Will Your Uploaded Mind Still Be You?
Will Your
Uploaded Mind Still Be You?
The day is coming when we will be able to scan our
entire consciousness into a computer. How will we coexist with our digital
replicas?
By Michael S.A. Graziano Sept.
13, 2019 10:53 am ET
Imagine a future in which a machine can scan your
brain and migrate the essentials of your mind to a computer. It’s called mind
uploading—preserving a person’s consciousness in a digital afterlife. As a
neuroscientist, I’m convinced that mind uploading will happen someday. There
are no laws of physics that stand in the way. It depends, however, on
technology that has not yet been invented, so nobody knows when mind uploading
might become available.
The brain relies on an elegant, underlying
principle: A simple working part, the neuron, is repeated over and over to
create complexity. The human brain contains about 86 billion neurons
interconnected by about 100 trillion synapses. Information flows and transforms
through those vast connected networks in complex and unpredictable patterns,
creating the mind.
To upload a person’s mind, at least two technical
challenges would need to be solved. First, we would need to build an artificial
brain made of simulated neurons. Second, we would need to scan a person’s
actual, biological brain and measure exactly how its neurons are connected to
each other, to be able to copy that pattern in the artificial brain. Nobody
knows if those two steps would really re-create a person’s mind or if other,
subtler aspects of the biology of the brain must be copied as well, but it is a
good starting place.
The first technical challenge is all but solved.
Engineers already know how to create artificial, simulated neurons and connect
them together through synapses. We can simulate networks of thousands or even
millions of neurons. The modern wonders of artificial intelligence, like Siri
or self-driving cars, depend on large artificial neural networks. Simulating a
brain with 86 billion neurons is a little beyond current technology, but
probably not for long. Computer technology is always improving.
The second challenge is much harder. A team of
scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine recently used an electron
microscope to map the complete “connectome”—the pattern of connectivity among
all neurons—in a roundworm, a tiny creature that has about 300 neurons. The
task required almost 10 years. It’s a milestone. But to upload a human brain,
we probably want a scanner that doesn’t kill the subject, and we would need it
to scan about a hundred million times as many details. That technology doesn’t
yet exist. The most wildly optimistic predictions place mind uploading within a
few decades, but I would not be surprised if it took centuries.
However long the technology takes, it seems likely
to be a part of our future, so it’s worth taking a moment now to think about
the implications. What will mind-uploading mean for us philosophically and
morally?
Suppose I decide to have my brain scanned and my
mind uploaded. Obviously, nobody knows what the process will really entail, but
here’s one scenario: A conscious mind wakes up. It has my personality,
memories, wisdom and emotions. It thinks it’s me. It can continue to learn and
remember, because adaptability is the essence of an artificial neural network.
Its synaptic connections continue to change with experience.
Sim-me (that is, simulated me) looks around and
finds himself in a simulated, videogame environment. If that world is rendered
well, it will look pretty much like the real world, and his virtual body will
look like a real body. Maybe sim-me is assigned an apartment in a simulated
version of Manhattan, where he lives with a whole population of other uploaded
people in digital bodies. Sim-me can enjoy a stroll through the digitally
rendered city on a beautiful day with always perfect weather. Smell, taste and
touch might be muted because of the overwhelming bandwidth required to handle
that type of information. By and large, however, sim-me can think to himself, “Ah,
that upload was worth the money. I’ve reached the digital afterlife, and it’s a
safe and pleasant place to live. May the computing cloud last indefinitely!”
But what does biological me think? I leave the
scanning facility feeling like I’ve wasted my money. I’m just as mortal as I
was when I walked in. Sure, somewhere in the cloud a copy of me exists. I could
even have a phone conversation with that copy and argue over who is the real
me. But in the end, bio-me feels cheated.
Philosophically, what is the relationship between
sim-me and bio-me? One way to understand it is through geometry. Imagine that
my life is like the rising stalk of the letter Y. I was born at the base, and
as I grew up, my mind was shaped and changed along a trajectory. One day, I
have my mind uploaded. At that moment, the Y branches. There are now two
trajectories, each one convinced that it’s the real me. Let’s say the left
branch is the sim-me and the right branch is the bio-me. The two branches
proceed along different life paths, with different accumulating experiences.
The right-hand branch will inevitably die. The left-hand branch can live
indefinitely, and in it, the stalk of the Y will also live on as memories and
experiences.
Have I really achieved digital immortality? The
heart of the problem lies in that word, “really.” Neither one of us is the “real”
me. We form an extended, branching geometry. That geometry might not stop at
two branches, either. One could imagine a much more twiggy tree that is still,
collectively, “me.” The idea of the individual would need to be revised or
thrown out entirely.
It’s a hard world to think about with any intuitive
comfort because, of course, nobody has had any experience with it yet. We’re
all used to going to sleep at night, experiencing a form of little death and
then waking up as someone who is 99.9%, but not exactly, the same. We don’t
obsess over whether yesterday’s me died and a new person has been foisted on us
in its place. We’re all so used to the process that we don’t think about it
much. With mind uploading, we’d have to get used to a different concept of the
continuity of life.
