This is something I wrote a long time ago, but which still bears out, I believe. It is a method I would be willing to employ to transfer my consciousness into another body, or into a computer.
To illustrate why this is important, let me say that I would not be willing to use a teletransporter that copied
my entire physical form, sent the data to another terminal which
reconstituted me, and then destroyed the original. Although I have no
philosophical objections to this happening, I find the idea highly
emotionally disturbing and would never go through with it. For that
matter, even if the original wasn't destroyed but was rather pulled
apart and transferred, I still wouldn't do it for reasons I think are
obvious.
Likewise, I would not be willing to be, say, put to sleep, have my brain
scanned, then be uploaded to a machine and have my body destroyed. I
would not object, of course, to having a copy of my mind made, to be run
later or used as a sort of back up.
However, there is a way I would be
willing to actually abandon my body and live in a virtual world
(assuming of course all assurances of liberty and safety, etc). If my
various faculties — sight, hearing, language, independent limb motor
control — were to be transfered one by one to an emulator running on a
computer connected to the various sensors and devices which would
temporarily mimic said faculties, I would be able to track the progress
of my mind from my head to the computer. I imagine the process something
rather like this:
I sit down in the chair, my head shaved and access plugs and
sub-cranial scanning mesh installed. The technician behind me takes one
long wire and inserts the end of it into the plug square in the back of
my head. He asks me if I'm ready. I take a deep breath and then nod. I
hear a switch flip, and then I vomit. My body thinks that I'm having a
stroke, or have an eyeball knocked out of its socket, or am spinning
faster than my eyes can focus on anything. After a few moments, I start
to orient myself. I am looking ahead, at a large black box, the size of a
television set, with a forest of instruments sticking out of it. I also
see my body, sitting in a chair, a host of medical equipment and one
technician behind me. I raise my right hand from the arm of the chair,
and see it both out the corner of my eye and from across the room
simultaneously. Finally, I come to grips with the fact: my brain is
getting direct data from a video camera hooked up to a computer. The
technician asks me again if I'm ready. I've long ago memorized the
sequence of the procedure. I hear another switch flip and a loud
humming, and slowly my vision of the computer in front of me fades.
However, I can still clearly see my body. Nothing has changed, but that
the part of my brain which receives data from my eyes has temporarily
stopped working. Luckily, I am hooked up to a camera, which replaces the
function of the eyes, and a computer, which now hosts the software
needed to interface between eyes and cognitive and reflexive areas of
the brain. The technician inserts another wire into the top left of my
skull. Now I feel as if I have a third arm. I move the arm on my body,
and it responds as it should. Then I move this new appendage, and see
something wave in from of my new field of vision. It is a robot arm,
identical in shape and construction to my natural arm. When the
inhibitor is turned on, it prevents my brain from sending signals to my
muscles, and I am no longer able to control my fleshy right arm. But I
can still quite easily control both my left arm and the robot arm to the
right of my field of vision. This continues — left arm, left leg, right
leg, diaphragm — until every part of my brain has been mapped,
transferred, and inhibited. Now comes the final moment. Up to now, I
have been physically connected to all of my wetware. I could have, at a
moment's notice, regained control of any part of my brain. But now the
technician removes the first wire he inserted. My visual cortex is
completely dormant and no longer connected to the computer, yet I can
still see my body — I am still connected to my body — and I can still
feel every part of it as if I'm still in my brain.
And so on. In this way, there would be no point at which I could feel
“myself” “die” or disappear. I would simply phase from one substrate to
another, and be awake and (at least nominally) in control the entire
time. Of course, none of this might ever be possible, but it’s not
completely unreasonable.
Showing posts with label mind. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mind. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 7, 2012
Friday, April 27, 2012
Only Atheists Get to Grieve
I'm gonna write an angry post. I haven't slept well this week and can't get my thoughts together well enough to write something I'm not immediately invested in, so I'm gonna write this instead. If anyone is offended by it (and quite a few people ought to be) I can't apologize in all honesty. Five months ago I might have been able to, but not right now.
A few weeks ago I went to my great-grandmother's grave alone for the first time. I'd been there before with my family, but this was the first time I spent any great length of time there. It was a bizarrely warm March day, with a bright sun and green grass, rather than the usual Minnesota Spring blizzard. I sat by my grandma's grave for an hour that day. When I first got there, I was just looking around, making sure it was tidy. I thought about the prosaic aspects of being at a graveyard, of my bike ride from Minneapolis to Falcon Heights, of the previous times I'd been. Then I stopped avoiding my real purpose in being there, and I started trying to articulate my thoughts and feelings, for the first time, four months after she had passed away.
