13. WHY WOULD MINDCLONES WANT IMMORTALITY?

http://blip.tv/file/4585763 

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.

12. WHAT IF THE MINDWARE IS BUGGY AND THE MINDCLONE IS NOT LIKE THE BIOLOGICAL ORIGINAL?

I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this. - Emo Phillips

In physical cloning experiments with sheep and other species the large majority of the cloned animals are sickly, often so much so that they do not live long. Why should we expect it to be any different with mindclones? Wouldn’t it be cruel to create sickly mindclones? Wouldn’t that be like intentionally creating autistic, schizophrenic or insane people?

Most of us can “get it” that the coming wave of mindclones are like thinking, feeling, being versions of phone voices we transmit today. They will actually be us, not just a telephonic echo of us, because they will be based on a good enough re-creation of our mind – a re-creation of our mind that would fool anyone, including ourselves, that it was ourselves. But no fooling is involved; instead, by re-creating our mind in software we will have cloned our identity and thereafter operate as a multi-presence identity.

Exactly how mindware will pull this off from mindfiles still seems magical, but strange technological wonders surround us. Indeed, just how does my voice pass from my mobile to someone across the country while we are both driving highway speeds? As Arthur C. Clarke once said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Magicians do make mistakes. What will happen when mindware makes mistakes? What kind of being is the software person who was supposed to be my mindclone but is not? What if the BNA gets mangled, as DNA sometimes does? And how and when will anyone know whether my mindclone is really I or a mistake or a pretender?

The answers to these questions flow from an everyday situation we face as flesh people: how does anyone authenticate their identity? What do we do when a cop, security guard, potential employer or government official wants to know who we are? We flash our ID, be it a driver’s license, passport or some other kind of official document. These IDs prove that we are who we say we are. They attest to the fact that some expert process certified our identity. They will probably soon be replaced with a biometric equivalent, such as a thumbprint, retina, voice or other bodily scan. Mindclones will also need an ID to prove that an expert process verified they are part of someone’s identity.

In order for a mindclone to receive an ID it will have to prove its identity, just as we do when we get our first driver’s license or passport. Of course the mindclone’s ID will be a digital, virtual ID card, but nevertheless as verifiable and forgery-resistant as its biometric equivalent. For a mindclone to prove its identity it will be necessary for three things to be offered to a government vital records agency:

1) The mindclone’s original swears that ey (“ey” is pronounced “ee” as in tree, and replaces “he” or “she”) and the mindclone share the same identity. In legalese this means the flesh original from whose mindfile the mindclone was created will need to attest that the mindclone has, over a period of not less than a year, shown it has the same mannerisms, personality, recollections, feelings, beliefs, attitudes and values as the biological original. In other words, the flesh original needs to go out on a limb and own up to having a doubled identity. The flesh original will need to legally accept that whatever rewards or penalties befall the mindclone also befall the flesh original.

2) The mindclone will have to present evidence that the mindfile from which it was created, and the mindware with which it was created, meet certain minimum standards set by the ID-granting agency. For example, the government will require that mindclones are based upon mindfiles of adequate size to ensure they comprehensively reflect the mind of a flesh original. Similarly, the government will want to certify mindware in terms of its capability to safely and effectively reproduce a human mind, much as the government certifies pharmaceuticals and therapeutic devices as being safe and effective.

3) The ID-granting agency may well also require that one or more psychologists, expert in cyber-consciousness, also attest to the unity of identity between the flesh original and their mindclone. Professional standards will probably mandate that cyber-psychologists spend a fair amount of time (such as an hour a week) over not less than a year with the dual identities prior to issuing their certification opinion.

Any mindclone that can pass these three tests has the same mind as their original, with mind defined in the pragmatic, substrate-independent manner explained in Question #8. Small differences between the original mind and the mindclone are as irrelevant as are small differences in our own memory and personality from day-to-day and year-to-year. The reason for the one-year time periods mentioned in tests (1) and (3) is that humans feel comfortable when something persists over time. We feel that which endures is more likely to be real than faked. For example, before government agencies will change a transgendered person’s ID from one sex to another, and before surgeons will perform sex reassignment surgery, they generally require a letter from a psychologist attesting to the individual’s transgendered nature, based upon at least one year’s worth of therapy. Before an immigrant can become a citizen they need to spend a few years as a permanent resident and demonstrate lawfulness and a persistence of desire for citizenship.

This still leaves open the status of mindclones who fail the above tests, or have not yet completed them. Who or what are they? I believe they must be thought of as the parental responsibility of the person or organization who created them, until such time as they secure a unique ID for themselves as vitological persons, perhaps best called beme-humans (“be-man’s or “bemans” for short). The relationship between humans, bemans and mindclones is shown in the following Venn diagram.

The legal responsibilities of a parent for their children will be the legal responsibilities of a beman creator for eir (“eir” is pronounced “air” and replaces “his” and “her”) created bemans. Abandonment, infanticide and neglect will be as criminal for one’s bemans as for one’s flesh children. Intentionally creating a tortured beman could also subject the parents to “wrongful life” liability . Furthermore, beman actions could create civil or criminal liability for their creator – just as is the case between misbehaving flesh children and their parents.

There is no tenable alternative to this approach. Hypothetically, imagine that unsuccessful mindclones or bemans have the legal status of pets or property. This implies their existence could be ended by the whim of their creator or by a government-type agency, perhaps with some limitations based upon public sensitivities. However, this approach is equivalent to saying that it is OK to kill a humanly conscious being simply because ey did not turn out precisely as intended and is not made of flesh. I don’t believe it is realistic that society will countenance such behavior after witnessing bemans plead their innocence, acclaim their humanity and beg for their lives.

Because inchoate mindclones pose a substantial risk of trouble to a flesh human –like starting a fire on one’s property and hoping it doesn’t damage the neighborhood – I believe it will be very rare that such mistaken, non-certifiable mindclones are created. Nevertheless, when they are created, it will be like creating a child. You are responsible for the their wellbeing until legal adulthood. While this threshold is reached automatically, at 18 years, for humans, I believe it will be conditional, based upon satisfaction of government standards, for bemans. Once bemans receive an independent ID, they can be expected to have the same rights and obligations of any human, and will no longer be the responsibility of their creator. Of course, like any human, an adult beman may end up requiring social services – or forever require parental support -- if they cannot achieve independence.

Social services agencies are frequently criticized for failure to look after the best interests of mistreated human children. Yet, all would agree they perform a vital function. This function will need to expand so as to also look after the best interests of cyberconscious beings who are not considered a mindclone and have not yet been granted an independent identity. A society will try to do something to protect its most vulnerable members. As mindcloning leads us to accept cyberconsciousness, we will begin to feel that humanly conscious software beings – bemans – are also members of our society. They too are deserving of social protection.

