20 - 001 Introduction to The Digital Human

The objective is to explain the meaning of our life as a human being using digital principles. So I am choosing to define us as Digital Humans. This will not be a simple task but it should prove most enlightening and create a whole new perspective on your life. At the end we may not have solved the complete meaning of life but we should have equipped you with many thoughts, ideas and feelings that will modify all your future thinking on this subject. You will become a digital life thinker with everyday taken up with visualising yourself as being a digital human. Not just a human being but a digital human being. So to establish what is the meaning of life you have to understand what life is in the first place. The difference between something having a life verse being life less. The butterfly verse the rock. But before we start our journey of discovery what has caused the writing of this book. The simple answer is the reading of over one hundred books, numerous academic papers and many articles in the areas of technology, physics, biology, chemistry and philosophy has painted for me this huge “paint by numbers” type of picture where many of the parts can be painted in whilst others are still a work in progress. Essentially it is a scientific approach although the unknown areas require some philosophical thinking or human guesswork to try and envisage what is life itself. Unusually I will adopt a different approach since I want you the reader to evolve the thought paths I have developed and in my case these have been formulated from reading, thinking, reading, storing, thinking, reading, storing, reading then possibly and rarely writing. Books and articles from very old to the very latest. I will qualify that since it cannot ever be the very latest since publications are being added daily or even hourly these days. So my bibliography is not at the end of the book but integrated into the book itself. I certainly do not intend copying content out of these books into this book. I have always been disgusted by plagiarism since it is as much as I can do to get now own ideas written down let alone steal others. But what I have read has formulated my ideas so it is important you read the same original contents to see how your ideas formulate from them. Importantly it will introduce you to a whole variety of authors who have spent often their whole lives thinking about life and what it all means. They have inspired me and hopefully they will inspire you.