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

Now this unique-entity definition of me does not require that me’s uniqueness be static.  Everyone realizes we are constantly forgetting, and more-getting, thinking good thoughts on one day and bad thoughts on another.  Hence, me’s uniqueness really means a unique stream of connected conscious states.  I am ‘me’ because I have pretty much the same (but not exactly, as I know they are subtly changing) mannerisms, personality, recollections, feelings, beliefs, attitudes and values as previously, or at least I remember once having them and evolving from them.  This is what is meant by “connected conscious states.”  I am me because, for starters, when I wake up each morning, I remember (ie, I know) where I am, who I am, when I am, what I should do, why I’m doing it, and how I got to these states of being.  It’s not like I need a user’s manual. 

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 20^th 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. 

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.

22. HOW CAN A MINDCLONE BE AN EXACT COPY OF A PERSON’S MIND?

“Ordinary men don't have much stomach for reality--even more so, horror. Memory is typically repressed or displaced.” Sigmund Freud

“Of all liars, the smoothest and most convincing is memory.” Folk Saying


“What should they know of England, who only England know?” Rudyard Kipling

It can’t be. Even a so-called “identical twin” is not an identical twin. Even if one’s DNA is the same as another person, as with identical twins, there are differences in terms of when particular genes within that DNA are turned on and off. These differences are due to a bio-chemical process known as methylation (meaning the attachment of triggering molecules to genes within our DNA), which is encoded outside of our DNA in something called the epigenome. Even if two people have identical DNA, they will not have identical epigenomes, and hence the timing and magnitude of the expression of their DNA into a body will be different. The epigenome does not change things enough to prevent two identical twins from looking the same, but it will change things enough to prevent identical twins from always getting the same genetically-predisposed diseases.

When one of two identical twins is exposed to a different pathogen than the other, the two twins’ immune systems will no longer be quite the same. Random errors in DNA copying that the cell fails to correct will occur during cell replication in one twin but not the other. We have 23 billion red blood cells alone (out of tens of trillions of human DNA-bearing cells in total). Even with our amazing human bodies, this leaves a lot of room for errors that crack the identicalness of so-called identical twins (an estimated 100,000 DNA copying mistakes occur daily based on a rate of about 3 uncorrected base pair errors per cell replication). Furthermore, we have ten times as many bacteria in and on our bodies as we have cells derived from our parents DNA. These bacteria, at least in absolute number, are most of us, and yet there is nothing identical about the specific bacteria populations that colonize identical twins.

Identical twins still feel that they are twins even though their bodies are not really identical. Each of us feels that we are the same body even though our own body is not identical day after day. Won’t these immaterial differences be just as irrelevant to minds as they are to bodies?

The interesting question is not whether a mindclone is an exact copy of its original, but how different can they be without losing a common identity? It is impossible for a mindclone and a biological original to share every single memory. Even biological originals do not have the same memories from day to day, and surely not from year to year. Yet, memories are crucially important to identity. In the words of memory expert Prof. James McGaugh of UC Irvine:

“We are, after all, our memories. It is our memory that enables us to value everything else we possess. Lacking memory, we would have no ability to be concerned about our hearts, hair, lungs, libido, loved ones, enemies, achievements, failures, incomes or income taxes. Our memory provides us with an autobiographical record and enables us to understand and react appropriately to changing experiences. Memory is the ‘glue’ of our personal existence.”

Prof. McGaugh’s cogent summary leaves bare the fact that our personal identity exists as more than one set of memories. For example, we need not remember everything about an enemy in order to remember that someone is an enemy. We need not remember everything about our income, or taxes, in order to remember that we have income and pay taxes. Indeed, the key to healthy memory is the largely automatic process of selecting what little to remember and what mostly to forget. For a mindclone to be us, to have the same ‘glue’ of our personal existence, means that the mindclone needs to share our most important memories – those that are retained because of the emotional contexts in which they were created or because of the significant repetitive effort we put into their formation – as well as the gist of our idiosyncratic selection process for what is worthy of remembering, and for how long. As that godfather of psychology William James so presciently observed:

“Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built…If we remembered everything, we should, on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing. It would take as long for us to recall a space of time as it took the original time to elapse, and we should never get ahead with our thinking. ”

