Its been an incredibly stressful time in my life. To help me sleep when the going gets tough, I lke to start the dreams thinking about the wild possibilities of science fiction. For sometime, Ive been coming back to something that has nagged me about the Startrek idea of teleportation, namely, how does one transfer consciousness. Newer ideas (which technology will make possible sooner than you might imagine) involve mind-uploading into a computer. You end up with two or more copies of yourself which to an outsider are indistinguishable from you. But your consciousness is still in the original biological copy, or is it? No-one knows what consciousness is. Great physicists and mathematicians claim that quantum wave theory can be used to describe consciousness and in this sense, consciousness is very tightly quantum-entangled within the biological structure of our brains. Personally, this is too far out there for me. I believe that the universe has many mysteries that we are unable to appreciated with our senses, but I dont believe there is any fundamental meaning in the universe. So even if the biological structure of our brains can tap into other dimensions, I am convinced that we are not sentient beings with greater selves - we are what we are, macro-survival organisms that have a beginning and an end. But that doesnt stop me wanting to visit the stars before the light goes out of my eyes. And so I dream in the late tired nights of ways to get there. Which confronts with a childhood dilemma that has haunted me ever since the day I become self-aware (I can still remember it vividly) - what is consciousness? Buddha has said that self is an illusion. I cant profess to understand anything on that level since I have never tried to follow that path. But I found myself reflecting on this last night as my heartbeat calmed. What if our sense of self is simply part of the hard-wired program of the brain, in the same way that language grammer is hard-wired from inception. Its a survival trait because a being with a sense of self has a far great chance to fight for survival and advance and control the environment than a creature with a limited sense of self. From this perspective, self-awareness is not unique to a person in much the same way as grammer facilities of the brain are not unique - we all have a similar variation of the same programming. An individuals uniqueness comes from his memories and from the neurological pathways that have been built out of his environment and his experiences. And so its true, self is an illusion. There is nothing different between my self and your self - its exactly the same program. Imagine that there is a procedure where you go to sleep and an exact biological duplicate is made of your. When you both wake up, unless you have controled the experiment to know which was the original, you will both have exactly the same self-awareness and think you are the original. Its counter-intuitive because we think that there is only one self. But there isnt. There can be billions of ourselves and at the point of inception (mind-transfer) we have the identical sense of self. Then the entropy of the universe takes hold and we diverge into the human race. It seems to me, then, that the only way to transfer oneself to another location or into another substrate (machine) and maintain the illusion of self requires controling the experiment such that the original self is killed. And this is exactly the theme of one of the greatest (in my opinion) science-fiction films of our time - Moon. Could you kill yourself in order to maintain an egotistical hold on your sense of uniqueness and immortality? The only lingering thought that I had before switching off my self-conscious and falling into sleep is that when I wake up, I can never know which copy of myself I am waking up in! https://youtube/watch?v=twuScTcDP_Q
Posted on: Mon, 22 Sep 2014 13:58:40 +0000
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