Communing with the dead online

Event details

Grief: A Study of Human Emotional Experience Lecture

Grief is ubiquitous. And it has always been supported by different technologies: from tombs, shrines, letters, and photographs to, more recently, online spaces, platforms, and resources that preserve our digital remains. In this talk, Joel considers the place of some of these emerging online technologies in our grieving practices. Drawing on work with Lucy Osler, he specifically considers how “chatbots” — software apps modelled after a specific person using their images, voice data, social media posts, text messages, and written letters — help us preserve and commune with the dead in increasingly sophisticated ways. After sketching some ways that chatbots help establish continuing bonds with the dead, he responds to several worries one might have about this technology. Joel concludes that chatbots may, for some, play a useful role within a broader repertoire of grieving practices.

About the speaker

Joel Krueger is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Exeter. He has published widely in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of cognitive science, especially on issues in 4E (embodied, embedded, enacted, extended) cognition, including emotions, social cognition, and psychopathology. He is an Associate Editor of Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.