cybersoul

In her 1999 book, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, Margaret Wertheim contextualized such speculations as attempts to, in effect, “construct a technological substitute for the Christian space of heaven.” Wertheim wrote. “This is the belief that our essence lies not in our matter but in a pattern of data.” She called this idea the “cybersoul."

If that's not enough, the Carnegie Mellon robotics expert Hans Moravec, the artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, the computer scientist Rudy Rucker, and others articulated visions of a future in which technology might truly free us from “the bloody mess of organic matter,” to use a phrase of Minsky’s.