In science fiction, the philosophical conundrum of
a branching geometry is usually conveniently avoided. For example, in the movie
“Tron” (1982), arguably the first really popular mind-uploading fantasy, when a
person enters the digital world, his physical self magically disappears, and
when he leaves the digital world, his physical self reappears. That way, you
never have to think about two of him at the same time. In “The Matrix” (1999),
each person has only one mind that can experience the physical world or be
plugged into the simulated world of the matrix.
This kind of gimmick is a clever storytelling
device that makes the fantasy digestible to the modern mind. But when mind
uploading arrives for real, we will have to adjust to personhood as something
more like a data file that can be duplicated and morphed into multiple
versions.
Let’s think through the implications even further.
Technologically, there is nothing to stop sim-me from connecting to the real
world, calling or Skyping, keeping up to date on the latest news, day-trading
or remote-conferencing. Sim-me may live in sim-Manhattan with other uploaded
minds, but with my personality and memories, he will love my family just as I
do and will want to interact with them. Sim-me will have the same political
views and want to vote; he will have the same intellectual interests and want
to return to the job he remembers and still loves. He’ll want to be part of the
world.
Biological people
would become a larval stage of human.
And what would stop him? He may live in the cloud,
with a simulated instead of a physical body, but his leverage on the real world
would be as good as anyone else’s. We already live in a world where almost
everything we do flows through cyberspace. We keep up with friends and family through
text and Twitter, Facebook and Skype. We keep informed about the world through
social media and internet news. Even our jobs, some of them at least,
increasingly exist in an electronic space. As a university professor, for
example, everything I do, including teaching lecture courses, writing articles
and mentoring young scientists, could be done remotely, without my physical
presence in a room.
The same could be said of many other
jobs—librarian, CEO, novelist, artist, architect, member of Congress,
President. So a digital afterlife, it seems to me, wouldn’t become a separate
place, utopian or otherwise. Instead, it would become merely another sector of
the world, inhabited by an ever-growing population of citizens just as
professionally, socially and economically connected to social media as anyone
else.
In that imagined future, who would accumulate the
most power? One possible answer is the people who live in the simulated world.
They’ve already built a lifetime of political and economic connections. Once
uploaded, they’ll have centuries to accumulate more resources and to expand
their empires of influence. People who live in the physical world would be mere
neophytes in comparison. Biological people would become a larval stage of
human, each of them aspiring to be among the lucky few who are allowed to
metamorphose into the immortal elites who own the world.
A second possible answer is that the most powerful
people would be those who control access to the simulated world. Think about
how religions work. People at the top tell you that if you behave well, you’ll
enter heaven, and if you behave badly, you may end up in eternal punishment. A
lot of wars have been fought based on that kind of motivation. We’re told that
suicide bombers are promised rewards in the afterlife. And yet, religious
demagogues offer an afterlife that can’t be objectively confirmed. It’s an
insubstantial carrot and stick.
Imagine the coercive power of an afterlife that is
directly confirmable. The public could Skype with people who are in a digital
heaven and (if the technology turns very dark) in a digital hell. Advertisers
have known for a long time that nothing convinces people as powerfully as
personal testimonial. Imagine if we all had access to the testimonials of
people actually in the afterlife. Now imagine a political leader who offers
that objectively confirmable heaven in return for loyalty and hell in return
for betrayal. At that point, the gatekeepers of the digital afterlife gain a
level of power that is impossible for anyone today to really understand.
And yet, a future with mind-uploading may not be
entirely dark. It would allow for the accumulation of wisdom. Currently, we can
accumulate knowledge. The invention of writing, five thousand years ago, gave
us our primary tool for trans-generational accumulation of knowledge, and it
also gave us the modern world.
But a wise, thoughtful mind has never been able to
live across generations. Mind uploading would give us a powerful new way to
accumulate skill and wisdom. It could cause as much of a change in human
civilization as writing did.
And mind uploading may give us one more remarkable
benefit. Currently, we are not a space-faring species, and it’s hard to imagine
how we ever can be. Our bodies are fragile, the cosmic rays that permeate space
are toxic to us, and we don’t live long enough to go anywhere interesting. The
fastest rockets today would take about 50,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri,
the nearest star.
Yet all of these obstacles could be overcome by
mind uploading. We could have whole colonies of minds, keeping each other company
in a virtual environment, sent off to explore the galaxy without any intrinsic
limit of time or space. The only way for us to become a truly space-faring
civilization might be not by building a spaceship environment to house the
human body but by building a platform to carry the human mind. Arguably, mind
uploading is humanity’s most obvious path into a deep future unburdened by our
mortality or the fate of our terrestrial home.
Dr. Graziano is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at
Princeton University. This essay is adapted from his new book “Rethinking
Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience,” which will be
published by W.W. Norton on Sept. 17.
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