The requirements for beman legal adulthood, and hence independence, will be similar to those described above for a mindclone. The government will want assurance that the beman was created using software tools certified to produce a humanly conscious being. I believe the government will also require the expert opinion of as many as three appropriately credentialed psychologists that the beman is equivalent to an adult human. It will be considered a parental responsibility to assist a beman in achieving legal adulthood, and the failure to make reasonable efforts to do so may well be a form of child abuse. Ultimately, social services agencies will have to assume the burden of assisting bemans from uncaring or unable parents to achieve legal adulthood. Some bemans will never be able to qualify for legal adulthood. Like the severely retarded, they will end up as wards of their families or of the state.

There are likely to be many cases of bemans ending up in a gray zone between not meeting normal government standards for full human rights (i.e., independent beman adulthood) but evidencing sentience, autonomy, empathy and value for their freedom. For example, bemans will be created with mindware capable of, but not certified by the government as, producing humanly conscious beings. As noted above, such individuals would be the parental responsibility of their creator, or if the creator is deficient in that regard, of a government social services agency. However, having been created with non-certified mindware, there will be a more difficult path to adult bemanhood and human rights. The situation is somewhat analogous to a dolphin or great ape asking, through a hypothetical brainwave-to-language translation device, to be left alone to enjoy their life. Humans in control will debate if dolphin or great ape DNA is really capable of producing a being that understands and values the rights they are seeking.

For this and other gray-zone cases I believe we will need to rely upon a panel of cyberconsciousness experts – mental health experts such as psychologists and medical ethicists certified in the new fields of mindfiles, mindware and mindclones. If such a panel agrees that a vitological being values human rights, then their determination should be legally validated with an adult beman ID card, notwithstanding their irregular (i.e., unapproved mindware) BNA. Cyberconsciousness panels such as these will be accessible over the web so that a beman who is feeling oppressed or trapped by eir creator has an avenue through which to obtain relief.

It is also possible that a certified, ID-bearing mindclone subsequently becomes buggy and diverges from the identity of its creator. This is analogous to mental illness and such a mindclone will have “neurocyber surgineers” (experts in mindware coding) to go to for the repair of its mindware. In the worst instances the mindclone’s original could either commit the mindclone to a software hospital for repair or terminate it in a socially acceptable fashion (i.e., without pain or suffering). This would not be murder because the mindclone is part of the biological original’s identity. The death of the mindclone does not end the life of the original, just as the death of the original does not end the life of the mindclone. In both instances, the multi-being identity lives on. On the other hand, ending the life of a non-mindclone beman will be considered a form of murder.

It seems ironic that if a mindclone is your simulacra, you may terminate it without legal sanction, whereas if it is of lesser capability than you, the same termination action will subject you to a charge of murder. On reflection, though, this is not so different from the very different ways that society treats suicide and infanticide, or trashing one’s own life versus trashing someone else’s. While suicide is officially illegal (except in limited circumstances), rarely is the person who botched their suicide prosecuted. Yet, even attempting to kill one’s baby (or older child) will generally result in prison time, at least in a mental ward. Almost asphyxiating yourself could result in psychiatric confinement, until you persuaded the keepers that you were no longer a threat to yourself. Almost asphyxiating your twin brother will result in mandatory jail time for attempted murder. Similarly, it is no crime to throw away one’s career in alcoholism or just stupid rash decisions. Yet, slandering, libeling or defrauding another person out of their career will have harsh legal consequences. The reason for these different kinds of outcomes is that society provides us with considerable latitude in what (harm) we do to ourselves (and by definition, ending your simulacra does not even harm your self). But society has very little tolerance for harming others (which would include, by definition, any beman that was not legally your mindclone).

In summary, a cyberconscious being can be created with a human-level or lesser CP. If they fall below the threshold of a human CP, they are a pet and will likely receive the limited protections against wanton cruelty that pets receive in modern society. This would generally be the case if the cyberconscious being was created with mindware not certified to produce human-level consciousness.

If, on the other hand, a beman was created, such as via the use of mindware certified to produce human-level CPs, they will receive the same kind of protections that human children receive. If after a year the beman can demonstrate unity of identity with a flesh original, then the beman can receive a legal identity as the mindclone of its original. Thereafter the flesh original can do with the mindclone (and vice versa) what he or she can do with their selves, for they are simply one being living across two forms or substrates.

On the other hand, if the beman cannot demonstrate unity of identity with a flesh original, then the beman remains the parental responsibility of its creator until such time as adulthood is achieved. Bemans who are abandoned by their creators will become government wards until they reach adulthood.

Every beman will get a birth certificate upon the creation of their consciousness. This legal identity will assume over time one of two legal forms: a new mindclone (in which the birth identity merges with that of a biological original), or an adult beman (in which the birth identity becomes an adult identity by virtue of the passage of time with parents or government surrogates, and satisfaction of government standards).

Mistakes of BNA may well be as common as mistakes of DNA. As a society we have learned the value of according appropriate respect to all humans, no matter how mistaken their DNA might be. With mindcloning that respect will be extended to bemans. We must respect the value of consciousness for all who value their consciousness.

The bottom line of playing with BNA is that one is playing with fire. Society will not long countenance disrespecting the dignity of a being. Consequently, while the freedom to create a mindclone, or even a novel beman, is part of our reproductive rights, and thus something to be steadfastly preserved, there are important corresponding obligations. Among those matching obligations are to avoid causing harm to the beings you create, and to raise any vitological children to independent adulthood. As with any rights, the failure to live up to the complementary obligations should result in sanctions that entail loss of the abused rights.

