Draft Notes for My Obituary

From ChatGPT

We went to a funeral last Thursday. Iris Klim, aged 95, a parishioner. Her son gave a eulogy: pleasant, informative, affectionate, moving. A model of its type.

Nigel said he would prefer something different when his time comes …

Skate rapidly over my life, he said: youthful communist - a militant of the Fourth International; software developer turned researcher in Artificial Intelligence; successful freelance designer of telecoms networks.

Nigel's wife and children confirm his weird and bizarre opinions.

He claimed that the passage of time is a psychological illusion, that all times exist as if in amber. He claimed Albert Einstein as an authority on this. He said that, in any case, both space and time are not fundamental: the universe we live in is an emergent artefact of quantum entanglement - true reality is set in abstract Hilbert space.

Honestly!

Nigel had yellow belts in Judo and Karate, and years of T'ai Chi. He practised these arts to the end but never fought anyone for real (after an inconclusive  scrap when he was nine  - he was provoked!).

He died a Catholic, although for most of his life he was irreligious. He said that the apocryphal Martian anthropologist (a methodological nihilist) might say that human beings were simply biological machines. But ‘it is not like anything to be’ any of the machines we know about. The materialist faith that consciousness is reducible to neural net operations is no more than that; in any case explanations do not account for lived experience: that is the mystery and reality which theology encompasses better than anything else. Anyway, he was drawn more to Catholic deontology than any specific ontology: how we live is important.

Nigel puzzled over the continuity of personal identity. How do we know that we, now, are the same person who will wake up tomorrow morning? Actually, he said, we can’t know. Many people are quite like us, whoever we are. Personal memory is always mentioned, he said, but who’d die in a ditch for that when it comes to the foundational nature of our very selves?

So at this space-time moment, in this branch of the universal wave-function, you should say: Nigel has passed on. He wanted you to know that in the great enduring sea of consciousness and human experience, it’s not such a big deal. Except to those who shared our lives together, for whom it is everything.