections of the mind.