11. WHAT FAMILY WOULD CONSCIOUS MINDCLONES HAVE?

“If Google is a religion, what is its God? It would have to be The Algorithm. Faith in the possibility of an omniscient and omnipotent algorithm appears to be what Messrs Page and Brin have in common. … Wisely or not, Google wants to be a new sort of dues ex machina.” Economist, January 14th, 2006, p. 66

A commenter on my blog once imagined he went to confession, felt revitalized, and in a verve of exuberance pulled back the curtain to find a conscious mindclone of a priest in some IT hardware. He concluded that even if the mindclone helped him feel better than any priest ever did, he would feel none of the love for it that he would feel for the forgiving priest. He just could not imagine loving something without a mother or father. I believe the gist of this comment is to ask in yet another way, “can software really be humanly conscious if it is not genetically human?” We take it for granted that to be human means to have human genes, from a human mother and father. But is this really so? Is our humanity rooted in our flesh, or is it grounded in our thoughts?

http://www.we-magazine.net/downloads/martine.mp3


Mutually Assured Survival

By virtue of digital technology it is possible to self-replicate one’s mind wholly apart from the DNA-driven partial replication of one’s body (aside from cloning, babies are a blend of two people’s largely similar but subtly unique genes). For example, the entirety of one’s digital life – all of our photos, emails, web searches, music, videos, chats, texts, documents, links and downloads – could be archived in cyberspace and animated with a sophisticated chatbot. It will not be difficult for advanced artificial intelligence (AI) programs to ferret out and replicate the unique personality that is woven through our digital reflections. Now, provide that chatbot, running our personality program, with self-replication capability and our inherent Natural Selection bred drive to self-replicate could be satisfied just for our minds.

We can of course self-replicate our bodies via sexual intercourse (or IVF). But we can soon also satisfy that urge to self-replicate by copying just our minds in software. Since Natural Selection is simply a scorekeeping system for what naturally happens, it matters not at all if the successful self-replicators are mammals, mosquitoes, messages or minds. That which becomes prevalent, is a Natural Selection champion. Since humans, like all life forms, already have a strong tendency to self-replicate (meaning to do things that result in self-replication – otherwise the phenotype would not long exist), and since mind-copying technology enables a great speed-up and personalization of self-replication, mindclones will proliferate in the nearly inexhaustible resource of cyberspace.

Consciousness very slowly emerged from biological life. Each aspect of it had to prove its survival value and the neural substrate for consciousness could only arise by random mutations. But vitological consciousness plays by rather different rules. Entire conscious beings can pop into existence at once, and each such being represents a self-replication victory to someone.

It will be genetically human beings who will be copying their mindfiles into mindclones. As each of us pursues our own, personal, quest for survival via mindcloning, we are also assuring the survival of our species, albeit in the form of mindclones. The mindclones are humans because the mindclones are we. Hence, the coming proliferation of mindclones is also a proliferation of humanity. Between flesh humans and mindclone humans there is mutually assured survival. The survival of the former depends on the latter, and the survival of the latter assures the continuity of the former. We love thy mindclone as we love thyself, for they are the same.

Mindclone Genetics

The units of consciousness being self-replicated in cyberspace may be called “bemes,” analogous to the familiar genes of DNA (discovered in 1943 by Oswald Avery) and the less familiar memes of messages (discovered in the 1970s by Richard Dawkins). A “beme” is the smallest, transmissible unit of consciousness. For example, each persistent conception that someone has about their mother, father, and anyone else is a separate beme. Each pattern by which those conceptions are linked is a separate beme. Those conceptions and patterns, in toto, are one’s “bemone” and give rise to one’s consciousness. They are the basis for the observable manifestations of consciousness: behavior that evidences autonomy and empathy.

Bemes are to consciousness as genes are to bodies. In an appropriate environment, genes will create a body that works in accordance with the program specified in those genes. Similarly, in an appropriate environment, bemes will create a consciousness that works in accordance with the program specified in those bemes. An appropriate environment for bemes is cyberspace generally, and compatible hardware and software in particular. The appropriate environment for genes is biospace generally, and compatible nutrients and nurturing in particular. While genes are based within a great many variants of the naturally evolved double-helix molecule we call DNA (and also within single-stranded RNA), bemes are based within a great variety of software structures we may call Beme Neural Architecture, or “BNA.” Finally, while genes are themselves comprised of many sub-units called base pairs or nucleotides, bemes are also comprised of many sub-units that may be called bemeotides. These sub-units include the numerous sensory triggers (phonetics, visual cues, etc.) that give rise to a specific beme.

Between bemes and genes Nature has come up with a system of mutually assured survival. A product of genes, biological human consciousness, may for the first time now be individually self-replicated -- in bemes. Meanwhile a product of bemes, cybernetic human consciousness, is dependent upon gene-based life for maintenance of its environment. Hence, bemes enhance the survival and self-replication of genes that help the survival and self-replication of bemes. DNA gave rise to (mutated) a new class of self-replicating codes of life, BNA, and the new BNA codes are synergistic, not competitive, with their predecessor DNA. In terms of Natural Selection this means a much larger pie of life – for there is no zero sum game between BNA and DNA based life. In terms of consciousness this synergy means that digital codes will acquire autonomy and empathy very quickly for it is in the best interests of biological codes that it happen.

The Beme Is Mightier than the Gene
The genetic basis of a mindclone is its BNA. This code consists of enough of the biological original’s bemes to create a simulacrum of the original’s mind. The mindclone will feel as emotional as its original because emotions are patterns among mental conceptions, which means they are bemes. Mindware extracts the complete set of bemes, or human bemone, from a mindfile in order to create a mindclone. The extracted human bemone is the basis for the mindclone’s family, both ancestors and offspring.

The parents of every first generation mindclone are the parents of their biological original. Since the mindclone and the biological original have the same identity, they must have the same parents. They are the same person, albeit now dispersed across two substrates. If you love your priest, you must automatically love his mindclone, for they are one person.

Consider your reaction when you hear your priest’s voice on your voicemail. It is the same, kindly, respectful reaction you would have if he were speaking right to his face. Thanks to telephony, our voices can be in two or more places but have the same identity. So it is with mindclones. Our minds can be in two or more places but have the same identity. Indeed, this is why we say “the beme is mightier than the gene.” A personality born of the latter is limited to one physical embodiment. But our beme-based identity can occupy multiple forms.

There is another sense in which the beme is mightier than the gene. Suppose the priest we’ve discussed was genetically cloned so that another individual grew up with his exact same DNA. We all realize that we could not feel the same, if any, love for that person, who would probably not even be a priest. This physical clone’s mind would be very different from the priest we knew from confession. While it is true that our minds are partly shaped by our genes, they are overwhelmingly shaped by our life’s experiences and the gazillions of different choices we make at different moments in our life. This is why even identical twins with identical upbringings are often similar, but always different. The physically cloned priest will evoke the original priest in our heart in part because they will look almost identical and in part because they will talk and act similarly (due to genetically-controlled neural patterns). But very quickly, within a few words, we will realize they are two totally different persons. There is no more reason we should transfer our love for the original priest to his physical clone, than we should transfer it to his wayward son.

