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If it were possible to digitally live forever, would you want to?
- Thread starter RawBert
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There's a really great episode of The Other Limits (the new version) that touches on this subject.
It involves a transport device that sends people from one planet to the other. You arrive at the station and need to stay there a few days to be trained for the transfer, because it's very consuming (not the simple pressing of a button).
What's supposed to happen is you step into this machine and your entire "self" (mind and body) is sent digitally to the new planet where you reform. It's a little more involved, but for the sake of the post let's leave it at that. In the meantime, the original you left on the old planet is wiped out (destroyed).
Well, in this episode some woman was being sent over, but her original didn't get wiped out (there was a malfunction), so she was still there when they opened the doors to the machine. So basically, this guy who trained her and got attached to her had to kill her, because there couldn't be two of her running around...
It involves a transport device that sends people from one planet to the other. You arrive at the station and need to stay there a few days to be trained for the transfer, because it's very consuming (not the simple pressing of a button).
What's supposed to happen is you step into this machine and your entire "self" (mind and body) is sent digitally to the new planet where you reform. It's a little more involved, but for the sake of the post let's leave it at that. In the meantime, the original you left on the old planet is wiped out (destroyed).
Well, in this episode some woman was being sent over, but her original didn't get wiped out (there was a malfunction), so she was still there when they opened the doors to the machine. So basically, this guy who trained her and got attached to her had to kill her, because there couldn't be two of her running around...
MindScan by Robert Sawyer explores a shade of this
legal and personal effects.
Eon by Greg Bear also deal with this.
and of course Ghost in the Shell
but if I had a choice I would definitely like to be uploaded at least for a little while.
forever ? probably no.
legal and personal effects.
Eon by Greg Bear also deal with this.
and of course Ghost in the Shell
but if I had a choice I would definitely like to be uploaded at least for a little while.
forever ? probably no.
No self-destruct button, but you do have this fine man keeping you company for eternity.
I wouldn't want to live virtually.
I would not want immortality as such, and that would be impossible anyway. There is a finite, albeit unimaginably long, lifespan on even the elementary particles of the Universe. You'd run out of any energy sources to keep yourself animated long before that, and stop having anything we'd recognize as "nature" to appreciate long before that. The sun will consume the Earth in five billion years, but the Earth will be stripped of its atmosphere and become uninhabitable much sooner than that, on the order of a billion years.
The storage requirements to even remember what you were for such a length of time become staggering. You end up with a post-biological species that becomes a plague on the Universe, greedily converting every bit of matter it can find into near-ideal-computing-device just to maintain its ever-expanding sense of self.
I would, however, like more of a say in the particulars of my own end, and given the choice of going digital or reaching a humiliating and incapacitated wasting conclusion that burdens my family, I would rather have the former. I wouldn't want immortality, but a bit more existence might be nice.
The "it's a copy" problem is a little thorny, but only given certain approaches. Imagine, for instance, a type of nanomachine that can live in the brain and identify neurons faltering due to age, and replace that neuron with a fully functional non-biological substitute. Your consciousness is never interrupted or "transferred" to another device, but just replaced one negligible bit at a time with something that doesn't decay and die. Would you ever stop being you? At what point?
Another idea that is possibly more plausible is that this could happen through a brain-computer interface that allows humans to augment their natural brains with a technological expansion. As the hardware portion becomes cheaper and more powerful, it becomes more plausible that this device could be designed to sustain the consciousness autonomously when the natural brain to which it is attached stops functioning.
However, I seriously doubt this will ever really become possible, and if it did I have some truly grim ideas about what would happen socially as a consequence.
The storage requirements to even remember what you were for such a length of time become staggering. You end up with a post-biological species that becomes a plague on the Universe, greedily converting every bit of matter it can find into near-ideal-computing-device just to maintain its ever-expanding sense of self.
I would, however, like more of a say in the particulars of my own end, and given the choice of going digital or reaching a humiliating and incapacitated wasting conclusion that burdens my family, I would rather have the former. I wouldn't want immortality, but a bit more existence might be nice.
The "it's a copy" problem is a little thorny, but only given certain approaches. Imagine, for instance, a type of nanomachine that can live in the brain and identify neurons faltering due to age, and replace that neuron with a fully functional non-biological substitute. Your consciousness is never interrupted or "transferred" to another device, but just replaced one negligible bit at a time with something that doesn't decay and die. Would you ever stop being you? At what point?
Another idea that is possibly more plausible is that this could happen through a brain-computer interface that allows humans to augment their natural brains with a technological expansion. As the hardware portion becomes cheaper and more powerful, it becomes more plausible that this device could be designed to sustain the consciousness autonomously when the natural brain to which it is attached stops functioning.
However, I seriously doubt this will ever really become possible, and if it did I have some truly grim ideas about what would happen socially as a consequence.
That's exactly my point. You would be creating a copy of your consciousness. You would have your consciousness, memories and personality....but there would also be an exact copy of you with the same consciousness, memories and personality. If you (your original body and brain) died, you will cease to exist. However, your exact copy would continue on.
Let's say you did download your full mind/consciousness/memories/personality into a computer or android body. To that copy, it will be you. That copy will have the memories and experience of your original body. It will also have the new experience of being "transferred" into this artificial (or cloned) body/system. That copy will swear up and down that it is you and that it's consciousness did transfer from the old, original body to the new one. However, this is the fallacy of perspective. You can only truly know what you experience through your own body. If you "copied" yourself once, you could do it an indefinite number of times. Each copied version of you will swear that it is the original version. However, the only true original version of you exists in your original body and brain.
Therefore, from a purely logical scientific perspective (excluding any philosophical, metaphysical or religious arguments), we will never be able to transfer human (or any living being's) consciousness. We will only, one day, be able to "copy" it.
The way I would answer this question is that it would still be your original conscousness. It would not be a copy of your original one. Replacing neurons and brain structure with new or artifical components is similar to the body naturally replacing cells. You don't become of copy of yourself simply because your body created new cells or you recieved a transplant. Much of the tissue in your body, as an adult, has been completly replaced from when you were a kid. Yet, you still have your original body. It is not a copy. Modifying and altering the brain is merely a variation on this process.