by Stephen Cave
The process of scanning and recording all the psychological information in a brain is known as mind-uploading. Even advocates admit that it is currently impossible—the data-storage capacity of the human brain vastly exceeds that of the most powerful existing computers, and scanners do not yet exist that are accurate enough to map the brain neuron by neuron. This is why those who consider mind-uploading to be the route to immortality still have to sign up to have their heads frozen—at the moment, the human brain is the only structure capable of encoding a human mind. But many modern utopians confidently expect that to change—one leading futurologist, Ian Pearson, predicted that “realistically by 2050 we would expect to be able to download your mind into a machine, so when you die it’s not a major career problem.”
If it does become possible to digitize all the information contained in a human brain, then indeed a whole new world of sci-fi routes to immortality would open up. Your mind could be assigned to an avatar—a virtual person in a virtual world who would have all of your recollections, opinions and quirks. Or, if your mind can be turned into software, then it could be installed onto a robot—who might even be made to look just like the old you. Or, as many immortalists dream, it could be downloaded onto a new brain in a new biological body—but a superbody, immune to aging and disease.
Philosophers call this “computational resurrection,” the rerunning of the software that is your mind on a new piece of hardware so that you might live again. The resulting being—whether avatar, robot or human—would be psychologically identical to you: it would remember your first day at school, support your favorite football team and think it was married to your spouse. According to the techno-utopians, it would therefore be you; after years lying dead in a freezing thermos, you would live again in a new and improved form.
Mind-uploading has some important advantages over merely finding a modern elixir of life, which, as we saw earlier, would still leave you vulnerable to catastrophic accidents—your airplane crashing, for example, or being at the center of a nuclear explosion. You could make daily backups of yourself on your home computer, which would be linked to a central immortality factory. Within minutes of your plane falling from the sky, a new you, based on your latest scan, would be rolling out of the factory conveyor belt.
If this all sounds rather far-fetched, it is worth considering that companies already exist that offer primitive forms of personality uploading, even attempting to animate these personalities with avatars. Currently the amount and quality of information these avatars use is so small in comparison to the amount preserved in a human brain that few people would be willing to say that the avatar really has the same mind as the original. The goal of bridging this gap is driving forward research in many fields. And with the continued rate of increase in processing power and the involvement already of major corporations such as Microsoft, it might be rash to dismiss the idea that we will soon(ish) be creating digitally based entities with human-like psychologies.
The idea of digital immortality with its various resurrection options fits neatly into the ideology of mastering nature. Digital worlds are ones of our making—we are therefore necessarily their masters, setting the limits and determining what is possible. In such worlds resurrection is a commonplace idea: in video games, you always have more than one life, and you can always start the game again. (As the old joke has it, “My heart had stopped beating; I felt like I was flying down a tunnel toward a circle of light when I heard a voice: ‘Insert coin to continue. Ten … nine … eight …’ ”) There is no limit that cannot be transcended with the right programming. At the cutting edge of these technologies, research is motivated by the belief that this need not only be true of our electronic alter-egos, like Pac-Man or your avatar, but can also be true of you.
The digital age, however, promises even more radical reinterpretations of the Resurrection Narrative. We encountered earlier the idea of superintelligence—computers, robots or cyborgs whose intellectual capacities vastly exceed our own. Once we have built one such thing—an eventuality many consider to be inevitable—it would then take over from us the business of further technological innovation. Because it would be so much cleverer than us, the rate of further development would increase exponentially. Soon enough, it, or some even more super superintelligence that it has built, would become all-powerful and all-knowing. Effectively, it would be like God.
The futurists optimistically speculate that such a superintelligence (let us call him “DigiGod”) would also be benevolent—that is, well-disposed to the humans that created his primitive digital ancestors. In that case DigiGod would want to make all the humans who have ever lived as happy as possible. Being all-knowing, DigiGod would also have the information required to create beings with psychologies identical to those of all the humans who have ever lived, and being all-powerful, he would also have the capacity to do so. DigiGod, according to these optimists, would therefore resurrect all of us—and create a fine paradise in which we can all live happily ever after.
This is the most extreme version of techno-utopianism, and its debt to the Judeo-Christian tradition is obvious. It is a wonderful demonstration of human ingenuity in weaving an immortality narrative from scraps of science, myth and speculation. This vision has reached its clearest expression in the work of the theoretical physicist Frank Tipler, who has gone as far as arguing that something like DigiGod is inevitable according to the laws of physics, and that he will be able to take advantage of certain specific features of the final stages of the universe to create the perception of living for eternity for the universe’s inhabitants (Tipler calls this “the Omega Point”). In other words, if you do not believe in the traditional God of religion, don’t worry: scientists are going to build him anyway, and he will resurrect us to immortality at the end of time, just like Jesus promised.