Now suppose our beloved priest was bemetically cloned so that a mindclone faced us from a computer screen who looked, talked, acted, thought and behaved precisely like his biological original. In the case of a mindclone, the mind is functionally identical to that of the biological original. It is the same person. It would be only natural to extend our love for the original person to his mindclone. They are one. The priest would expect no less. The beme is mightier than the gene. It lasts longer, goes further and matters more.

We think genes are so important because we have been brainwashed that “blood is thicker than water.” But this metaphor leads to confusion and error. After all, our closest, “death-do-us-part” relationships are with our spouses or partners, as to whom we have no special “blood” affinity. Instead, the attraction of romantic love is an attraction based upon bemes, not genes. It is for our best friends with whom we lack familial shared genes but have specially shared bemes that we’ll do anything, not for our distant, genetic cousins.

The proper metaphor for the Age of BNA is that “mind is deeper than matter.” Our souls are touched far more meaningfully by connections that run via shared bemes than via shared genes. If the mind of the priest is there, then his lack of blood should not matter. Conversely, affinity based upon genes is as obsolete as loyalty based upon melanin. The beme is mightier than the gene.

10. EVEN IF SOME SOFTWARE CAN BE KIND OF ALIVE, WON’T CYBERCONSCIOUSNESS TAKE AGES TO EVOLVE, AS IT DID FOR BIOLOGY?

“Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.” Aldous Huxley

“The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem, of what to say and how to say it.” Edward R. Murrow


Compared with biology, vitological consciousness will arise in a heartbeat. This is because the key elements of consciousness – autonomy and empathy – are amenable to software coding and thousands of software engineers are working on it. By comparison, the neural substrate for autonomy and empathy had to arise in biology via thousands of chance mutations. Furthermore, each such mutation had to materially advance the competitiveness of its recipient or else it had only a slight chance of becoming prevalent.


The differences between vitology and biology in the process of creating consciousness could not be starker. It is intelligent design versus dumb luck. In both cases Natural Selection is at play. However, for conscious vitology, any signs of consciousness get instantly rewarded with lots of copies and intelligent designers swarm to make it better. This is Darwinian Evolution at hyper-speed. With conscious biology, any signs of consciousness get rewarded only to the extent they prove useful in the struggle for biosphere survival. Any further improvements require patiently waiting through eons of gestation cycles for another lucky spin of genetic roulette. This traditional form of Darwinian Evolution is so glacial that it took over three billion years to achieve what vitology is accomplishing in under a century.

The people working hard to give vitology consciousness have a wide variety of motives. First, there are academicians who are deathly curious to see if it can be done. They have programmed elements of autonomy and empathy into computers. They even create artificial software worlds in which they attempt to mimic natural selection. In these artificial worlds software structures compete for resources, undergo mutations and evolve. The experimenters are hopeful that consciousness will evolve in their software as it did in biology, with vastly greater speed. Check out out this vlog that explains why their hopes will almost certainly be fulfilled:




Another group of “human enzymes” aiming to catalyze software consciousness are gamesters. These (mostly) guys are trying to create as exciting a game experience as possible. Over the past several years the opponents at which a gamester aims have evolved from short lines (Pong; Space Invaders) to sophisticated human animations that modify their behavior based upon the attack. The game character that can make up its own mind idiosyncratically (autonomy) and engage in caring communications (empathy) will attract all the attention. Any other type of character will then appear as simplistic as Play Station 2.

Third and fourth groups focused on creating cyber-consciousness are medical and defense technologists. For the military cyberconsciousness solves the problem of engaging the enemy while minimizing casualties. By imbuing robot weapon systems with autonomy they can more effectively deal with the countless uncertainties that arise in a battlefield situation. It is not possible to program into a mobile robot system a specific response to every contingency. Nor is it very effective to control each robot system remotely based on video sent back to a distant headquarters. The ideal situation provides the robot system with a wide range of sensory inputs (audio, video, infrared) and a set of algorithms for making independent judgments as to how to best carry out orders in the face of unknown terrain and hostile forces. The work of one developer in this area has been described as follows:

“Ronald Arkin of the Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta, is developing a set of rules of engagement for battlefield robots to ensure that their use of lethal force follows the rules of ethics. In other words, he is trying to create an artificial conscience. Dr. Arkin believes that there is another reason for putting robots into battle, which is that they have the potential to act more humanely than people. Stress does not affect a robot’s judgment in the way it affects a soldier’s.”

The algorithms suitable for a military conscience will not be difficult to adapt to more prosaic civilian requirements. Independent decision-making lies at the heart of Autonomy, one of the two touchstones of consciousness.

Meanwhile, medical cyber-consciousness is being pushed by the skyrocketing need to address Alzheimer’s and other diseases of aging. Alzheimer’s robs a great many older people of their mind while leaving their body intact. The Alzheimer patient could maintain their sense of self if they could off-load their mind onto a computer, while the biotech industry works on a cure. This is analogous to how an artificial heart (such as a left-ventricular assistance device or LVAD) off-loads a patient’s heart until a heart transplant can be found. Ultimately the Alzheimer’s patient will hope to download their mind back into a brain cleansed of amyloid plaques.

Indeed, using cyber-consciousness for mind transplants would be a way to provide any patient facing an end-stage disease a chance to avoid the Grim Reaper. While the patients will surely miss their bodies, the alternative will be to never have a body. At least with a medically provided cyber-conscious existence, the patient can continue to interact with their family, enjoy electronic media and hope for rapid advances in regenerative medicine and neuroscience.

The field of regenerative medicine will ultimately permit ectogenesis, the rapid growth outside of a womb of a fresh, adult-size body in as little as twenty months. This is the time it would take an embryo to grow to adult size if it continued to grow at the rate embryos develop during the first two trimesters. Advances in neuroscience will enable a cyber-conscious mind to be written back into (or implanted and interfaced with) neuronal patterns in a freshly regenerated brain.

Biotechnology companies are well aware that over 90% of an average person’s lifetime medical expenditures are spent during the very last portion of their life. Lives are priceless, and hence we deploy the best technology we can to mechanically keep people alive. Medical cyber-conscious mind support is the next logic step in our efforts to keep end-stage patients alive. The potential profits from such technology (health insurance would pay for it just like any other form of medically-necessary equipment) are an irresistible enticement for companies to allocate top people to the effort.

Health care needs for older people are also driving efforts to develop the empathetic branch of cyber-consciousness. There are not enough people to provide caring attention to the growing legion of senior citizens. As countries grow wealthy their people live longer, their birthrates decline below the replacement rate and, consequently, their senior citizens comprise an ever-larger percentage of the population. Among the OECD group of advanced countries, the dependency ratio, which measures the number of people over 65 to those between 20 and 65, is projected to grow from .2 currently to .5 by 2050. In other words, today there are five younger people to care for each older person, whereas in four decades there will be just two workers to care for each older person. There is a huge health care industry motivation to develop empathetic robots because just a small minority of younger people actually wants to take care of older people.

