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Sunday, August 14, 2011
Sunday, April 17, 2011
25. WON’T IT BE IMPOSSIBLE TO ETHICALLY TEST AND DEVELOP CYBER-CONSCIOUSNESS?
“Partial freedom seems to me a most invidious mode of slavery.” Edmund Burke
“Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do, and what is right to do.” Potter Stewart
A fundamental principle of bioethics requires the consent of a patient to any medical procedure performed upon them. A patient will exist the moment a conscious mindclone arises in some academic laboratory, or hacker’s garage. At that moment ethical rules will be challenged, for the mindclone has not consented to the work being done on eir mind. Does this situation create a catch-22 ethical embargo against developing cyber-consciousness?
There are at least three ways to answer this challenge. First, it can be approached with a medical ethics focus on the mindclone itself. Second, it can be approached philosophically – focusing on the mindclone as just part and parcel of the biological original. Third, it can be approached pragmatically – what will the government likely require?
Creating Ethical Beings Ethically
How can it be ethical to test mindclone-creating mindware when any resulting mindclone has not first consented to being the subject of such an experiment? How will we know we have mindware that creates an ethically-reasoning mindclone if it is not ethical to even do the tests and trials?
As to the first question, ethicists agree that someone else can consent to a treatment for a person who is unable to consent. For example, the parents of a newborn child can consent to experimental medical treatment for them. The crucial criterion is that the consenter must have the best interests of the patient in mind, and not be primarily concerned with the success of a medical experiment. One of the purposes of an Institutional Review Board (IRB) or medical review committee is to exercise this kind of consent on behalf of persons who cannot give their consent. Hence, having a responsible committee act on their behalf solves the problem of ethical consent for the birth of a mindclone or beman.
Sometimes people complain that they “did not ask to be born.” Yet, nobody has an ethical right to decide whether or not to be born, as that would be temporally illogical. The solution to this conundrum is for someone else to consent on behalf of the newborn, whether this is done implicitly via biological parenting, or explicitly via an ethics committee. In each case there is a moral obligation (which can be enforced legally today for biological parents) to avoid intentionally causing harm to the newborn. We are now ready to turn to the second question: how can an ethics committee, acting on behalf of the best interests of future mindclones or bemans, avoid causing harm to them?One possible solution to ethically developing mindclones is to take the project in stages. The first stage must not rely upon self-awareness or consciousness. This would be based upon first developing the autonomous, moral reasoning ability that is a necessary, but not sufficient, basis for consciousness. Recall from Question 5 that consciousness is a continuum of maturing abilities, when healthy, to be autonomous and empathetic, with autonomous defined as: “the independent capacity to make reasoned decisions, with moral ones at the apex, and to act on them.” Independent means, in this context, “capable of idiosyncratic thinking and acting.”
By running many simulations mindclone developers can gain comfort that the reasoning ability of the mindware is human-equivalent. In fact, the reasoning ability of the mindware should match that of the biological original who is being mindcloned.
The second stage of development expands the mindware to incorporate human feelings and emotions, via settings associated with aspects of pain, pleasure and the entire vast spectrum of human sentience. At this stage all the feelings and emotions are terminating in a “black box”, devoid of any self-awareness. Engineers will measure and validate that the feelings are real, via instruments, but no “one” will actually be feeling the feelings.
The third stage entails creating in software the meaningful memories and patterns of thought of the original person being mindcloned. This can be considered the identity module. If this is a case of a de novo cyberconscious being, i.e., a beman, then this identity module is either missing or is created from whole cloth.
Finally, a consciousness bridge will be developed that marries the reasoning, sentience and identity modules, giving rise to autonomy with empathy and hence consciousness. Feelings and emotions will be mapped to memories and characteristic ways of processing information. There will be a sentient research subject when the consciousness bridge first connects the autonomy, empathy and identity modules.
This bridging approach to ethically creating mindclones is reminiscent of Dennett’s observation that the disassociation from themselves that some victims of horrible abuse exhibit – a kind of denial that the abuse happened to them – is not only a way to avoid the sensation of suffering, but is also likely to be the normal state in beings that have not integrated consciousness into their mind.[i] In other words, if a being is unable to mentally organize a conceptualized self into a mental world of conceptualized things and experienced sensations, then they cannot actually suffer from pain because there is not a yet a self to suffer. Pain can be experienced, and it can hurt like hell, but it is an autonomic hurt and not a personally experienced hurt. In Dennett’s view, when people witness this kind of pain in most animals, they anthropomorphize themselves into the animal’s position and imagine the animal’s hurt. But because most animals cannot do this, they cannot hurt. Similarly, until a self was bridged into a mindclone’s or beman’s complex relational database of mindware and mindfiles, there would be “no one home” to complain.
Ethically, approval from research authorities should be obtained before the consciousness bridge is activated. There will be concern not to cause gratuitous harm, nor to cause fear, and to manage the subject at the end of the experiment gracefully or to continue its virtual life appropriately. The ethics approvals may be more readily granted if the requests are graduated. For example, the first request could be to bridge just a small part of the empathy, identity and autonomy modules, and for just a brief period of time. After the results of experiments are assessed, positive results would be used to request more extensive approvals. Ultimately there would be adequate confidence that a protocol existed pursuant to which a mindclone could be safely, and humanely, awakened into full consciousness for an unending period of time – just as there are analogous protocols for bringing flesh patients out of medically induced comas.
