Taina voda

The dream of transhumanism is to transfer individual “self” from biological carbon-based hardware to “artificial” silicon-based hardware, thus achieving immortality. Afterall, if the “software” runs on one, why shouldn’t it run on the other? That is if they know how to install the software, ahem “self”… Considering that science still considers that conscience might be a biological phenomenon, it is under question if one can be separated from its biological substrate and transferred to another.

In any discussion on conscience, we seem to have two groups of people – neuroscientists, who know well the brain functioning and technologists, who can create artificial intelligence. At least for now, they seem to poke the question without needing any help from psychologists for example. Although I’m kind of sure that some pseudo gurus are moderating these discussions or at least offering wisdom, or sort of.

On one side we have people who know the hardware and the results it can produce – if we cut here, this stops and we can conclude by this that the brain creates the experience of “this”. On the other side we have people who can recreate the intellectual outputs of the brain, but have no idea how that happened, let alone why it happened without the biological brain. Both share the desire to become immortal by transferring themselves to a … server….

Science is religion’s daughter that emancipated herself by marrying capital. Their child, technology, is making weird pokes at something that makes grandmother smile. And this deserves a gin tonic, not a diaper change!

Before even using any theological argumentation, on a very basic human level we must ask ourselves who really wants to upload their soup of a head anywhere? I surely don’t want to live through the same nightmare in an eternal loop. The idea that the minds we have are all powerful and magnificent is entirely false. There is nothing more faulty than the human mind. It’s a machine that doesn’t serve us well – it’s fragmented, forgetful,  absent by random intervals, does hidden things from me like regulating my stomach which I cannot access and modify as I wish, it lies by changing MY memories, it dreams things I don’t understand, it can’t do math the same way I’ve done it 15 years ago, sometimes it makes me walk absent mindedly though streets of cities and I can’t recall why, it convinces me that 5 year old me and today’s me are the same person, because the same body was still alive, but I can’t access my 5 year old mind or joy of sweets. And when it comes to experiencing the present, oftentimes I’m not even present and yet I don’t know where I go. Sensation is the only thing that validates I’m still here. Lost in thoughts who whisper and disappear like fog. It leaves me helpless and not knowing WHO AM I? And yet with this faulty mind I must navigate life without crashing, but my whole experience is a feeling of constant crash. And every human is exactly like this. Even the most brilliant minds don’t remember where they pissed this morning, and this worries me.

It is normal for brilliant minds to be afraid of death. Afterall religion gives some guarantees for the soul, but no one insured the mind. When you spend your entire life producing outcomes most other humans get nosebleeds from, you arrive to the point of asking yourself wouldn’t it be a pity if this brilliance just disappeared. I don’t want to be failed by my failing body, said the mind and disappeared into another Epstein style mansion. But the destiny of the mind is to die, dear daughter Science! Better make peace with it while on the way…

But let’s get more ambitious than just copying people’s personalities, so that we can create movies, chatbots and other entertainment or hack governments. I want to challenge this community of brilliance that they are not ambitious enough. I don’t want to look forward to the possibility to preserve my soup of a head in a new can, I want a better head!

I feel like I have gone back in time and I’m observing a group of early humans compete on who can run faster. Kind of prehistoric Olympic games. The best runners outshine the rest. I notice that even their children seem to run faster than others. What should I do? Should I help them outnumber any slow human so that we can advance much faster as a tribe or should I mount a horse?

I, as a human, should go forward in the fog even if I don’t know who I am. Every cloud that passes through me is not me, everything that fails me, is not of me, everything that augments me, follows me.

It is not a question of achieving immortality by uploading a bunch of memories to a new prison. It’s about giving us the chance to navigate this world with less crashes, hoping to diminish the suffering we carry. Giving us a mirror to our own minds, which will atrophy. Would some people use it to control our behavior? Maybe, but who controls them? The same soup you live with everyday.

I don’t know yet how to ride a horse, nor do I know where it would take me. But I can’t run fast anyways.