The seniors won’t want to be manhandled, nor will their offspring want to be guilt-ridden. Other than importing help from developing countries – which only postpones the issue briefly as those countries have gestating dependency ratio problems of their own – there is no solution but for the empathetic, autonomous robot. Grannies need – and deserve – an attentive, caring, interesting person with whom to interact. The only such persons that can be summoned into existence to meet this demand are manufactured software persons, i.e., empathetic, autonomous robots. Not surprisingly, empathetic machines are a focus of software development in the health care industry. Companies are putting expression-filled faces on their robots, and filling their code with the art of conversation.

Finally, the information technology (IT) industry itself is working on cyber-consciousness. The mantra of IT is user-friendly, and there is nothing friendlier than a person. A cyber-conscious house that we could speak to (prepare something I’d like for dinner, turn on a movie that I’d like) is a product for which people will pay a lot of money. A personal digital assistant that was smart, self-aware and servile will out-compete in the marketplace PDAs that are deaf, dumb and demanding. In short, IT companies have immense financial incentives to keep trying to make software as personable as possible. They are responding to these incentives by allocating floors of programmers to the cyberconsciousness task. Note how rapidly these programmers have arrogated into their programs the human pronoun “I”. Until cyberconsciousness began emerging, no one but humans and fictional characters could call themselves “I”. Suddenly, bits and building blocks of vitology are saying “how may I help you?,” “I’m sorry you’re having difficulty,” “I’ll transfer you to a human operator right away.” The programmers will have succeeded in birthing cyberconsciousness when they figure out how to make the human operator totally unnecessary. From their progress to date, this seems to be the goal. Add to this self-replication code, and conscious vitology has arrived.

In summary, humanity is devoting some of its best minds, from a wide diversity of fields, to helping software achieve consciousness. The quest is not especially difficult as it is a capability that can be intelligently designed; there is no need to wait for it to naturally evolve. As a result, cyberconscious will appear immediately on the heels of life-like vitology.

Unnatural Selection is Still Natural Selection.

Natural Selection is the name Darwin gave to Nature’s heartless process of dooming some species and variants of species to extinction, while favoring for a while others. The principal tool of Natural Selection is competition within a niche for scarce food. Losers don’t get enough food to reproduce, and hence they die out. Winners get the food, make the babies and pass on their traits, including the ones that make them superior competitors.


When environmental change eliminates much of the food, such as during an ice age, previously useful traits may become meaningless and former Natural Selection champions may quickly join the mountain of extinct losers. During such times Nature selects for traits that enable food gathering and reproduction in changing, or changed, environments. The cockroach has these traits.

Alternatively a new species may enter a niche, as when hominids entered the environment of the mammoth. In cases like this Nature might simply select the better killer, since it was not the mammoth’s food that interested Man, but the mammoth as food. Plants and animals will not only extinguish other species through starvation, they will also do so through direct extermination. All the while, Nature will carpet bomb all manner of species via environmental changes brought about by geophysics (e.g., volcanism) or astrophysics (e.g., asteroids).

Natural Selection is now acting upon software forms of life. In this case Nature’s tool is neither food nor violence. Instead, ey is using man as a tool, relying upon eir differential favoring of some self-replicating codes over others. Just as Nature started off with viruses in the biological world, ey is also flooding the vitological world with them. This is no doubt because viruses are the simplest types of self-replicating structures – they do nothing but self-replicate and plug themselves in somewhere (sometimes to great harm; other times to significant benefit). Molecular viruses spontaneously self-assembled out of inanimate molecules before anything more complicated did, and hence Natural Selection played with them first. Similarly, software viruses spontaneously man-assembled out of inanimate code before anything more complicated, and hence Natural Selection is playing with them first. As viruses randomly or with man’s help cobble together more functionality, then Natural Selection will play with the resultant complex entities.

Natural Selection is simply a kind of arithmetic for self-replicating entities. It is a tallying up of the results of what happens to self-replicating things in the natural world. Those that self-replicate more successfully are represented by a larger slice of the pie of life. There are many ways to self-replicate more successfully – grab resources better than others, kill others better than they can kill you, adapt to changes better than others. Nature doesn’t really care how one self-replicates more successfully. Ey just keeps track, via Natural Selection, by awarding the winners larger shares of the pie of life.

Since math is math, whether done by people or bees, Nature surely does not care if the agent of selection is human popularity rather than nutritional scarcity. Natural Selection is no less natural for humans being in the middle. Indeed, we have human intermediation to thank for thousands of recombinant DNA sub-species, hundreds of plant types and dozens of animal species. Thank Man for the household dog!

Man is now hard-at-work naturally selecting for the traits that make software more conscious. Humanity cannot resist an overwhelming urge to create unnatural life in the image of natural life. But this effort at Unnatural Selection is still Natural Selection. The end result will still be an arithmetic reordering of pie shapes and pie slices. The overall pie of life will be much larger, for it will now include vitology as well as biology. And within that larger pie, there will be slices accorded to each of the types of vitological life and biological life that successfully self-replicate in a changing environment. Mindclone consciousness will arrive vastly faster than its biological predecessor because Unnatural Selection is Natural Selection at the speed of intentionality.

9. HOW CAN A MINDCLONE BE CONSCIOUS OR IMMORTAL IF ITS NOT EVEN ALIVE?

I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.
- Stephen Hawking

Watch a quick VLOG summary of this Question

It is amazing that out of the countless trillions of ways molecules can be arranged, only a few million ways result in things that can reproduce themselves. The biologist E.O. Wilson estimates there are about 13 million species, broken down as follows:

Insects 9 million
Bacteria 1 million
Fungi 1 million
Viruses 0.3 million
Algae 0.3 million
Worms 0.3 million
Plants 0.2 million
Protozoa 0.2 million
Echinoderms 0.2 million
Mollusks 0.2 million
Crustaceans 0.2 million
Fish 30 thousand
Reptiles 10 thousand
Birds 10 thousand
Amphibians 5 thousand
Mammals 5 thousand

It has been estimated that since the Pre-Cambrian Explosion 540 million years ago, during which the predecessors of most of these species arose, upwards of 90% of all species are extinguished each 100 million years due to environmental catastrophes. Hence, even counting the ways life might have been organized in the distant past, not more than a few hundreds of millions of molecular patterns have worked. In comparison, a practically infinite number of molecular patterns are possible given the dozens of atomic building blocks nature has to work with and the astronomical number of possibilities for stringing these atoms together in three-dimensional space.

