Science fiction vividly presents the rich imagination of the near-future world and lifeforms, with "Cyberpunk" novels being the most influential subgenre. Originating in the 1980s, Cyberpunk absorbed many features of the science fiction "New Wave" since the 1960s, such as critical analysis of socio-cultural issues and focus on the inner world of individuals, while also incorporating the 1980s' imagination of new technologies, particularly information technology. It blends hacker culture, punk (music), youth culture, and crime literature, presenting an enlightening vision of the future. However, with the pace of contemporary technology, another phenomenon depicted in Cyberpunk novels has started to gain prominence–the development of sensory immersive digital cyberspace and the generation and existence of various new lifeforms within it. In the future, the so-called "digital existence" may no longer be limited to the external aspects like "using smart digital devices," but evolve towards "digital world," "digital life," and largely change the traditional definitions of "birth", "death," etc.

Science fiction has also greatly expanded and updated humanity's understanding, imagination, and construction of public space from a technical perspective. The digital world as a cyberspace embodies the ideal of creating a new world, possesses significant totality and publicity, updates the understanding of public space in human society from the technical dimension, and provides an activity space for digital life.

The three possible forms of digital life mainly include: simulated images of humans in the digital world, referred to as "digital twins"; the highly immersive "Human+" form combining organisms and inorganic matter; and purely digital life forms that live independently in the digital world. The first, digital twins, are mainly simulated images formed by people in the digital world through external devices, mapping and realizing their actions and operations. The second is the digitized "Human+" form, which fully immerses in the digital world but can freely move between the physical reality and the digital world. The third are independent digital life forms, or people who live entirely in the digital world. These digital lifeforms have become dissimilar and lack resonance with carbon-based lifeforms.

Digital life represents the generation of a subjective form, the "cycle of life", breaking the "life chauvinism" based on natural organisms. With the definition change of birth and death, the imagined digital life in science fiction has also formed two possible "revivals": the digitized mind of the deceased in the digital world and the digital simulation of the deceased already emerging in our reality. The significance of the digital world and digital life is not to provide an illusion of immortality but mainly to prospectively renew human understanding of the meaning of life itself and to construct an integrated world framework with new life and norms.

Literature and science, as two paths for human cognition of the world, have always been in a dynamic development. From the initial homology in early history, to the estrangement after the subdivision of disciplines in Renaissance period, and then to the re - integration under the trend of interdisciplinary research in modern times, the process reflects the construction and expansion of the human knowledge system. The changes in social demands at different historical stages are the external motives for the adjustment of the relationship between the two, while the development laws of academia itself and change of thinking are the internal driving forces. Studying the relationship between the two can deepen the understanding of the essence of disciplines and provide theoretical support for the development of interdisciplinary research.

This paper explores the material underpinnings of digital resurrection in Greg Egan’s Permutation City (1994), situating its speculative framework within contemporary debates on posthumanism, digital subjectivity, and computational metaphysics. N. Katherine Hayles, while skeptical of disembodied digital consciousness as proposed by Hans Moravec’s Mind Children (1988), nonetheless finds herself captivated by Egan’s exploration of post-biological existence. Unlike Moravec’s teleology of disembodiment, which assumes an uninterrupted continuity of human subjectivity through computational processes, Egan’s vision interrogates the unstable foundations of digital existence by embedding his “copies” within a world constrained by material infrastructures, algorithmic determinism, and emergent randomness.

Building on Hayles’ critique of the computational universe, this paper examines how Permutation City challenges the epistemological and ontological assumptions underlying digital resurrection. Through the novel’s depiction of self-aware digital beings, I introduce the concept of digital changelings—entities that, unlike avatars, are not merely extensions of human agency but autonomous subjects formed through the economization of surplus data. These changelings problematize the boundaries between embodiment and simulation, as their existence is predicated not on corporeal continuity but on patterns, iterations, and stochastic emergence. By foregrounding the tension between structure and randomness in Egan’s “Dust Theory,” I argue that Permutation City advances a radically posthumanist vision—one that reconfigures agency not as a property of an isolated subject but as an entangled process of algorithmic and material becoming.

Furthermore, this study engages with Karen Barad’s agential realism to explore how Egan’s nested simulations do not merely simulate physical reality but enact an ontological shift, wherein digital beings generate their own material conditions through computational entanglements. This marks a departure from traditional AI narratives that frame digital consciousness as either a tool of human intent or an existential threat. Instead, Egan’s computational universe suggests that digital subjectivity, rather than being a mere extension of human consciousness, emerges as an autonomous force, co-constituted with the infrastructures that sustain it.

