Dualism Through Reductionism
Hans Moravec
You may think the following proposals are thought experiments, that's fine, as such they still make the point in question. I happen to think of them as real, highly desirable, possibilities for the foreseeable future. For me they are a solution to the annoying certainty that we will be overtaken in every area by future superintelligent machines, and will be excluded from all the really interesting developments unless we keep up, personally and intimately, with the technologies of thought. That these ideas raise and clarify some interesting metaphysical questions is a bonus.
Transmigration
You are in an operating room. A robot brain surgeon is in attendance. By your side is a potentially human equivalent computer, dormant for lack of a program to run. Your skull, but not your brain, is anesthetized. You are fully conscious. The surgeon opens your brain case and peers inside. Its attention is directed at a small clump of about 100 neurons somewhere near the surface. It determines the three dimensional structure and chemical makeup of that clump nondestructively with high resolution 3D NMR holography, phased array radio encephalography, and ultrasonic radar. It writes a program that models the behavior of the clump, and starts it running on a small portion of the computer next to you. Fine connections are run from the edges of the neuron assembly to the computer, providing the simulation with the same inputs as the neurons. You and the surgeon check the accuracy of the simulation. After you are satisfied, tiny relays are inserted between the edges of the clump and the rest of the brain. Initially these leave the brain unchanged, but on command they can connect the simulation in place of the clump. A button which activates the relays when pressed is placed in your hand. You press it, release it and press it again. There should be no difference. As soon as you are satisfied, the simulation connection is established firmly, and the now unconnected clump of neurons is removed. The process is repeated over and over for adjoining clumps, until the entire brain has been dealt with. Occasionally several clump simulations are combined into a single equivalent but more efficient program. Though you have not lost consciousness, or even your train of thought, your mind (some would say soul) has been removed from the brain and transferred to a machine.
In a final step your old body is disconnected. The computer is installed in a shiny new one, in the style, color and material of your choice. You are no longer a cyborg halfbreed, your metamorphosis is complete.
For the squeamish there are other ways to work the transfer. The high resolution brain scan could be done in one fell swoop, without surgery, and a new you made, "While-U-Wait". Some will object that the instant process makes only a copy, the real you is still trapped in the old body (please dispose of properly). This is an understandable misconception based on the intimate association of a person's identity with a particular, unique, irreplaceable piece of meat. Once the possibility of mind transfer is accepted, however, a more mature notion of life and identity becomes possible. You are not dead until the last copy is erased; a faithful copy is exactly as good as the original. These issues are examined in greater detail later.
If even the last technique is too invasive for you, imagine a more psychological approach. A kind of portable computer (perhaps worn like eyeglasses so it can cover your entire visual field) is programmed with the universals of human mentality, with your genetic makeup and with whatever details of your life are conveniently available. It carries a program that makes it an excellent mimic. You carry this computer with you through the prime of your life, and it diligently listens and watches, and perhaps monitors your brainwaves, and learns to anticipate your every move and response. Soon it is able to fool your friends on the phone with its convincing imitation of you. When you die it is installed in a mechanical body and smoothly and seamlessly takes over your life and responsibilities.
What? Still not satisfied? If you happen to be a vertebrate there is another option that combines some of the sales features of the methods above. The vertebrate brain is split into two hemispheres connected by a very large bundle of nerve fibers called the corpus callosum. When brain surgery was new it was discovered that severing this connection between the brain halves cured some forms of epilepsy. An amazing aspect of the procedure was the apparent lack of side effects on the patient. The corpus callosum is a bundle far thicker than the optic nerve or even the spinal cord. Cut the optic nerve and the victim is utterly blind; sever the spinal cord and the body goes limp. Slice the huge cable between the hemispheres and nobody notices a thing. Well, not quite. In subtle experiments it was noted that patients who had this surgery were unable, when presented with the written word "brush", for instance, to identify the object in a collection of others using their left hand. The hand wanders uncertainly from object to object, seemingly unable to decide which is "brush". When asked to do the same task with the right hand, the choice is quick and unhesitating. Sometimes in the left handed version of the task the right hand, apparently in exasperation, reaches over to guide the left to the proper location. Other such quirks involving spatial reasoning and motor coordination were observed.
The explanation offered is that the callosum indeed is the main communications channel between the brain hemispheres. It has fibers running to every part of the cortex on each side. The brain halves, however, are fully able to function separately, and call on this channel only when a task involving co-ordination becomes necessary. We can postulate that each hemisphere has its own priorities, and that the other can request, but not demand, information or action from it, and must be able to operate effectively if the other chooses not to respond, even when the callosum is intact. The left hemisphere handles language and controls the right side of the body. The right hemisphere controls the left half of the body, and without the callosum the correct interpretation of the letters "brush" could not be conveyed to the controller of the left hand.
