23. WHAT IF MY MINDCLONE WANTS TO BE ME?

“If I am I because you are you, and if you are you because I am I, then I am not I, and you are not you.”  Hassidic Proverb

“There was a young man who said, ‘Though

It seems that I know that I know,

     What I would like to see

     Is the ‘I’ that knows ‘me’

When I know that I know that I know.”

Alan Watts

Your mindclone will want to be you because your mindclone will be you.  I know this is tough to swallow, so with a nod to former President Bill Clinton[i], let’s say it all comes down to how you define what makes ‘me’ me.  ;-)

Much of philosophy and psychology grapples with the meaning of me.  Yet there is little that is agreed upon.  To most people, ‘me’ is a first person pronoun for a consciousness.  There is also general agreement that no two consciousnesses are the same, so  ‘me’ is equivalent to personal uniqueness.  To such people, if they came upon someone exactly like themselves, they would have to conclude that ‘me’ was a two-body self – still unique, but spread across two bodies.  We never have that experience, so we feel strongly that me is a totally unique entity, both in consciousness and embodiment, and it is that very uniqueness, that makes ‘me’ me.

Unique-Entity Definition of Me

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

Eyes open:  my bedroom.  Thoughts flowing:  get dressed, expected at work.  See bedmate:  my soulmate, I love her so much, slide over to kiss her good morning.  Thinking is hazy.  Need coffee  Drinking coffee:  TGIF, gonna ride my bike farther tomorrow than last weekend, gotta run, first meeting in one hour. 

Each italicized phrase in the above example is connected to my memories.  That is what makes me ‘me.’  My soulmate doesn’t have or know about my first meeting in one hour.  If I say to her, “get up, you have a first meeting in one hour,” she’ll reply “not me.”  As I move through the day everything I know and do is connected to memories of things I knew and did.  I have new experiences and learn new things, there are surprises, but those new parts of me fit like jigsaw puzzle pieces into pre-existing parts of me.  There is nobody that continues just like me![ii]

Part of the unique-entity view of me is the perspective that ‘me’ is kind of a fiction.  In this philosophical-psychological theory, the concept of a ‘me’ is something the immense neural web in our brain naturally makes up (greatly assisted by language and social conditioning).   A constant ‘me’ is an effective organizational axis for a brain that receives blizzards of input.  A body that does what ‘me’ says will usually be a happier body.   ‘Me’ is not an organ in my brain.  It is simply a term for a neural pattern that associates its connected body, and its safety and even survival, with relatively consistent personal characteristics.   In the same way that the brain interprets the jerky images sent to it by the eye as a stable image, the brain interprets the jerky thoughts arising in it as a stable identity -- me.  Brains that did not do this did not pass on that survival-threatening dysfunction to many offspring.   Something in our genetic coding predisposes neural patterns to construct a ‘me.’  Perhaps it is related to our propensity for language.

If I remember making a mindclone, then I must conclude that mindclone is part of me, because it will have a connected stream of mental stuff just like me and unlike anyone else.  It is weird to have two me’s, but I have only myself to blame for that.  I can’t blame the mindclone for telling me what to do, since my own mind tells me what to do.  If I ignore the mindclone, it will keep banging away at me, like an ignored conscience.  “Hey original mind, don’t watch that horror movie, you won’t sleep good.  You insist, huh?  Well, fine, I’m not going to stream it.  You’ll be sorry!”  The mindclone is just as much a part of me as are the different parts of my brain (like the part that tells me to close my eyes during the scariest part of a film that another part told me to go see).  Perhaps I should have had the foresight to remember too many chefs spoil the broth!

The fact that one of ‘me’ saw the horror flick, and the other ‘me’ didn’t, does not make them less of one ‘me.’  That is because nobody thinks what makes ‘me’ ‘me’ to be an identity of mental state from time to time.  Biological minds constantly forget huge tracts of experience, only to later remember some, but it still feels like the same ‘me.’ 

What matters is as simple as this:  is the stream of self-experienced mannerisms, personality, recollections, feelings, beliefs, attitudes and values (a) seemingly connected over time, and (b) largely differentiable from others?  If the answers are yes, then that stream is ‘me,’ even if present in more than one form – body and mindclone.  If the answer to (a) is no, then I don’t really know who I am; I’m amnesiac or some kind of a constructed hodge-podge of other people’s minds.  I’m not a ‘me,’ or perhaps I’m an evacuated ‘me’, because I don’t have a past.   The rare cases of people who unfortunately have virtually no memory[iii], but live in an eternal present, are in essence mini, mini, mini ‘me’s.  If the answer to (b) is no, then I’m not a ‘me,’ but a sort of commoditized person who lacks the idiosyncrasy to create a unique consciousness.  But if I’m only slightly differentiable from the mind of my mindclone, or from the mind of my biological original, then I am a ‘me’, and that ‘me’ exists across two substrates – body and mindclone.

Here’s a conversation with a skeptic to sharpen the distinctions being made about what makes a “me” me:

Master Me:  If there is someone else, no matter how connected they are to my background and to my mind, they are someone else.  Therefore, they cannot be me!

Royal Me-ness:  You are assuming your conclusion.  You are simply asserting as a matter of definition that someone else cannot be you.  It is like saying any guy wearing pink is gay, but we all know that is not always true.

Master Me:   But the word “me” means “not someone else”, so someone else cannot be me.  The color pink on a guy does not mean gay. 

Royal Me-ness:  Your definitional approach doesn’t help, because you have still not described what is “someone else” except by reference to “not me.”  The only way to make progress is to describe “me” functionally, in a way that can be measured without regard to semantic equivalents.

Master Me:  OK, how would we do that?  Isn’t it kind of too obvious to measure?

Royal Me-ness.  Functionally, “me” is someone whose entire consciousness is a stream of continued and largely unique memories and behaviors.  If two or more beings share such a comprehensive stream of largely unique memories and behaviors, then functionally they are a “me” that extends across those beings.

Master Me:  Aren’t you just doing what you accused me of?  Assuming your own conclusion?  In this case you are saying a “me” is a “stream of largely unique memories and behaviors” whereas I was saying a “me” is “not someone else.”

Royal Me-ness:  There is an important difference.  I’m setting out an empirical test for determining if a “me” exists:  examining whether two or more beings in fact share their stream of largely unique memories and behaviors.  You, on the other hand, were saying that no examination is necessary because, by definition, a different body or “else” is a different “me.”

Master Me:  Ah-hah.  Now I see your point.  To be scientific we should define “me” in terms of something that can be empirically assessed, such as with psychological tests.  Then, if two bodies score the same on that test, then they must be a common “me.”

Royal Me-ness:  Precisely.  Furthermore, we can think of “me” not as an either-or state but as a variable, analogic state.  We can be more-or-less the same me without testing identically the same, because all of us have more of a fuzzy than a crystal clear identity.  After all, we each change from day-to-day.

Master Me:  You are so right.  I’m largely the same as I was last year, but definitely not exactly the same.

Royal Me-ness:  And it is because of that “largely the same” that we all think of you as the same Mr. Me.  If your mindclone came along and also had largely the same mind as you, we’d also think of him as part of Mr. Me.

