Humans have always dreamt of an afterlife. It's something we had to create, if only in our minds, once we made the conscious realization that try as we might to survive we would inevitably one day die. This must have come as a terrible shock to our ancestors in deep prehistory (for it was surely many hundreds of thousands of years ago that the realization was made); centuries, even millennia might have passed between the realization of death and the invention of an afterlife, and the interim must have been a melancholy period indeed. One can only imagine the neuroses that plagued the period during that time.
Belief in an afterlife is one of the only memes that nearly every religion seems to share. It doesn't need to be an endlessly delightful heaven: reincarnation, ancestor spirits, the empty gray afterworld of the Greeks, or even the endless torment of hell are all preferable to simple nothingness. Dreams of something after the grave are universal in our species.
It's in the human character, though, that we try to make our dreams real. Whether we're dreaming of breakfast or bridges, we make our dreams manifest, if we dream them long enough, and hard enough, and enough of us share it. There are a lot of us now, and we've been dreaming of an afterlife for a long time. You might say it's become the survival imperative apotheosized at the species level. With a dream that big, at some point the universe has to give.
That point will come soon.
Our dreams become more sophisticated with time. Once we dreamed of crossing small streams, and we cut down some trees; now, we dream of connecting islands to continents, and lay down strips of steel and concrete. Our dreams of an afterlife have grown the same way, accreting complexity as our numbers swelled and our records grew longer. Tales told around the campfire became towering religions, though remaining fantasies for all that. Fantasies are are still all we have, but for the first time those fantasies are starting to resemble technical blueprints rather than stories. We're learning what makes us us, deep inside our brains: neuroscience is mapping it in every relevant detail, cognitive science is figuring out how the parts all fit together, and information science is starting to put together working models.
Before many more decades are out, we'll be able to lift a persons soul out of their mind and put it in a computer. In all likelihood people won't even have to die first; some distant successor of an MRI might be able to read a person's soul in a matter of minutes, at which point you can either use it to back yourself up (in case of death, regrow a body and imprint the soul on it), or animate it, inhabiting either a simulation or a robot body (or another you, if you have extra bodies kicking around.) It's the latter options that I find really interesting; a backup is useful if all you want is immortality, but being able to inhabit multiple bodies simultaneously, now that has some interesting applications. Imagine being able to run a million you's in parallel, having a million times the experience you could have on your own (a million at least; that's assuming the sims aren't running much faster than you). Having bodies distributed around the world would lend people some interesting new capabilities as well, especially as robots - unlike people - are well-suited to survival beyond the Earth's biosphere. A person would live a life of ease at the center of a network of millions of their own personalities, spread through microchips and robots, that do all of their work for them.
You might question what need the network would have of that crusty old lump of meat sitting at its center, directing it's actions. Certainly there's no need for a template; once the first copy has been made, copies of that copy can be made with near-perfect fidelity a near infinite number of times (in practice, every copy could be so copied.) David Brin's idea in Kiln People - a novel that explores the nature of a world where people live in parallel - was to give the dittoes a maximum lifespan of days, and to make ditto-to-ditto copying impossible. In practice I don't see that as a likely technical limitation, although you never know. Still, I like to think humans as such would be kept around over the long run, if only as ornaments, much the same way many countries retain their politically non-functional monarchs.
In the world I see, that is exactly the place I see humanity as occupying. Every man a king of a country of himself, his soul become an eternal thing that survives beyond any one body, for it occupies many.
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
Dreams Come True
Monday, July 30, 2007
Back-Door Uploading: The Free Alternative to Cryonics
These two sites, CyberRev and LifeNaut, are earily similar to an SF story I was working on, involving an upload constructed from a bog-standard human simulation architecture overlaid with all the recorded experiences of the original (of course, the upload is separated from the original, and the original - charged with species treason for playing video games and thus helping to train AIs up to the Turing level - has his brain very precisely wiped of the personality traits and memories that made him a rebellious youth in the first place ... thus making the upload choose between life in virtual heaven and a perilous journey in the world of atoms to reunite his original with his original memories.)
The basic idea at the two sites is to harness expected future computing power to do a kind of poor man's back door mind uploading. This amounts to throwing as much personal data as possible into a secure place (I'd hope impregnable would better describe the facilities, given the privacy implications of this.) Pictures, video, diary entries, personality tests, favorites lists, purchase histories (okay, I made that one up, but you have to admit that would probably be a useful check on other data): any data that is in any way specific to you, gather it in one place and then keep on feeding it.
Imagine if this kind of thing really took off: people wearing portable always-on cams and recording and instantly backing up everything they see and hear. If this uber-archiving became widespread it would create enough information to utterly confound present day historians; they'd rejoice at the abundance and curse their inability to make good use of it.
But really, what would be the point of recording so much? You're sure as hell not going to sit there and re-watch any but the slightest fraction of it; you don't particularly want anyone getting their hands on it, not without your permission anyway, because they'd use it to self stuff to you or incriminate you or in some other way use to do something to or against you. Whatever isn't dangerous or interesting (and that'll be most of it) is just useless. Dead data, archived away forever to no good purpose.
The bet is that future historians will be not be drawn from a population of standard humans, but AI orders of magnitude more intelligent, beings for which humans are as easy to understand as bacilli are to us. They'll take a basic (by which I mean exhaustive and cross-disciplinary) knowledge of what makes humans tic, likely a standardized model of some kind, and then use the archives to do some mixture of setting various universal but variable parameters and training the model up (in some sense it would be as though it lived your life through from the beginning all over again, at least from when you started recording.) Whatever comes out on the other side won't be you, exactly ... but if done well enough, you yourself might by hard-pressed to tell the difference (that is, if you put enough data in: two pictures of your family and a video of you joking around with your buddies at the bar is not likely to produce a faithful rendition.)
This idea is loopier than cryonics, in the sense of being so diagonal to the various views of the world people hold that it simply baffles them, so I don't see it ever really catching on. The same logic applies as in cryonics: by the time people might start to catch on to the feasibility of the idea (freezing yourself in case of death to be revived in case of more advanced technology), the technology will be so advanced that it will simply be able to prevent death from anything, rendering the practice moot. I very much doubt that cam-wearing people recording every mundane thing they see and do will ever become a common sight, at least for reasons of psychic longevity; by the time enough people really clue into the idea, direct uploading - simply doing a brain scan and using that to set a model running - will be both doable and likely relatively common.