13. WHY WOULD MINDCLONES WANT IMMORTALITY?

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For age is opportunity no less
Than youth itself, though in another dress,
And as the evening twilight fades away
The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow




Some people want to achieve immortality through their work or their descendants. I would prefer to achieve immortality by not dying.
- Woody Allen


There is only one compelling reason to want immortality – it is because you are enjoying life. Our knee-jerk reactions against immortality are because life gets miserable once disease, depression, disability and decrepitude arrive. It can also be seen that death brings relief from boredom, sadness, drudgery and despair. One can argue that since sleep is great, death must be heaven.

There are also abstract reasons for and against immortality. Its been argued that people will treat the world more kindly if they know they must live with it forever. Or it can be argued that civilization will advance more assuredly if there would be more of a hands-on transferring of experience. On the other hand, it can be argued that there will be less room for new talent to shine if the old guard never leaves the stage. Or that society will change too slowly if a gerontocracy holds onto power. I don’t consider any of these abstract reasons particularly compelling. They all have such a “maybe so, maybe not” character. What is unambiguous, though, is that if you love being alive, you’ll want to continue being alive. If you don’t, you won’t mind a peaceful death.

Mindclones shouldn’t feel their bodies falling apart because (a) they won’t have a real body, and (b) painful sensations from virtual bodies should be more easily remediable than flesh maladies. Thus, welcoming death to avoid the fragility of old age seems inapplicable to our cyberconscious selves. But since it is our minds, not our bodies, that feel depression, boredom, sadness and drudgery, those reasons will continue to pull us, even as mindclones, into the sweet embrace of everlasting sleep.

Some people enjoy their lives until the very end. Many of those will be the kind of people who quest for the immortality of the mindclone. Other people are dissatisfied with their life, and are thus much less likely to activate their mindfile with mindware to create an immortal mindclone. But there are also many exceptions in both categories. One of my favorite people, Thomas Starzl, MD, is now in his eighties and lives the exciting life of a celebrated organ transplant pioneer. He travels the world to receive awards and recognition, and he receives countless letters of gratitude from the thousands of people who are still alive due to his medical breakthroughs with liver and kidney transplantation. Immortality category? No. Tom tells me that he would not want to take the risk that an immortalized version of him turned out to be insane. Another friend of mine has suffered just about every bad economic and emotional break the world has to offer. Despite her sufferings, she is a kindly soul and looks forward to creating an immortal mindclone. Like the Hindi believers in reincarnation, her view is that the next life has got to be better than this one. She wants to grab a good place in the queue.

Mindclone creators will surely want a “kill-switch” so that the gravely unhappy mindclone can end it all with the cybernetic equivalent of hemlock, wrist-slashing, overdosing, hanging or a bullet. No doubt some mindclones will kill themselves out of some kind of depression. Mindclone suicide may well be as large a problem as its flesh-based cousin. On the other hand, anti-suicide legislation may also criminalize assisting the suicide of a mindclone.

There are two reasons the number of self-terminated mindclone lives is likely to be small. First, it takes an inordinate amount of motivation to kill oneself. While it is terrible that one million people do take their lives annually, the one million people who die naturally every week swamp that toll. Second, not one of the million people who kill themselves each year ever asked to be born. By contrast, every mindclone brought into existence asked to do so. They might not have known what they were getting into, and they might regret it so much they kill themselves, but at least they started their life with an intention to continue living.

Among the things mindclones will do that will keep them wanting to live are: reading books (“so many books, so little time…”), watching movies, writing poetry, creating art, chatting with friends, making virtual (but still orgasmic, via digital haptics) love, playing sports and games, learning new things, going to virtual parties, working in real companies to make money, starting non-profit organizations, star-gazing, parenting younger mindclones, and mentoring flesh people. Mindclones will pine for healthy bodies, and thankfully miss diseased ones. In general, there will be as much to live for as a mindclone as there was as a person. So, if the original person would have wanted to keep on living, it is likely that the mindclone, who is the same personality and consciousness as the original person, would also want to keep on living.