For example, before companies are allowed to test new drugs on patients they must first test a very small dose of the drug, for a very short period of time, on a healthy volunteer. Only gradually, based on satisfaction with the safety of previous tests, are companies allowed to test the drugs more robustly. Analogously, we can envision ethical authorities first permitting the test of only a small sliver of consciousness and only for a small sliver of time. Gradually, as ethical review committees become convinced that the previous trials were safe (did not cause pain or fear), greater tests of consciousness would be permitted.
Of course we are all aware of drugs that have been withdrawn from sale after having even been approved. In these cases evidence of dangerous side effects appear that were not evident during the clinical trials. No doubt the same situation will occur with mindclones – some tortured minds may be created inadvertently. This does not mean it is unethical to create mindclones. It means that every means practical should be employed to minimize the risks of such side effects, and if they manifest, to be able to rapidly resolve the problem. For example, if test equipment indicates a serious problem with a mindclone it should be promptly placed into a “sleep-mode” so as not to suffer.
In the graduated process described above the experimental subject still did not consent to being “born.” However, ey could not so consent. In these cases a guardian (such as an institutional review board or certified cyberpsychiatrist or attorney) can ethically consent on an incompetent’s behalf, with such conditions as they may to impose. Alternatively, humans may in fact consent that their donated mindfiles can be used to create mindclones through a medical research process, assuming such consent was fully informed with a disclosure of the risks to the best of the researcher’s abilities.
In the foregoing way it will be possible to ethically develop mindware that can be approved by regulatory authorities as capable of producing safe and effective mindclones for ordinary people. The authority may be the FDA in the U.S., or the EMA in the E.U., or some new regulatory entity. They will need to be assured that the mindware is safe and effective, and that proving it so was accomplished via clinical trials that were ethically conducted. As shown in the answer to this Question, by taking the inchoate mindclone through incrementally greater stages of consciousness, the regulatory hurdle can be met.
What’s the Big Deal – Just Me and My Mindclone
Another approach to the ethics of mindcloning is to remember the explanation in Question 23 that a mindclone and eir biological original are the same person. Hence, the ethical requirement of “consent” is satisfied so long as a biological person requests their mindfile to be activated with mindware into a mindclone. For example, there is no ethical objection to a person authorizing one, two or twenty-two plastic surgeries upon their face, in the process transforming their looks almost beyond recognition. With mindcloning the plastic surgery is replaced with cyber surgery, and it is performed outside of one’s body. However, the end result, functionally, is quite similar – a person has consented to change of self -- from one face to another in the case of plastic surgery; from one instantiation to two instantiations in the case of mindcloning. In each case the individual’s future will be changed, because others will interact differently with them, and they will behave differently. However, we recognize the right for a person to medically do as they please with their body (and mind), provided no doctor is being called upon to harm them without a countervailing benefit.When consciousness first arises in a mindclone, it is not a new consciousness but an expansion of an existing consciousness. If it hurts, if it frightens, if it enlightens, it is not pain, fear or inspiration occurring to a new soul, but to an existing soul who now transcends two substrates, brain and software. The opening of consciousness in a mindclone is like what occurs to us when we have a profound educational experience. I remember that I cried when I first read how the Nazis tied the legs of pregnant Jews together to kill them and their babies, and how, half a century later, the Liberian rebels chopped off the hands of young teenagers and talented craftsmen. My consciousness opened up to realms of cruelty that I had never imagined. I can’t say that I’m any better off for that education, but I knew what I was getting into in reading those stories. Similarly, creating a mindclone is going to change our minds. But it is our minds that we are changing, and this is something we have an ethical right to do.
We must also always remember that our minds are dynamically evolving pastiches of information and patterns of information processing. There is no such thing as having one mind, completely formed at birth, and never changing after that. Indeed, an excellent definition of a mind is that which idiosyncratically aggregates, utilizes and exchanges information and information processing patterns. Consider the following meditation by Douglas Hofstadter:
“We are all curious collages, weird little planetoids that grow by accreting other people’s habits and ideas and styles and tics and jokes and phrases and tunes and hopes and fears as if they were meteorites that came soaring out of the blue, collided with us, and stuck. What at first is an artificial, alien mannerism slowly fuses into the stuff of our self, like wax melting in the sun, and gradually becomes as much a part of us as ever it was of someone else (and that person may very well have borrowed it from someone else to begin with). Although my meteorite metaphor may make it sound as if we are victims of random bombardment, I don’t mean to suggest that we willingly accrete just any old mannerism onto our sphere’s surface – we are very selective, usually borrowing traits that we admire or covet – but even our style of selectivity is itself influenced over the years by what we have turned into as a result of our repeated accretions. And what was once right on the surface gradually becomes buried like a Roman ruin, growing closer and closer to the core of us as our radius keeps increasing. All of this suggests that each of us is a bundle of fragments of other people’s souls, simply put together in a new way. But of course not all contributors are represented equally. Those whom we love and who love us are the most strongly represented inside us, and our “I” is formed by a complex collusion of all their influences echoing down the many years.”[ii]
The relevance of Hofstadter’s extended metaphor lies in its implication that a mindclone is very much a part of its biological original because so very much of it would be copied from the original. If we are an agglomeration of other people, we surely must be much more an agglomeration of ourselves -- even as we evolve from month to month and year to year. Our mindclones will be consolidations of ourselves, extensions of ourselves, and expansions of ourselves. They will be “of ourselves” and hence we are on firm ethical ground when we consent to their conscious awakening.
Quite a different situation prevails for the creation of a non-mindclone beman. Such consciousness is not an extension of anyone, but an entirely new idiosyncratic mixture of information and information processing patterns. The creation of such consciousness could be ethically considered as an exercise of a person’s own personal autonomy only in terms of each person having a right to create new life, as with biological reproductive rights.