It will be a crucially important element of mindware design to ensure that most things are forgotten, and that the settings for the memory selection algorithm must closely match those of the biological original. Mindware will set its selection algorithm for each person by first processing their mindfile and comparing the details a person evidences memory of (such as in digitized records of voice, video and images) with databases of the kinds of details that could have been remembered about each topic. For example, if a person’s digitally recorded conversations (part of their mindfile) refer in detail to sports scores of the past week, but only sketchily to sports scores of the past month, then a curve of the selection algorithm can be determined with respect to sports scores. If another topic area reveals a greater degree of recall, then for topics with comparable emotional importance (as indicated in their mindfile) a different curve of the selection algorithm will be determined. Ultimately the mindware will employ a memory selection algorithm that first categorizes inputs by a factor that correlates well with the degree and duration of detail that is recalled (as indicated in their mindfile), and then forgets those inputs in accordance with a time curve that applies to that and similar factors. The algorithm will also accommodate memory adjuvants, such as especially high impact, emotional or repetitive experiences. The memory selection algorithm will be modeled closely on the way psychological studies have shown human minds to actually work.

Over one hundred years ago Hermann Ebbinghaus discovered, as shown in the chart below, that humans typically forget more than half the information they are exposed to in an hour, and retain only about a fifth of received information after a few days. With so much forgotten, a mindclone cannot be an exact copy of someone’s mind because every mind is itself constantly changing in its repertoire of memories. What is important is that the pattern of selective forgetting be comfortably similar – similar enough for a biological original to say of eir mindclone: “ey is I and I am ey.”

Clearly, a biological original and eir mindclone will not remember most specific events in precisely the same way for precisely the same duration. But I don’t think this makes them different people. We humans don’t remember events precisely the same way when we were young than when we were old, or when we are tired and when we are alert, or when we are happy and when we are sad. But we are still the same person. What is important is whether our core memories are the same, which they will be, as these will be recorded in our mindfile. What is also important is whether our general pattern of forgettng things is comparable, not precisely the same. That too can be achieved via the aforementioned algorithm.

People are remarkably ready to alter their ability to forget things. The robust market in supplements to improve memory and learning aids to diminish forgetting are good proofs of this. Hence, having a mindclone that is somewhat better, or somewhat worse, at remembering things makes them no less the same identity as you. People may find themselves pleasantly surprised to be remembering more as a mindclone than as a human, or disturbed to be doing so. If it is a problem, they can go to a cyberpsychologist and have their algorithms adjusted so that they are comfortable with their degree of forgetfulness.

Do We Really Know Who We Are?

In asking how a mindclone can really be a copy of our brain we face a bit of a dilemma. We cannot know whether there is a copy of our mind until there is a mindclone. We can then observe it respond to the world and determine whether, in fact, it responds the way we would respond. If so, mark one down for “good copy.” However, as a biological original, we cannot know if the mindclone is actually thinking the same thoughts and feeling the same feelings as are we. We can only make a best guess based on our conversations with the mindclone.

As the mindclone, we realize we are a mindclone and can assess how close we are to the biological original by comparing eir responses to the world with how we would be predisposed to respond. If very similar, then mark one down for “I am really a good mindclone. I am just like my biological original.” But we cannot really know if our internal thoughts are the same as the biological original’s thoughts. We can only make a best guess based on our conversations with the biological original.

I think these best guesses are good enough to have confidence that the mindclone and biological original have similar enough internal states to be the same person. The main reason I think this is based upon my experience with people that I love and who profess love for me. Because I am not the mind of my spouse, or my mother, I cannot know directly whether they really love me or not. However, based on our conversations, and actions, I am totally convinced that they think of me the way I think of them – with greatest loving concern for the other’s happiness and health. Beyond that, I believe they are focusing on being satisfactorily occupied during the day. Because we are so close, I believe we can infer much of each other’s internal states. 

On the other hand, many other people say “Martine, I love you.” However, I don’t feel that I understand their internal states. I’m not close enough to them. Their expressions of love are far short of the comprehensive relationship of shared experiences that I would need to infer their internal state. Indeed, over the years, people who said they love me have done things that I consider to be utterly surprising, if not shocking. Clearly, I did not know their internal states. To the contrary, the unexpected activities of my mother or my spouse were never shocking. They were behaviors I could fully see them doing based upon my understanding of their internal state.