But what an opportunity. Suppose we sever your callosum but then connect a cable to both severed ends leading into an external computer. If the human brain is understood well enough this external computer can be programmed to pass, but also monitor the traffic between the two. Like the personal mimic it can teach itself to think like them. After a while it can insert its own messages into the stream, becoming an integral part of your thought processes. In time, as your original brain fades away from natural causes, it can smoothly take over the lost functions, and ultimately your mind finds itself in the computer. With advances in high resolution scanning it may even be possible to have this effect without messy surgery - perhaps you just wear some kind of helmet or headband.
Vernor Vinge devised a particularly slow and gentle transfer method in True Names, his novel of the near future. The world of True Names is interconnected by a computer network containing processes linked to every vital function of society. Experienced hackers connect to the net through innovative terminals they have developed; like radio amateurs early in the century they are at the leading edge of the new technology, ahead of the establishment. The hackers' terminals are bi-directional electroencephalogram (brain wave) machines; they enable a computer to read the human's brain waves and also to induce them. Through years of practice, experimentation and programming the hackers have discovered a combination of mental and computer techniques that permit a dreamlike trance in which information from the computer controls elements of a lucid dream, and actions in the dream affect the computer. In the dream data objects are represented by metaphor - a locked computer file, for instance, might appear as a steel safe with a combination lock. Guessing and dialing the right combination unlocks the file. The interface is tremendously fast and effective because the full mind of the human is coupled to the machine.
The hackers meet in the network, each in an imaginative guise. Sometimes their computer personas continue to operate under control of special programs even when their owners temporarily disconnect. A new potential of the net reveals itself as the story unfolds. One of the characters has augmented her thinking in the net by directly incorporating computer subroutines. In real life she is an old woman suffering from advanced senility. In the network, by contrast, she appears extraordinarily swift and intelligent because of the computer routines she has written to substitute for her lost natural abilities. Her illness is progressive, and she is constantly programming new capabilities as her natural ones disappear. Her goal is to complete the process before she dies. With success she will continue to live in her computer persona though her physical body no longer exists.
Afterlife
Whatever style you choose, when the transfer is complete advantages become apparent. Your computer has a control labelled speed. It had been set to slow, to keep the simulations synchronized with the old brain, but now you change it to fast. You can communicate, react and think a thousand times faster. But wait, there's more!
The program in your machine can be read out and altered, letting you conveniently examine, modify, improve and extend yourself. The entire program may be copied into similar machines, giving two or more thinking, feeling versions of you. You may choose to move your mind from one computer to another more technically advanced, or more suited to a new environment. The program can also be copied to some future equivalent of magnetic tape. If the machine you inhabit is fatally clobbered, the tape can be read into a blank computer, resulting in another you, minus the experiences since the copy. With enough copies, permanent death would be very unlikely.
As a computer program, your mind can travel over information channels. A laser can send it from one computer to another across great distances and other barriers. If you found life on a neutron star, and wished to make a field trip, you might devise a way to build a neutron computer and robot body on the surface, then transmit your mind to it. Nuclear reactions are a million times quicker than chemistry, so the neutron you can probably think that much faster. It can act, acquire new experiences and memories, then beam its mind back home. The original body could be kept dormant during the trip to be reactivated with the new memories when the return message arrived. Alternatively, the original might remain active. There would then be two separate versions of you, with different memories for the trip interval.
Two sets of memories can be merged, if mind programs are adequately understood. To prevent confusion, memories of events would indicate in which body they happened. Merging should be possible not only between two versions of the same individual but also between different persons. Selective mergings, involving some of the other person's memories, and not others would be a very superior form of communication, in which recollections, skills, attitudes and personalities can be rapidly and effectively shared.
Your new body will be able to carry more memories than your original biological one, but the accelerated information explosion will insure the impossibility of lugging around all of civilization's knowledge. You will have to pick and choose what your mind contains at any one time. There will often be knowledge and skills available from others superior to your own, and the incentive to substitute those talents for yours will be overwhelming. In the long run you will remember mostly other people's experiences, while memories you originated will be floating around the population at large. The very concept of you will become fuzzy, replaced by larger, communal egos.
Mind transferral need not be limited to human beings. Earth has other species with brains as large, from dolphins, our cephalic equals, to elephants, whales, and giant squid, with brains up to twenty times as big. Translation between their mental representation and ours is a technical problem comparable to converting our minds into a computer program. Our culture could be fused with theirs, we could incorporate each other's memories, and the species boundaries would fade. Non-intelligent creatures could also be popped into the data banks. The simplest organisms might contribute little more than the information in their DNA. In this way our future selves will benefit from all the lessons learned by terrestrial biological and cultural evolution. This is a far more secure form of storage than the present one, where genes and ideas are lost when the conditions that gave rise to them change.
Our speculation ends in a super-civilization, the synthesis of all solar system life, constantly improving and extending itself, spreading outward from the sun, converting non-life into mind. There may be other such bubbles expanding from elsewhere. What happens when we meet? Fusion of us with them is a possibility, requiring only a translation scheme between the memory representations. This process, possibly occurring now elsewhere, might convert the entire universe into an extended thinking entity, a probable prelude to greater things.
There's more...
http://www.primitivism.com/reductionism.htm
