Margaret A. Boden

“(Hofstadter adds that a dearly loved person can still exist after bodily death. The self of the "lost" person, previously fully instantiated in their brain, is now instantiated at a less fine-grained level in the brains of the loving survivor/s. He insists that this isn't merely a matter of "living on" in someone's memory, or of the survivor's having adopted some of the other's characteristics, e.g. a passion for opera. Rather, the two pre-death selves had interpenetrated each other's mental lives and personal ideals so deeply that each can literally live on in the other. Through her widower, a dead mother can even consciously experience her children's growing up. This counter-intuitive claim posits something similar to personal immortality—although when all the survivors themselves have died, the lost self is no longer instantiated. Lasting personal immortality, in computers, is foreseen by the "transhumanist" philosophers: see Chapter 7.)”
― Margaret A. Boden, AI: Its Nature and Future