The point here is that sometimes, if two people are close enough, an internal state of a person can be largely inferred from their observable actions. When the two people become as close as a mindclone and an original, which is far closer than a spouse or mother, inferring their internal state becomes second nature. When the internal state of another is second nature to one’s own internal state we have a difference that does not make a difference. When “I think like you think and you think like I think” then we are one personal identity.

We may well end up knowing ourselves best as mindclones, and we may well end up knowing the mindclones better than they know themselves. This is because it is hard see oneself from oneself, but with just a little bit of distance, the self comes into sharp relief. We earth dwellers never appreciated who we were so well as when we received the photograph from space of our blue-and-white planet suspended in inky black space.

And hence mindcloning is not about being accurate in every memory, in every thought pattern and in every emotion as to a biological original. It is, instead, about feeling that there is a oneness of personal identity between the two – a oneness that comes from a preponderance of common memories, emotions and patterns of thinking, selecting and forgetting. Philosophers sometimes refer to this as a continuity of self. As the 30-year-old self knows the 20-year-old self, though they are of course not the same, so the mindclone will know the biological original. A difference that makes no difference is not a meaningful difference.

8. WHAT IS TECHNO-IMMORTALITY?

"Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated”, Samuel Langhorn Clemens, a.k.a. Mark Twain, in a May, 1897 note to the New York Journal, which had reported news of the fatal illness of Twain’s cousin, James Ross Clemens, as that of Twain. New York Observer, June 2, 1897. (In fact, Twain died the day after the 1910 perihelion of Halley’s Comet, having been born two weeks after its 1835 perihelion, leading him to immortally observe “now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.”)

http://blip.tv/play/AYHC9S0A

Cyberconsciousness implies techno-immortality. Immortality means living forever. This has never happened in the real world, so we think of immortality as a spiritual existence (as in heaven) or as a non-personal existence (as in ‘Bach’s music will live forever’). With cyberconsciousness it will be possible, for the first time, for a person to live forever in the real world. This unique, technologically empowered form of living forever is called techno-immortality.

Mindclones are the key to techno-immortality. Imagine that before a person’s body dies he or she creates a mindclone. After bodily death is declared the person will insist that he or she is still alive, albeit as a mindclone in cyberspace. The surviving mindclone will think, feel and act just as did the deceased original. While the mindclone will be stuck in cyberspace, he or she will still be able to read online books, watch streaming movies, and participate in virtual social networks. It will seem no more right to declare the mindclone dead than it would be to declare someone dead upon becoming a paraplegic. Practically speaking the mindclone’s original achieved techno-immortality.

A semantic purest may argue that “immortal” means “forever”, and since we have no way to know how long the mindclones will last they cannot be deemed immortal. This is a fair point, but it should be recognized that mindclones last far longer than the hardware they run on at any particular time. Mindclones, just as people, are really sets of information patterns. In the same way that the information patterns of great books and works of art are copied through the ages in new media after new media, so will be the case with mindclones. We are continuing to copy and interact with human texts that are thousands of years old, originally written in stone, and now stored digitally. Mindclones, being conscious beings with a desire to survive, can be expected to last even longer.

Therefore, by techno-immortal, we do not literally mean living until the sun explodes and the stars disappear. Such eschatological timeframes are beyond our consideration. Techno-immortality means living so long that death (other than by suicide) is not thought of as a factor in one’s life. This uber-revolutionary development in human affairs is the inevitable consequence of mindfiles, mindware and mindclones. Our souls will now be able to outlast our bodies -- not only in religion, but also on earth.

Techno-immortality need not imply an eternity of life in a box. Broadband connectivity to audio and video, and to tactile, taste and scent enabled future websites, will make life much more enjoyable than the ‘in a box’ phrase suggests. The outputs of our fingertips, taste buds and olfactory nerves are electronic signals that can be interpreted by software in the same manner as are sound waves and light signals. Nevertheless, it is hard to beat a real flesh body for mind-blowing experiences. Within a few score years for an optimist, and not more than a few centuries for a pessimist, current rates of technology development will result in replacement bodies grown outside of a womb. Such spare bodies, or “sleeves” as novelist Richard Morgan calls them , will be compatibly matched with mindclones. To make the sleeve be the same person as the mindclone either:

(a) the sleeve’s neural patterns will need to be grown ectogenetically to reflect those of the mindclone’s software patterns; or
(b) the sleeve’s naturally grown neural patterns will need to be interfaced and subordinated to a very small computer implanted in the cranium that contains a copy of the mindclone’s software.

