Me Versus Copy of Me: Transhumanism's Dilemma

Transhumanism: "Transhumanism is an international intellectual and cultural movement supporting the use of science and technology to improve human mental and physical characteristics and capacities."

It is not a philosophy, as it may sound like some reaction to Humanism. Its beliefs range from using advanced medicine to cure diseases to the extreme of uploading human consciousness into computers and living entirely digital lives. At its heart, transhumanism acknowledges a belief that technology has essentially replaced humankind's natural evolution. (Of course, it may be argued that technological evolution is an extension of natural evolution, but that's a whole different debate, which is pretty philosophical.)

The issue that I would like to discuss is the idea of full uploading. I am not endorsing any of this, just trying to imagine what different possibilities might arise in the future, and discuss ethical consequences of them all.

Let's assume 3 things:
1. We would have technology scan a human brain with 100% fidelity.
2. We would also have sufficient technology to transfer this brain scan to a new destination. This destination could be a computer simulation, or a custom-grown human body with a brain tailored to host the source brain's data.
3. That the destination would have a consciousness, and would beat absolutely any test that could be thrown at it to try and disprove identity of the person.

And let's save the whole religious question for another time. "Is that a person? Would that have a soul? Would there be a transference of a soul?" etc. These religious questions are a matter of belief and faith and are difficult to come to any objective agreement, due to the speculative and personal nature of the topic. They make for an interesting discussion, but a very different topic.

The question I am most centrally interested in: "Is that me or is that a copy of me?"

We can assume one of two conditions to answer this question:
1. That the human source and the destination could exist at the same time.
2. That the human source cannot survive the transference procedure.

If the first condition is assumed, then there should be little doubt that the destination is "a copy of me". Of course, from the copy's perspective they absolutely are the same person. The copy would have all the memories up to the moment of transference and it would seem that they have just moved physical location. (or digital, in the case of a computer simulation)

The second condition being assumed makes the question a little more tricky. As with the first case, the destination would have every reason to believe and assert that they are the same individual. Is an individual's consciousness and/or soul something that can be transferred as well? (An argument that one might make against the third of my original assumptions.)

Here we simply must turn to our imagination to supply possible answers.

Answer #1: We are more than our memories.
as seen in the film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
(Technically, spoiler alert, though the film does pretty much lay out its conclusions at the very beginning, so not much of a spoiler.)
In the film, two lovers have a bad falling out. The impulsive of the two has her memories of the other erased with a new technology, and the other - facing the possibility that he can never get her back, has the same procedure done to himself to erase her. The movies opens with them meeting seemingly for the first time, hitting it off, and then it becomes clear that this is the end of the story, and the rest of the movie is a flashback explaining what happened. Maybe their memories didn't totally erase and the technology doesn't work. Or perhaps, as I think is the movie's message, is that there is a transcendental nature of love, human relationships, and human beings themselves. While the movie is not religious at all, there is a pretty strong indication that we are not merely the sum of our memories.

This comes down to the fundamental philosophical debate of mind / body and mind / spirit duality. Where does the human body end and the human being as an individual begin?

Answer #2: Transporters and Seat Belts!
as seen in the TV series and films of Star Trek

Throughout the Star Trek series, creator and writer Gene Roddenbury included a pretty common space science-fiction technology: point-to-point transporters. Star Trek was the first science fiction, to my knowledge, to not only use this technology regularly, but explain and analyze it. As the technology is presented in Star Trek, a person's matter is scanned, transformed into energy, beamed to the location, and reassembled into matter. The reason I wrote "Seat belts!" is because there are so many regularly occurring technical contradictions and oversights throughout the Star Trek series. If I get too wrapped up in one of them, I remind myself of how many lives could have been saved if starships had seatbelts. (It's even joked about in the first episode of Star Trek: Enterprise by the character Captain Archer.) In other words, sci-fi pieces like Star Trek are meant to discuss philosophical and contemporary issues rather than the technology itself. (This should be apparent in the fact that Roddenberry put a black woman, a Russian, and a half-alien on the bridge of the Enterprise; this was during a time when Americans was still fighting for race and gender equality, was at Cold War with the Soviet Union, and had lots of space-movies where aliens are scary take-over-the-world types.)

There are two episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation where philosophical issues of transporting humans comes up. The first entitled, "Realm of Fear", where a character Lt. Barclay overcomes his fear of transporters. There's a great exchange between himself and the ship's mental health counselor (Deanna Troi), after he balks on being "beamed down" on a mission to the surface via transporter.

"BARCLAY: I usually manage to avoid it somehow. You wouldn't believe how many hours I've logged on shuttlecrafts... (shudders) The thought of being deconstructed molecule by molecule. It's more than I can stand...

Barclay sits down, dejected.

BARCLAY: Ever since I was a child, I've been scared to death that if I ever dematerialized... I wouldn't come back whole again. (beat) I know it sounds crazy.

Troi is reassuring.

TROI: There's nothing crazy about it, Reg -- you are being taken apart molecule by molecule. You're not the first person to have anxiety about transporting."

Unfortunately, this is just a scratch at the philosophical debate - hinting, really, rather than directly discussing it. Barclay's fear is clearly not simply about whether or not the machine will function properly. This would be similar a person fearing air travel because they are afraid of a crash, despite air safety being far better than automobile travel. No, instead clearly he's afraid of the process itself - being deconstructed molecule by molecule. His concern is his own mortality in the deconstructing itself. Will he still be alive? Will it be a copy of him that pops out at the other end? The important thing to understand is that neither the transporter copy, nor any observer, would have any way of telling at all that they were not the original.