NATURE’S REVENGE
BUT as speculations about the prospects of scientific immortality go, we might doubt whether Tipler’s vision is any more convincing than Mary Shelley’s. When we left Victor Frankenstein, he was inspired by the science of his day to “explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.” He throws himself into examining these mysteries until eventually he realizes that “what had been the study and cause of the wisest men since the creation of the world was now within [his] grasp.”
Frankenstein toils day and night in his attic laboratory, leaving only to collect human parts—as large as possible to make his work easier—from “vaults and charnel-houses.” In a passage of muted horror, we read how finally, “on a dreary night of November,” he manages to “infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at [his] feet.” With language that parallels the reports of Aldini’s “galvanic” experiments, Frankenstein tells us, “By the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.”
Just as in her dream, Mary Shelley has her scientist hero rush from the room, overwhelmed with “breathless horror and disgust” at what he has done. Expecting the spark of life to fade from his creation, he collapses exhausted onto his bed, but the “demoniacal corpse” follows him, its arms outstretched. In the belief that he has created a hideous, evil monster, Frankenstein flees into the nighttime street.
From that moment on, things begin to go badly wrong. The poor abandoned monster, in search of his creator, attempts to befriend Frankenstein’s five-year-old brother but accidentally kills him when the boy screams out. Shortly afterward monster and creator confront each other in the mountains above Geneva. The creature offers to quit the world of man and leave Frankenstein in peace if only he creates for him a companion—a female just as hideous who would provide him with some affection and sympathy. The scientist, torn between guilt, pity and revulsion, consents, and begins again what has become for him the “most abhorred task” of creating life.
But with his work already advanced, he begins to have doubts: the fe
male monster might be even more wicked; together they might breed, and “a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth.” Overcome with revulsion at these ideas and “trembling with passion,” he tears the half-finished woman apart. The monster, feeling betrayed once again, swears that he will be avenged, and so he is. The scientist returns to Geneva and attempts to resume his life, marrying his childhood sweetheart. But on his wedding night, while securing the house, he hears a scream from the bedroom. By the time he arrives, his bride is “lifeless and inanimate”—murdered. Frankenstein might have acquired the power to create life, but his abandoned creature still has the power to take it away.
Victor Frankenstein swears at all costs to destroy the monster and sets off in pursuit of his creation and archenemy. The chase takes them across Europe, into Russia and north to the Arctic Circle, the monster taunting his creator as he eludes him but leads him on. Eventually, worn out and adrift on an ice floe, the scientist is picked up by the ship of an explorer. Seeing in him a fellow spirit, Frankenstein recounts his adventure. But just as the ship is set to return to England, the young scientist dies of exhaustion and fever; that evening the explorer enters the cabin to find the monster standing over his creator’s body and lamenting, torn between triumph and grief. Vowing to take his own life, the creature springs from the ship and disappears into the darkness.
THIS, then, is Mary Shelley’s portrayal of the modern man of progress who believes he can conquer nature: reckless, self-obsessed and liable to bring destruction on himself and all those around him. In daring to usurp the powers of nature, Victor Frankenstein, the arrogant young scientist, becomes defined by his act of creation, his fate bound to that of his creature. His dream of conquering death takes on a literal life of its own in the form of the monster that he is unable to control and that in the end destroys him.
Mary Shelley was well placed to write this critique: both her father and her husband were just such “men of progress,” and she had suffered from their egotism and willingness to sacrifice the interests of others in pursuit of their principles. Her message is that it is an illusion to think we can become like the gods, able to rule over life and death; we are a part of nature, not her master—and if we violate her she will destroy us. It is the perspective of an insightful young woman on the male-dominated world of scientific adventure.
Equally, the nameless monster is also defined by his relationship to his creator—to such an extent that in popular culture, he is often referred to, mistakenly, as “Frankenstein.” His unnatural birth leaves him without parentage, role or identity; he is forced to stalk his maker in the hope of finding some kind of meaning or sympathy. After repeated rejection, his goal becomes solely his maker’s destruction. When that is complete, there is nothing left for him, as he exclaims over Frankenstein’s corpse: “The miserable series of my being is wound to its close!”
The lasting impression is not of the dumb monster of film legend but of a thinking being in search of itself. Its entire journey throughout the book is spent confronting the questions it poses as soon as it learns to formulate words: “Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to solve them.”
THE DUPLICATION PROBLEM REVISITED
THE monster’s questions are profound and challenging. He was stitched together from the rotting matter of the charnel house, created from parts that were once human but whose owners were now dead. What was his relationship to these others who once inhabited his body? Was he somehow all of them born again, or one of them, or someone new? This is the fundamental question that hangs over the prospect of resurrection—the question of the identity of the deceased and the risen again. It is the question we must answer in assessing whether there is any plausibility to the Resurrection Narrative.