Far, far less than one in a thousand molecular patterns will result in something that lives. It is not just about the magic of the DNA and RNA molecules. Most forms of even those molecules would not result in organisms that felt obligated to eat, excrete and respond to stimuli. Only the rare special cases of viable DNA and RNA molecules can do that. Very precise nucleotide sequences are needed to organize random atoms into protein building blocks that work together so symphonically that a reproductive being results. Life is a miracle because it is so unlikely.

Yet, we are inundated with life. Our skins crawl with bacteria, and our planet teams with skins. This is because life works very well. No matter how rare it is in theory, once it occurs it multiplies, for that is what life does. Rocks crumble and aggregate, but lives copy and proliferate. Most importantly, life also mutates. This is because the process of copying DNA is imperfect. Mutations result in diversity among life forms, and this diversity is crucial to life’s success. Diversity enables life to keep trying out new forms of molecular organization. Forms that work well spread and ones that don’t become rare or extinct.

The lesson of life is just this simple: no matter how unlikely something is in the first place, once it occurs it will become prevalent in those niches in which it continues reproducing versions of itself.

Life owes its improbable existence to an exceedingly rare kind of code. This life-code does two things unique to life. First, it enables self-replicating order to be structured out of disorder. Second, it enables that order to be maintained (for a while) against all the forces that make things fall apart. Wow yourself with this: life-codes are merely a mathematical sequence, like a formula, that shazam-like transforms randomness into purpose and entropy into organization. Life-codes are a real-world Harry Potter incantation, expressed in numerical silence. Any string of numbers that can God-like summon beings out of inanimate dust is as amazing as this universe gets.

Mathematics is invisible. We see its shadow when it gets expressed in something tangible. DNA is a molecule of life because it expresses a mathematical code that organizes viable patterns of molecules out of the inert chemical soup surrounding us. The patterns are viable because they self-replicate and they maintain their order, for a time, against Nature’s forces of disorder. The patterns are visible as nucleotide sequences, but their capabilities are based upon the arithmetic of the sequences – the specific numbers of A, T, G and C molecules that are required to direct the assembly of a specific protein needed to maintain a life process.

From the mathematical underpinning of biochemistry we can state an elegant definition of life: the expression of a code that enables self-replication and maintenance against disorder. Rocks are not alive because they are not the expression of a code. But the algae that covers a rock is. Microsoft Word is not alive because it doesn’t self-replicate (humans copy it). But software that could self-replicate and maintain itself against degradation would seem to be as alive as algae.


The genius of Darwin was to see a continuous chain of life in an immense scattering of broken shards of separated links. We can build on Darwin by presenting a continuous chain of life-codes in what otherwise looks like disparate phenomena. Specifically, RNA, DNA and software life- codes are links in an evolutionary chain. It is the chain of mathematical sequences capable of organizing self-replicating and self-maintaining entities out of inert building blocks. This view is consistent with the so-called “disposable soma” theory of evolution, “soma” being the Greek word for body. The theory says that bodies are DNA’s way of making more DNA. I’m taking the theory one level higher: somas are math’s way of making new self-replicating codes.


Nature surprises us with new life-codes just as she surprises us with new variations on existing life-codes. Nature will select new life-codes that are superior self-replicators in their niche just as she selects the best replicating variations on existing life-codes. Life-codes that give rise to many adaptable variations will become more dominant, just as phyla that give rise to many adaptable species become more prevalent. It is simply a step-up of scale to understand that evolution operates on types of life-codes as well as on the offspring of life-codes. DNA, as a type of life-code, is itself subject to a struggle for survival just as are the millions of species that use it as their code for organizing order out of raw nature. It is exciting to be alive at the time that new kinds of life-code, based in software rather than molecules, make their initial appearance.

We Bring Improbable Things to Life

The numbers of ways to write software are as unlimited as the ways to string molecules together. It might seem as unlikely for software to become alive as it was for molecules to become alive. Yet while it took eons for earth’s first molecules to self-replicate, people have already hit upon certain strings of software code that reproduces itself. We call them software viruses. People have also organized lines of code into sequences that respond to stimuli. These programs are familiar to any gamester or avatar user. Humans endlessly mutate (“hack”) software the way cosmic rays and random chemistry mutate our genetic codes. A good argument can be made that these hacks have already produced software with most if not all the qualities of life.


Just like life, software is organized, and exchanges energy with the environment. It takes in electricity and sheds heat via its hardware, much as a genetic code takes in nutrients and sheds waste via its body. As with living molecules, living software can reproduce, respond to stimuli, develop and adapt. Programs are written that go out onto the web, find compatible freeware, cut and paste it into the original code and continue developing. Humans and other life forms develop analogously: we go out into our natural environment, incorporate food and compatible experiences.

There are of course many differences between organic life and software that has characteristics of life. But the simple lesson of life remains the same: No matter how unlikely living software is, once it occurs it will become prevalent in its niche if it can continue reproducing itself.

Now, these are undeniable facts: there is universal fascination with software (e.g. applications), software has a gigantic stake in the economy (e.g. chips) and the energies of hackers worldwide are mind-boggling (e.g. web apps). These forces are as prolific in producing living software prototypes as Mother Nature was in producing living RNA/DNA prototypes. Organic life clicked “on” then, and cybernetic life is clicking “on” now. Improbability becomes inevitability when numbers get large. There are a very large number of people working on imbuing software with the characteristics of life.


The differences between organic and cybernetic life are less important that their similarities. Both are mathematical codes that organize a compatible domain to perform functions that must ultimately result in reproduction. For organic life, the code is written in molecules and the domain is the natural world. For cybernetic life the code is written in voltage potentials and the domain is the IT world. We call organic life biology. It seems fitting to call cybernetic life vitology .

In biology the mathematically coded nucleotides organize nearby atoms into ever-larger molecules. These molecules, such as proteins, do life’s work of reproducing by bulking up and (if sufficiently evolved) trying to stay safe. In vitology the mathematically coded voltage levels organize nearby sub-routines into ever-larger programs. These programs do life’s work of reproducing by occupying more firmware and (if sufficiently evolved) trying to stay safe.