Up to that point, from the day she died December 4th, I hadn't cried. In fact, I hadn't really cried outside of watching movies in about a decade. And I hadn't cried at her funeral, or at my subsequent visits. And I didn't cry right then. But I sat down on the grass and started talking. I started saying mundane things about missing her, and finally coming to see her, and how strange it felt for her not to be around. And then the same part of my brain responsible for writing this blog kicked in, and I started drawing straight lines. Straight lines are what I do. I don't curve around inconvenient ideas (in as much as I can help it — we all have our biases). I try to think straight through all the relevant information I have in my head.
And a line of thought began to develop. My grandma was dead. Her body lay six feet beneath me in a coffin in the ground. This was a physical reality. Everything that had ever been her was in a box beneath the earth. I pictured her brain, as it was then, several months after her death. It certainly was not a pleasant image, but that was what everything referred to as "her" was now. All we are is a subset of the pattern of neuron firings in our heads. And that pattern had come to an end.
That pattern hadn't gone anywhere. It hadn't transcended matter. It wasn't part of a soul, or spirit, or chain of reincarnation. Everything that had been my great-grandma, that had experienced love and life and war and migration, all of that was now a pool of gray mush inside a very slowly crumbling skull. It had been sustained as part of a self-perpetuating chemical process for nearly a century, which had quickly degenerated and ceased to be. Now, for some people, that is an ugly and horrible thought, that that is all we are. But to me, it's heartbreakingly beautiful: this pile of gray mush pushing electrons around via sodium and potassium exchange wrote the Bible, built St. Peter's, painted the Sistine Chapel, and composed the Ave Maria. That is a miracle.
And then my mind took the next step forward: all of that ability and potential and memory and personality was gone for my grandma. It had gone out like a candle, with barely even a wisp of smoke to show for it. It was gone. She was gone. She was gone, and she was nowhere, and she never would or could come back. There's a physical law that says as much. The laws of physics literally dictated that my great-grandma had ceased to exist for eternity. Except a huge host of high deluded people thought that she wasn't.
Religious people believe in the eternal soul. They hold it that there is some essential, everlasting part of us that continues to exist before life and beyond death. They believe that we are never really gone, and some of them even believe that we will join our loved ones in eternal paradise after death (or judgement, or whatever fairy tale they wish). But they're wrong. And they know they're wrong. How do I know that they know they're wrong? Because they grieve.
If I had the slightest shred of belief that my great-grandma was not well and truly gone for all eternity, I would not have shed a single tear that day. But as I came upon the above line of reasoning, I started crying. Sobbing. Huge, painful dry heaves. I sat on the grass for forty-five minutes straight and cried into my hands. I cried because I knew my grandma was gone. I knew she was gone. I knew it right down to my bones. I knew it the way a baby zebra knows its mother is gone after finally finding her lion-eaten corpse. It was beyond thought, beyond culture or memory or ideology. It was chemical.
And in my grief came also anger. Outrage, in fact. Outrage at the fact that religious people would dare to grieve at a funeral. That they would dare to wail and moan about the supposed "loss" of a loved one. The hypocrisy of it galled me. Had I any hair, I would have been tempted to tear at it. To claim that there is an afterlife where your relatives wait for you before an eternity of bliss, and then to bemoan their passing struck me as obscene. And on clear-headed reflection, I can do nothing but stand by that line of thought.
If a religious person thinks that a deceased person is merely in another place, where they themselves will eventually go, then grief is not simply unnecessary, but nonsensical. We do not grieve when our loved ones move away. We do not grieve when the brother we're angry at leaves town and we know we likely won't speak to him again. We do not grieve when we leave a job, knowing we'll never again see our coworkers. We might be sad, or disappointed, or upset, but we do not grieve for separation. We grieve for death. Because we know right down to our DNA what death is, and all the religious platitudes in all the holy books read by all the priests and sages can't stop us knowing it. And I think that claiming that "it's God's plan" and "she's in a better place" is the absolute worst of sanctimonious, hypocritical delusion.
If you want to claim that you are religious, and believe in a God, or a Soul, or an afterlife, then you do not get to fucking grieve. You get to be sad and annoyed and impatient, because you won't get to see your loved ones for a little while. But what is the remainder of your life compared to eternity? Nothing. Literally, mathematically nothing. So just don't. However, if you accept your grief for what you know it to be, give up your childish insistence on magical thinking and ancient fairy tales. Accept that the universe is a system of particles interacting in infinitely complex ways, guided by blind, stupid natural laws which still somehow manage to produce the absolute miracles of thoughts and songs and love and life. If you insist on keeping your holy books and imaginary creatures, I won't judge you. But only atheists get to grieve.
A few weeks ago I went to my great-grandmother's grave alone for the first time. I'd been there before with my family, but this was the first time I spent any great length of time there. It was a bizarrely warm March day, with a bright sun and green grass, rather than the usual Minnesota Spring blizzard. I sat by my grandma's grave for an hour that day. When I first got there, I was just looking around, making sure it was tidy. I thought about the prosaic aspects of being at a graveyard, of my bike ride from Minneapolis to Falcon Heights, of the previous times I'd been. Then I stopped avoiding my real purpose in being there, and I started trying to articulate my thoughts and feelings, for the first time, four months after she had passed away.