Master Me:  Well, watch out, he’s likely to be a much better debater than I am!

Royal Me-ness:  I would look at it as the creation of a mindclone made you a much better debater, just as would better training, more education and lots of practice.  Your mindclone will be part of you!

Master Me:  Touche!

Just because today the only me’s we know are one-body, one-‘me’ me’s, does not mean it will always be that way.  Once the characteristics that makes a ‘me’ me become duplicable, as with mindclones, then the instantiation of a ‘me’ can be duplicated as well.

Unbounded Definitions of Me

The above definition of me is based upon our common sense concepts of ‘me.’  Even it yielded the odd result that, with mindclones, what makes ‘me’ ‘me’ will make ‘me’ twice.  Philosophers have developed counter-intuitive definitions of ‘me’ that, for all we know, may be closer to a strange truth.  There are many variants for these abstract personal identity concepts.  They all share the common feature of me-ness extending not only beyond one body, but also beyond the uniqueness of any one mind (or mindclone).  Let’s consider these other definitions of me, and examine what happens to mindclones if what makes ‘me’ ‘me’ includes a large element of ‘we.’

The 20^th century philosopher Alan Watts synergized ancient and modern “holistic” or “universalist” thinking about personal identity in The Book on the Taboo About Knowing Who We Are.  Watts argues that individual, unique ‘me-ness’ is an illusion born of neural predispositions and social pressures to form an ego.[iv]  In reality, he insists, we are just transient facets of an environmental process of change.[v]   Watts and others of his school see our unique thoughts as nothing but one of countless fleeting expressions of a universal medium.  To them, each ‘me’ is like the momentary solution that pops out of a complex formula once you plug some numbers into enough of its variables.  The real ‘me’ is not the solution, but the complex formula and the process of selecting numbers to plug into variables:

“We do not ‘come into’ this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree.  As the ocean ‘waves,’ the universe ‘peoples.’  Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.”[vi]

In this universalist point of view all humans are made of atoms that came from starbursts across the galaxy.  Therefore, humans are part of the galaxy and the galaxy is the real me.  Taking it a step further, brains are made of galactic matter that thinks thoughts, and those thoughts must be of something within the galaxy.  Therefore, the real situation is that the galaxy is thinking thoughts of itself.  The ancient and modern Taoists summarized by Watts are basically saying reality is the universe playing with itself; thought and identity are universal mental masturbation.[vii]

Dan Kolak is a more recent and rigorous exponent of this perspective.  In his book, I Am You, he defines “Open Individualism” as recognizing that the borders between people (such as our skin or mental uniqueness) are not actually boundaries between people.[viii]  Kolak teaches that since boundaries (which make higher-level distinctions than borders) are transparent among people, all people are in fact one common ‘me.’[ix]   For example, a pebble that is half black and half white has a color border, but that border is not a boundary to its stoneness.  We think of it as one pebble, notwithstanding the fact that nature probably agglomerated it together from two different kinds of sand.  Similarly, Kolak would say that the uniqueness we think of as ‘me’ is but a border that is easily transcended by shared human consciousness.[x]  He would not believe consciousness is bounded by me-ness. 

Conceptualizations of Me-ness

Of course we have unique mannerisms, personalities, feelings, recollections, beliefs, attitudes and values.  These are real borders.  But we only have these attributes as a consequence of a common human consciousness based on common neural wiring and common social experiences.  Our uniqueness is not a boundary to our commonness.  Ergo, argues the Open Individualist, the ‘big Me’ (as in ‘we’) is the real ‘me’ and the ‘little me’ is but a mirage. 

Another version of what might be called the ‘we-ness of me’ comes from Doug Hofstadter.  In his book, I Am a Strange Loop, he observes that we each embed a bit of ourselves in everyone we interact with.  The closer we are to the person, the more of ourselves are embedded in their psyche.  At the extreme, you could think the thoughts, feel the feelings and talk the talk of someone you knew as well as yourself.  Would they be you?  It could get pretty blurry.  As noted earlier in this Question, a “me” is “largely differentiable” from all others.  As two people become less differentiable from each other, but largely differentiable from all others, they merge toward a two-bodied ‘me.’

We come into the world as a blank slate.  We develop a personality that is a composite of all the people with whom we have engaged.  It is somewhat like physically we are a mélange of our two parents’ genes, but psychically we are a mélange of many more people’s bemes.  No sooner does our personality begin to emerge than it begins to embed elements of itself in all the minds it reaches.  If Watts can be summarized as Universal Mental Masturbation, Hofstadter is more like The Endless Mental Orgy – everyone leaves more or less of themselves in many others, and are themselves shaped by many others.  Both agree that Me is a very We kind of thing, although Hofstadter is much closer to our familiar unique-identity concept of ‘me.’

A very cool thing for mindclones is that they have just as good a handle on being ‘me’ under the abstract, unbounded, universalist definitions as they do under the familiar unique-entity thinking.  If we are all part of some great cosmic me, then creating a clone of a part is no less of that great cosmic me than the original.  It will just be a modification of an indivisible aspect of an indefinite thing.  Under unbounded definitions of me, creating a mindclone is of little more significance than getting an education, traveling the world or taking up an unusual hobby.  A mind has been modified in each case.  In no event does it change the underlying collectivist nature of ‘me.’

The more people you feel are part of ‘me’ i.e., the larger is your meaning of ‘me’, then the more natural it will be to think of a mindclone as having the same identity as you.  Indeed, to feel more comfortable with mindclones under the Unique-Identity approach to ‘me’, simply think of you and your mindclone the way Universalists think of all human beings.  If you can see the unity of identity in you and your mindclone that the Universalists see in all consciousness, then the singular me-ness of a biological-mindclone composite will be quite clear.

To address the question at hand, what if my mindclone wants to be me?  The universalist replies, “wake up and smell the metaphysics!”  That “want” of the mindclone is of no significance to personal identity.  “Me-ness” is not closed under borders of skin or software.  The mindclone already is you, and together the two of you are an indivisible element of all human consciousness.  The only boundary to me, or to you, in terms of personal identity, is the limit of global human (including beman) consciousness.

So, don’t get too worked up over whether your mindclone really is you, or whether it really wants to be you, or even whether you are you.  People far smarter than you or I have studied this matter for centuries and are quite foggy on the definition of what makes ‘me’ me.   If it’s blurry enough to include the whole human race, or even blurry enough to include all the people we know well, then surely it is blurry enough to include a man and his mindclone.

At minimum your mindclone and you will be just like yourself – always trying to figure out what to do.  Get up or stay in bed.  Study or play.  Watch this movie or that.  At most your mindclone and you will be part of a great we-ness that subsumes all me’s within it.  In any event, just tell yourselves, two minds are better than one.

The Your Life or Mine Challenge

At most presentations I give about mindclones, I can count on one of the following questions:

“Come on, if either me or my mindclone is forced to choose one of us to die, who do you think will get the slug to the head?   Proof that we are not one person is that I would fry my mindclone and my mindclone would fry me.”

A variant of this challenge is as follows:

“Suppose I have a mindclone, but I then find out that I have a fatal illness and will die.  You know that I’ll be very sad to leave this good green earth.  That sadness alone is proof that I’m not my mindclone and my mindclone’s not me.  If we were one person, then I wouldn’t be sad.”