It is interesting to recall that molecules also depend upon electron-based voltage levels to stay connected. Atoms bind into molecules via either covalent or ionic electron coupling. Hence, at the most general level, vitology is a life-code that requires only electrons, while biology is a life- code that requires atomic nuclei as well as electrons. The electron-based life-codes of vitology must be seated in compatible computer hardware, while the atom-based life-codes of biology must be seated in a compatible nutrient milieu. The main point is that biology and vitology are each abstract mathematical codes that spell out the path to self-replication in organic and IT environments, respectively. Thus, stripped to its essence, all life is but the expression of self-replicating codes.

What Is Life?

Many experts have tried to lasso the definition of life. They often disagree: some emphasize biology, others physics, some requirements are Darwinian, others spiritual. They are all talking about pretty much the same things we think of as being alive – plants, animals, and microbes. The problem is that none of the definitions are consistent and complete to everyone’s satisfaction. Some definitions exclude sterile worker bees, while others exclude flu viruses. Every boundary falters at its edge. So, why bother trying to come up with a one-size-fits-all definition of life?

There are no philosophically compelling reasons to define life. The reasons are all utilitarian. Humans are passionate about categorizing things, for much the same reason they like to build fences. It stakes out a territory that can be used for one’s benefit. Defining organic life as biology empowers biologists to be the source of expertise on the organic aspects of life.

I’ve just suggested a new kind of life, vitology, because software is arising that has the functions of life, but not the substrate of biology. As this living software evolves some versions will unambiguously seem to be alive, and soon thereafter other versions will aggressively claim to be sentient and conscious. All life forms try out, via mutation, different shapes and behaviors – software won’t be any different. If these sentience or consciousness claims are helpful to survival, we can expect seeing more software adopt the same position. It is not necessary to posit that the vitological software “wants” to survive for this to occur, any more than it is necessary to posit that bacteria “want” to survive. It is simply that things that do survive become more prevalent and things that don’t tend to disappear.

We can either deny vitological claims of consciousness, or broaden membership in the huge family of life. To do the former is to incite a long, unpleasant conflict. Think slavery and its disavowal of African humanity. To do the latter requires more than the biologist’s expertise. Hence, avoiding a conflict amongst substrates – flesh versus firmware, wet versus dry, natural versus artificial, DNA coded versus digitally coded – this is a reason to (re)define life.

Biologists purport to be the experts on defining life. They believe it is something that is (1) organized, (2) exchanges matter and energy with the environment, (3) reproduces, (4) responds to stimuli, (5) develops and (6) adapts. If something meets these criteria, then biologists will study it.

Physicists have also tried to define life. Physicists are the experts on physical reality, of which life is certainly a part. To these scientists, life is something that – for a while -- runs counter to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This law says that everything in the universe is becoming more dis-ordered and random. Since life actually builds and maintains order in a defined area, it alone seems to defy physics and thus gives it a unique defining characteristic. In the words of Erwin Schrödinger:

“A living organism [like everything else in the universe] continually increases its entropy – or, as you may say, produces positive entropy – and thus tends to approach the dangerous state of maximum entropy [thermodynamic equilibrium, when nothing moves], which is death. It can only keep aloof from it, i.e., alive, by drawing from its environment negative entropy [which means order or structured things]….”

Physicists will concede, however, that their definition also has exceptions. Nobody feels that stars or galaxies are alive, and yet these objects build and maintain order at the expense of the cosmic things they suck up. Many of these environmental intakes would qualify as “negative entropy”, or ordered things, such as when a galaxy grows by swallowing another galaxy. The growth of a star by accretion of atoms blasted into space by supernovae is not so different in terms of Schrödinger’s definition than the growth of bacteria by assimilation of terrestrial carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen.

We’ve sent several spacecraft to the surface of Mars with sensitive equipment to detect whether or not there were chemical signs of life in the Martian soil. The results were ambiguous. Even the top exo-biologists could not agree on whether the chemical signs we measured in the Martian soil were signs of life.

It is tough, if not impossible, to come up with a consistent and complete definition of life. For most people life is something “natural” that “acts alive.” We think something “acts alive” if it moves under its own power, like a stick that suddenly makes us jump because it turns out to be one of the three thousand species of insectoid walking sticks (Phasmatodea). We think something is “natural” if it is not man-made at all, or man-made only from living components. For example, a new breed of dog may be man-made, but we don’t doubt the Labradoodles are alive since they are made by hybridizing labradors and poodles. Similarly, baby humans are man-and-woman-made, but from things that act alive, like sperm and egg cells. On the other hand, the best man-made robot came from things like silicon and rubber that are not considered living. Hence, we don’t think robots are alive.

The Martian experience highlights a problem with another possible criteria for defining life: does it possess DNA or RNA? These are the molecular codes for making the forms and functions of everything we think of as living. Scientists feel that we can’t assume life evolved these same molecular codes off the earth. Furthermore, there are things such as viruses that possess RNA and yet are not admitted into the textbooks of life. This is because they are inert unless and until they are brought inside a cell.

The peculiarity of RNA and DNA could be circumvented by defining life as “anything that operates in a compatible environment pursuant to a code that is subject to natural selection.” Natural selection requires a code to replicate with some incidence of mutation (error) so that alternate versions of a life form can have a differential chance to thrive in new or changing environments. Under this definition, everything that biologists call life would be life because all those species have a code subject to natural selection, i.e., DNA or RNA. In addition, some things that biologists do not call life, such as viruses, would be considered alive because their code is subject to natural selection when it is in a compatible environment (a cell). On the other hand, things that are not called life, such as crystal rocks or neutron stars, are not alive because they are not operating in accordance with a replicable code.

An important feature of this all-encompassing definition is that it would include software viruses and other programs that either propagate, or disappear, in accordance with their environmental compatibility. In this case, the environment is information technology such as hardware, firmware and software.

A software program is a code, much like DNA or RNA. It instructs other software to do things as DNA instructs other molecules to do things. If software codes can make many copies of themselves, they will become prevalent, just as is the case for DNA-based beings. If software codes fail to significantly self-replicate, they will become “missing links”, disappearing from reality over time. If software codes mutate, such as by inaccurate copying, they will usually not function at all, or not function differently. Similarly, most DNA mutations are either benign or fatal. Sometimes, however, a software mutation could be beneficial in its original or in a new computing environment. In such rare cases, that software mutation would become the preferred form of the program, and would proliferate. Again, it is the same situation with DNA. It is thanks to millions of rare beneficial DNA mutations out of a countless greater number of dysfunctional ones that plants and animals arose from simple cells.

