Will we someday “upload” ourselves into the machine? The Singularity is getting closer every day, of course, and people are working on the challenge, slicing brains up into ever thinner slices.
I may have first read about the idea of uploading consciousness into a machine in the Gateway books by Fred Pohl, way back as a science fiction reading teenager in the ’80s. I’m just pointing this out to bolster my credentials. I’m no Johnny-come-lately to the upload party. I’ve been daydreaming about this stuff for a long time.
The Matrix was a good visualization of this idea of living in a machine-generated reality, and of course prompts much speculation of whether this could be a simulation, this world we believe we live in now. (See also David Brin’s “Stones of Significance.”)
It’s fun to think about, to imagine that uploading ourselves to the internet would lead to good times cruising out on that “Information Superhighway.” (We must never let that term die.)
Could we simulate paradise? And would we only be dreadfully bored with it? Would it make people unhappy, to not be able to have more than others? Do we choose our make-believe lives for the thrill of having something at stake? Is a lifetime of suffering but an afternoon spent in a theater watching a sad movie?
Though I’ve sometimes wished for a digital existence, a life in “the cloud,” I’m not so sure anymore. Now that the cloud has blown in, and I’ve toiled long enough inside the I/T factory, I don’t know that I’d trust myself to an existence in software. Our software systems are creaky and fragile, and it would be risky, depending on thin budgets and overworked I/T guys to maintain my incorporeal person, and a bummer to have most of my memories overwritten in the interests of copyright and copy protection.
And think about it: we still get to have some privacy in our own mind. Imagine when it’s all reduced to files on a computer, and your thoughts are all logged. Who will read those logs, and what will “they” think? What will they do? What new crimes and punishments will be created for thinking those dirty thoughts, you filthy disgusting pig? (Sing it, Bob: “If my thought-dreams could be seen, they’d probably put my head in a guillotine.”)
Is that what God is? The auditor of our log files?
Perhaps we’re already unreal enough, and only meant to be downloaded and analyzed when our program terminates.
7 Comments
For what it’s worth, I addressed this a bit in a (very)short story I posted recently and since you’re someone who thinks about this stuff as well, I’d love your opinion if you have a few minutes to read it: http://fictionbyjoeross.tumblr.com/post/32262557378/arnie-and-the-early-adopters
12 October 2012 at 10:06 am
Hi, Joe! Thanks for stopping by. I read, and I commented. :-)
12 October 2012 at 10:38 am
Funny that this should appear in my Twitter feed today, via Marcel Gagné:
“Yes, we may all be living in the Matrix, say physicists”
However, be aware that:
Yes! I always say that lattice spacing is key, along with the GZK-whatzit.
12 October 2012 at 10:43 am
Re: your comments about the fragility of such an existence. Surely fleshly existence is just as fragile and risky? You could be wiped out at any time by a speeding bus, a raging virus, a crazy gun-wielding maniac, a meteor… Or, perhaps, because we live with these risks every day, we don’t think of them as risks anymore?
And, maybe by the time of the singularity, software upgrades and maintenance will be something we will have more control over as code in the matrix.
I’d upload myself in a heartbeat if it meant I could control my surroundings like Neo.
12 October 2012 at 3:37 pm
Ah! Good points.
Or maybe the proverbial bus, or a “real” biological virus, or any number of bad things are just symptoms of programming problems with the simulation we already have. (Or constraints, or features.)
And I wonder how much control we already have over our environment. I think about that thing that guy in the bible said about having the faith of a mustard seed. Or the things that Richard Bach talks about in “Illusions.” Hold on a moment, I’m going to go try swimming in the turf outside…
(Highly recommended, “Illusions!”)
12 October 2012 at 3:53 pm
In a sense, aren’t we uploading ourselves to the internet everytime we surf?
I wonder what it would be like to one day lose all memory since you were 10 years old, and then be granted access to your Google search history, Facebook account, email, etc.
Do you think you would recognize yourself? Could the internet be used to help memory loss victims?
16 October 2012 at 1:39 pm
I think I’d still have about a 15 year hole in my history, from 1980 to about 1995, before I had an email and Google and etc trail.
17 October 2012 at 7:09 pm