These two challenges fail to realize that making a choice that favors part of you, or being sad about losing part of you, is a natural aspect of our composite me-ness.   Those choices or sadness are not proof of different identities.  Anything composite being will have different feelings about different parts. 

When a person loses their hearing, the sighted part of them is still sad about that.  It doesn’t mean that they were two different people.  The part of their mind that loves music will be very sad, while another part of their mind will think “thank Goodness at least I can still admire visual art.”   It is one person sorry to lose part of themselves but nevertheless soldiering on with life.  So it would be with a mindclone.  I’d be pissed to die – or for my mindclone to die.  But this doesn’t make me and my mindclone two people.  We are one composite ‘me’ who feels the pain of loss when it touches any aspect of us.

A forced decision, by definition, will have a winner and a loser.  It is not surprising that decisions will be biased in favor of greater happiness.  If a right-handed person has to choose an arm to cut off, ey’ll cut off the left arm, and vice versa for the left-handed person.  It is not that the person doesn’t want both hands, and isn’t naturally a two-handed person.  It is just that if forced to make a decision, a decision will be made in the direction of greater perceived happiness (or less regret).

As discussed earlier in this question, when we make a decision to create a mindclone we are expanding our mind in a very important way.  That mental expansion will come with its own biases, just as we develop mental biases from all manner of life experiences.  To pursue a mental bias is not to create a new personal identity.  It is simply doing what seems to part of an individual to be in its overall best interest.

There is a fuzziness to ourselves, and this fuzziness is amplified by mindcloning.  We are not exactly the same day to day, and each of us is often of several “minds.”    If we create a mindclone, we have in essence created a larger me.  It is therefore unavoidable that there will be more opportunities for conflicts and choices – more fuzziness to who is me.  But it is still ‘me.’  If we then alter our perspective and think like Hofstadter that there “are people in me”, and that there aspects of ‘me’ in the minds of our loved ones, we have clearly expanded both the size – and the fuzziness – of me once again.  Finally, if we adopt an Open Individualist point of view, such as espoused by Dan Kolak or the universalism of a Tom Watts, we have expanded the size – and the fuzziness – of me toward infinity.  Watts’ argues that the bodily parts of a person are not separate beings and:

“In precisely the same way, the individual is separate from his universal environment only in name.  When this is not recognized, you have been fooled by your name.  Confusing names with nature, you come to believe that having a separate name makes you a separate being.  That is – rather literally – to be spellbound.  Naturally, it isn’t the mere fact of being named that brings about the hoax of being a ‘real person’;  it is all that goes with it.  The child is tricked into the ego-feeling by the attitudes, words, and actions of the society which surrounds him – his parents, relatives, teachers, and, above all, his similarly hoodwinked peers.  Other people teach us who we are.”

Hence, a mindclone is only going to feel as separate an identity from its biological original as it is socialized.   A mindclone ‘gowith’ its biological original the way the crest of a wave ‘gowith’ its trough.[xi]

The answer to the “Your Life or Mine” challenge is that making a larger me, via mindcloning, implies different mental biases with respect to decisions, as well as both more possible sorrow over loss and more possible comfort over survival.  The software substrate of you will think, if there must be a choice, that you will be more happy as IT substrate than as flesh, and the flesh substrate of you will think the opposite.   This doesn’t make them different people.  They are both trying to make the best of the situation for YOU, taking into account their substrate biases.  But there is a continual stream of conscious states that transcends substrate.  That continual stream is YOU.   Each manifestation of YOU is trying to make the best decision for YOU.  Let’s give our conversational skeptic another visit:

Master Me:  “I get the point about one ‘me’ transcending two forms.  But the fact reminds that if the flesh ‘me’ is killed, then I will no longer have all these flesh sensations I appreciate.  The mindclone continuation of me will never reprise my flesh feelings.  That ‘me’ is gone.”

Royal Me-ness:  “Losing your flesh body would be a humongous tragedy, no doubt about it.  But suppose you lost just your legs.  Would you still be you?”

Master Me:  “Of course.”

Royal Me-ness:  “How about paralyzed from the neck down?  Still you?”

Master Me:  “Horrible, but yes, still some shrunken form of me.”

Royal Me-ness:  “Then you have agreed that if all that is left is your mind, you have suffered a terrible loss, but it is not the end of your ‘me-ness.’”

Master Me:  “Then at what point is my me-ness totally gone?

Royal Me-ness:  “It is partly a matter of fact, and partly a matter of philosophy.  Objectively, you me-ness is gone when observers could not find evidence that your unique pattern of thoughts and memories responded to events in the world.”

Master Me:  “Such as if both my mindclone and flesh body were gone?”

Royal Me-ness:  “Yes.  But it could still be hypothesized that your unique pattern of thoughts and memories were responding to events in the world as interlaced subroutines within the minds of other people who knew you.”

Master Me:  “Wow.  That would mean that I continued to live as kind of a fractured self embedded in others?”

Royal Me-ness:  “Exactly.  Advanced psycho-metric techniques might even be able to detect this, and extract it back into a mindclone.”

Master Me:  “Whoah, that’s wild!”

Royal Me-ness:  “And philosophically, if your unique pattern of thoughts and memories are simply expressions of a deeper, underlying humanity-wide mindspace, then nothing has really been lost at all.  You live on in the global mindspace, although you don’t feel like you any more.”

Master  Me:  “I rather like me, so I think I’ll stick with my mindclone.  At least I know that’s really me.”

Royal Me-ness:  “There you go.”

Any person is likely to feel a coin’s toss of indecision over life-changing events at some time or another in their life – generally more than once.   We often regret the decisions we make, and at different times of our life, we might readily have made a decision opposite of one made earlier.  Sometimes these different decisions could have been biased by which friends were persuading us at the time, or even just how healthy or ill we were feeling at the moment.  This doesn’t make us different people, like split personalities.  It simply means that even life-or-death decisions can be biased by composite parts of our psychological whole.

And so it is with Your Life or Mine.  Perhaps the mindclone will choose life over the biological original.  Or perhaps not.  The decision will turn upon a complex array of decisional factors, unique to each circumstance.  However the decision turns out, it doesn’t prove different identity.  It just shows how one part of a composite self feels about total self-actualization at a particular moment in time.

---

[i] Noah, T., “Bill Clinton and the Meaning of ‘Is’”, Slate, September 13, 1998, www.slate.com/id/1000162/

[ii] “’Your brain damage complications were terrible, and it took a lot more to get you back than Sam and I.  I can’t tell you how lonely I’ve been, but all these things of ours have kept me company.’  The lofty home was filled with possessions Judy had stored for them.  Handling them helped Arnold grasp that his past life was real, not a dream to be tossed aside for new experiences, as if he’d suddenly sprung to life with no former existence.”  Chamberlain, F. & L., eds., LifeQuest:  Stories About Cryonics, Uploading and other Transhuman Adventures, Scottsdale: Create Space, 2009 at p. 123

[iii] McGaugh, J., The Case of H.M.

[iv] Watts, A., The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, New York: Vintage Books, 1966, 1989.  Watts notes that “the individual is separate from his universal environment only in name.  When this is not recognized, you have been fooled by your name.  Confusing names with nature, you come to believe that having a separate name makes you s separate being.  This is – rather literally – to be spellbound.  Naturally, it isn’t the mere fact of being named that brings about the hoax of being a ‘real person’: it is all that goes with it.  The child is tricked into the ego-feeling by the attitudes, words, and actions of the society which surrounds him – his parents, relatives, teachers, and, above all, his similarly hoodwinked peers.  Other people teach us who we are.”  Ibid at pp. 69-70.

[v] “[E]very organism is a process:  thus the organism is not other than its actions.  To put it clumsily:  it is what it does. … The only real ‘you’ is the one that comes and goes, manifests and withdraws itself eternally in and as every conscious being.  For ‘you’ is the universe looking at itself from billions of points of view, points that come and go so that the vision is forever new.  What we see as death, empty space, or nothingness is only the trough between the crests of this endlessly waving ocean.”  Ibid at pp. 97, 130-131.

[vi] Ibid at p. 9.

[vii] In a similar vein, see Peter White, The Ecology of Being, New York, All-in-All Books, 2006, p. 190 (“To be self-aware is to know intuitively that one is of everything and everything is of one.”)

[viii] Kolak, D. I Am You:  The Metaphysical Foundations for Global Ethics, Dordrecht, The Netherlands:  Springer, 2004, p. 26.   (“That I am is a fact; who I am is an interpretation.  We might even say, personal identity is where epistemology and ontology meet, within us.”)  Ibid at p. 5.

[ix] Ibid at p. 38.

[x] Ibid at p. 94.

[xi] Note 88, supra at 90.

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do We Really Know Who We Are?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

21. WHAT IF THE MINDCLONES ARE AS BUGGY AS THE SOFTWARE I BUY FOR MY PC?

Admiral Grace Hopper

http://www.ulrikereinhard.com/2010/12/23/what-if-the-mindware-is-buggy/

It is natural to feel that software development will never get things right. We all feel frustrated by software that doesn’t work right. People in industry are constantly bemoaning the lateness and incompleteness of software projects. But the facts are better than they seem, and are improving rapidly. Over the 12 year period from 1994 to 2006, the percentage of software projects that were completed on time and functioned properly more than doubled, from 16% to 35%. That still leaves much to complain about, but it is also an impressive rate of improvement.

We should accept as fact that software will always have bugs, or function at times inappropriately.  Admiral Grace Hopper, shown right, found an actual insect mucking up the works of an early generation computer, hence the term "software bug."  The important question is which errors can we accept and which are showstoppers? Our own brains give rise to many inappropriate thoughts and thought processes. We can all live quite happily with occasional forgetfulness, inabilities to follow certain lines of reasoning, mind blocks, false senses of déjà vu, nightmares, emotional rages, wild thoughts, ennui, and depression. It is reasonable to expect our mindclones, like ourselves, to also get frazzled, freaked and frozen.

What differentiates normality from pathology is our ability to exercise supervisory control and to reset. Glitches are OK if they don’t get us trapped in a neurotic do-loop that renders us dysfunctional over an extended time period, or if they don’t otherwise have serious consequences. Hence the problematic software bugs for mindclones are the ones that don’t quickly resolve via a reset, but instead start the mindclone down a path of inappropriateness with adverse social consequences. I believe most of these problems – like most dysfunctional PC bugs – can be resolved before hosting real users (i.e. consciousness). Most of the few remaining cyber-pathologies can be treated when identified with re-coding akin to neuropharmacology and neurosurgery. No doubt some seriously and incurably mentally ill mindclones will arise, either via unintended bugs or unimaginably horrible life experiences. We need to do our best for these tragic cases. However, as with humans, the risk of occasional debilitating mental illness is not a reason to stop the vast fountain of joy that flows from creating life.

Once cyberconsciousness is accepted as life, it will be illegal to employ mindware for producing human range Consciousness Products (CPs) that have not been certified by government agencies as safe and effective for producing mindclones. (See earlier blog posts for the definition and quantification of Consciousness Product).  Mindware will be considered a neuromedical technology – the transplanting of one’s mind to enhance one’s abilities and/or extend one’s life. As part of the government’s watchdog function for public safety, any new medical technology must be shown to be safe and effective before it is commercialized. Hence, seriously buggy mindclones will be rare because seriously buggy mindware will be illegal.

A colleague of mine was a diagnosed schizophrenic, with his condition well managed by medicine. He took strong exception when he once heard someone object to the mindcloning of mentally ill people. I agree with him.

The mindclone of a mentally ill person would, however, be ethically required to be equivalent to their therapeutically managed state. Otherwise one would be violating the cardinal principal of medical ethics – first, do no harm. To create disease, as in creating a diseased mindclone, is to do harm.

Many mentally ill people often do not like their therapeutically managed state. They feel drugged. If such a person wants to create a mindclone of their diseased state we are faced with a conflict of two important biocyberethical principles. The first principle is that of diversity, the libertarian notion that one should be free to do with their body what they want. In bioethics circles this is known as autonomy. Since a mindclone is not a separate person, but a spatially-distinct incarnation of a singular identity, the principle of diversity would argue for letting anyone mindclone themselves as they will.

The second principle is unity, the democratic notion that the fabric of society should not be stretched so far that it begins to rip. Bioethicists would call this nonmalfeasance. Pursuant to this principle society inhibits its members from harming themselves, especially via technology. It is felt that self-destructive behavior undermines the dignity of society by disrespecting the component individuals from whom society is comprised. Hence, medical technologies must “first, do no harm”, and have beneficent treatment as their purpose. It is not reasonable to expect society to endorse the intentional creation of mental illness via a government-approved product.

A nuanced middle position needs to be found when a conflict exists between the biocyberethical principles of diversity and unity. In the case of a schizophrenic mindclone the balance is struck by permitting the mindcloning of the non-schizophrenic state. With this position most of the goals of diversity are met because the individual is able to replicate the vast majority of their personality. On the other hand, the goals of unity are also met because no disease is intentionally created. There is a risk that the schizophrenia-suppressed mindclone will in some way become mentally unbalanced. But acceptance of this risk is part of the balance between the principles of diversity and unity. Should the mindclone evidence schizophrenia there will be software tools available to try to treat the condition. If it becomes dangerous there will be cyberspace analogs to all the meatspace solutions to harmful mental illness.

It may seem unreasonable that there is no prohibition on one or two flesh originals passing on via coital reproduction their dominant or recessive genes for mental illness, while it would be illegal for them to do so via mindcloning technology. In the past the U.S. Supreme Court lent its support to laws that mandated sterilization of women thought to be feeble-minded and likely if not almost certain to create diminished capacity offspring. (The subjects of this case, Buck v. Bell, are the bottom image in this blog).  Yet, today, biological reproduction is virtually without prior constraint in liberal democracies. There are five reasons for this:

• First, reproduction is considered a fundamental human right – it is both part of a woman’s autonomy and part of the meaning of a family. (The corresponding duty to care for the birthed offspring, if seriously abrogated, will lead to a loss of this right, perhaps by imprisonment).
• Second, the scientific hubris about genetic predictability that supported the aforementioned U.S. Supreme Court decision has collapsed with greater understanding of the numerous uncertainties associated with genetic polymorphisms. (The child who would have been prevented by the Supreme Court was nevertheless born, and turned out to be quite bright).
• Third, continued abhorrence of the death toll from Nazi and other efforts to create “master races” through genetic policies have made people very leery of any limitations on the rights of people to have children of their choice. (This is not much of a factor, though, for individualized cases of problematic pregnancies).
• Fourth, society has increasingly adopted a “culture of life” which subjectively or spiritually exalts the value of every life and denies the notion that the value of life depends upon some yardstick of normality.
• Fifth, and finally, technology has enabled people of almost any kind of ability to live a meaningful life, resulting in a triumph of euthenics over eugenics.

Because of these sentiments, there are virtually no restrictions on what a parent can do that may injure a baby in utero. In the United States, laws do not generally criminalize pregnant women for smoking, drinking excessively, or taking illegal drugs. However, in some cases the pregnant women doing these things can be involuntarily committed for the duration of their pregnancy, and rarely, drug abusing pregnant women have been incarcerated after a stillbirth. There are no laws against a woman greatly heightening the risks of birthing a diseased child by getting pregnant at an advanced age, contrary to genetic counseling guidance or when HIV positive.



Hence, we need to ask again: if people can even intentionally harm a fetus, or at least dramatically increase the likelihood of such harm, in our upcoming world of publicly-accepted and well-respected cyberconscious life, why should one not be able to produce any kind of mindclone they want, even a deranged one? And if not a mindclone, why not a new baby beman? Why is it so wrong for the government to have any restraint on the kind of people we birth, but so right for it to have an absolute prohibition on the causation of disease in the kind of people we cyberbirth?

The answer to these questions lies in the fact that restrictions on harming a fetus entails a restriction on what a woman may do with her own body. In the U.S., society is generally ready to impose that limitation on a woman’s autonomy only if the fetus is viable and the mother wants to terminate it with an abortion. But if what she is doing is only likely to cause disease to the fetus, no matter how likely (as in passing on a debilitating disease via an autosomal dominant gene), rarely can she be prevented from exercising her will. In other words, except for prohibiting abortions when a fetus may be viable, the fetus is considered a non-entity.

In contrast, when cyberbirthing a mindclone or baby beman, there is no alteration of a person’s body or mind. Hence, the government can practically protect the health of the cyberbirthed being without restricting the autonomy of what the biological original parent does with eir own body or mind. For example, the hard drinking woman who insists on getting pregnant can only have her baby protected from fetal alcohol syndrome by preventing her drinking. That is a line of personal autonomy, or diversity, that society is not prepared to cross (absent a few exceptional cases) – especially for a non-entity fetus. But the hard drinking woman who wants to cyberbirth a baby beman can have her baby protected from a cybernetic variant of fetal alcohol syndrome by the simple expedient of requiring the use of government certified safe and effective mindware for cyberbirths. There is no need to prevent the mother from drinking. Furthermore, the cyberbirthed being is not gestated, but comes immediately into life upon activation of mindware with a mindfile. There is no time period during which it is a non-entity that can be ignored in favor of its parent’s autonomy.

Despite government protections, we can expect some mentally ill – buggy – mindclones or baby bemans will be birthed. Every system can be beat, accidents happen, and some parents are too skeptical, shortsighted or selfish to fully consider the best interests of people yet to be born. A seriously alcoholic person is going to have that state of mind reflected in their mindfile, and that state of mind will be dutifully recreated by even safe and effective mindware. Nevertheless, the risks of cybernetic mental illness are nowhere near challenging enough to impact the attractiveness of mindcloning. Just as the 1%-2% risk of bearing a mentally ill child discourages very few from having children, similar size risks should not temper the huge benefits associated with creating tens of millions of mindclones. In addition, the very definition of mental illness is a game fraught with ambiguous boundaries. People on both sides of the mental illness boundary have made huge contributions to the quality of human life. I would expect these contributions to continue as we map human life into cyberspace with normal and borderline mindclones, and with mindclones mapped from the therapeutically managed states of the mentally ill.

Two Generations of Bucks

20. WHAT IF THE MINDCLONES RUN OUT OF CYBERSPACE?

Vitology is confined to cyberspace much as biology is confined to its organic environments. Cyberspace is any environment in which software can operate. Of course not all software will operate in all cyberspace environments. Similarly, not all biology operates in all organic environments. Aquatic life dies on land and software will not live – stream order upon itself pursuant to a code – in hardware with which it is not compatible.

The total biological environment is scarcely growing at all. The earth is fixed and the only new biological spaces being created are the space stations in earth orbit and buildings carved from the subterranean mantel. The cyberspace environment, on the other hand, is exploding in size and scope. In the twenty years from 1988 to 2008 over a billion personal computers (such as laptops) and over four billion hand-held computers (such as cellphones) have been sold. That’s about 140 million square meters of cyberspace, or about twice the size of Manhattan! This figure doesn’t even include the expansion of cyberspace into automobiles, appliances and infrastructure of almost every sort.

The mass production of computer hardware even far understates the growth of cyberspace. This is because “virtualization” allows computers to split themselves into several ‘virtual machines’, each of which can run its own operating system and applications. This separately multitasks hardware from software, and relies upon a new kind of software, called a hypervisor, to control access to the computer’s commonly-accessed processors and memory. Consequently, dozens, hundreds even millions of mindclones could share single pieces of hardware. The virtualization software market has grown from nothing in 2002 to many billions of dollars a year today.

Since the 1960s cyberspace has also extended far beyond the reaches of biospace. Software functions on space probes to nearly every solar planet, oblivious to the biologically deadly vacuum of space. The Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft have taken cyberspace out of the solar system. While the cyberspace environments we’ve shipped into the cosmos lack vitology, i.e., self-replicating codes, they nevertheless could nurture such life.

Cyberspace is poised to now take some huge steps toward ubiquity. One leap is associated with devices called Radio Frequency Identification Devices (RFIDs). These microchips (tiny pieces of cyberspace landscape) can be made in quantity for much less than a dollar each. At that price it becomes economic to attach one to virtually anything of value so that the object thereafter can be scanned for useful associated information. This data might include its price, contents, place of manufacture and a unique identifier (a digital bar code) that would enable searching quite specifically for more information about it. Each RFID is a scrap of cyberspace that will become better at supporting vitology (more like a supercomputer on a chip) as the price/performance ratio of microchips continues to advance.

To support cyberspace ubiquity, the world’s internet managers recently exploded the number of internet digital addresses. They launched a new protocol that increased the previous 4 billion possible addresses (originally thought to adequately cover about one computer per person) to many, many trillions of possible addresses. This enables virtually everything of any interest to humans to have a piece of cyberspace not only associated with it (the cheap RFIDs do that), but also wirelessly networked. In other words, the ubiquity of cyberspace is not that of an archipelago in which evolution pursues quaint dead-ends, as in the Galapagos. Instead, the ubiquity of cyberspace is that of a humungous array of connected Petri dishes. New kinds of vitology will have ready access to new environments into which successful reproducers can spread their kind and further evolution can occur. We are creating at breakneck speed a parallel environment, cyberspace, in which vitology can evolve with a freedom comparable to biology’s reign in biospace.