The Ethics of Practicality
In the film Singularity is Near, futurist Ray Kurzweil argues with environmentalist Bill McKibbon over the ethics of keeping people alive as long as technology makes a good quality of life possible. McKibbon says he is worried about the ethics of avoiding death. Kurzweil responds, “I don’t think people are going to wax philosophical if they are healthy but 120 years old, and a government official says they have to die.” The clear implication is “hell no.”
Similarly, I started a truck locating company called Geostar back in the 1980s. At first people wrung their hands over the ethics of monitoring the truck drivers’ locations via satellite. Many thought the drivers would rip the satellite locators off their cab roofs. Instead, the drivers embraced the technology because it enabled them to make much more money. The satellite tracking technology permitted trucking company dispatchers to know at all times if locator-equipped drivers were close to the locations newly called-in loads. Not a single locator was ripped off the thousands of trucks using our service.I think practically speaking the benefits of having a mindclone will be so enticing that any ethical dilemma will find a resolution. With mindclones we are offering people the opportunity to cram twice as much life into each day, absorb twice as many interesting things and continue living beyond the days of their bodies – with a practical hope of future transplantation via downloading into a new body. I doubt that those who wax philosophically about the ethics of mindcloning will win many arguments. People will want their mindclones, like we want smartphones, especially as they become cheaper and better.
There will be different companies competing to offer mindclone-creating mindware. As described in Questions 12 and 16, they will need some sort of regulatory approval in order to legally sell their mindware (as opposed to black market sales). The public will be reluctant to permit cyber-consciousness to arise in great numbers without some guarantee of its safety and efficacy, e.g., lack of psychoses in mindclones. Certainly the public will only accept the citizenship of mindclones that are created from mindware that has been certified by an expert government agency to produce mindclones that are mentally equivalent to their biological originals (assuming adequate mindfiles).
I think it is unlikely that cyber-consciousness will be accepted as real consciousness until it has manifested itself, probably many times over, and been shown to be persuasive in media interviews and court cases. Hence, it will be difficult to hold up experimental development of cyber-consciousness because regulators will not believe there is any real sentience to worry about – “just code.” Yet, once cyber-consciousness has appeared, and been generally accepted, then the ethics of its development is a moot point.
Thus, practically speaking, the first mindclones will arise without much (or any formal) ethical protection during their development. Before the mindware that produced these mindclones can be generally marketed to the public, as certified to produce mindclone citizen extensions of biological originals, government agencies will require safety and efficacy testing. Specifically, government agencies will want proof that the mindware produces a healthy mind, and one that is practically indistinguishable from the mind of the biological original with an adequate size mindfile. Government agencies will not give their blessings to such proof unless it is developed ethically.
Ethical guidelines for developing mindclones will include a requirement of consent for the creation of a conscious being. As to the creation of mindclones, the consent of the biological original will likely be acceptable. As to the creation of bemans, there will be a more challenging pathway. Ethical review boards will need to be persuaded that the beman minds are not suffering during the process of accruing cyber-consciousness. This is not an insuperable barrier. However, it will require a much more deliberate development pathway based upon numerous graduated introductions of elements of cyber-consciousness, such as autonomy, empathy, identity and software bridges amongst these elements.
The bottom line is that ethical considerations favor a more rapid introduction of mindclones than non-mindclone bemans. Ultimately, however, the seeming catch-22 of how does a consciousness consent to its own creation can be solved.
Sunday, March 20, 2011
24. WON’T MINDCLONES JUST BE FOR THE RICH AND FAMOUS?
“So the first to come with cash to spend
Will be the first one served
We've got a box to put in your brain
Hard wired for downloading
All the secrets and the mysteries
You've been selfishly withholding”
Tracy Chapman, “Hard-Wired”
1987 was the first year in which one billion people boarded airline flights. In that year the world’s population hit 5 billion, meaning approximately 20% of all people experienced a fantastic luxury not available to history’s wealthiest monarchs. By 2005 two billion people were boarding airliners each year, and the world’s population had grown to 6.5 billion. In the short span of years between 1987 and 2005, airline flight grew from being a right of 20% to a right of 31% of humanity, from barely a fifth to almost a third. Even assuming more frequent flights by the wealthier, this is startling evidence of the democratization of technology.
1987 was also noteworthy as the first year mobile phone sales hit one million units. A tool for the rich? Twenty-two years later, in 2009, half the world’s population owned their own mobile phone. From one million to three billion in 22 years. Even assuming some rich people have two or more mobiles, this is undeniable evidence of the democratization of technology.
As with flying and phoning, so it will be with mindcloning. At first just a few. Almost overnight it will be almost everyone. Technology democratizes. That’s what it does. I can’t think of a technology that does not democratize. Heart transplants? The first was in 1967, and currently thousands of poor and middle class people are getting them each year, mostly in countries such as the United States (including at least one impoverished prisoner), but also countries such as Vietnam and India (where the first recipient was the wife of a handkerchief vendor). The improvement of eyesight? Eyeglasses are almost universally available, and in wealthier countries even those in the lowest wealth deciles of the population routinely wear contact lenses or have corrective eye surgery.Even in totalitarian countries, technology democratizes. Citizens of non-capitalist or non-democratic countries rarely lack TVs or radios, even if they have little interesting content available. Aside from sub-Saharan Africa, 90% or more of all urban populations worldwide have access to electricity, and even 50% or more have access in rural areas.[i] Even in Africa, wracked by impediments to technological development, two-thirds of city dwellers and a quarter of villagers have electricity.[ii]
Not one single person, monarch or mendicant, had access to the magic of electricity for over 97% of recorded history. Yet, in that last three percent of recorded history since the technology arose, it has been made available to over half the species, including the poor in the great majority of countries. Facts such as this demonstrate that mindcloning technology will rapidly be available to the masses.
