Thursday, May 04, 2006
Transhuman Conundrums
A meeting at work today started off with a discussion of Kurzweil and the transhumanists. If you are not familiar with transhumanism, Kurzweil's book is an interesting read. The basic idea of transhumanism is that a time will come in the near future when computers are powerful enough to emulate the human mind. At that point, you could copy the "data" in a person's brain and load it into a computer and start the emulation. "You" would now be alive in the computer.
I was quite taken with this idea and wanted to be the first to volunteer. But, then, my clever son pointed out that the copy would be a copy - like spawning a new process in a computer. Your copy would die - and blink out of consciousness. Sure, your copy would live on as you, but it wouldn't actually be you. This took some of the fun away for me.
I blogged about this on my CR blog once and a clever reader had a solution. He would replace your brain, part by part, with a gradual subsitution. Then, you would continue on indefinitely - wouldn't you? Hmm, maybe that would work. I'd be willing to try it!
We had this discussion at dinner again. This is a great framework for discussing many of the more vexing questions of consciousness. If I lose consciousness and wake up again - is it really the same "process" that was there before - or a new one, that has my memory and my old "hardware"? How would that be any different than the Kurzweil copy? Do we "die" when we go to sleep and wake up a new "consciousness" every day?
Clearly, the me that is thinking now is the active conscious process of the physical me. If I lose conscious and deactivate the physcial me, the newly conscious me that wakes up still thinks it is me. The Kurzweil copy will think it is me. It will be me in a very serious sense. "I" will continue on. But the me that is in this physcial body will die. The copy will be as distinct from that me as you are. So, in some ways, transhumanism will not let you live forever. It will create an entity with consciousness, with your memories and, perhaps, your mental capabilities (or better) that could live forever.
What would be the advantage of this? Really, there is no advantage to you and me. We will no doubt actually die one day. But, we could grant eternal life to our clone. Even then, it is unlikely that a clone will be invented that would last forever. If you shut down one clone and transferred its data to a new improved set of hardware, it would "die" too. In fact, every time you "rebooted" it, or restored a backup of it, it would "die" and be "reborn". Hardware improvements could happen much faster than genes allow. Direct connection to the internet? Much faster clock cycles (like 1000 or 1,000,000 times faster than people), encyclopedic memory, built in macros? It boggles.
In some ways, it hardly matters, doesn't it? Here I am, typing this post, with my lifetime of memories housed in an organic processor. This lifetime of memories creates me every time I awake and the organic processor starts back up. If I copied the whole set to a new physical processor every night and threw the old one away, it would still think it was "itself" when it started back up in the morning. The only reason we care so much is that our brains have a strong instinct for self-preservation. We are wired to struggle mightily to stay alive. We find the notion of the copying to be distressing. Try it on your friends and family. You can become a persona non grata very quickly at a family reunion. I know.
This is related to the paradox of "why me?" I am sure this paradox has a formal name, but I don't know what it is. I call it "why me?" This is the paradox that causes people to exclaim in wonder "Aren't we lucky that we are on the Earth - a planet that is so amenable to human life?" A silly statement indeed, because anyone who is alive would be on an amenable planet, ipso facto. Another example is "I am so lucky to be the only survivor - why me?" Someone has to be the last survivor. They were not chosen, they just are.
You are reading this because you are your brain's consciousness. Your brain's consciousness is all you are. You are not a separate thing that just happened to lodge in your brain - "picking it" in some way. You are your brain's consciousness trying to understand itself. Quite a struggle, isn't it?
A meeting at work today started off with a discussion of Kurzweil and the transhumanists. If you are not familiar with transhumanism, Kurzweil's book is an interesting read. The basic idea of transhumanism is that a time will come in the near future when computers are powerful enough to emulate the human mind. At that point, you could copy the "data" in a person's brain and load it into a computer and start the emulation. "You" would now be alive in the computer.