I only wish this episode specifically addressed these ideas, but it is clear that Roddenberry's take on transporters was that it was the same person. This leads us to the other episode of Next Gen.

The episode, "Second Chances", occurs later in the same season. The main plot deals with two of the main character reconsidering their long set-aside relationship. It does so in a novel way. The character Commander Ryker finds his double, who has been stranded on a planet for eight years after a unique transporter accident. Eight years prior to the episode's present, Ryker was just a Lieutenant and serving on another starship. (I wonder if that rank makes one more accident-prone on transporters?) While they share the same past up to the accident, the time lapse and separation allows the characters to act very differently.

What is great about this episode is that all of the other characters do not question that this double has every right to the identity of Ryker, and be treated as an officer in Starfleet. This is backed by the doctor on board doing extensive scans reinforcing that there is no discernable difference in their DNA and brain structure - formed from behavior. (As opposed to a clone, who would have developed differently.) Additionally, it is also very clear that it is expected that this person be an individual, be treated like one, and make their own choices. By the end, Ryker-double choose to rename his first name, and departs for a new assignment, continuing his career as a Lieutenant.

But is this double really the copy, or the original? Or, are they both copies? Again, by Roddenberry's rules, at least one of them has to be the original. However, the way they are treated in the show makes it seem like they are *both* originals. If both are equal, then I believe there really is no distinction between calling both of the copies. And that's where I differ from Roddenberry's view - I share Barclay's fear that I would cease to exist, and a copy of me live out my life.

Answer #3: Merrily, Merrily, Merrily, Merrily, Life is but a dream
as seen in the film, Groundhog Day and any other time-travel movie where changing events in your past does not effect your memory.

When we sleep, our brains take our consciousnesses away from our surrounding world. When we wake up, our consciousnesses are returned to this world. There is a disconnect - and there is, strictly speaking, no way for sure for us to know that we are the same consciousness as we were before we went asleep. Like the transporter scenario, we have the same memories and our bodies are identical. It is only through third-person observation that we can look at brain functions and show a continuously operating brain shifting between sleep cycles and into waking consciousness. I suppose it all boils down to "I think, therefore I am".

Walt Disney and other folks who have undergone cryogenic freezing, hope to literally wake up in the future. I say, "Hey, if you got the money, you have nothing to lose if you're wrong." Well, unless there's some odd situation where a human soul doesn't leave a cryogenically frozen body - but that is yet another whole different discussion. There are plenty of examples of plant seeds and primitive animals that have been put on ice and then revived. There's even cases where humans seem to be brain-dead and have come back to life. (Not to be confused with the Terry Shaivo case - where her brain wasn't dormant; unfortunately it was physically deteriorated.) The possibility is there, and perhaps in our lifetime we shall even know for certain the truth.

There is a more general question, as well. Is consciousness itself just an illusion? Humans experience time linearly, but not everything in the universe does. Tachyons, for example, are particles that can travel backwards through time. Or so the scientists who study really-really-complicated-physics claim. Most religions will assert that God or gods exist at all times at once, or, at the very least, can experience all times simultaneously. A recent article I read indicated that studies are showing that your mind literally controls how you experience time.

On one hand, time seems to be pretty relative. On the other hand, you will fail if you try and find one example of someone successfully stopping time or reversing it altogether. Most time travel stories involve someone swapping from one universe into a parallel one. Which I think is horribly silly and a consequence of the romanticism of quantum theory. But what #$*! the do I know?

Groundhog Day is a movie where Bill Murray plays a man trapped living the same day over and over. He instantly transported back in time at the same time each day - when he woke up the previous morning, wearing the same clothes, his body the same age and state as before. (Which is more odd even as he kills dies on more than one day.) The only difference is that he retains his memories and is conscious all the way through the ordeal, which potentially lasts decades.

Is sleep like this? Or, for that matter, does this occur at every moment we experience? Are we souls traveling from one universe to the next so quickly that we don't even notice? Is there an immutability to our consciousness that even if we're traveling through time and changing events, we still retain our own identity? Does our identity change constantly and we don't even realize it, because we now possess memories of the new identity?

This all hurts my brain, and, frankly, I doubt it. But it can be fun to think about.

Ethical Ramifications

The "Me vs Copy of Me?" question has ethical consequences derived on each answer. The dilemma varies in complexity depending on what theory with which you subscribe.

Ideal, Full Transfer

The ideal situation is the easiest to imagine, but perhaps the most difficult to explain. This is if a person somehow could transfer their consciousness / soul / whatever into another vessel, be it a new human body, or a computer program, or a reincarnation of another life form. Gone with the old, in with the new. That individual is the same person, has all the rights as the same person, and should be treated as a person who has had to replace parts of their body. It's a super-dualist idea - that our soul is completely separate from our bodies. But it makes ethics easy.

Less Ideal, "Legacy" Transfer

The next possibility is that such a brain scan and transference only makes a copy of you, and that the source person cannot survive the procedure. People who undergo the procedure would know that this is the end of their life, but that their legacy will live on and continue to grow as if it were them. Alas, we cannot cheat death, but this is the next best thing to immortality.

Clearly, there's no issue of "who's the real me?", but there is a matter of whether this copy of you should be treated the same way as the original you. If we are talking a computer simulating you, then the debate largely centers around whether Artificial Intelligence will be considered a life form with rights. And there is plenty of debate on the Internet out there for you to seek that out, and it is hardly definitive either way. However, let's assume that stem-cell research lets us grow a younger version of ourselves, but just an empty body with no consciousness. