Bursting Elon's Bubble - The Singularity, and the Idea that Consciousness can be Transferred to a Machine, or Host Avatar.

I've employed critical thinking to deduce that this will never be possible in the way that we want it to be. Right now there are multibillionaires wildly throwing their money at solving life’s biggest problem, death. Why are they doing this? They’re doing it because just like everyone else, they don’t want to die. The problem with this is, we haven’t even figured out how to transfer computer files, how in the world are we going to transfer our minds!?

In the digital age, the word ‘transfer’ has always been a convenient misnomer. When we send a file from point (A) to point (B) it might be our intention, or simple understanding that what we are doing is transferring a file, however in reality, an exact duplicate is being created. So whenever there is a successful digital file transfer, the original file is not the file that is sent/or/received.

That might seem like a stupid observation at first glance, because what’s the difference if the file is the original, or a perfect copy of the original? To answer my own question, there is no difference, and it’s not important.

However, when considering human consciousness, what we’re talking about is an entity that is the sum of the totality of its entire index of subjective life experiences. This is a big deal, but mostly it’s only a big deal to us, and this is why it is something that cannot be ignored with respect to the notion that consciousness may one day be transferable.

Let’s say that tomorrow you were abducted by an advanced race of alien beings. These aliens in particular though, they are very conscientious. So much so, that they don’t like to leave worlds in which they visit disturbed, or influenced by their activities. So they hop around, gallivanting from one galaxy to the next, collecting life forms in which to study. Yet in order to cover up their tracks, and prevent disturbing these civilizations they leave behind perfect copies of the people they’ve kidnapped.

Nobody would be the wiser, as people would interact with your doppelganger, just as they’ve always interacted with you. In fact your doppelganger wouldn’t even know that it’s a copy. It would think that it was you, act like it is you, hell it would be you, but you… you’d still be on that spaceship, experiencing.. only god knows what!

So all of these rich folks who are chasing that pipe dream that one day we’ll be able to live forever. Yeah sure, maybe we’ll live forever, but it won’t be us. Just our legacy, posthuman, 2.0 selves. Unless of course by some miracle of magic, that when consciousness is cloned, the living human and the digital counterpart both suddenly start to experience a sense of bilocation. Now that would be impressive!

For me, the interesting part to this entire thought experiment is that I'm inclined to think that people like Elon Musk have already had these notions, and rephrased the question accordingly. E.g. If a transfer of consciousness will not allow humanity to bypass death, then what other ways might we achieve immortality? I do believe he's asked himself this question, and I think that the path he's on with the neural lace will ultimately prove to be more realistic than the flawed notion that we can transfer human consciousness.

Inspired by a question posed at 'An Experiment In Critical Thinking'.

The images in this post were sourced from Pixabay.

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