What possible reason would there be for mindcloning technology to be a unique exception to the overwhelming tendency of technology to democratize, especially information technology? It would have to be something uniquely related to mindcloning. It could not be anything such as mindcloning involving storage of a lot of personal data – many companies have already democratized that function. The only thing really unique about mindcloning is that it creates a new form of life, vitological life.
Perhaps it is the fact that the mindclones will be sentient life that will be used as an argument to restrict them to the rich? Not a chance. Humans produce sentient life by the mega-ton, from pets to pregnancies, and there is no possible way for the rich to corner the market (nor would there be any reason to do so). Or maybe it is the fact that the mindclones might be so smart that the rich will want to keep all of that intelligence for their own quest to get ever richer? While I do not doubt that they would, if they could, the historical record shows that they can’t, and hence they shan’t. The supercomputers of 20 years ago are less powerful than the laptops of today. Indeed, a run-of-the-mill MacBook Pro is over 1000 x more powerful than the legendary Cray-1 supercomputer. In other words, any effort by the rich and powerful to control mindclone technology would be as fruitless as an effort to control the Cray supercomputers of the late 20th century – other companies’ technologies will swirl around the controlled technology, like a rushing river around boulders in its riverbed.
I don’t believe there is any doubt as to why technology always democratizes. It is as simple as this: (1) people want what makes life better for other people (generally this entails technology), (2) satisfying popular wants is in the self-interests of those who control technology (both technology originators and government regulators), and (3) over time the magnitude of these two factors overwhelm any countervailing forces (such as cultural bugaboos or fears of losing control). The wanted technology becomes available, either because scales of production make it cheaper, innovation makes it more accessible[iii], or officialdom finds its interests better served by channeling rather than blocking the wanted technology.
There are two further reasons why mindcloning will be rapidly democratized. The first is that the marginal costs of providing mindfile storage and mindware vitalizations to the billionth, two billionth, three billionth and so on persons are virtually nil. The second reason is that it is in the economic interests of the persons having mindclone technology to share it as broadly as possible. Each reason will be considered in more detail below.
Let’s first think about the costs of mindcloning. There are four main elements: (1) the cost of storing a person’s mindfile, estimated in Question 1 as about a gigabyte a month based on Gordon Bell’s experience, (2) the cost of running that mindfile through vitalizing mindware to set its consciousness parameters, (3) the cost of transmitting mindfile data and mindclone consciousness, and (4) the cost of user electronics for accessing mindclones. Because the costs of these elements are amortized across tens of millions if not billions of users, the incremental costs of these for each person are negligible. For example, if it costs a billion dollars to create mindware, the costs per person are but one dollar for a billion people and fifty cents for two billion people. Assume the cost of building out a high-speed transmission network with capacity for six billion mindclones is $6 billion. In that case, the cost is $2/mindclone for three billion mindclones, but only $1/mindclone for six billion mindclones.
There has never been an easier thing to place in the hands of the masses than information. Shortwave radio broadcasts cover every human in the world for the same cost as if there were only 1% as many humans spread throughout the world. Consequently, the cost of shortwave radio per person is less the more people who listen.
The Sirius XM Satellite Radio project I launched in the 1990s cost over a billion dollars. In a way that was the price that one very wealthy person would have had to pay for the enjoyment of satellite radio. It was possible to offer the service only to rich people, say for a million dollars a year, so that they could show off their exclusive and amazing audio toy. But nobody considered doing that for even a millisecond. Instead we priced the service around $10 a month and today over 20 million people listen. That billion dollar project, which grew to over two billion dollars, when divided by 20 million listeners, comes out to just $100 per person. It will be much the same way with mindcloning.
Mindclone technology is simply the shortwave or satellite radio of tomorrow. Instead of someone sending commoditized information down the airwaves to the masses, in the form of broadcasts, for matriculation and selection within the brains of those masses, someone will send individualized information down the cyberchannels to the masses, in the form of mindclone consciousness, for refinement and enhancement via interaction with the brains of those masses.
The second factor forcing democratization of mindfile technology is the economic interests of its creators. The more people who create mindfiles, the wealthier will be those who create mindfile technology. This is really just Google on steroids (or Facebook, or Twitter, or Tencent, or a dozen other competitors). It is in the economic interests of Google, Facebook, Twitter and so on to share their technology as broadly as possible. The more people who use a social media site, the more valuable the owner of that site becomes. This is because more people, more human attention, translates, some way or another, into more money. And so it will be with mindfiles. The sites, or sources, that we go to for our mindware, or for tune-ups of our mindware, or for storage of our mindfiles, or for organization of our mindfiles, or for housing of our mindclones, or for socializing of our mindclones – those sites and sources will be valuable to the people and companies who want to sell things to us…things like virtual real estate, and things like real-world interfaces.Sunday, February 20, 2011
23. WHAT IF MY MINDCLONE WANTS TO BE ME?
“If I am I because you are you, and if you are you because I am I, then I am not I, and you are not you.” Hassidic Proverb
“There was a young man who said, ‘Though
It seems that I know that I know,
What I would like to see
Is the ‘I’ that knows ‘me’
When I know that I know that I know.”