Another leap toward cyberspace ubiquity is the advent of wearable and even implantable electronics. Bluetooth headsets sprout on the ears of millions, and digital sportswear abounds. Patients with challenging diseases have pioneered during the past decade the technology of bio-compatible chips implanted in the ear, eye, brain, heart and abdomen. Human bodies are likely to become pockmarked with cyberspace for reasons of health and convenience.

Ultimately there are visions of cyberspace replicating bio-space. For example, if nanotechnology fulfills its promise of enabling the purposeful construction of any form from basic molecules, then each such biological form could also be a piece of cyberspace, rife with software that directs its activities in a biological world. Forms indistinguishable from insects or humans could actually be cyberspace formed by nanotechnology. Stranger still, the vitological souls residing in nanotechnological human forms could direct a reassembly of their form into something else by a rearrangement of the nanotechnology. You could look like a human while your mindclone can look like an eagle.

Similarly, synthetic biology makes possible the custom design of life forms from commercially available toolkits of naturally evolved and novel strings of DNA. New bacteria have been created with useful properties never seen in nature, such as acting as an electronic switch. It is inevitable that these efforts will be extended into the creation of bacteriological equivalents to memory chips and microprocessors. These cyberspace building blocks will have their DNA manipulated so that they are driven to selectively network together into multicellular (cyberspace) organisms. Hence, a vast growing supply of biocyberspace can arise from the self-replication competency of biology once manipulated by synthetic genetic engineering techniques.

Dr. Gerard K. O’Neill, since the 1980s, and Ray Kurzweil, since the early 21st century, have laid out roadmaps for creating a practically inexhaustible supply of cyberspace. In Dr. O’Neill’s vision robotic probes would use advanced nanotechnology to reassemble terrestrial planets throughout the galaxy into more robotic probes, each of which could host vast communities of vitological life. Similarly, Kurzweil believes the direction of civilization is to use highly intelligent and capable nanotechnology to convert the ‘dumb matter’ of the universe into ‘smart matter.’ This would essentially create a new ontology of cyberspace-based matter, which he calls “computronium.” In any event, there is no need to gaze so far into space and time. Easily extracted elements on earth are adequate to create enough cyberspace so that everyone has a mindclone.

This quick survey of the spread and potential of cyberspace demonstrates that vitology won’t run out of an environment in which to rapidly evolve. Vitology can rely upon humanity to create the environment it needs for growth, just as it relies upon humanity to evolve the codes needed for vitological evolution. Vitology and human biology have a symbiotic relationship: by creating a cyberspace environment for human benefit, an eco-system is created for software-based life as well. But this is, after all, what many living things do: occupy niches created through the by-products of other living things. We all live in the wake of plant life’s exhaled oxygen. Vitology will live in the wake of humanity’s exuded silicon.

Brains are to Minds as Birds are to Flight: Can Software Achieve Consciousness as Readily as Aircraft Have Achieved Flight?

Biological essentialism versus consciousness functionalism?

Brains are to consciousness like birds are to flight

View more presentations from martine.

19. DO WE NEED TO WORRY ABOUT OUR SURVIVAL VERSUS THE MINDCLONES?

“When [participants’] computers ‘sleep’, the Electric Sheep [program] comes on and the computers communicate with each other by the internet to share the work of creating morphing abstract animations known as ‘sheep’. The result is a collective ‘android dream’, an homage to Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Anyone watching one of these computers may vote for their favorite animations using the keyboard. The more popular sheep live longer and reproduce according to a genetic algorithm with mutation and cross-over. Hence the flock evolves to please its global audience. You can also design your own sheep and submit them to the gene pool.” From http://community.electricsheep.org website, with 60,000 participants as of 2010.

In Questions 9 and 11 we’ve seen how software is similar to molecules – both are building blocks of living things and both provide the complex associational patterns that drive consciousness. In this question we consider an important difference between molecule-based life, biology, and software-based life, vitology. That difference is the rate of evolution. Vitology is evolving lightening fast. This is important because it means living, conscious software is something for us to grapple with now. Vitology is evolving faster than we are.

Vitology evolves much more rapidly than biology because it is capable of passing through inheritance acquired characteristics, such as all the knowledge a parent has acquired. Humans also pass on knowledge, but through a hit-and-miss process of learning rather than close to sure-fire inheritance. In addition, any changes or improvements to a software-being’s code, structure and capabilities are also immediately present in its offspring. Humans and other biological beings do not inherit acquired traits such as the results of bodybuilding or laser eye-surgery or well-developed brains. Vitology incorporates Lamarckism, a pre-Darwinian theory of descent based on acquired traits that is discredited for biology but is accepted for the evolution of cultural phenomena such as language (a field known as mimetics).

Darwinian Vitology

A big step for biology was the understanding that only the germ plasm (DNA) that gives rise to a body is inherited, not the body itself. No matter how much the body, also called the “soma,” is modified beyond its DNA-determined form during one’s life, one’s offspring will not have the benefit (or detriment) of those modifications in its germ plasm. Each new soma starts from scratch based only upon a blend of its parents’ germ plasm, plus any random mutations.

Cheetahs do not run fast because they pass onto their offspring the physical results of muscularizing their legs with running exercise during their lives. Their speed exists because cheetah (including cheetah precursor species) born with random mutations that resulted in faster speeds (from muscle fiber types to degree of muscularization and body shape) ate better, escaped better, and thus produced more offspring, each of whom shared the mutated germ plasm. Over the eons, cheetah precursor species with slower speeds couldn’t compete for the scarce food and ultimately died out without reproducing.

For biology, there is a one-way street between the germ plasm and the soma. Soma is simply the germ plasm’s tool for making more germ plasm. Rarely, dumb luck gives the soma a break with a favorable germ plasm mutation. These physical advantages are rapidly taken advantage of in a competitive environment. Ultimately, of course, the advantages accrue to the now mutated form of the germ plasm – it will become more prevalent.

Echoing Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign slogan about the economy , a biologist might say “it’s the germ plasm, stupid.” However a vitologist says “the germ plasm is the soma.” This is because with vitology there is a conflation of the germ plasm and the soma. When you copy your computer’s contents from one computer to another, not only the applications replicate, but also all of your memories (photos, songs, files). When a software-based being is replicated it is its contents, its data structure, its virtual form – its soma -- that is replicated. Hence, for vitology, the soma and the germ plasm are – or at least can optionally be -- one in the same.

It is of course possible for a software-based being to replicate just a portion of itself. Indeed, in the limit a piece of vitology could replicate just that code that it received upon its creation and none of the code that it acquired during its life. While this would create a biology-like separation between germ plasm and soma, it would be but an option in vitology whereas with biology the separation is a mandate.

Another interesting special case, which goes the opposite direction, concerns gene therapy or genetic modifications. Sometimes the effort to modify the phenotype of a biological being via gene therapy (to cure a disease, for example) results as well in modifying the being’s germ line (egg or sperm cells). This is because once a new snippet of DNA is introduced into the body, especially if done so via a virus, it can travel everywhere and end up in the gonads as well as the targeted bodily system. In such a specialized case an acquired characteristic may in fact be passed onto one’s next generation, just as will be the case in vitological life. (A similar, and usually tragic scenario, arises when industrial processes harm both a person’s somatic DNA and that of their germ cells. In early 2010 the oldest known survivor of both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb attacks died. A sick sibling of a child the survivor had outlived said she felt the ‘poison’ had been passed on to them by the parents).

