Sum By David Eagleman

Is there an afterlife? How do we get there if it exists? Who gets to go? What will it be like? These are some of the points brought up in David Eagleman’s story “Sum”. The book contains forty different tales from the afterlives and presents information that is convincing and forces us to take a moment to think about what the world would be like if this or that were true. One of the stories is titled “Death Switch” and recounts a world where technically there is no afterlife, but a piece of us still survives. Instead of there being a sole place, an afterlife, for everyone to go to, Eagleman plays with an idea for a type of technology called the death switch. In the age of computers, there are passwords, and often times only one person knows
In the 4 May 1905 tale, there is a place where time goes on as it does for us, but not much seems to happen, and the everyday events are just the same wherever you look. Just as two people meet, have lunch, talk, gossip, and continue about their days, the same is true for everyone else. If you look around, everyone seems to be doing about the same things, acting the same ways, having similar experiences, and the passage of events are the same. A life comparable to “life” after the “death switch”, where time goes on and days pass by, but activity is the same. Instead of seeming like robots simply going through the daily motions of life like in the 4 May story, we are actually living on through programmed machines, ones and zeros, been sent back and forth forever, simulating an active, hustle bustle world, when in reality not much is happening and as the saying goes, it’s just the “same old, same old.” The social network of our past lives continues on in an actual network of interconnected machines carrying out programmed messages simulating our daily lives, and so we live on forever, doing nothing, as time passes
Being able to send messages of praise and love to those people who were closest to you while you were alive, that would be the best purpose for death switch technology in my opinion. But then again, the impact you leave behind from your time here is what really matters, everything after that would only be a computer algorithm acting as you. I would try to live the best life I can while on this planet, and then only have my ideas and factual life history recorded in a death switch so that future generations could come along and relive my experiences and understand the points of view from the past, and maybe help them understand why they are how they are now. I know personally I’ve tried to look up information about my ancestral heritage only to find more questions than answers, so by leaving a death switch of a time capsule of sorts would allow future generations to come along and understand their past and allow me to communicate what their great great great great uncle was like back in the