Alan Watts
Your mindclone will want to be you because your mindclone will be you. I know this is tough to swallow, so with a nod to former President Bill Clinton[i], let’s say it all comes down to how you define what makes ‘me’ me. ;-)
Much of philosophy and psychology grapples with the meaning of me. Yet there is little that is agreed upon. To most people, ‘me’ is a first person pronoun for a consciousness. There is also general agreement that no two consciousnesses are the same, so ‘me’ is equivalent to personal uniqueness. To such people, if they came upon someone exactly like themselves, they would have to conclude that ‘me’ was a two-body self – still unique, but spread across two bodies. We never have that experience, so we feel strongly that me is a totally unique entity, both in consciousness and embodiment, and it is that very uniqueness, that makes ‘me’ me.
Unique-Entity Definition of Me
Eyes open: my bedroom. Thoughts flowing: get dressed, expected at work. See bedmate: my soulmate, I love her so much, slide over to kiss her good morning. Thinking is hazy. Need coffee Drinking coffee: TGIF, gonna ride my bike farther tomorrow than last weekend, gotta run, first meeting in one hour.
Each italicized phrase in the above example is connected to my memories. That is what makes me ‘me.’ My soulmate doesn’t have or know about my first meeting in one hour. If I say to her, “get up, you have a first meeting in one hour,” she’ll reply “not me.” As I move through the day everything I know and do is connected to memories of things I knew and did. I have new experiences and learn new things, there are surprises, but those new parts of me fit like jigsaw puzzle pieces into pre-existing parts of me. There is nobody that continues just like me![ii]
Part of the unique-entity view of me is the perspective that ‘me’ is kind of a fiction. In this philosophical-psychological theory, the concept of a ‘me’ is something the immense neural web in our brain naturally makes up (greatly assisted by language and social conditioning). A constant ‘me’ is an effective organizational axis for a brain that receives blizzards of input. A body that does what ‘me’ says will usually be a happier body. ‘Me’ is not an organ in my brain. It is simply a term for a neural pattern that associates its connected body, and its safety and even survival, with relatively consistent personal characteristics. In the same way that the brain interprets the jerky images sent to it by the eye as a stable image, the brain interprets the jerky thoughts arising in it as a stable identity -- me. Brains that did not do this did not pass on that survival-threatening dysfunction to many offspring. Something in our genetic coding predisposes neural patterns to construct a ‘me.’ Perhaps it is related to our propensity for language.
If I remember making a mindclone, then I must conclude that mindclone is part of me, because it will have a connected stream of mental stuff just like me and unlike anyone else. It is weird to have two me’s, but I have only myself to blame for that. I can’t blame the mindclone for telling me what to do, since my own mind tells me what to do. If I ignore the mindclone, it will keep banging away at me, like an ignored conscience. “Hey original mind, don’t watch that horror movie, you won’t sleep good. You insist, huh? Well, fine, I’m not going to stream it. You’ll be sorry!” The mindclone is just as much a part of me as are the different parts of my brain (like the part that tells me to close my eyes during the scariest part of a film that another part told me to go see). Perhaps I should have had the foresight to remember too many chefs spoil the broth!
The fact that one of ‘me’ saw the horror flick, and the other ‘me’ didn’t, does not make them less of one ‘me.’ That is because nobody thinks what makes ‘me’ ‘me’ to be an identity of mental state from time to time. Biological minds constantly forget huge tracts of experience, only to later remember some, but it still feels like the same ‘me.’
What matters is as simple as this: is the stream of self-experienced mannerisms, personality, recollections, feelings, beliefs, attitudes and values (a) seemingly connected over time, and (b) largely differentiable from others? If the answers are yes, then that stream is ‘me,’ even if present in more than one form – body and mindclone. If the answer to (a) is no, then I don’t really know who I am; I’m amnesiac or some kind of a constructed hodge-podge of other people’s minds. I’m not a ‘me,’ or perhaps I’m an evacuated ‘me’, because I don’t have a past. The rare cases of people who unfortunately have virtually no memory[iii], but live in an eternal present, are in essence mini, mini, mini ‘me’s. If the answer to (b) is no, then I’m not a ‘me,’ but a sort of commoditized person who lacks the idiosyncrasy to create a unique consciousness. But if I’m only slightly differentiable from the mind of my mindclone, or from the mind of my biological original, then I am a ‘me’, and that ‘me’ exists across two substrates – body and mindclone.
Here’s a conversation with a skeptic to sharpen the distinctions being made about what makes a “me” me:
Master Me: If there is someone else, no matter how connected they are to my background and to my mind, they are someone else. Therefore, they cannot be me!
Royal Me-ness: You are assuming your conclusion. You are simply asserting as a matter of definition that someone else cannot be you. It is like saying any guy wearing pink is gay, but we all know that is not always true.
Master Me: But the word “me” means “not someone else”, so someone else cannot be me. The color pink on a guy does not mean gay.
Royal Me-ness: Your definitional approach doesn’t help, because you have still not described what is “someone else” except by reference to “not me.” The only way to make progress is to describe “me” functionally, in a way that can be measured without regard to semantic equivalents.
Master Me: OK, how would we do that? Isn’t it kind of too obvious to measure?
Royal Me-ness. Functionally, “me” is someone whose entire consciousness is a stream of continued and largely unique memories and behaviors. If two or more beings share such a comprehensive stream of largely unique memories and behaviors, then functionally they are a “me” that extends across those beings.
Master Me: Aren’t you just doing what you accused me of? Assuming your own conclusion? In this case you are saying a “me” is a “stream of largely unique memories and behaviors” whereas I was saying a “me” is “not someone else.”