Up to that point, from the day she died December 4th, I hadn't cried. In fact, I hadn't really cried outside of watching movies in about a decade. And I hadn't cried at her funeral, or at my subsequent visits. And I didn't cry right then. But I sat down on the grass and started talking. I started saying mundane things about missing her, and finally coming to see her, and how strange it felt for her not to be around. And then the same part of my brain responsible for writing this blog kicked in, and I started drawing straight lines. Straight lines are what I do. I don't curve around inconvenient ideas (in as much as I can help it — we all have our biases). I try to think straight through all the relevant information I have in my head.
And a line of thought began to develop. My grandma was dead. Her body lay six feet beneath me in a coffin in the ground. This was a physical reality. Everything that had ever been her was in a box beneath the earth. I pictured her brain, as it was then, several months after her death. It certainly was not a pleasant image, but that was what everything referred to as "her" was now. All we are is a subset of the pattern of neuron firings in our heads. And that pattern had come to an end.
That pattern hadn't gone anywhere. It hadn't transcended matter. It wasn't part of a soul, or spirit, or chain of reincarnation. Everything that had been my great-grandma, that had experienced love and life and war and migration, all of that was now a pool of gray mush inside a very slowly crumbling skull. It had been sustained as part of a self-perpetuating chemical process for nearly a century, which had quickly degenerated and ceased to be. Now, for some people, that is an ugly and horrible thought, that that is all we are. But to me, it's heartbreakingly beautiful: this pile of gray mush pushing electrons around via sodium and potassium exchange wrote the Bible, built St. Peter's, painted the Sistine Chapel, and composed the Ave Maria. That is a miracle.
And then my mind took the next step forward: all of that ability and potential and memory and personality was gone for my grandma. It had gone out like a candle, with barely even a wisp of smoke to show for it. It was gone. She was gone. She was gone, and she was nowhere, and she never would or could come back. There's a physical law that says as much. The laws of physics literally dictated that my great-grandma had ceased to exist for eternity. Except a huge host of high deluded people thought that she wasn't.
Religious people believe in the eternal soul. They hold it that there is some essential, everlasting part of us that continues to exist before life and beyond death. They believe that we are never really gone, and some of them even believe that we will join our loved ones in eternal paradise after death (or judgement, or whatever fairy tale they wish). But they're wrong. And they know they're wrong. How do I know that they know they're wrong? Because they grieve.
If I had the slightest shred of belief that my great-grandma was not well and truly gone for all eternity, I would not have shed a single tear that day. But as I came upon the above line of reasoning, I started crying. Sobbing. Huge, painful dry heaves. I sat on the grass for forty-five minutes straight and cried into my hands. I cried because I knew my grandma was gone. I knew she was gone. I knew it right down to my bones. I knew it the way a baby zebra knows its mother is gone after finally finding her lion-eaten corpse. It was beyond thought, beyond culture or memory or ideology. It was chemical.
And in my grief came also anger. Outrage, in fact. Outrage at the fact that religious people would dare to grieve at a funeral. That they would dare to wail and moan about the supposed "loss" of a loved one. The hypocrisy of it galled me. Had I any hair, I would have been tempted to tear at it. To claim that there is an afterlife where your relatives wait for you before an eternity of bliss, and then to bemoan their passing struck me as obscene. And on clear-headed reflection, I can do nothing but stand by that line of thought.
If a religious person thinks that a deceased person is merely in another place, where they themselves will eventually go, then grief is not simply unnecessary, but nonsensical. We do not grieve when our loved ones move away. We do not grieve when the brother we're angry at leaves town and we know we likely won't speak to him again. We do not grieve when we leave a job, knowing we'll never again see our coworkers. We might be sad, or disappointed, or upset, but we do not grieve for separation. We grieve for death. Because we know right down to our DNA what death is, and all the religious platitudes in all the holy books read by all the priests and sages can't stop us knowing it. And I think that claiming that "it's God's plan" and "she's in a better place" is the absolute worst of sanctimonious, hypocritical delusion.
If you want to claim that you are religious, and believe in a God, or a Soul, or an afterlife, then you do not get to fucking grieve. You get to be sad and annoyed and impatient, because you won't get to see your loved ones for a little while. But what is the remainder of your life compared to eternity? Nothing. Literally, mathematically nothing. So just don't. However, if you accept your grief for what you know it to be, give up your childish insistence on magical thinking and ancient fairy tales. Accept that the universe is a system of particles interacting in infinitely complex ways, guided by blind, stupid natural laws which still somehow manage to produce the absolute miracles of thoughts and songs and love and life. If you insist on keeping your holy books and imaginary creatures, I won't judge you. But only atheists get to grieve.
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