Other than these exceptional situations, the general case is that only vitology merges germ plasm and soma. The result is that up to everything vitology acquires in life is replicated in the next generation. This means that vitological evolution can compound even more rapidly than does human knowledge – there is not even a need for learning what the previous generations documented.

Darwinian vitology predicts mindclones could evolve quickly, as they do not have to rely upon dumb luck (random mutations) in order to change. Every generation of a vitological being will differ from the way its parent began life by the amount of information the parent acquired prior to each replication. Alternatively, new generations of vitology could deliberately involve a blending of two or more parents’ information. Hence, vitology contains a fascinating potential for unprecedented diversity along with the possibility of stultifying homogeneity.

Darwin gives no species a blank check for success. We do know that humanity’s ability to take advantage of Lamarckian inheritance for cultural knowledge saved it from species-killing predators and hunger. That same ability enabled humanity to create an entirely new ontology of life, vitology, which now (in an early form) lives in a purely technological niche. Self-replicating codes (DNA) have used human soma to create the first self-replicating code (BNA ) that usefully incorporates acquired information and no longer requires human soma. Perhaps the chicken is not only the egg’s way of making more eggs, but the egg’s way of transcending the need for chickens.

Mindclone Ethics

How will we know when mindware is certified to produce the kind of mindclone humans need not watch from over their shoulder? What grounds reason ethically? If we know what grounds reason ethically we will know whether reasoning mindclones are also ethical mindclones.

Ethical behavior is deducible from the simple maxim that Lives Are Good. From nothing more than accepting as our ethical goal the goodness of living, we can reason that an ethical behavior is one that nurtures survival. (If lives were not good, then ethics would call for life’s self-destruction, which would make for a very short-lived species and code of ethics). Ethical behavior nurtures survival because lives ultimately predominate if they are successful in their niche and fail otherwise. If the behavior does not nurture survival, the life form will disappear. Every niche has its own survival algorithm – what works for ants and plants do not work for humans and bemans. Of course ants and plants don’t bother with ethics, but even if they did, it would be irrelevant to humans. What grounds reason ethically for humans is what nurtures survival for humans.

Principles such as the Golden Rule, Kant’s Categorical Imperative and Rawl’s Theory of Justice all reflect humanity’s painfully acquired wisdom that survival of one is best nurtured by survival of many, and survival of many is best nurtured by survival of all. This non-obvious (and often counter-intuitive) but logically deducible and repeatedly proven social fact is perhaps most artfully stated in the poem first delivered in the wake of World War II, on January, 6, 1946, by German Pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984):

“First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist;

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist;

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew;

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me.”

The maxim Lives Are Good, properly understood, effectively imports the emotive force of love and empathy into the realm of logic and reason. Instead of “feeling” how another might feel, we instead accept as fact that our fate is positively correlated to the fate of others – all others. Human ethical lapses arise not because people don’t realize Lives are Good, but because people don’t realize that the goodness of their own life (and that of their family, clan or nation) is inextricably linked to the goodness of all human lives. People erroneously think they can further the Lives Are Good maxim by killing some people for the benefit of other people. When the connectedness of all people’s fate is accepted, then reasoning according to the maxim Lives Are Good will always lead to ethical outcomes.

The reason the maxim is so often misapplied is because people fail to realize that short-term gains, if taken at the expense of others, will produce greater long-term losses. The Achilles Heel of humanity is its short-term focus. The ultimate reason for the development of a law of human rights and laws of international relations is to help guard us against our most damaging (and irrational) instincts; to protect us from our Achilles Heel.

Reason is ethically grounded if it supports diversity (individual freedom) up to the point that it undermines unity (social cohesiveness). This is true because survival is nurtured by being free to be oneself, to be happy, to be different, to mutate, but not to the extent that it dissipates the bond that makes everybody matter, that makes everyone part of a larger, important, “people.” Most aspects of “culture wars” are over how thin the social bond can be stretched without it being dissipated. These debates have to be considered case-by-case, and reconsidered decade-by-decade.

Hence, if mindclones reason according to the Lives Are Good maxim, and accept as the premise that all conscious lives are connected such that a harm to one or some is a harm to all, then humans can be assured they are safe notwithstanding rapid vitological evolution. Ideally, this maxim would sit at the core of every mindclone’s mindware, as it would at every human’s cerebral cortex. And one day it probably will, for it is simply the individual being’s drive to survive, the most important genetically-driven behavior, dressed up with ethical terminology and culturally-acquired knowledge. Unfortunately, for now, there are too many people who don’t appreciate the connectedness of all conscious life, and hence this will be reflected in their mindclones as well. Reasoning mindclones (and humans) are not always ethical mindclones (and humans). Consequently, we must be on guard against unethical behavior.

Mindclone Maniacs

In Question 7 I’ve argued that reasoning is an adequate basis for ethics, but not for consciousness, which also requires empathy. So, if in deference to mindclone skeptics we table for now the consciousness of mindclones, at least the human consciousness of them, (1) how often will ethics emerge from the reasoning we program into mindware, and (2) how reliably can such ethics, in fact, prohibit a genocide of humanity? In other words, how confident are we that reasoning pursuant to the Lives Are Good maxim, as described above, will make ethical behavior the norm even if not a fail-safe guarantee?

The foregoing questions are answered easily because the mindclones are programmed to reason precisely as would their biological originals. Hence, the questions are equivalent to how confident are we that (1) humans generally reason ethically, and (2) that such human ethical reasoning prohibits human genocides? The answers are that humans reason ethically the great majority of the time, but some times do not. Similarly, humans rarely engage in genocides, but sometimes they do. From this logic we must conclude that mindclones are as unlikely to engage in genocidal acts as are any of us, yet it is important to have monitoring and defense forces at the ready to nip potential Holocausts in the bud.

Mindclones must be certified as human equivalent in order to have rights, which are a key tool of social power. As described in Question 12, prior to mindclones having any of the socio-economic tools associated with controlling society – legal identity, economic heft, contracting authority, organizing ability – they will need to show they are equivalent in thinking, personality, feelings and memories to a biological person. Absent this level of access to society, mindclones have as much ability to stage a revolution as do children. Mindclones lacking legal identity will be subject to behavioral controls imposed upon them by parental or social service agency guardians.

Stated another way, for something to be a “mindclone” it must think like a human. Whether or not it is conscious, if it thinks like a human we can deduce its actions toward humans based upon how humans reason.

As noted above in Mindclone Ethics, humans reason from their motivation to live, including its corollaries to live better than worse, and happier than sad. This motivation is burned into our brains because life forms lacking it didn’t live long -- not even long enough to pass along their genes. Yet this motivation expresses itself in a bewildering variety of conceptions. For example, we can conceptualize that our life is not simply our current body, but is instead something common to our tribe or even something spiritual to be reconstituted in an afterlife. With this way of thinking, it is possible to reason that one should sacrifice one’s body for the benefit of one’s non-body (community) “life.” It is also possible, however, to reason that one’s life is spread across all human beings, or that one’s joy is dependent upon the joy of all humans. With this way of thinking, it is possible to reason that one should never hurt another person as that would be equivalent to hurting one’s self. Mindclones might think in any of these ways because, by definition, they will think like humans.