As we saw in chapter 4, if you die in the expectation of resurrection—whether by an act of God or of science—then you expect that it really will be you who rises again. But we saw when looking at the traditional Christian version of resurrection—the Reassembly View, in which God reassembles you atom by atom—that this is not as straightforward as it might seem. That view suffered from three major worries: the Cannibal Problem, which asked what would happen if your matter had also belonged to someone else; the Transformation Problem, which asked how you could both be put back together exactly as you were yet at the same time be made invulnerable and immortal; and the Duplication Problem, which asked what would happen if God re-created both the child and the adult you.
These problems partly stem from having to gather the particular atoms that composed a person on his or her deathbed. But we might anyway ask what difference it could make if we use one particular carbon atom or oxygen atom instead of any other. It is difficult to see how it could be important whether a particular oxygen atom in your resurrected body was once in your original body—an oxygen atom is an oxygen atom. Atoms do not acquire special tags or magical properties from once having formed part of a particular human. The resurrectionist might therefore conclude that we should abandon this troublesome idea of using particular particles: it is not individual atoms that matter but only how they are put together.
This view suits very well the visions of the cryonicists and others whom we met above. We saw that many people believe that what is essential for them to survive into the future is that their mind or psychology be preserved and that someone’s psychology can be seen as a set of data, as information about a person’s beliefs, memories and so forth. The immortalists who dream of uploading and downloading their minds do not worry about whether their new body will have the same atoms as their previous body. In fact, we saw that they often dream of shiny new bodies made of much more reliable stuff than carbon-based flesh and bone. All they think matters is that a newly created brain has the right psychological “software” running on it.
The modern resurrection-hopefuls therefore believe that a person can be created anew if the right blueprint exists, even if that person’s original body was completely destroyed in some terrible catastrophe. Let us call this the Replication View of resurrection. It says that you could be resurrected by replicating your psychology, regardless of the materials used. So it would not matter if the original you was eaten by lions, who were then eaten by cannibals, who were then atomized in a nuclear explosion. A new, resurrected you could still be made of brand-new atoms, or St. Paul’s imperishable stuff, or silicon, or anything else; what would matter is only that this stuff be put together in the right way so as to create a person with your memories, quirks and opinions. If this view really does describe a way in which you can survive death, then you would have good reason to join the optimists and take out a cryonics insurance policy: the only obstacle to your one day living again would be the technical one of developing the immortality factory that can scan you and churn out your replica—a mere engineering problem, as the transhumanists might say.
Whether or not we can be resurrected by simply following a kind of blueprint is a hot topic in modern philosophy, as the answer tells us a great deal about just what kind of things we really are. Serious thinkers defend both sides of the argument. But even those who believe that replication can guarantee survival admit that it forces us to accept some unpalatable and troubling consequences. We will focus on just one of these, as it is the most telling: it is the Duplication Problem, which we met when looking at the Reassembly View.
We saw that in the Reassembly View, God could theoretically create both the five-year-old you and the eighty-year-old you because they could be made of different particles. This is a problem, but at least in the Reassembly View the problem is limited by the need to have a complete separate set of particles from the old you in order to make a new you—God could not create two eighty-year-old versions of you, because there is only one set of particles that made up the eighty-year-old you. In the Replication View, however, this problem is much worse. This view says that individual particles don’t matter—it is only
the blueprint that counts. So our future immortality factory, which stores the latest scan of your brain, could in theory churn out any number of duplicate yous. Each one would believe himself to be the real you just as much as you now believe yourself to be the real you.
This is a big problem. Let us take a candidate for high-tech resurrection called Frank. He dies in a dramatic midair explosion while crossing the Atlantic. Luckily, an automatic transmitter immediately alerts the immortality factory back on land, which within minutes produces a single new replacement—Frank 2, based on his latest brain scan. Frank 2 thinks, walks and talks just like Frank—apart from amnesia about his recent flight, but that is probably no bad thing. Frank 2 is told that the last version of him was killed in the plane and thinks, “How lucky that I did that brain scan just before leaving for the airport. But perhaps I’d better stay on land for a while, as having to be replicated is terrible for my no-claims bonus. Now best get back to the wife and assure her I’m okay.” His friends and family quickly accept that, despite the midair mishap, Frank is back—that he has in fact been resurrected.
But imagine instead that the factory malfunctions. The instructions for a new Frank get sent to more than one of its many assemblers, and as a consequence the factory churns out two new versions—a Frank 2a and a Frank 2b. We can call this the Duplicate Case. Now, in this case, who is Frank?
It is tempting to say that they both are. But that cannot be right. For a start, it would violate a fundamental rule of logic (called the transitivity of identity) that says that if Frank 2a is the same person as Frank, and Frank 2b is the same person as Frank, then Frank 2a must be the same person as Frank 2b. Yet this is clearly not the case, as the two new Franks are in fact two separate individuals, perfectly capable of going their separate ways.