Calvin Mercer
Department of Philosophy and Religion, Appalachian State University
Calvin Mercer is a religious studies scholar at Appalachian State University who has spent a decade mapping the religious structure of the technological future. His earlier tracker-listed works include a theological assessment of whole brain emulation and an argument that whole brain emulation requires an enhanced theology, and with Tracy J. Trothen he wrote Religion and the Technological Future: An Introduction to Biohacking, Artificial Intelligence, and Transhumanism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), whose chapter Mind Uploading: Cyber Beings and Digital Immortality is the subject of this site’s coverage.
The book’s contribution is continuity. Digital immortality narratives extend religious structures, the preserved self, the resurrected person, into technical vocabulary, and the demand side of mind uploading inherits its certainty from that inheritance rather than from evidence. This site covers the book in the cyber beings and digital immortality analysis.
The site assigns him no position in the consciousness debate, because his covered work analyzes the cultural formation rather than defending a theory of consciousness. The analysis is nonetheless load-bearing for the substrate debate, since it explains where uploading’s confidence comes from.
Known for. Religious studies analyses of transhumanism, theology and whole brain emulation, co-authoring Religion and the Technological Future
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