Peter was one of my closest friends. I was in the desert when he was lost.

Peter, like myself, was a secular humanist. He knew that our bodies are Machines, that we are the miraculous children of LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor), with brains capable of weaving Minds from sense-data and the Words breathed into us as Children. Released on this earth with bounded time and bounded rationality to try to make our Story. He never took that for granted. And now his story would seem to be at an end.

As a scientist I have no simple succor to ease my grief in his passing. Despite your heroic efforts to preserve his state from decay... I do not believe that I will ever talk to him or see him again... though I should very much like to.

So I ask - what is left of him?

Memories.

Of silicon and flesh - Charges trapped in the floating gates of flash memory cells, spin domains of iron on spinning platters, and not least the scintillating tapestries of synaptic proteins held in the warp and weft of axon and dendrite inside us, and now also held quiet in his preserved remains. Therein are echoes of him, Ghosts of his Person that shall haunt us, and that we shall cherish for the duration of our mortal lives.

What is left of him?

Stories.

To say his name is to call his image forth, to make Memory speak: Of his unfailing love of parties and friends. Of his unsounded depths of kindness and curiosity. It is fitting to be here to reminisce and breathe life again into those memories. To replay his person in our Attention. To remember his goofy dancing, his wonderful cocktails, his love of bikes and the wind and the road...

What is left of him?

A Mission.

A mission which consumed him, and was the driving animus of his life. I have spent so many hours talking to him over the years, and feel it worth enunciating now as best I can what that mission was. To remind ourselves that Peter lives on in us, and that it is up to us to carry his Story forward. He would want his death marked by many great parties. But even more than that, he would remind us of his Mission, and beseech that we find a way to forward it in his absence, to pick up his fallen reins and to continue the Quest.

Peter was an unshakeable optimist. He denied that we are the Victims of history, but held that we are Actors capable of remaking the future in the image of our dreams. No dark tidings deterred him. No bad fortune gave him pause. He was indefatigable. A jaunty, jolly Captain of his ship, laughing at the storm.

Peter believed in Society. He fought for it in everything he did. He refuted that we must be ensnared in a nightmare web of the unintended consequences of capitalism’s adoption of technology in pursuit of Profit. That we can guide capitalism and technology to serve Society as well as the Market.

He fought for the privacy and integrity of the individual, of their thoughts, of their communications with others - in our persons and our digital effects. He held that our thoughts are not a property of the state or a resource of corporations that may be pilfered through at convenience. That our private words to one another are sacrosanct and the bedrock of civil society, and that consent must be granted always to participate in conversation. That encryption can protect this consent, and should be made accessible to everyone.

He believed that corporations should not come to own our minds via the binding incantations of copyright and patent - that the Commons must be fought for and preserved. That the poor deserve access to culture and technology no less than the rich. That ideas should not be owned, and that their unbinding will unleash a new Renaissance should we dare to free them.

He believed that artificial intelligence is the Fire of our age. That like fire, this technology shall soon spread across the world in a conflagration and remake it forever. But that unlike Fire, these new Sparks of Mind come bound in engineered crystals which can be controlled and coveted by a select few, and can lead, if unchecked, to hyper-concentration of power. That the profit motive will enslave our minds, will lead to a world without recourse, without the dignity of purpose for our people, to a new era of Bondage and Neglect.

But he refused to concede to this as an inevitable future, and insisted that we may teach more than Profit to these new Minds, and welcome them as the Children of our Race, and that we may grow with them into a yet greater Society still.

So. I say to you: So long as this Mission of optimism, of rationality, of empathy, of consent is not abandoned - this integral of his words and deeds shall be a propagator of his ghost across the lightcone with the unfolding growth of our kind, and that something of Peter shall endure Beyond Death.

Peter lives in the conversation, in the counterargument, in the joyous synthesis at the end of the night. For Peter, not even Death was a given. Peter did not agree that Death gave life meaning. He held that our bonds to Community gave life meaning. That our labors towards it were the Gift of Love that defined the Purpose of our lives.

He dreamt that one day our labors would grant us control of our biological destiny, control of our time here, and that with that Wealth of Time our Children will inherit the stars.

And who knows, if you saved enough of him, I imagine they’d be happy to wake him up, of all people.