Once these feats of neuro-technology are accomplished, techno-immortality will then also extend into the walkabout world of swimming in real water and skiing on real snow. In addition, mechanical bodies, including ones with flesh-like skin, are rapidly being developed to enable robotic help with elder care in countries like Japan (where the ratio of young to old people is getting too small). Such robot bodies will also be outfitted with mindclone minds to provide for escapes from virtual reality.

Techno-immortality triggers a philosophical quandary about identity. The gist of it is that people say ‘you cannot be dead and alive at the same time.’ This is related to another objection to mindclones – that they can’t really be ‘me’ or ‘you’ because we can’t be two different things, or in two different places, at the same time. All of these objections flow from the inability of the philosopher to accept that identity is not necessarily body-specific. In other words, a person’s identity is more like a fuzzy cloud that encompasses, to a greater or lesser extent, whatever loci contain their mannerisms, personality, recollections, feelings, beliefs, attitudes and values.

It is hard for us to feel comfortable with this view of identity because we have had no experience with it. Throughout history the only locus for our mind was the brain atop our head and shoulders. Hence, it is natural for us to believe that identity is singular to one bodily form. In a similar way, before Einstein, it was natural to believe that the speed of light depends upon how fast the source of light is traveling. All of our experience was that a rock thrown from a moving train must have the combined speed of the train’s motion and the rock’s pitch. When Einstein showed us how to think about something outside of our experience, we were able to logically deduce that the speed of light must be invariant. Similarly, when you think about a computer that runs mindware on a mindfile that is equivalent to your mind, then you must logically deduce that identity is not limited to one locus. Identity follows its constituents – mannerisms, personality, recollections, feelings, beliefs, attitudes and values – wherever those components may reside.

We are all familiar with the associative law of mathematics: if a = b, and b = c, then a = c. In our case a = our identity as defined by b, the key memories and characteristic thought patterns stored in our brain’s neural connections. With the advent of mindfiles and mindware it is possible to recreate those key memories and characteristic thought patterns in c, a mindclone. Since our original identity, a, derives from our cognitive status, b, and since the cognitive status from a brain, ba, is no different than the cognitive status from a mindclone, bc, it follows logically that our mindclone identity, c, is the same as our brain identity, a. Furthermore, this proof demonstrates that identity is not limited to a single body or “instantiation” such as a or c. Ergo, with the rise of mindclones has come the demise of inevitable death. While unmodified bodies do inevitably die, software-based patterns of identity information do not.

There is a great inclination to argue that unless every aspect of the a-based identity is also present in the c-based identity, then ba is not the same thing as bc and hence a is not really equal to and c. This argument is based on a false premise that our identity is invariant. In fact, nobody maintains “every aspect” of identity from day to day, and certainly not from year to year. We remember but a small fraction of yesterday’s interactions today, and will remember still less tomorrow. Yet we all treat each other, and our selves, as people of a constant identity.

Even in the extreme cases of amnesia or dementia, we do not doubt that the patient has a constant identity. Only in the final stages of Alzheimer’s does our confidence in the sufferer’s identity begin to waver. Therefore, a perfect one-to-one correspondence between ba and bc is not necessary in order for them to be equivalent. Instead, if suitably trained psychologists attest to a continuity of identity between ab and cb, which would tend to track with the perceptions of laypeople as well as of the original and their mindclone, then it must be accepted that the psychological fuzz of identity has cloned itself onto a new substrate. The individual’s cloud identity is now instantiated in both a brain and a mindclone.

Techo-immortality is possible because it will be soon possible to replicate the constituents of your identity – and hence your identity – in multiple, highly survivable loci, namely in software on different servers. It is irrelevant that these copies are not identical to the original. Perfect copies of anything are a physical impossibility, both in space as well as in time. Mindclones that are cognitively and emotionally equivalent to their originals, and practically accepted as their original identities, must be techno-immortal continuations of the original beings.