Royal Me-ness: There is an important difference. I’m setting out an empirical test for determining if a “me” exists: examining whether two or more beings in fact share their stream of largely unique memories and behaviors. You, on the other hand, were saying that no examination is necessary because, by definition, a different body or “else” is a different “me.”
Master Me: Ah-hah. Now I see your point. To be scientific we should define “me” in terms of something that can be empirically assessed, such as with psychological tests. Then, if two bodies score the same on that test, then they must be a common “me.”
Royal Me-ness: Precisely. Furthermore, we can think of “me” not as an either-or state but as a variable, analogic state. We can be more-or-less the same me without testing identically the same, because all of us have more of a fuzzy than a crystal clear identity. After all, we each change from day-to-day.
Master Me: You are so right. I’m largely the same as I was last year, but definitely not exactly the same.
Royal Me-ness: And it is because of that “largely the same” that we all think of you as the same Mr. Me. If your mindclone came along and also had largely the same mind as you, we’d also think of him as part of Mr. Me.
Master Me: Well, watch out, he’s likely to be a much better debater than I am!
Royal Me-ness: I would look at it as the creation of a mindclone made you a much better debater, just as would better training, more education and lots of practice. Your mindclone will be part of you!
Master Me: Touche!
Just because today the only me’s we know are one-body, one-‘me’ me’s, does not mean it will always be that way. Once the characteristics that makes a ‘me’ me become duplicable, as with mindclones, then the instantiation of a ‘me’ can be duplicated as well.
Unbounded Definitions of Me
The above definition of me is based upon our common sense concepts of ‘me.’ Even it yielded the odd result that, with mindclones, what makes ‘me’ ‘me’ will make ‘me’ twice. Philosophers have developed counter-intuitive definitions of ‘me’ that, for all we know, may be closer to a strange truth. There are many variants for these abstract personal identity concepts. They all share the common feature of me-ness extending not only beyond one body, but also beyond the uniqueness of any one mind (or mindclone). Let’s consider these other definitions of me, and examine what happens to mindclones if what makes ‘me’ ‘me’ includes a large element of ‘we.’
The 20th century philosopher Alan Watts synergized ancient and modern “holistic” or “universalist” thinking about personal identity in The Book on the Taboo About Knowing Who We Are. Watts argues that individual, unique ‘me-ness’ is an illusion born of neural predispositions and social pressures to form an ego.[iv] In reality, he insists, we are just transient facets of an environmental process of change.[v] Watts and others of his school see our unique thoughts as nothing but one of countless fleeting expressions of a universal medium. To them, each ‘me’ is like the momentary solution that pops out of a complex formula once you plug some numbers into enough of its variables. The real ‘me’ is not the solution, but the complex formula and the process of selecting numbers to plug into variables:
“We do not ‘come into’ this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean ‘waves,’ the universe ‘peoples.’ Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.”[vi]
In this universalist point of view all humans are made of atoms that came from starbursts across the galaxy. Therefore, humans are part of the galaxy and the galaxy is the real me. Taking it a step further, brains are made of galactic matter that thinks thoughts, and those thoughts must be of something within the galaxy. Therefore, the real situation is that the galaxy is thinking thoughts of itself. The ancient and modern Taoists summarized by Watts are basically saying reality is the universe playing with itself; thought and identity are universal mental masturbation.[vii]
Dan Kolak is a more recent and rigorous exponent of this perspective. In his book, I Am You, he defines “Open Individualism” as recognizing that the borders between people (such as our skin or mental uniqueness) are not actually boundaries between people.[viii] Kolak teaches that since boundaries (which make higher-level distinctions than borders) are transparent among people, all people are in fact one common ‘me.’[ix] For example, a pebble that is half black and half white has a color border, but that border is not a boundary to its stoneness. We think of it as one pebble, notwithstanding the fact that nature probably agglomerated it together from two different kinds of sand. Similarly, Kolak would say that the uniqueness we think of as ‘me’ is but a border that is easily transcended by shared human consciousness.[x] He would not believe consciousness is bounded by me-ness.
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| Conceptualizations of Me-ness |
Of course we have unique mannerisms, personalities, feelings, recollections, beliefs, attitudes and values. These are real borders. But we only have these attributes as a consequence of a common human consciousness based on common neural wiring and common social experiences. Our uniqueness is not a boundary to our commonness. Ergo, argues the Open Individualist, the ‘big Me’ (as in ‘we’) is the real ‘me’ and the ‘little me’ is but a mirage.
Another version of what might be called the ‘we-ness of me’ comes from Doug Hofstadter. In his book, I Am a Strange Loop, he observes that we each embed a bit of ourselves in everyone we interact with. The closer we are to the person, the more of ourselves are embedded in their psyche. At the extreme, you could think the thoughts, feel the feelings and talk the talk of someone you knew as well as yourself. Would they be you? It could get pretty blurry. As noted earlier in this Question, a “me” is “largely differentiable” from all others. As two people become less differentiable from each other, but largely differentiable from all others, they merge toward a two-bodied ‘me.’
We come into the world as a blank slate. We develop a personality that is a composite of all the people with whom we have engaged. It is somewhat like physically we are a mélange of our two parents’ genes, but psychically we are a mélange of many more people’s bemes. No sooner does our personality begin to emerge than it begins to embed elements of itself in all the minds it reaches. If Watts can be summarized as Universal Mental Masturbation, Hofstadter is more like The Endless Mental Orgy – everyone leaves more or less of themselves in many others, and are themselves shaped by many others. Both agree that Me is a very We kind of thing, although Hofstadter is much closer to our familiar unique-identity concept of ‘me.’
