Ray Kurzweil is a successful inventor and futurist who has predicted, in essence, that humanity will become immortal by the year 2045. A Time exposition of his theories is here.
Kurzweil predicts that by 2045, due to the exponential growth of computing power, we will have computers sufficiently powerful to model and store human brains, or digital simulations of them, and their entire workings. In this way, we could conceivably upload our consciousnesses into a computer, and, so long as the data is preserved, live forever.
At first, the hypothesis is attractive. Being part of the cloud gives us much more resilience than our puny human bodies can hold; should anything happen to this node, we can revert to our most recent backup. No big deal.
In truth, though, I think the concept of uploading one’s brain raises some very fundamental questions about the nature of self. What am I? Think about what happens when you upload a document to Google. Google gets a copy of the document; the original remains on your computer. Both copies are identical, it is true, but now they can have different destinies. Someone can edit the document you uploaded, adding a comma here, deleting a paragraph there… and you could do the same thing, but in different places. With a document as complicated as a human mind, with electrical currents constantly flitting from place to place, atoms jiggling here and there, the editing would begin almost immediately.
So which one is you? The answer seems to be that both are you – or at least, to an outside observer, both would have the essential characteristics of you. There would be no single perceiver receiving the input or edits that each separate copy of you experiences. Each copy of you would regard itself as a separate and unique entity with its own stream of consciousness and edits. In time, the edits would accumulate sufficiently differently that the two yous might actually behave as very different people.
This gives me the uneasy feeling that the uploading of one’s consciousness to a computer is no act of self-perpetuation, but some sort of mimicry. On an atomic level, this is definitely true. But what about on a spiritual level, whatever that means? More to the point, what about on the level of my experience? When they give me the anesthesia and plug the electrodes into my brain, will I wake up as biological me, or the electronic copy? The dilemma is similar to the one faced by the Robert Angier in The Prestige (spoiler ahead). After Tesla’s machine operates, will he be the him that appears elsewhere in the theater, or the him that falls into the tank to drown?
As you no doubt understand, Kurzweil’s thesis rests on some very shaky unstated assumptions. Most to the point is that by that date we will understand consciousness well enough to model it perfectly in symbolic logic. I think this is unlikely, and that the nature of self will recede as we approach it, just as understanding of the nature of matter is fundamentally no different than it was fifty years ago.
The computing-power issue is meaningless, since although it will be incredible, it will mostly be used to stream reruns of “My Mother the Car” by voice activation to your iHologram projector. Far from putting consciousness into a machine, then, you will be using machines to entertain you with a surrogate life – I think the movie “Surrogates” makes an excellent point in this regard.
I don’t hesitate to say that I absolutely don’t understand, but I am as skeptical as you are. As someone having a molecular biological background, it’s unclear (literally, I don’t know) to what extant a computer could ever mimic the output of a human brain, without mimicking every single atom. Perhaps it is possible, perhaps it is not. But Kurzweil’s followers will admit of no debate on this ground. I wondered whether this little piece might call into question the very notion of cybernetic immortality.
As usual, there is an even larger question that I thought it might pose, which is, “What is the nature of self?” and more particularly, “What is the nature of the self-preservation instinct? What self does that instinct seek to preserve?” The following thought experiment really stumps me: someone could construct an exact copy of me and teleport it to some location in the universe arbitrarily different from me. It seems to me that each of the new mes would only care about its own self-preservation, and not just because from the moment of separation their experiences, and thus identities, became slightly different. There is some other reason. Each me is just an instance of a program, it is true, an instance of a particular pattern of atoms and electrical currents. But the instances only care about their own particular selves, not the pattern that I would argue is the essence of me.
You had an additional comment here, something about selflessness?
In thinking about “What is self?” in may be helpful to consider its antitheses. Consider the concept of selflessness. Can anyone exist in a selfless state?
An example might be Mother Teresa, giving all her time to the poor and sick. But this is a self-aware activity, that is, as you do it you know you are doing it. You are acting with purpose, but it is you that is acting.
Perhaps the soldier, in wartime, with only a couple of seconds to cat to save his buddies, by, say, falling on a grenade. Certainly there is no contemplation. It is a reflex action with no thought of the consequences for the self. And it is not an animal reflex, because self-preservation would be paramount and cause one to avoid, not approach, the danger. A selfless act, surely, but not a selfless state. So selflessness can momentarily exist at least.
What about the cult member? Total subordination of the individual to the group is claimed in some cases. Here we are getting closer I think. Tribes, clans, religious communities. Can it be possible?
At some level all people have different experiences. No one feels your pain in spite of the phrase. In fact no one can even compare their experience of pain with someone else’s and be sure they are similar. Then there are the personal interactions. Perhaps the nausea one feels at the approach of someone with certain personal characteristics – their resemblance to a hated figure from one’s past, the pitch of their voice, their bad breath – perhaps that can be suppressed and you can feel at one with everyone in the group. But you still have that individual sense data…
I think it’s the emotional component, the learned reactions, the hormonal releases, the hate and love and fear and desire that is all so different in each of us that makes self, that and the individuality of the sensory input. But of course there needs to be awareness of otherness too. Here I am, warm and dry and typing, there is someone else, standing in the rain and cold. I have felt wet, but am not; he is wet; therefore he is not me.
I guess I will not solve this problem or answer the question.
Antitheses:
Mother Theresa is selfless. But she is merely a computer program acting out a part.
A cult member lacks the self-preservation instinct. But not really; he has just adopted false premises that either falsely conflate his self with something else, or give it the illusion of future preservation through another means: legend, spiritual immortality, etc.
Other is not self. This of course gets at the question. It’s my thought experiment again, except that all of the distinction you make are not relevant. If there were two mes, with exactly the same nature of sensory input, exactly the same sensations at a given time, still they would be different from each other, and each one would think of itself as the real me. Each would seek to preserve itself. It’s perhaps an impossible question.
I must modify an earlier comment: computers will certainly be able to imitate humans sooner or later. Consider how easy it would be to make a chatbot indistinguishable from corporate spokespeople. All you’d need is a random number generator, the words “hur” and “dur”, and some mapping from numbers to words. 1 2 1 1 2 1. Dur hur dur dur hur dur. Did that output come from a Sony spokesperson or my random number generator? You’ll never know.
The incremental transfer of your consciousness to another physical location would be unnoticed by your conscious personality other than adapting to the expansion of the information and content the new location affords. Every six to seven years your current body replaces ALL (yes all) of the cells within it. This includes and is not limited to your brain cells, neurons and synapses. The continuity of thought is what allows this transfer to remain you and not a copy. Just as your body replaces cells biologically, technology can one day replace them one at a time with electronic synapses. You won’t really notice while it is happening.