On a far less maudlin note

[textualdeviance]

I'm sure one of my SFF-savvy friends will know this:

Has there ever been a book/movie/etc. in which it's posited that ghosts are actually holographic projections of a flash-memory stored version of ourselves that gets uploaded somewhere when we die?

I'm thinking along the lines of our brain contents and basic physical image being stored in a cloud somewhere (a literal cloud, if one wants to use iconic heaven imagery) and then called up in virtual form when our meatspace hard drive crashes. And because the memory form in question is read/write, it can use that existing snapshot as a building block from which to create new actions and experiences, even if our meat machines aren't there to give us proper sensory input.

I know similar ideas have been used in terms of uploading exisitng people to new bodies (Old Man's War, I believe, does this, and then there's always the Cylon rebirth business) but I wasn't sure if it's been used to explain the metaphysical.

Comments

[thefirstalicat.livejournal.com]

There's definitely a bunch of stories with this metaphysical outlook, dating back at the very least to the 1970s. I'm trying to think of specific titles, though the only one that comes to mind at the moment is an early GRRM story, "Song for Lya," in which a young man who cannot deal with the death of his lover becomes a sort of "memory junkie" because the technology allows him to access incidents in his love's life in real time chunks. From, I think, about 1976, and very poignant. I'll check some anthologies, see if I can remember more titles.