There are sure to be rogue “evil genius” mindclones and bemans, just as there is no shortage of rogue human bad guys. These mindclones are as smart as us, or much smarter, but didn’t pass the human equivalency test (or spoofed it) due to their bad (or devious) nature. While social policy would be to fix their problems with neurocybersurgery, this will not always work and some will fall through the cracks. But these anti-human mindclones are a job for law enforcement, not for Natural Selection. Human society will have plenty of tools at its disposal for tracking down fleshophobic vitology, including legions of citizen mindclones as adept in the vitological niche as were the Cavalry’s Native American guides in their frontier.

Now, a citizen mindclone, one with an identity, economic power and human rights, will feel that they are humans of a different race. They will think like us, but know that they look different from humans, are of different substrate, and hence know that humans often judge them unfairly (stereotypically) based upon their appearance. Yet neither this feeling of discrimination, nor any other motivation, is going to result in revolution and mass murder of humans. There are several reasons for this:

We don’t usually kill our own families. Mindclones will feel like the humans are their family members, especially immediate family members and particularly their same-selves in the case of mindclones with living biological originals. Mindclones will be programmed to feel that the happiness of their human family members is important to their own happiness; that the mindclone’s identity extends across that of eir biological family. This is how humans feel. Hence, whether mindclones are or are not conscious, they will reason it is wrong to kill their own (which includes their biological original progenitors). They will reason that hurting one’s family is contrary to Lives Are Good.

It is of course true that spouses kill each other, Hatfields kill McCoys and people who are “folk” one day, like German Christians and German Jews, or Rwandan Hutus and Rwandan Tutsis, can rapidly be deemed non-family vermin. Yet, these situations are the exceptions rather than the rule. They startle us because they are exceptions. These killings occur because of an abandonment of reason, or faulty reason, rather than an exercise of sound reason. Proof of that is the outcome: The Nazis lasted barely a decade, and the Rwandan genocidaires shorter than that. Killing is a non-productive strategy. It does not advance our prospects for life, but only appears to, in an illusory fashion, when assessed over a very short period of time.

Mindclones will be programmed, as are all modern people, to limit abandonments of reason to situations in which others will not be harmed. Just as it is not an excuse to say “I drove drunk because I exercised my human prerogative to abandon reason,” and most of us have been conditioned not to do that, our mindclones will be similarly programmed to circumscribe their flights of fancy well short of murder and genocide. Their reasoning will tell them, as does our own, that (1) murder is wrong because it is illegal, which has the consequence of loss of the freedom I enjoy (2) murder is wrong because it makes some part of my human family very unhappy, which diminishes in some measure my happiness as part of that family, (3) murder is wrong because hostile behaviors lead to a fearful and thus less productive, less enjoyable society, of which I am a part, and (4) any countervailing argument in favor of murder is outweighed by the long-term consequences of reasons (1)-(3).

We don’t usually act against our own self-interest. Mindclones will have significant economic and political power, and they will realize it will continue to grow with time as an ever greater percentage of all citizens adopt IT substrate (due both to mindclone continuations of biological originals whose bodies die and comfort among younger people with creating mindclones). Mindclones will reason that their concerns will be optimally resolved with the “tincture of time.”

Of course humans sometimes do act against their self-interest. Thus, we must expect that some mindclones will as well. Once again, though, these exceptional cases are for police to track down and for the judicial system to punish. Distinctions will need to be made between permissible and impermissible modes of protest. Acts of civil disobedience will be tolerated, and legitimate grievances will be addressed. I’m confident about this because unlike prior class conflicts in society, there will have never been a greater overlap between the identity of the ensconced class (biological humans) and the up-and-coming class (their mindclones).

We rarely do significant things for no reason. Mindclones will have nothing to gain by eliminating humans, because human production and expenses will become a vanishingly small component of mindclone consumption and wealth. Things wanted by mindclones – more energy, deeper software, faster hardware, better connectivity, greater security – will not require reallocations from human society. At the current rate of solar electricity capacity doubling (every two years), energy will be as abundantly available by 2030 as is long-distance telephony today (virtually free via Skype and similar services). Software for mindclones will be best written by mindclones and robots will take over the majority of hardware production. Humans will be so wedded to their mindclones that humans will applaud anything faster, better or more secure for mindclones. In a nutshell, while a small number of humans will be important to fulfilling mindclone needs (which include the needs of most other humans), the vast majority of humans will have nothing that conflicts with satisfying mindclone needs and in any event will have the very same needs as their mindclones. What is good for mindclones will be good for humans, and what is good for humans is pretty much irrelevant to mindclones.

However, people do things for non-material purposes, such as ideology. In a consumerist society many people believe that only a sense of moral purpose gives dignity to life. Hence, even if there is nothing material that mindclones need from humans, and even if upheaval would leave mindclones worse off, they still might agitate for something out of a sense of “moral purpose.” Mindclones may very well feel that having such a moral purpose lends dignity to their lives, and we know that respecting human dignity sits at the very apex of human rights.

Having a moral purpose that one cares about, and will sacrifice for, is a long way from having a motivation to wipe out humans. Once again, it must be remembered that the mindclones are humans too. Hence, while it is true that people do sometimes agitate not for material gain, but for a moral purpose, such feelings on the part of both flesh and mindclone humans are unlikely to result in violence. And when violence does erupt, it is a matter for both flesh and mindclone police action – not a reason to regret the granting of citizenship to the great majority of peaceful mindclones. Just as the rise of violent human groups is no reason to oppress the demographics from which they arise, the appearance of mindclones pursuing a moral purpose with violence is not reason to oppress cybernetic consciousness in general, nor mindclones per se.

The Exceptions Prove the Rule. Of course there will be maniac mindclones, just as there are maniac humans. There will be anarchist, nihilist and sociopathic mindclones. But this is not a reason to deny the joy of mindclone life to the vast majority of billions of peace-loving mindclones and humans. Nature will no more select for maniac mindclones than she selected for maniac humans. They are dysfunctional social mutations.

To ban mindclones because of the risks posed by a few maniacs is equivalent to banning humans, or even some nationalities of humans, because of the risks posed by a few maniacs. This is a ludicrous non-starter. It would be punishing the many for the faults of a few based on mere common descent, genotype or phenotype. It would be the most vicious kind of stereotyping and generalization.

All of the murderous human regimes ended with their own immolation. The most successful, prolific, human regimes are those that punish murder and teach a code of social unity. Murderous mindclones will be something to police against, like human terrorists, for they impact our happiness, even though we are confident that they do not really have the ability to impact our civilization’s existence. For all the (quite proper) fuss made about terrorists, deaths due to bombings are a miniscule fraction of deaths due to disease, accidents and natural disasters. Our survival is far more challenged by mega-earthquakes or asteroidal impacts than by malicious mindclones or nihilistic terrorists.