The eyes are the window to the soul. I always thought of that as meaning, If you look into someone’s eyes, you can see what’s in their heart. Just today it occurred to me that it could be looked at another way, that our souls are built up by what we look at.
I am building a soul to be archived. My project for 2023 is to record quite a bit of detail about my life so that my essence, my soul, could be preserved in a Jukebox of Souls. It is very likely that technology will create a memory storage medium that will be cost effective, high capacity, and durable for centuries. It is very feasible that I could document enough details about my ordinary life that at some point in the future, someone could take my disc and pop it into the Jukebox of Souls, an AI program that recreates people based on their physical parameters, their life history, their thoughts and achievements, their environment and historical context. In theory, it is entirely possible that you would have an entire library of people available to you through a handheld device, or augmented reality glasses, or a chip in your head, and you could say, “I would like to talk to James Branson about what it was like to search for lost pets in 2023,” and the AI player would load all of my data and project a lifelike representation of me that could answer questions about Kelsy and Mu and Tino, about being dragged through ravines and through mud and blackberries. Someone who played my disc in the Jukebox of Souls would hopefully see that it was my mission to serve animals, the lost cats and dogs and also my search dogs, to help them be their best selves.
In 2023, I am building my eternal digital soul. What I choose to record and remember will be a large part of what the AI player would spit out in the Jukebox of Souls. This will be a skewed version of myself, as I could reasonably be assumed to leave out details of my life that I would not want to be remembered forever. In my journals, I will record my greatest sin: my consumerist lifestyle, although greener than the average American, contributed to the death of the biosphere. My generation caused more environmental damage than any other species in the history of the planet, as great as the Chicxulub asteroid strike. My records will probably leave out most of my more mundane flaws. So, I am building an idealized version of myself for history, not inaccurate, but leaving aside some ordinary things.
If I want to give someone in the future a representative view of my soul, I would not show pictures of myself, where people can see my eyes. When a representation of me is playing in the Jukebox and someone sees me in front of them, in a physical representation, it wouldn’t be useful to look into my eyes to see my soul. To see what I consider to be the heart of my soul, you would need to see what my eyes see, looking out through my eyes. So, it wouldn’t just be my avatar that would be important for the Jukebox, but the images and videos I have curated over the years.
If I wanted to say to someone, this is my soul, I would show this picture of a dog. This morning, on our regular walk, I stopped Tino in the driveway because I liked the light, and I needed to get his picture, again. I have about 20,000 pictures of Tino, and if you know me on Facebook, you have probably seen a picture very like this one. I shot it Raw, so the file is almost 30 megabytes, eating up a huge chunk of memory. Also, I shot about twenty frames in order to get just the right expression. I tricked Tino into thinking I had a cookie, even though I had already given him all the cookies in my pocket. (I gave him another cookie as soon as we got back to the house.) I’m very please with this photo, even though it’s an ordinary mutt, and not so different from hundreds of other photos of Valentino. It is a recording of how he looked today. Also, it is an image of my soul. My soul is not a selfie of my face. My soul is his face. I live through him. I have a shared soul that wraps around Tino. If someone pops my disc into the Jukebox of Souls in the future, it shouldn’t just display an avatar of me, talking about myself. My avatar would be a guide to what was important to me, and I would walk them through my memory palace as far as they would care to go, showing them pictures of my dogs, and telling stories of our work and our adventures.
If my eyes are the window to my soul, what my eyes see and value would tell you the most about who I am. I would want to say, if I were to describe my own soul, that I was the person who loved Valentino, who worked with him, who went everywhere with him, who was by Valentino’s side every single day of his life, who thought he was magnificent and beautiful. I am the one who bought the iPhone with the maximum amount of memory, knowing I would fill it up with pictures and video of my dogs. When someone pops my disc into the Jukebox of souls, I would choose, as the introductory image, a synthesized video of me, sitting on the ground, surrounded by every cat and dog I have ever had in my family, and with my arm around Tino. That is who I am.