In this world we live in, where influencers and Instagrammers are ruling the masses and our image plays the most important role in our lives, we tend to forget what makes us special.
It is not the colour of our eyes, the shape or our lips, the size of our breast or the beauty of our body. What makes us who we are, lies within.
You can call it soul, consciousness, awareness or inner self, among other terms. And that’s what hosts our personality.
The way we talk, the way we walk, how we look at the world and the people surrounding us, how we react to the different stimulus we’ll encounter throughout our lives, the way we choose to be a good person or rather a mean one.
It doesn’t matter what you see in front of the mirror. You can be gorgeous and handsome all the same and, at the same time, have the darkest personality ever imagined. You could be a monster inside the innocent body of a puppy. Or just the other way around.
We seem obsessed with the idea of extending human lifespan as much as possible, trying to keep our body in the best possible condition. We are told to have a healthy lifestyle, eat a balanced diet, do regular exercise, sleep plenty of hours every night, don’t consume drugs, go easy with alcohol and avoid stress and free radicals as much as possible. But why?
Anything we do will affect our body in one way or another and since we only have one, we need to look after it if we want to live well for long. But, what if we are looking in the wrong direction here? What if we were wasting our time and effort trying to keep our body young and healthy when we could just choose another body once we start feeling the wear and tear of our bones and muscles related to ageing?
I would like to invite you to play a game here. Let’s imagine we live in a fantasy world where we can swap our body like we swap our smartphone these days. Let’s imagine you are a teenager that one day, get up in the morning and catch the reflection of your body on a mirror. For some reason, you don’t like what you see. You have grown tired of your general image and a visit to the hairdresser or even plastic surgery won’t help much with that. Then you decide to try a different body. You go online and start browsing a huge catalogue of possibilities.
Let’s imagine that after a while, you have chosen your ‘new’ you. The body you feel fancy to ‘wear’ right now and right here. You get into a capsule located in your bedroom, press a button and in just a few moments, ‘voilà!’, a completely different individual appears in front of the mirror now.
It’s breakfast time so you go into the kitchen where your parents are already having a bite. Your dad is reading the newspaper and stares at you as you walk in, spitting all over the place the orange juice he’s drinking. ‘Who the hell are you’, he would probably ask.
The shocking first moment would pass once they see how you take the cereals and the bowl, pouring the milk just the way you always do. They would recognize your personality on every single action you perform. From the way you look at them to how you answer their same everyday questions.
No matter how or ‘who’ we look, we are always ourselves and so the people surrounding us would feel who we are, no matter the body we got ourselves into.
This is a very interesting idea we have seen in many fiction works. One of my favourite movies ever is Paul Verhoeven’s ‘Robocop’. In this extraordinary movie, a police officer is critically injured in a shooting. The only solution: making a lethal machine out of it.
While the machine has the same face and consciousness from the human body, the rest of it is pure metal and electronics. However, there’s something else. The machine is not a lethal weapon because a program drives it. What makes it special is the brain of the police officer inside its head.
Throughout this awesome movie, man and machine will fight not only against some mean bastards but also against each other as memories from the previous human life come to the surface provoking some kind of conflict between the human brain and machine’s software.
In this clip, you can see the moment when another police officer recognises the man within the machine despite that bunch of a metallic creature he has become.
A very similar scenario is shown in the second part (‘Robocop 2’) where the main villain’s consciousness is transferred from his body into a huge beast of a killing machine. In this case, a small screen concealed within the machine’s head can mimic the facial features of the consciousness’ owner.
These are just a couple of examples but there are many more. In the more recent series ‘Altered Carbon’, the lead character swaps his body in the very first episode in a world where that’s something pretty much anybody can do, as long as you have the money for the expensive process.
Another good example of consciousness transfer is the comedy series ‘Upload’ where the lead character’s inner self is ‘uploaded’ into a virtual world in the cloud, where again, money plays a key role.
I cannot forget to mention the excellent Paul Verhoeven’s ‘Total Recall’, where we can enjoy a different twist of consciousness exchange. Seems to me the Dutch famous director is keen on the matter.
In this movie, the lead character played by Arnold Schwarzenegger will experience an exciting as hell adventure living the life of another person on a different planet. Or so it seems…
A more kind and tender approach is found in this other movie called ‘A dog’s journey’, where the same consciousness will travel throughout the life of several different dogs, meeting the same people over and over again, under the whims of fate.
All these are some very interesting examples provided by fiction works where the fantasy of a sharp mind has entertained us with the possibility of playing with our consciousness in one way or the other, in a – hopefully – near future, where the life of our mind, personality and soul seems to be limitless despite our body decay, while Death awaits patientless holding its scythe covered by cobwebs.
Can you imagine to live an endless life jumping from one body to another?
And yet, another question arises in my mind…
...who wants to live forever?
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