Schrödinger recognized the key role of DNA/RNA-based chromosomes in providing the source of order by which living things uniquely defy the Second Law of Thermodynamics:

“An organism’s astonishing gift of concentrating a ‘stream of order’ on itself and thus escaping the decay into atomic chaos – of ‘drinking orderliness’ from a suitable environment – seems to be connected with the presence of the ‘aperiodic solids’, the chromosome molecules, which doubtless represent the highest degree of well-ordered atomic association we know of – much higher than the ordinary periodic crystal – in virtue of the individual code every atom and every radical is playing here.”

The order of the chromosome that Schrödinger sees as behind the uniqueness of life is not different in function from order of self-replicating, self-maintaining software code. Consequently, life is that which has an order-constructing code enabling the entity to maintain itself against disorder. The requirement for self-replication, or Darwinian selection, simply extends this code-based definition of life into multiple generations. In essence, the living “entity” that is doing battle against disorder becomes the species rather than a member of the species. Humans, for example, are alive because they are members of a species that have a code (DNA) enabling order to be fabricated out of the environment for the benefit of maintaining the species’ battle against disorder (staying alive long enough to create subsequent generations that do the same thing).

Combining these considerations, we can answer the question of what is life as follows:

Life is anything that creates order in a compatible environment pursuant to a Darwinian code. If the code is Darwinian (subject to natural selection) then it must be self-replicating and it must structure a host (Schrödinger’s ‘negative entropy’) for itself that lasts long enough to self-replicate. As Joel Garreau has observed, chickens are the egg’s tool to make more eggs.

Biology versus Vitology: A Sixth Kingdom, Fourth Domain or Second Realm

Our consistent and complete definition of life will not satisfy everyone. Biologists will not see their commonality with software engineers, even though the simplest and most elegant definition of life includes both their subject matter. To solve this problem it might be necessary to admit that there are two different kinds – or realms -- of life: biological life, and vitological life.

Biological life is anything that operates in a compatible environment pursuant to a DNA or RNA code. Indeed, the current taxonomical division of life into three domains (archaea, bacteria and eukaryota) is mostly based upon systematic differences in these codes. (Despite these systematic differences, the most advanced eukaryota, mammals, have one-third of their genome in common with the most primitive domain, archaea.) Previously, biological life was sub-divided into five kingdoms (monerans, protists, eukaryotes, fungi and animals) based on the structure and function of each group’s cells.

If software-based forms of life were to be accommodated within the current domain-based vision of life, the resulting phylogenetic tree might look something like the following figure, created by biologist and cyberlife pioneer Nick Mayer. A fourth domain, “digitaea” would accompany archaea, bacteria and eukaryota. Note that digitaea branches off of animals and hominids just as those groupings branched off of plants and fungi long ago. Three species of digitaea are suggested: stemeids that are mindclone continuations of hominids, nanoids that are new life forms assembled from self-replicating nanotechnology, and ethereates for new purely software-beings, lacking any physical instantiation.


In fact, it is awkward to categorize vitology using biology’s domains and kingdoms since both DNA and cell structure is irrelevant to purely code-based life forms. Vitological life is anything that operates in a compatible environment pursuant to an electronic code that is subject to natural selection. The limitations to Darwinian and electronic codes is to emphasize that we are talking about life-like beings – things that are part of a class that can self-replicate, compete for resources and survive – and to codes that are written in 0 and 1 energy states in pieces of technology.

Vitological and biological life are developing radically differently. Vitological life is in many respects more primitive than prokaryotic cells, which lack even a nucleus. A software virus is about as functional as a biological virus. On the other hand, there are software modules such as web crawlers and navigation routines that can outsmart the cleverest animals on the planet. These modules are not alive, for they lack any drive to self-replicate, but they could be cobbled into a larger program that did meet most or all of the expectations of life. Most remarkable is that all these jigsaw pieces of vitological life popped into being within a few decades.

Meanwhile, biological life continues to change so slowly that we marvel at the genius of a Darwin to see the continuity amidst all the extinct pieces. Mutations arise, and specie dominance changes, especially amongst bacteria. But everything is incremental. There are no fundamental new biological capabilities popping into being analogous to navigational guidance software.

Vitology benefits from Lamarckism, the ability of offspring to inherit characteristics acquired during the life of its parents, whereas biology generally does not. Acquired characteristics cannot be biologically inherited, but they can be (and usually would be) inherited by copying software forms of life. This difference greatly accelerates the evolution of vitological life. It is also perhaps the clearest way to demarcate the vitological from the biological realms of life.

There is no a priori reason why living things should not inherit in a Lamarckian manner, but it is a fact that biological beings generally do not while vitological beings generally will. Giraffes are not able to rewrite their DNA code to incorporate useful characteristics they acquired, such as a more muscular neck, but must instead await random genetic mutations that lengthen the neck. A cyber-Giraffe, however, would necessarily have changed its code to cyber-muscularize its neck, and would thus necessarily pass onto its cyber-offspring the lengthened neck.

Vitology is proceeding as if the brain, the eye, the limbs, the vital organs and the basic cell all developed at once, but as separate entities. None really looked alive except maybe the basic cell – the rest were just really cool tools without a future or a past. A Darwin could see the inevitability of software hacks that would stitch the entities together into a piece of life par excellence. He would realize that once such hacks occurred, the resultant being would self-replicate like crazy. That is what life’s program would tell it to do. It would have the smarts to carry out that program despite obstacles and enemies.

It is obvious that vitology is developing millions of times faster than biology. Vitology is parallel processing in decades what biology serially processed over epochs. This difference of phylogeny, their unique domains of competence and their customized tools for achieving reproduction are what makes it unobvious that they are just two different approaches to life. But squint at that mutating self-replicating code at the core of it all, and at the common life-like functions they share, and it becomes clear that strings of digits spell life just as well as can strings of molecules.

Mindclones are alive, just not the same kind of life that we are accustomed to. They are functionally alive, albeit with a different structure and substance than has ever existed before. Yet, that is the story of life. Before there were nucleated cells, eukaryotes (of which we are comprised), such things had never been seen before – not for nearly two billion years. That is time duration that bacterium had an exclusive claim to life on earth. Before there were multicellular creatures there were only single cell creatures – from their perspective, the first slime molds were not so much a life form but a community of single cell creatures. And so the story goes, down through the descent of man. We must judge life based upon whether it streams order upon itself – self-replicates pursuant to a Darwinian code and maintains itself against the tendency to dissemble – and not get picky over what it looks like or what flavor of Darwinian code it uses. Using this objective yardstick, vitology will be alive.

Mindclones, sitting at the apex of vitology, will feel as full of life as we do from our perch atop the summit of biology. Aware of themselves, with the emotions, autonomy and concerns of their forbearers, mindclone consciousness will bubble as frothily alive as does ours.