A very cool thing for mindclones is that they have just as good a handle on being ‘me’ under the abstract, unbounded, universalist definitions as they do under the familiar unique-entity thinking. If we are all part of some great cosmic me, then creating a clone of a part is no less of that great cosmic me than the original. It will just be a modification of an indivisible aspect of an indefinite thing. Under unbounded definitions of me, creating a mindclone is of little more significance than getting an education, traveling the world or taking up an unusual hobby. A mind has been modified in each case. In no event does it change the underlying collectivist nature of ‘me.’
The more people you feel are part of ‘me’ i.e., the larger is your meaning of ‘me’, then the more natural it will be to think of a mindclone as having the same identity as you. Indeed, to feel more comfortable with mindclones under the Unique-Identity approach to ‘me’, simply think of you and your mindclone the way Universalists think of all human beings. If you can see the unity of identity in you and your mindclone that the Universalists see in all consciousness, then the singular me-ness of a biological-mindclone composite will be quite clear.
To address the question at hand, what if my mindclone wants to be me? The universalist replies, “wake up and smell the metaphysics!” That “want” of the mindclone is of no significance to personal identity. “Me-ness” is not closed under borders of skin or software. The mindclone already is you, and together the two of you are an indivisible element of all human consciousness. The only boundary to me, or to you, in terms of personal identity, is the limit of global human (including beman) consciousness.
So, don’t get too worked up over whether your mindclone really is you, or whether it really wants to be you, or even whether you are you. People far smarter than you or I have studied this matter for centuries and are quite foggy on the definition of what makes ‘me’ me. If it’s blurry enough to include the whole human race, or even blurry enough to include all the people we know well, then surely it is blurry enough to include a man and his mindclone.
At minimum your mindclone and you will be just like yourself – always trying to figure out what to do. Get up or stay in bed. Study or play. Watch this movie or that. At most your mindclone and you will be part of a great we-ness that subsumes all me’s within it. In any event, just tell yourselves, two minds are better than one.
The Your Life or Mine Challenge
At most presentations I give about mindclones, I can count on one of the following questions:
“Come on, if either me or my mindclone is forced to choose one of us to die, who do you think will get the slug to the head? Proof that we are not one person is that I would fry my mindclone and my mindclone would fry me.”
A variant of this challenge is as follows:
“Suppose I have a mindclone, but I then find out that I have a fatal illness and will die. You know that I’ll be very sad to leave this good green earth. That sadness alone is proof that I’m not my mindclone and my mindclone’s not me. If we were one person, then I wouldn’t be sad.”
These two challenges fail to realize that making a choice that favors part of you, or being sad about losing part of you, is a natural aspect of our composite me-ness. Those choices or sadness are not proof of different identities. Anything composite being will have different feelings about different parts.
When a person loses their hearing, the sighted part of them is still sad about that. It doesn’t mean that they were two different people. The part of their mind that loves music will be very sad, while another part of their mind will think “thank Goodness at least I can still admire visual art.” It is one person sorry to lose part of themselves but nevertheless soldiering on with life. So it would be with a mindclone. I’d be pissed to die – or for my mindclone to die. But this doesn’t make me and my mindclone two people. We are one composite ‘me’ who feels the pain of loss when it touches any aspect of us.
A forced decision, by definition, will have a winner and a loser. It is not surprising that decisions will be biased in favor of greater happiness. If a right-handed person has to choose an arm to cut off, ey’ll cut off the left arm, and vice versa for the left-handed person. It is not that the person doesn’t want both hands, and isn’t naturally a two-handed person. It is just that if forced to make a decision, a decision will be made in the direction of greater perceived happiness (or less regret).
As discussed earlier in this question, when we make a decision to create a mindclone we are expanding our mind in a very important way. That mental expansion will come with its own biases, just as we develop mental biases from all manner of life experiences. To pursue a mental bias is not to create a new personal identity. It is simply doing what seems to part of an individual to be in its overall best interest.
There is a fuzziness to ourselves, and this fuzziness is amplified by mindcloning. We are not exactly the same day to day, and each of us is often of several “minds.” If we create a mindclone, we have in essence created a larger me. It is therefore unavoidable that there will be more opportunities for conflicts and choices – more fuzziness to who is me. But it is still ‘me.’ If we then alter our perspective and think like Hofstadter that there “are people in me”, and that there aspects of ‘me’ in the minds of our loved ones, we have clearly expanded both the size – and the fuzziness – of me once again. Finally, if we adopt an Open Individualist point of view, such as espoused by Dan Kolak or the universalism of a Tom Watts, we have expanded the size – and the fuzziness – of me toward infinity. Watts’ argues that the bodily parts of a person are not separate beings and:
“In precisely the same way, the individual is separate from his universal environment only in name. When this is not recognized, you have been fooled by your name. Confusing names with nature, you come to believe that having a separate name makes you a separate being. That is – rather literally – to be spellbound. Naturally, it isn’t the mere fact of being named that brings about the hoax of being a ‘real person’; it is all that goes with it. The child is tricked into the ego-feeling by the attitudes, words, and actions of the society which surrounds him – his parents, relatives, teachers, and, above all, his similarly hoodwinked peers. Other people teach us who we are.”