Ultimately, this paper argues that Permutation City does not merely speculate on digital immortality but reveals the inescapable material entanglements of digital existence. In doing so, it offers a framework for rethinking agency, materiality, and the ontological status of digital life in the age of algorithmic governance and computational capitalism.

Kazuo Ishiguro imagines a small story about the post-human survival situation in "Klara and the Sun": Josie, a victim of life-threatening gene-editing technology, is saved by her AF (Artificial Friend) Klara's faith in the SUN. This is clearly a MIRACLE with mythological narrative characteristics set against the backdrop of the future society depicted in the book. Combining Mircea Eliade's philosophical anthropology theories, this paper attempts to explore the philosophical thoughts on the existence of life that Ishiguro implies beneath the surface of the story through a close reading of the text: the extreme rationality of technology has intensified the existential anxiety of Modern People in the Terror of History; the estrangement between humans and nature (the sacred) makes the Hierophanies possible only through artificial intelligence as Primitive; the ambiguity of the novel's ending further reveals the significance of this post-human fantasy for the contemporary era, that is, LOVE is always the Fixed Point that helps human subjectivity from being submerged by the flood of digital intelligence, and the coexistence of The Dialectic of The Sacred life experiences is one of the scales we must adhere to.

石黑一雄在《克拉拉与太阳》中设想了有关“后人类”生存境遇的小故事：生命垂危的基因编辑技术受害者乔西因其AF（人工智能朋友）克拉拉的“太阳”信仰得到拯救。这在全书设定的未来社会背景下显然是一个具有神话叙述性质的“奇迹”。结合米尔恰·伊利亚德哲学人类学相关理论，本文试图在文本细读基础上对石黑一雄内蕴于故事表层下的生命存在性哲思进行探究：技术理性极端化加剧了“现代人”身处“历史的恐怖”中的生存焦虑；人与自然（神圣）的隔阂使“圣显”必须籍由作为“前现代人”的人工智能方能实现；小说结局的模糊性则进一步显示了这则“后人类”幻想对当时代的意义，即“爱”始终是帮助人类主体性不被数智洪流淹没的“定位”，“圣俗并存”的生命经验则是我们必须坚守的尺度之一。

The popularity of virtual reality makes us wonder in what sense "abandoning the body and enjoying the wandering of consciousness in fictional mechanisms" satisfies human needs. Does this indicate that some basic assumptions about human subjectivity have unconsciously entered the "post-human" era? I will discuss this issue through the robots or artificial intelligence imagination in science fiction.In the first part of the paper, I will trace the evolution of robot imagination in science fiction narratives to clarify the development logic of the construction of modern subjectivity discourse, and explain the blurring, disappearance, and even outward expansion of the subject boundary in contemporary AI literary narratives do not directly indicate the emergence of a new type of human beings. Instead, it forces us to return to the clue of the construction of modern subjectivity through the mind-body dualism to re-understand the underlying logic of human subject construction and discover its coherent thread. In particular, from the contemporary robot science fiction literature narratives, we do not see a transcendent imagination, but can read the reflections and worries about the old subjectivity problems from authors.In the second part of the paper, I will mainly analyze Spike Jonze's science fiction film "Her" (2013) and Kazuo Ishiguro's novel "Klara and the Sun" (2017) as the main texts to explain the fictional characteristics and cultural logic of subjectivity in contemporary AI science fictions. In these texts, neither "body" nor "mind" can define the boundary of "being ". The texts jointly present a new model of the subject: in the subject-to-subject interaction, human beings made up and imagine “alter-ego” reflected on others, with the fictional purpose of making the world completely satisfy the self's needs and narcissism. This subject model can explain the social communication predicament in our contemporary life and also indirectly indicates that the questioning of the essence of existence has never withdrawn.In the last part of the paper, I will place the science fiction texts in the specific technological background of the information age to study how the production logic of virtual culture sustains the mechanism of human subject production. The "being" that survives in an autonomous and self-regulating social system is also the "alter-ego" of the social production logic and always maintains a "heterogeneous isomorphism" balance with social changes. Cybernetics and systems science can reveal the phenomenon that human subjectivity is "alienated" in the social system and exploited by consumerism. However, humans themselves have agency. Under the inspiration of new science fiction narratives, we need to break through the old logic of subjectivity production, remain vigilant against the expansionary subject model promoted by consumerism, and then explore the generation logic of a new ontology.