Ulatowski, Joseph W.2026-07-292026-07-292026-10-16Ulatowski, J. (2026). Do digital immortals dream of offline afterlives? In SecondDeath: Experiences of Death Across Technologies. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-98808-0_4https://hdl.handle.net/10289/18488The aim of this paper is to argue that it is not possible for a person to live an indefinitely long life as a digital immortal. To argue for this, I show that there is an insurmountable problem from the digital immortal’s perspective. If the digital immortal is an exact replica of a mortal, then the entirety of the digital mind will be directed toward offline content, e.g., from big events like birthday parties, weddings, and the birth of one’s children to the more mundane such as what the embodied mortal had for breakfast on 22 June 1987. The possibility of digital immortals living a person’s life indefinitely means that the digital immortal is able to conceive of and understand the content of the mortal’s embodied mind. To conceive of and to understand the content of a mortal’s embodied mind the digital immortal must know what it is like to be an embodied mortal. However, the digital immortal cannot conceive of what it is like to be an embodied mortal because the experience would be so transformative that it would be irrational to consider it (cf. (Paul in Transformative Experience. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014)) and because it would have to conceive of its own offline afterlife, which is something well beyond its capacity. Just as we cannot conceive what it’s like to be immortal because of its highly transformative experience (cf. (Ulatowski in Diametros: Online J. Philos. 16(62), 65–77, 2019), digital immortals would be similarly perplexed by an offline afterlife. Our digital döppelganger would have no way of knowing what meaty embodied lives are like. The pollyannaish view of living forever as a digital döppelganger gives rise to the realisation that our functionally equivalent digital replica would be filled by memories, experiences, and other content of which it cannot possibly conceive.enThis is an author’s accepted version of a chapter in the book SecondDeath: Experiences of Death Across Technologies. © 2025 Springer.digital afterlifeartificial intelligenceimmortalityphilosophy of religionphilosophy of mindChapter in Book10.1007/978-3-031-98808-0_4