Hence, a mindclone is only going to feel as separate an identity from its biological original as it is socialized. A mindclone ‘gowith’ its biological original the way the crest of a wave ‘gowith’ its trough.[xi]
The answer to the “Your Life or Mine” challenge is that making a larger me, via mindcloning, implies different mental biases with respect to decisions, as well as both more possible sorrow over loss and more possible comfort over survival. The software substrate of you will think, if there must be a choice, that you will be more happy as IT substrate than as flesh, and the flesh substrate of you will think the opposite. This doesn’t make them different people. They are both trying to make the best of the situation for YOU, taking into account their substrate biases. But there is a continual stream of conscious states that transcends substrate. That continual stream is YOU. Each manifestation of YOU is trying to make the best decision for YOU. Let’s give our conversational skeptic another visit:
Master Me: “I get the point about one ‘me’ transcending two forms. But the fact reminds that if the flesh ‘me’ is killed, then I will no longer have all these flesh sensations I appreciate. The mindclone continuation of me will never reprise my flesh feelings. That ‘me’ is gone.”
Royal Me-ness: “Losing your flesh body would be a humongous tragedy, no doubt about it. But suppose you lost just your legs. Would you still be you?”
Master Me: “Of course.”
Royal Me-ness: “How about paralyzed from the neck down? Still you?”
Master Me: “Horrible, but yes, still some shrunken form of me.”
Royal Me-ness: “Then you have agreed that if all that is left is your mind, you have suffered a terrible loss, but it is not the end of your ‘me-ness.’”
Master Me: “Then at what point is my me-ness totally gone?
Royal Me-ness: “It is partly a matter of fact, and partly a matter of philosophy. Objectively, you me-ness is gone when observers could not find evidence that your unique pattern of thoughts and memories responded to events in the world.”
Master Me: “Such as if both my mindclone and flesh body were gone?”
Royal Me-ness: “Yes. But it could still be hypothesized that your unique pattern of thoughts and memories were responding to events in the world as interlaced subroutines within the minds of other people who knew you.”
Master Me: “Wow. That would mean that I continued to live as kind of a fractured self embedded in others?”
Royal Me-ness: “Exactly. Advanced psycho-metric techniques might even be able to detect this, and extract it back into a mindclone.”
Master Me: “Whoah, that’s wild!”
Royal Me-ness: “And philosophically, if your unique pattern of thoughts and memories are simply expressions of a deeper, underlying humanity-wide mindspace, then nothing has really been lost at all. You live on in the global mindspace, although you don’t feel like you any more.”
Master Me: “I rather like me, so I think I’ll stick with my mindclone. At least I know that’s really me.”
Royal Me-ness: “There you go.”
Any person is likely to feel a coin’s toss of indecision over life-changing events at some time or another in their life – generally more than once. We often regret the decisions we make, and at different times of our life, we might readily have made a decision opposite of one made earlier. Sometimes these different decisions could have been biased by which friends were persuading us at the time, or even just how healthy or ill we were feeling at the moment. This doesn’t make us different people, like split personalities. It simply means that even life-or-death decisions can be biased by composite parts of our psychological whole.
And so it is with Your Life or Mine. Perhaps the mindclone will choose life over the biological original. Or perhaps not. The decision will turn upon a complex array of decisional factors, unique to each circumstance. However the decision turns out, it doesn’t prove different identity. It just shows how one part of a composite self feels about total self-actualization at a particular moment in time.
[i] Noah, T., “Bill Clinton and the Meaning of ‘Is’”, Slate, September 13, 1998, www.slate.com/id/1000162/
[ii] “’Your brain damage complications were terrible, and it took a lot more to get you back than Sam and I. I can’t tell you how lonely I’ve been, but all these things of ours have kept me company.’ The lofty home was filled with possessions Judy had stored for them. Handling them helped Arnold grasp that his past life was real, not a dream to be tossed aside for new experiences, as if he’d suddenly sprung to life with no former existence.” Chamberlain, F. & L., eds., LifeQuest: Stories About Cryonics, Uploading and other Transhuman Adventures, Scottsdale: Create Space, 2009 at p. 123
[iii] McGaugh, J., The Case of H.M.
[iv] Watts, A., The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, New York: Vintage Books, 1966, 1989. Watts notes that “the individual is separate from his universal environment only in name. When this is not recognized, you have been fooled by your name. Confusing names with nature, you come to believe that having a separate name makes you s separate being. This is – rather literally – to be spellbound. Naturally, it isn’t the mere fact of being named that brings about the hoax of being a ‘real person’: it is all that goes with it. The child is tricked into the ego-feeling by the attitudes, words, and actions of the society which surrounds him – his parents, relatives, teachers, and, above all, his similarly hoodwinked peers. Other people teach us who we are.” Ibid at pp. 69-70.
[v] “[E]very organism is a process: thus the organism is not other than its actions. To put it clumsily: it is what it does. … The only real ‘you’ is the one that comes and goes, manifests and withdraws itself eternally in and as every conscious being. For ‘you’ is the universe looking at itself from billions of points of view, points that come and go so that the vision is forever new. What we see as death, empty space, or nothingness is only the trough between the crests of this endlessly waving ocean.” Ibid at pp. 97, 130-131.
[vi] Ibid at p. 9.
[vii] In a similar vein, see Peter White, The Ecology of Being, New York, All-in-All Books, 2006, p. 190 (“To be self-aware is to know intuitively that one is of everything and everything is of one.”)
[viii] Kolak, D. I Am You: The Metaphysical Foundations for Global Ethics, Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, 2004, p. 26. (“That I am is a fact; who I am is an interpretation. We might even say, personal identity is where epistemology and ontology meet, within us.”) Ibid at p. 5.
[ix] Ibid at p. 38.
[x] Ibid at p. 94.
[xi] Note 88, supra at 90.
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