Have I ever told you about the boundary of self-awareness?
Virtualization / mind transfer
Because more and more people now believe that one day we’ll be able to abandon the body and keep only the consciousness, thereby achieving “ascension.”
Yesterday I watched Black Mirror season 3 episode 4, “San Junipero” — after the two of them die, their consciousness is uploaded into a made-up paradise where they go on existing with senses and consciousness. That counts as a happy ending.
But it got me thinking about something I said one day: just like if a person could be quantum teleported, you don’t know whether the identical person who arrives on the other side is really the original person. Even though the memories are identical and the physical state is completely identical — every physical structure in the brain’s neurons, all the way down to the quantum state, all exactly the same — you still don’t know whether the original person who got teleported is dead.
Copy A + paste B + delete A: from a third party’s point of view, nothing is out of the ordinary. But as far as A is concerned, A is actually dead — and A can’t tell anyone, not even B. B is still completely convinced that B is A.
Same thing with the consciousness uploaded to the cloud when you die: there’s no way to prove or disprove whether it’s really the original consciousness. Because consciousness doesn’t just need the brain — it requires the whole body working together to produce that single unique result. The original consciousness was a side effect of chemicals driving the body. While you’re alive, sure, you plug in and transmit into a virtual reality to feel things, but that virtual world’s program is still running in your brain and body; you’ve just bolted on a few plugins to help generate the chemical sensory stimulation. Once the body is dead, how could the consciousness possibly exist? That thing running in the cloud works in a completely different way — it’s no longer the side effect of chemicals driving a body. Is it just a pile of AI running its own calculations, convincing itself it’s real?
Chilling when you think about it.
Oh, right — “Transcendence” is actually about exactly this. Maybe quantum teleportation is something the universe has already ruled out, something that can’t be achieved. But humans might soon use AI and virtualization to pull off a fake consciousness transfer, and about that I’m still pessimistic.