There are also several special situations where mindclones seem to have uniquely compelling justifications. For example, many jobs entail risking one’s life for the benefit of society. These professions include police, firemen and soldiers. It seems reasonable to permit these brave souls to have a mindclone backup so that all is not necessarily lost if they have to lose their life to save the lives of others. A similar special case involves astronauts on long duration, and necessarily hazardous, space missions.

In summary, we and our mindclones will want to keep on living if we are the kind of people that wish for more life, and are willing to accept its cybernetic equivalent while hoping for a future download into a cellular regenerated fresh body. Many if not most of us are not those people. To this large cohort, life is something to be enjoyed or endured as best as possible, but to ultimately surrender in exchange for a blissful eternity of dreamless sleep. Clearly, this is not a cohort that will sign up for mindclones.

Creating a mindclone is much more momentous than having a child or getting married. Those responsibilities have limited or limitable durations. When you create a mindclone, you are eliminating the possibility of a natural, or accidental, or unexpected death. That’s a big thing to give away. But you are gaining a shot at an eternity of living life to its fullest, and you still have the escape of death, albeit now only through the emotionally arduous route of cyber-suicide.

How many people will grab the mindclone brass ring? We know that as death approaches, and if the alternative is not pain and suffering, then most people do whatever is in their power to avoid death. Not only do most people not commit suicide (in part due to its illegality), they will spend their last dollar and put up with many medical interventions to stay alive. This is a reason to believe that once people become comfortable, through familiarity, with cyberconscious life, that a majority of people will choose to activate a mindclone.

Creating a mindclone will likely become thought of as a form of organ transplantation. The organ being transplanted is the brain, although it is the brain’s mind rather than the brain’s flesh that is being moved, and it is being moved from a diseased body rather than into one. Nevertheless, from the patient’s perspective, whether they consent to a mindclone-based “brain transplant” or to a conventional heart, lung, liver or kidney transplant, they are just trying to keep on living, not to be “immortal.”

A mindclone-based “brain transplant,” for example, could give doctors an opportunity to completely rebuild a badly diseased body. Or even more fantastically, if a diseased body were a total loss, a new body could be grown from stem cells in an artificial womb. This process is called ectogenesis and is the subject of significant scientific progress. If a stem cell continued to divide and grow at the rate of a natural human fetus during its first six months, by the 20th month it would reach adult size. A mindclone-based “brain transplant” team would then endeavor to write back onto the new brain’s neurons, or mechanically (via an implanted microcomputer) interface to them, the information patterns contained within the mindclone.

Once the mindclone was replicated back in the newly grown flesh body, ey (‘ey’ is pronounced ‘ee’ as in ‘tree’ and means he or she) would continue to live as a dual-substrate person – one legal identity, but two instantiations, one in the new flesh brain and one in mindclone. This decision to be a dual substrate identity would have been taken when the mindclone was first created. It is a momentous decision, but so is deciding to accept a heart transplant knowing that due to organ shortages someone else will therefore die for lack of that heart.

The unprecedented opportunities brought to us by advanced medical technology have unconventional legal and ethical sequelae. Be it frozen embryos, surrogate mothers, kidney donations or computerized prosthetics, we have been able to get comfortable with the moral consequences. We have repeatedly shown ourselves to both be able to create life-affirming possibilities that have never before existed, and to then accommodate such creations to our ancient life-respecting values.

Ultimately mindclone activation may be a generational sort of thing. Mindclones will be largely eschewed by older generations that grew up with death as a natural end to life. But mindclones will be welcomed by younger generations – digital natives -- that grew up knowing mindclones. The bottom line is that there can be a compelling reason to keep on living after bodily death, and most people want to keep on living. Hence, as the public becomes comfortable with mindclones as a form of life, the immortality aspect of mindclones will be much more of a drawing card than a turn-off.

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.