Copyright 1992 by Richard Kennaway. Permission for electronic distribution is freely granted so long as this notice is included. Contact the author for permission to distribute via other means. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The topic of uploading and its relation to personal identity regularly arises on the Extropians list. This note assumes for the sake of argument that uploading is possible -- that is, that the brain (and, if necessary, any other body part) can be faithfully copied into an artificial substrate, complete with sensory interface, by technology which we do not yet have but can foresee. The questions then arise: Who or what is uploaded? What becomes of the original? Is the uploaded entity the same person? Many words have been expended on these questions, but no agreement has emerged. Here I merely list the arguments and viewpoints that have appeared, in the hope of avoiding needless repetition of things that have already been said. Frequently Asked Questions and Frequently Questioned Answers. None of the statements below should be read as being asserted by me, and none of the questions is intended to presume any particular answer. However, the list of topics is probably biased by my own preoccupations. Additions and corrections welcome. Remember, this is just a list of arguments, no attempt to convince anyone of anything. * Uploading by gradual replacement: If the brain is replaced by silicon one neuron at a time, then presumably you will experience a continuous consciousness throughout the whole process, until you are entirely implemented in silicon. Doesn't this preserve 'you'? But perhaps you would experience your own consciousness slowly waning away, while a new, separate consciousness takes form in the silicon and thinks it's you. But suppose you add the silicon, one neuron-equivalent at a time, without destroying the original? * Uploading by destructive analysis of the original, then construction of a duplicate: This is the likely fate of those who have themselves frozen by Alcor, assuming Alcor manages to preserve their bodies until the singularity. It is also how the Star Trek transporter is generally believed to operate. Is the copy you, or just a replacement for the now dead original? Did Spock die when he first walked into a transporter? (This gets regularly hashed over in rec.arts.startrek.*, equally inconclusively.) Even if you don't consider it's really you, is it still worth it, to you, to sign up with Alcor or their rivals? (Technical note: the official explanation of the Star Trek transporter is different. It converts the person into an energy pattern which is then transmitted and converted back into matter. Note: energy, not information, so there's never more or less than one of the person being transported.) * Uploading by duplication, then destruction of the original: Make a duplicate of the brain in silicon or whatever your preferred medium is, then destroy the original. How does the original feel about being destroyed? It doesn't experience the duplicate's consciousness, the duplicate is a separate person. Suppose the duplicate brain is initially attached to the same body as the original brain, in order to check its fidelity, receiving inputs only. Then if all is well, switch all the output nerves from the original brain to the duplicate. Finally, destroy the original brain. Is this acceptable? (This is the scenario of "Learning to Be Me" referenced below.) * Uploading by duplication, no destruction of the original: One of the few points of agreement. Everyone seems to agree that in this case, the original and the duplicate are separate persons. Neither experiences the thoughts, feelings, sensations, etc. of the other. Can either copy reasonably object to being killed given the knowledge that the other will survive? Even if it objects, is there any consolation in knowing that the other copy survives? * Immortality through continuity, through copies, through posterity, through works, through remembrance, through not dying: If in the future there is always some being having a physical continuity with my current form, does that constitute immortality, even if such a future being is unimaginably different to my present self? If there will always exist a copy of myself somewhere in the universe, have I achieved immortality, even if my current body is destroyed and has no physical continuity with any of the copies? Is such immortality worth any more than that which one obtains through having descendants? Or through doing great works that live in people's memory for ever? Or by having a tombstone that survives to be studied by archaeologists of the far future? Or by having existed, and being remembered by Tipler's hypothetical Omega Point being? Woody Allen said: "I don't want to achieve immortality though my works. I want to achieve immortality by not dying." We want to eliminate the 'simple' forms of death, such as car crashes and diseases, but uploading and self-modification introduce the possibility of more subtle notions of 'death'. People will differ over what they are willing to accept and what they will strive at all costs to avoid. * Continuity of identity: We don't even have that now (sleep, anaesthetics, mind-altering drugs). Who wakes up in your bed tomorrow morning? Is the Star Trek transporter any different? Or any of the other uploading scenarios? * Fidelity: How accurate does the duplicate have to be? The Klingon transporter introduces some error every time. How often would you go through a Klingon transporter? (Chilling line from Star Trek: "Is the transporter repaired yet?" "We sent some inert matter down and retrieved it, but it returned in a disassembled state. I wouldn't dare try it with people yet.") * Modification of uploaded persons: Why stop at duplication? Once a mind is located in an artificial substrate, one may be able to experiment with modifications to that mind. Start with greater speed and memory. Add more acute senses. Add new senses. Add a computational engine for fast and accurate mathematical calculations. Add the entire written works of mankind, exhaustively catalogued and