10. The Myth of Thinginess: Some Thoughts on Uploading Consciousness

Few science fiction motifs are more ubiquitous than consciousness transference. Its uses range from the comic through to the philosophic. The cinematic image of two people with linked metal caps on their heads via which their minds are swapped stretches far enough back in popular culture so as only to be remembered in black and white, as does serious speculation on what a person might do after waking up in someone else's body. Though practically unrealistic, these modern myths make intuitive sense as they reflect our tendency to identify ourselves with our minds as opposed to our bodies—to see the body as a container for our essential being, but not as integral to that being itself. Similarly, speculation on the real possibility of uploading human consciousness to a technological scaffolding of some kind has gained increasing traction in popular discourse over the last few decades and is currently a matter of not just serious investigation but anticipated attainment. And here again, at the level of popular culture, the image seems to be one of transference—taking as given that once a suitable technological medium is developed, a person's consciousness can be moved from one container to another. That is, we tend to assign some degree of thinginess to consciousness itself—to the mind. We assume that some THING is being transferred from one medium to another, perhaps with perfect fidelity and perhaps not.

For instance, when I posted the following short talk on the subject of consciousness uploading by Steven Kotler (link) to the Facebook page devoted to a course in Human Nature and Technology, those students who responded tended to do so with concern. There were the usual questions of whether we “should” be undertaking such a venture, as well as some questions about how accurately an actual consciousness could be copied onto a non-biological medium, assuming the medium to be something analogous to a hard drive and the consciousness in question to be something analogous to data. There was also some interesting speculation on the possibilities that such a process might hold, both existentially and intellectually, for the long-term survival of whatever it is that makes us us—for instance the exploration of space across distances uncrossable in a single human lifetime. What every comment had in common though (for reasons of student privacy, I will not reproduce them here), was that same assumption that some THING would be transferred from one container to another, that the stream of the person's awareness would consist of a single line starting at whatever point one's memory began, continuing through the duration of the original body, then bridging into a second, artificial body or sequence of bodies.

This assumption is deeply embedded in Western culture, with its frequent association of selfhood with some singular metaphysical entity, which for the sake of simplicity we can call the soul. But to be honest, I've long been critical of this seemingly commonsense assumption. My criticism is rooted in the understanding of consciousness not as a thing in itself but rather as an activity in a complex system (for a discussion of this idea, see above entry “Well Bless My Cyborg Soul). The mind, as far as our best cognitive science has been able to discern, is produced by the brain—and produced not as a single being that drives the system but rather as an emergent property arising from many discrete elements located across the system, many having evolved millions of years apart from others. The mind is, in other words, a part of the brain's behaviour in the way that grasping is part of the behaviour of the hand; it is simply one of the things the brain does, not something that anything is. The notion of transferring consciousness in this sense is thus not a matter of moving a thing from one container to another; there is, literally, nothing to move. Rather, as consciousness is dynamic, transference might be usefully thought of as training one system to behave in a manner functionally identical to a prior system, even in such areas as data storage and memory construction. Should the copying and training be complete, cognition originally active in a single system would then be active in both (or all) systems. You would, at that point (and maybe that point only), be literally in two (or more) places at once, quite possibly looking yourselves in the visual receptors.

Insofar as such transference may offer a portal to immortality, it is important to bear this last possibility in mind: because nothing would have moved from the first medium to the second, the You still running in its original biological system—call this one Bio-You—would be no less mortal than before while the You now running in the technological system—call this one Techno-You—might be looking at a much later expiration date. From that moment on, your functional identity would cease: Bio-You would continue to function as before, collecting memories and experience, gradually changing away from what never really was a steady state, until it either failed internally or was rendered non-functional by some outside cause, i.e. died by either illness or accident. Meanwhile, Techno-You would also change, taking your shared memories and experiences forward and thus, with every moment, becoming less and less identical with the shared You at the moment of transference, but no less You for all those changes as both systems, not just Techno-You, would be in perpetual flux. In fact, given the superior accuracy of technological to biological memory, it is arguable that after enough years had passed, Techno-You would be more fully You than Bio-You relative to the transference identity; old brains, after all, tend to forget things. Thus, You both would and would not become radically extended. Bio-You would of course die; all cerebral activity and thus all mental activity would cease; no consciousness would carry forward. At the same time, Techno-You might be alive and well, and no less real for all of Your state-of-the-art systems. In fact, You might easily end up attending Your own funeral, simultaneously dying and not yet knowing the experience of death, as much a stranger to yourself as You are to any other individual and as all other individuals are to You.

But what would be the meaning in such an existence? It is a commonplace that the meanings of our lives arise from their brevity: that whatever we want to do with our time, we'd better do it fast. Time runs out and is therefore precious, and how we spend it matters. Were we to achieve radical life extension, say on the order of thousands of years, we might suppose that this sense of urgency underlying so much of what we do would be removed, and with it, the source of much of the meaning that we experience during our fleeting few decades. Personally, I've always found this position to be ripe with the sweet sweet stench of self-satisfied bullshit.

Let's set aside the question of full blown immortality as practically improbable and just dwell on radical life extension in a technological medium, which may be a realistic possibility. At first, in this case, the above argument may seem to have some traction: we tend to value things in proportion, at least in part, to their rarity. The more rare: the more precious; the less rare: the less precious. Were we to find ourselves with orders of magnitude more time, it follows by this logic that each parcel of time would be orders of magnitude less precious, the tendency being toward virtual meaninglessness. The problem here, though—or one of them—lies in the seeming assumption that this is the only way to value time: that the IS of our current lifespans constitutes an OUGHT, or at least a pretty insistent SHOULD. It has long seemed to me, though, that this position does little more than assign a moral gloss to the status quo by suggesting that our biological limitation constitutes some sort of moral limitation. But how do we know that if we were to have radically extended lifespans we would not also develop radically extended horizons for achievement? Are our dreams not in some way a priori constrained by this same limitation that supposedly gives our lives meaning? The limit of what we can aspire to cannot be assumed equal to the limit of what we could aspire to. In fact in this case, CAN might end up being a fairly small subset of COULD. Is COULD immoral because CAN? Is TEN immoral because ONE?

Looked at in this light, the possibility of radically extended horizons points not toward a reduction in the value and meaning of a life, but toward an opening up to possibilities both quantitative and qualitative that our current lifespans don't allow us to seriously consider. Our mistake seems to be in assuming our current and contingent limits, which arise from nothing more than our immediate physicality, to be teleologically binding. The life that can be imagined and enacted over eight decades, the possibilities allowed and denied by that limit, would certainly wear thin and probably meaningless after a few centuries. But to impose an 80-year horizon on our imaginations while standing on the brink of something orders of magnitude greater, and then project the resulting meaninglessness onto that heretofore unnavigable span of years, makes as much sense as standing in the shallows, looking out over the waves, and saying to ourselves, “This is all the ocean has to offer; the whole ocean is only more of this; I really shouldn't build a boat.”

Life is always embodied—life is something bodies do—and we have no idea how meaningful a radically extended life span might be until we have lived it in our own bodies, or in whatever bodies we may make for ourselves. And as with any normal lifespan, some will be used well and meaningfully while others will not. In some cases, the years will certainly become a torment of tedium, but this is no more an argument against continuing to lengthen our lives than is the possibility of five or six extra maybe-meaningless decades to a neolithic person looking at a thirty year expiration date. The value of expanding our horizons, even of expanding them through new and alterable media while leaving our biological selves staring behind us in confusion and wonder, lies in the explorations we might make, not in those we might fail to make.