George Rebane
The recent burst of large language models (LLMs) from AI research has reinvigorated the Singularity related topics of machine sentience, sapience, super-intelligence, agency, ethics, morals, …, along with prognoses of what they may have in store for humans when/if they become ascendant. Most commentators, including yours truly, see a high likelihood of a dystopian post-Singularity future for mankind.
Among these well-known AI experts are internationally renowned scientists like Nick Bostrom (e.g. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, 2014) and Max Tegmark (e.g. Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, 2017). These tomes are worth reading more than once, which I am currently doing. It turns that both Bostrom (Oxford) and Tegmark (MIT) are established physicists, philosophers, and AI researchers (and both were born in Sweden).
Their counsel for humanity to proceed carefully into a future not dominated by our species is countered by more hopeful futurists like Hans Moravec (e.g. Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence, 1990) and Ray Kurzweil (e.g. The Singularity is Near, 2005).
About the Singularity, Moravec (Carnegie-Mellon) advises his readers that “human equivalence is just the beginning, not an upper bound. Once the tireless thinking capacity of robots is directed to the problem of their own improvement and reproduction, even the sky will not limit their voracious exploration of the universe. … Moravec challenges us to imagine with him the possibilities and pitfalls of such a scenario. Rather than warning us of takeover by robots, the author invites us, as we approach the end of this millennium, to speculate about a plausible, wonderful postbiological future and the ways in which our minds might participate in its unfolding.”
And it is our postbiological future that I would like to expand on here. Moravec, Kurzweil, and others of their ilk have been describing a post-Singularity world that is inhabited by both intelligent machines and various forms of ‘transhumans’ – humans who have shed their evolved mortal coils and taken up new forms in both the physical and computational sense. A popular scenario has some of us living in cyborg bodies. Another inviting future has us living in virtual worlds as computational entities, and still others have us co-habiting the material (real?) world with superintelligent machines exercising some manner of peer relationships.
The common denominator of all these future forms of existence is that our consciousness, along with other cognitive facilities, is transported to a new and improved processing stratum. This will presumably happen with little or no discontinuity of our perception of self, nor modification of any stored memories, skill sets, and/or proclivities that were in place before we were postbiologically transported. Most certainly none of our loved ones, friends, and other acquaintances would be able to detect in us any change or discontinuity – to them we remain cognitively the same as always, albeit perhaps now expressing ourselves through a different interface.
Moreover, as we consider the prospect of becoming a postbiological transhuman, we are assured in the brochure of Amalgamated Transhuman Services Incorporated of the wonderful life a post-transported existence has in store for us. And by the ability to encode our cognitive metadata into multiple repositories, we are guaranteed virtual immortality (as long as we keep our license current). But are such continuities of consciousness really possible?
I have revisited this question for many decades, ever since I read a short sci-fi story that ignited a doubt still with me today. The essence of the story involves a man, just being told of his terminal illness, who has the opportunity to use new technology to cure his illness and save his family, friends, and colleagues from having to go through the sad and disruptive transition that his early death would entail. After hearing about how the entire process works – starting with a comprehensive body and neurological scan, and ending with a new reconstituted healthy body – he is convinced and signs up for the transport of his ‘old self’ into a new postbiological body.
There is one proviso that our pioneer transhuman becomes aware of only after he has been scanned, and while he is waiting to be introduced to his ‘new self’ to assure that the transport process has gone as advertised. The attendant in charge informs the ‘old self’ that since this transhuman transport was to be carried out in strict confidence, wherein the ‘new self’ would seamlessly step out into the world of the ‘old self’ without anyone being the wiser, the ‘old self’ would, of course, volunteer to be taken out of circulation and disposed of by means of a painless pharmaceutical concoction.
Our ‘old self’ is left alone to vet his ‘new self’ during which the ‘new self’ passes muster through a series of tests designed for such verification. When all is said and done, it is time for the old and new to part company, and the ‘old self’ to take his medicine as he contemplates resuming a healthy and happy life in his ‘new self’. And then with pill in hand, he hesitates and realizes that he is about to commit suicide; he will never again see his family and friends. While no one else will be able to tell that the ‘new self’ has replaced the ‘old self’, the ‘old self’ will know that in this process, and in all such processes, the chain of consciousness must needs be broken. The old consciousness must be annihilated, it cannot survive. Such scans and replacements don’t work.
Once a scan is initiated to replicate an existing cognitive framework, we cannot help but go through a transition of two concurrent sentient individuals. The only possible way around this conundrum is if the transport process truly replicated one cognitive function at a time in a continuous sequence discernible to the transported subject. After each step he would always be able to declare that, ‘I am still the I that I was before the last step.’ In short, there would never be an instant during which two concurrent individuals existed, with one having then to be annihilated.
This kind of problem has long been discussed in the ‘Star Trek’ format in which the intrepid chief engineer is always asked to ‘Beam me up Scottie.’ Critics have argued that even in that case there has never been a guarantee that those who exit the beam are the same ones who entered it, no matter that concurrency was never encountered.
But having said all this, does continuity in the chain of consciousness really matter? Well yes, if we hold with many physicists and multiverse proponents that we and other intelligent critters are transcendent. Transcendent means that our reassembled existence continues after we suffer what we call bodily death. For example, quantum physicist Frank Tipler (Physics of Immortality, 1994) taught, that since information cannot be annihilated, it will be reconstituted in the far distant future as our universe expands to its maximum and then contracts to its next Big Crunch. In that epoch the universe will reassemble and vitalize all the previously dear-departed sentiences. In the meantime, no matter the nature of post-Singularity superintelligences to be, the chain of consciousness is fragile – we die.
And then there is, of course, the matter of God.
rebanesruminations.com 
Leave a comment