cross-indexed -- an enormous hypertext system, and you have enough short-term memory not to get lost in it. With all these enhancements, are you still you? Go further. Eliminate sleeping, dream while waking, choose what emotions and moods to experience, inhabit artificial bodies of either sex or of completely new sexes, edit your memories undetectably, have drug experiences that make heroic doses of LSD pale into insignificance, eliminate unwanted personality traits, install new ones, invent new emotions, spawn subprocesses and merge them back into 'yourself', incorporate parts of other people's minds or animals' minds....Are you still you? Even in the present day, one comes across people fixed in a way of life, who refuse to develop. Would clinging to one's original personality be just as unskilful a behaviour in a world with uploading? If you don't open this Pandora's box, someone else will. * Rights of copies and other artificial persons: Perhaps you don't want to risk radically modifying yourself. In that case, make copies of yourself and experiment on them. Those copies might have legal rights forbidding you to manipulate them at will, but that just means you do it in secret. For safety and secrecy, provide the experimental copies with virtual realities rather than letting them run around in the real world. After each test run, erase the experimental copy, retaining only whatever data you found useful. Is this moral? If I create a person, totally under my physical control, what may I rightly do to it? Consent is no longer a meaningful line to draw, since it can be designed to consent to everything. If you don't object to what someone does in private with a copy of their own mind, do you care what they might do with a bootleg copy of yours? Cf. the intelligent animal in Douglas Adams' "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe", which is designed so as to want to be killed and eaten, after recommending to the diner its tastiest cuts. "Would you rather eat something that *didn't* want to be eaten?" * Can artificial devices, including uploads, think at all? Can they be persons? How do you know that other people think now? Do you consider any non-human animals to think? Or humans whose skin colour differs from your own? Whatever test you are applying to decide these questions, are you willing to apply it to uploaded entities? If not, what further test would you require? I have never seen anyone who has claimed that a machine cannot think (e.g. Searle) state what they would count as evidence of thought. * No such thing as personal identity: Uploading, duplication, and modification of persons makes clear what the Buddhists have known for thousands of years, that personal identity is a convenient, conventional fiction. There is not really any such thing. But if so, why should one be motivated to continue living at all? The Buddhists have an answer to this, but I'm not sufficiently enlightened to understand it. Study the Prajnaparamita (Perfection of Wisdom) sutras and the doctrine of shunyata (emptiness). A koan: would the Buddha step into a transporter? Another koan: *What* is uploaded? Warning: meditation on this topic can lead to enlightenment. Do not drive or operate heavy machinery in this state until you have fully comprehended that there is no-one who drives, nothing which is driven, no attainment of enlightenment, and no non-attainment of enlightenment. * Is there mind-stuff? The more we find out about the brain, the more a separate mind-stuff seems an unnecessary hypothesis. On the other hand, stories of reincarnation suggest that perhaps something does survive bodily death. But what? (No answers from Buddhism here -- the Buddha would not answer the question "what is reincarnated?") Do the Tibetan description of the after-death experience and their tradition of reincarnated lamas deserve study? * What succeeds, succeeds. People who try to maximise the chance that at least one copy of themselves will always exist will eventually wipe out those acting under the constraint of preserving continuity with their physical incarnation. Um, so what? I'm sure someone said something like this, but its relevance escapes me. Besides, the fact that copiers may arbitrarily outnumber non-copiers does not imply that the latter class becomes extinct. Remember also that people willing to modify their copies in order to increase 'their' chances of survival even more will in general survive even better than 'faithful' copiers. * References (I have only read some of these): Non-fiction: Hofstadter & Dennett "The Mind's I". Dennett "Consciousness Explained". Minsky "The Society of Mind". Moravec "Mind Children". Hofstadter "Godel, Escher, Bach" and "Metamagical Themas" (ignore the pop Godel, but study the game "Nomic"). Penrose "The Emperor's New Mind" (about which I don't think I've seen a favourable word here). Tipler "The Omega Point as Eschaton" (Zygon, vol.24, 1989). Protagonists in the never-ending debate on the possibility of artificial intelligence -- many of the above, plus Searle, Weizenbaum (?), Feigenbaum, the Churchlands -- see also the Usenet newsgroup comp.ai.philosophy. Bernard Suits "The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia" (University of Toronto Press, 1978) (which studies the question: how do you pass the time in Utopia?). Fiction: Greg Egan's stories "Learning to Be Me" (Interzone 37) and "Axiomatic" (Interzone 41). "Can Machines Be People?" (a collection of SF stories on the title theme, author unknown). "The Modular Man" (recently serialised in Analog, author?). Vernor Vinge "True Names". See also the works mentioned earlier. More references welcome. * And does it matter? As we aren't going to agree on any of this, it would be more interesting and useful to speculate on what a world would be like in which people can upload, duplicate, and modify themselves at will. There's material here for a whole shelfful of SF novels, some of which have been written already. -- ____ Richard Kennaway \ _/__ School of Information Systems Internet: jrk@sys.uea.ac.uk \X / University of East Anglia uucp: ...mcsun!ukc!uea-sys!jrk \/ Norwich NR4 7TJ, U.K.