Yesterday I presented how AI could be used as a bid for immortality. If an AI created based on a scan of me is indistinguishable from me, then isn’t it me? If I go to sleep and wake up inside a computer, haven’t I become immortal (or at least a life as long as that of the universe)? If my thought process continues uninterrupted, if I still think of myself as me, who’s to say that I haven’t successfully supped from the fountain of eternal life?
I am. I say that this process is a sham. We cannot gain immortality through the uploading of consciousness and here’s why.
There are generally two ways that ‘uploading’ is thought to happen: destructive and non-destructive. The difference between these is whether or not your body and mind are destroyed in the process of recording before a simulation of you is created on the computer. Destructive uploading is the more commonly considered, partly because it is imagined that cutting up the brain is going to lead to better scans and partly because then there isn’t the problem of there being two of you at the same time. But I don’t think destructive uploading is going to be the future we will live.
Thinking systems are self-organising systems. In order to create a model of how a system that self organises through processes works, we need to examine it while it is performing this process. In other words, the brain is more than the sum of its parts; it is the interactions between them. In order to effectively record someone’s brain, we can’t chop it up into pieces first. A person’s brain will need to still be functioning as it normally would in order to be recorded.
It may be possible to get around this, and it may even be easier to get around this than it is to use a non-destructive uploading technique, but I doubt it. For the sake of argument, let us assume that the only uploading method is destructive. Here’s the problem: it’s not going to have a 100% success rate. Some people undergoing the uploading process are going to die instead of becoming ‘immortal’ and that is not a risk that many people are going to be willing to take. In fact, most people would rather wait to see if something better is going to come along in the near future (such as a non-destructive upload) than take an unnecessary risk of death. The only people who will consider this option is those who know they only have a short while to live – a minority most people hope to never be part of. If the only shot at immortality requires one to know that one is about to die then it doesn’t seem like a very good deal anymore.
However, non-destructive uploading is a more likely alternative, at least in the long run. Here there is no chance that you are going to die, and when the upload is done you can see that it has definitely been successful. But here the problem is that there are now two of you, and one of you is still in a biological body that is going to die. I used to think this didn’t matter, that since there was now two of me and since we both had the same memories then I would be immortal. Any time I uploaded myself, I would effectively be flipping a coin, and half the time I would be immortal.
I’m still tempted to believe this argument, but the problem is that there is a definite original and a definite copy. Unlike digital copies of music, it is important to someone which copy is the original and which is the copy. Specifically, it is important to both the original and the copy, and which is which is completely obvious. The one in the organic body is the original. I am fairly sure that my psychological considerations of myself will change if I know I am a copy. Most importantly for the current discussion, I will not think that the original has gained immortality.
While at the point of copying my two selves will be identical, they will quickly diverge. To a casual observer, the difference may not be great, but to me… well, I wouldn’t want to assume that the other ‘me’ had enough of the same thoughts since the divergence to still be considered the same as me. So even from the perspective of similarity, I would not have gained immortality. The only perspective from which I would have gained immortality is from the perspective of creating sibling-children, and that may be worth it alone, in much the same way that having children the ‘normal’ way is worth it.
I like myself, and so I imagine I would also like people who thought exactly like me (either that, or I would find them incredible annoying). I also trust myself, and believe I would trust those who were my sibling-children. Lastly, I believe that anyone who thought exactly like me would be easier to understand and be understood by. These all seem like excellent reasons to go through with a non-destructive upload. They give me as many people to work with as I want, all of whom I like and trust, and all of whom understand what I say with very little effort on my part. Together, we could do anything! (Or at least anything that I can already do, albeit faster and more compartmentalized.)
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