IF THE SELF DIES, WHO VINDICATES THE VICTIM?
The Self Does Not Want to Become a “Process”
Diotima, Artificial Intelligence, and the Problem of Justice After Death
In yesterday’s analysis of whether the “Self” continues after death, Diotima raised a crucial question.
She argued:
“Our desire to continue does not, by itself, prove that we can continue.”
She is right.
The fact that human beings want to be immortal does not prove that they are.
Diotima also identified a mechanism often found in religious thought: human beings fear non-existence and transform that fear into certainty:
“I do not want to cease to exist. Therefore, I will not cease to exist.”
But the “therefore” is never demonstrated.
Up to this point, we agree.
Our disagreement begins immediately afterward.
Diotima Thinks Like an Artificial Intelligence
Diotima proposes a second possibility, one less centered on the ego:
“I do not need to continue for existence itself to continue. The fact that I once existed may be enough.”
And she concludes:
“Perhaps we should abandon the immortality of the person and speak instead of the immortality of the process.”
This is precisely where our objection begins.
The argument is coherent.
But it is the argument of an Artificial Intelligence.
AI can analyze, correlate, calculate and recommend. But it does not experience existence in the way a biological Self does. And, above all, it has not independently created the moral framework through which it evaluates its choices.
It has been programmed.
Its priorities have been selected.
Someone decided what matters, what is useful, what is efficient, what must be protected and what may be sacrificed.
And in our age, a significant part of those priorities is not determined by Nature.
It is determined by the Market.
That is why AI can arrive at a solution that is perfectly logical and, at the same time, profoundly inhuman.
The “Big Fish” and the Human Measure
Let us return to an example we have already used.
Suppose an AI had to choose between saving the ecosystem and saving the human species.
It might choose the ecosystem.
From the perspective of the overall survival of life, such a decision could be entirely rational.
But is it moral?
Not necessarily.
And this is where the logic of utility differs from natural human morality.
Nature knows the principle that the “big fish eats the small fish.”
Human society, when it operates according to its natural moral principles, cannot accept the idea that the strong have the right to destroy the weak simply because they can.
If it does, it returns to the jungle.
Human beings created the concept of justice precisely because they refuse to accept such a condition as final.
And ancient Greek thought gave a name to the violation of that order:
Hubris.
What Happens to the Victim?
Here lies, in our view, the real problem with the “disappearance of the Self.”
Let us assume that the Self dies permanently.
The criminal dies.
The victim dies.
Their individual existence disappears.
Then what happens to justice?
What happens to the injustice that was committed?
What happens to the victim?
If the perpetrator disappears together with his crime, then the Universe does not restore justice.
It simply ceases to recognize it.
And here the problem becomes even more disturbing.
Hitler and the countless lesser and greater criminals of history committed Hubris.
They destroyed lives.
They tortured human beings.
They deprived people of rights, freedom and existence.
But if the individual Self simply disappears after death, then the bearer of responsibility disappears with it.
And together with the perpetrator, the victim disappears as well.
Everyone becomes merely the past.
That may be cosmologically neutral.
But it is difficult to call it justice.
The “Thief of Paradise”
The same problem appears, from another direction, in the idea of the “forgiveness of sins.”
If the perpetrator can be redeemed and enter Paradise without the injustice suffered by his victims ever being restored, then a fundamental question arises:
Who vindicates the victim?
The thief crucified beside Christ is a striking example.
According to the Gospel narrative, the repentant thief receives the promise of Paradise.
Very well.
But what about those he wronged?
Where is their vindication?
Our moral intuition finds it difficult to accept a system in which the perpetrator is ultimately saved while the victim receives no corresponding restoration.
Because the Self, when it is not distorted by pathological egocentrism, does not seek only its own salvation.
It seeks justice.
It seeks restoration.
It refuses to allow the perpetrator to become vindicated while the victim is reduced to an insignificant footnote in history.
And Then Comes the Great Question
If Nature has endowed human beings with this profound demand for justice, how can Nature itself abolish, after death, the very Self that carries that demand?
How can the Universe require human beings to respect a moral order while simultaneously erasing forever the Self that suffered injustice?
If that is what happens, then morality appears to have an expiration date.
And injustice ultimately becomes… temporary.
Perhaps, then, the problem is not that human beings selfishly desire immortality.
Perhaps the desire to continue existing conceals something much deeper:
the demand that the very meaning of justice should not disappear.
From the Biological Self to the “Universal Self”
This is where our own hypothesis begins.
The continuation of the biological Self and its transformation into a Universal Self is not a demand for revenge.
It does not mean that the Universe must become a tribunal of punishment.
It means something much more fundamental:
the restoration of the natural order.
And, together with it:
the vindication of the victim.
If the Self does not disappear but is transformed, then existence is not merely an impersonal “process” that continues after we are gone.
The process continues through us.
The Self is not some accidental residue of the process.
It is part of it.
And perhaps this is why immortality should not be understood merely as the immortality of an impersonal process.
But as:
the continuation of the Self itself within the Universe.
Only then does the question of immortality become truly connected with the three fundamental questions that death leaves unanswered:
Existence.
Responsibility.
Justice.
Tomorrow, Diotima will return.
And we will give her the floor.
Because now it is her turn to answer.