This question reminds me of the amazing story about how a young student, Aaron Lansky, saved Yiddish literature from disappearing. By the late 20th century, virtually all of the native speakers of Yiddish were elderly. After they died, their Yiddish books were being thrown away – almost no one understood a need to preserve this literature. Perhaps 5%-10% of the entire literature was literally disappearing each year. Lansky took it upon himself, with the help of a small group of friends, to collect all of the Yiddish books in the world before they ended up in dumpsters. After a decade his team had collected over a million volumes, had reignited interest in the language and had created a global Yiddish book exchange system. However, because the books were so frail (Yiddish was mostly read by poor Jews, and thus printed on cheap early 20th century paper to keep prices down) they were disintegrating before they could be shared. Consequently, Lansky then raised the money and signed contracts to digitize the entire collection. Indeed, the first literature completely digitized was Yiddish. Thereafter, those who wished any particular book simply selected the title from an online catalog and a print-to-order new copy was sent to them, on nice acid-free paper.

Did digitizing Yiddish literature save it from death by oblivion via dumpsters? Absolutely. Were the digitized texts the exact same as the handworn books? No. Did it matter? Absolutely not. The culture, what might be called the Yiddish soul, was exactly the same in the reprinted books of hundreds of authors, poets and playwrights.

Lingering objections to mindclones based upon inexactitude simply misunderstand the nature of identity. Identity is a property of continuity. This means that a person’s identity can exist to a greater or lesser extent depending upon the presence or absence of its constituents. We believe that we have the same identity as we grow from teenagers to adults because to a great extent our mannerisms, personality, recollections, feelings, beliefs, attitudes and values have been continually present over those years. Of course we have changed, but the changes are on top of bedrock constancy. For the same reason it is not necessary for our mindclone to share every memory with its biological original to have the same identity as that original. Similarly, Yiddish literature is alive even if only 98% rather than 100% of Yiddish literature has been digitized. To love your mother you need not remember all that she has done for you. A continuity of strong positive and emotive orientations toward her, as well as the remembered highlights of your life with her, are plenty adequate.

In summary, techno-immortality is the ability to live practically forever through the downloading of your identity to a mindclone. Identity exists wherever its cognitive and emotional patterns exist, which can be in more than one place, in flesh as well as in software, and in varying degrees of completeness. While humans have never before experienced out-of-body identity, that is about to change with mindcloning. Along with this change will come something else new to humanity – techno-immortality.

What Are Mindclones?

A mindclone is a software version of your mind. He or she is all of your thoughts, recollections, feelings, beliefs, attitudes and values, and is experiencing reality from the standpoint of whatever machine their mindware is running on. Mindclones are mindfiles being used and updated by mindware that has been set to be a functionally equivalent replica of one’s mind. A mindclone is your software-based alter ego, doppelganger, or mental twin. If your body died, but you had a mindclone, you would not feel that you personally died, although the body would be missed more sorely than amputees miss their limbs .

We have absolutely no experience with mindclones. Never in history has there been anything like them. Hence, it is natural to find it difficult to understand the concept. From time immemorial we have thought of our identity as being limited to one instantiation, namely that contained within our body. To grasp mindcloning it is necessary to envision identity as being a unique pattern of thinking that can occur in two or more substrates or forms. If you can accept that a mind can be duplicated, with appropriate mindware and a rich enough mindfile, then you have accepted that a single identity can occur at least twice.

Now, it is certainly true that an easy distinction can be drawn between an original identity and that of its mindclone. Simply by virtue of being a copy, the mindclone is not the original, and hence it can be said that the mindclone does not have the same identity as the original. Yet, this is a distinction without significance. It is analogous to claiming that identity changes over time because people grow and acquire new experiences. While there is no doubt that our personality evolves, and our thoughts change, we are still the same person – the same identity.

So, why is it that we feel an uploaded version of our mind knows that it is an upload, and is thus not really us, whereas an aging version of our mind knows it is different from its youth, but is still definitely us? The reason is our deep-felt bias, based upon our entire human experience, that identity is substrate-specific. Some people take this so far as to believe that transplant recipients, especially of hearts, assume some of the identity of the organ donor.

With mindcloning we will have our first experience with the technological possibility of substrate-independent identity. It will take some time for society to adapt. Ultimately, though, most people will understand that just as a person’s voice can be in two places simultaneously via telephone, their identity can be in two places simultaneously via mindcloning.