I was quite taken with this idea and wanted to be the first to volunteer. But, then, my clever son pointed out that the copy would be a copy - like spawning a new process in a computer. Your copy would die - and blink out of consciousness. Sure, your copy would live on as you, but it wouldn't actually be you. This took some of the fun away for me.
I blogged about this on my CR blog once and a clever reader had a solution. He would replace your brain, part by part, with a gradual subsitution. Then, you would continue on indefinitely - wouldn't you? Hmm, maybe that would work. I'd be willing to try it!
We had this discussion at dinner again. This is a great framework for discussing many of the more vexing questions of consciousness. If I lose consciousness and wake up again - is it really the same "process" that was there before - or a new one, that has my memory and my old "hardware"? How would that be any different than the Kurzweil copy? Do we "die" when we go to sleep and wake up a new "consciousness" every day?
Clearly, the me that is thinking now is the active conscious process of the physical me. If I lose conscious and deactivate the physcial me, the newly conscious me that wakes up still thinks it is me. The Kurzweil copy will think it is me. It will be me in a very serious sense. "I" will continue on. But the me that is in this physcial body will die. The copy will be as distinct from that me as you are. So, in some ways, transhumanism will not let you live forever. It will create an entity with consciousness, with your memories and, perhaps, your mental capabilities (or better) that could live forever.
What would be the advantage of this? Really, there is no advantage to you and me. We will no doubt actually die one day. But, we could grant eternal life to our clone. Even then, it is unlikely that a clone will be invented that would last forever. If you shut down one clone and transferred its data to a new improved set of hardware, it would "die" too. In fact, every time you "rebooted" it, or restored a backup of it, it would "die" and be "reborn". Hardware improvements could happen much faster than genes allow. Direct connection to the internet? Much faster clock cycles (like 1000 or 1,000,000 times faster than people), encyclopedic memory, built in macros? It boggles.
In some ways, it hardly matters, doesn't it? Here I am, typing this post, with my lifetime of memories housed in an organic processor. This lifetime of memories creates me every time I awake and the organic processor starts back up. If I copied the whole set to a new physical processor every night and threw the old one away, it would still think it was "itself" when it started back up in the morning. The only reason we care so much is that our brains have a strong instinct for self-preservation. We are wired to struggle mightily to stay alive. We find the notion of the copying to be distressing. Try it on your friends and family. You can become a persona non grata very quickly at a family reunion. I know.
This is related to the paradox of "why me?" I am sure this paradox has a formal name, but I don't know what it is. I call it "why me?" This is the paradox that causes people to exclaim in wonder "Aren't we lucky that we are on the Earth - a planet that is so amenable to human life?" A silly statement indeed, because anyone who is alive would be on an amenable planet, ipso facto. Another example is "I am so lucky to be the only survivor - why me?" Someone has to be the last survivor. They were not chosen, they just are.
You are reading this because you are your brain's consciousness. Your brain's consciousness is all you are. You are not a separate thing that just happened to lodge in your brain - "picking it" in some way. You are your brain's consciousness trying to understand itself. Quite a struggle, isn't it?
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I have long been fascinated with this subject. As a working research scientist (biologist, but not a neuroscientist) I have a reasonable grasp of how the neuroscientists do think about this. You might enjoy reading some of the "Nature Reviews Neuroscience" back-catalogue for a good introduction (might need to find a uni library so as to download the articles). Basically there is a part of our brain which models what is going on further down (subconscious) "as if" it was a unitary experience, and another part which models the concept of the self itself. The latter isn't always there - this is the basis of "flow"; when you're really occupied the "self" part just dies down and vanishes, neurologically speaking. Then it starts up again when it's necessary to include the self in the mental model of the world. It's brain-twisting but lots of fun.
IanR (PS I'm posting as my wife because I can't be bothered logging on separately).
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IanR (PS I'm posting as my wife because I can't be bothered logging on separately).
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