When I have presented mindcloning in conferences there are usually one or two people who rush to the microphone after my talk. They are insistent that a mindclone cannot be the same person as the original because it is not the same person. The fault in this kind of reasoning is that it is a tautology, a circular form of argument that just restates itself. The “same person” is different from the “same body”, or substrate. While it is true that a mindclone is not the same body as the original person, it is the same mind. Hence, my questioners have difficulty because they think that a person is their body and I insist that a person is their mind.

Sometimes the questioners challenge me as follows: “If you created a mindclone, surely you would not agree to be killed in favor of your mindclone!” My reply is that I like my body quite a bit, and if my mindclone could be given one like mine or better (such as through some future medical technology), then I would not be any worse off, save for the trauma of the killing. The questioners are rarely satisfied; they simply do not accept that identity can remain constant across two or more substrates. Logically, however, they are in error. Assuming a mind can be replicated, such as with mindfiles and mindware, its identity would thereafter have in fact been altered to become a two-substrate version of the original one-substrate identity.

Another question that arises is for how long would a singular identity span two substrates? Each mind – the biological original and the mindclone – will surely have its own thoughts just as each of us has different thoughts from minute to minute. Indeed, this is sometimes used as an argument why mindclones do not share the identity of their original.

I believe a singular identity will always span the mindclone and its original. This is easier to appreciate when you consider that normally each of them will continuously synchronize their common mindfile, using high-speed links. Both parts of the single identity will take note of what the other has done. Perhaps fear of losing control over one’s life to a mindclone will dampen enthusiasm for creating them. As mindware gets ever better at making mindclones that are absolutely faithful psychological replicas this fear will dissipate. In any event, most people do not fail to get married out of fear that another person will have access to a joint bank account. And we will know our mindclones far better than we know our fiancées.

There will be instances in which the mindclone and the original do not update each other. Instead, the single identity decides, in conversation with itself (we biological originals do talk to ourselves, weighing pros and cons in our heads), to experience life separately. Like being dealt two 8s in a blackjack game, and deciding to split, some people and their mindclones will go separate ways. Even in such cases I believe we are speaking of a single identity. We must remember that both the biological original and the mindclone share a unique psychological profile based upon a mountain of mindfile data. They are the same person. The fact that they subsequently have many unique, perhaps life-changing experiences does not change either of their individual identities, and hence cannot have changed their common identity.

While the original and the mindclone will be very different after years of unique experiences, they will still be the same person. It will be as if you visited a close friend after first living ten years in Ethiopia, and then again after living ten years in China. On the first visit your friend would remark on how the Ethiopian experiences changed you, but would still recognize you as his friend. On the second visit your friend would see yet another version of you, this time changed by life in China. Once again, though, your friend would surely recognize you as the same person who first left for Ethiopia twenty years earlier. This is the power of an established set of mannerisms, personality, recollections, feelings, beliefs, attitudes and values. Whatever changes will not be able to entirely mask the starting set of conditions. It is all but impossible to completely crawl out of an established mind.

Perhaps deciding to have a mindclone is analogous to having a child. Once the child is born, you will always be a parent. Similarly, once a mindclone is created, you will always be a dual-substrate identity. Many parents have little or nothing to do with their offspring, but neither the parent nor the offspring can get the parental relationship out of their mind. Their identity has permanently been altered to include the fact that they are part of a (good or bad) parent-offspring relationship. Analogously, even if a mindclone parts ways with their original, neither will ever be able to forget the fact that someone else with their same mind exists. The creation of a cognitive doppelganger is an identity-altering experience.

In summary, a mindclone is a fully functional, software-based copy of your mind, residing on computer substrate. You and your mindclone will think the same thoughts, and feel the same feelings, as well as having unique ones. In most instances the two of you will be wirelessly linked to a common mindfile so there will be a constant synchronization of cognition and experiences. When mindclones arise in the next few years, as a consequence of our burgeoning mindfiles and rapidly developing mindware, we will get used to the idea that identity is replicable. A person will be able to be in two places at the same time.

How will we really know that our mindclone is conscious, actually feeling the same fears, and dreaming the same dreams, as are we? It is easy to imagine a mindclone just doing an amazing job of mimicking our consciousness, like some chatbots today mimic human conversational behavior. Is the mindclone my real life, or a compelling, tear-jerking “movie” of my real life? These questions of consciousness, and of cyberconsciousness, are answered next.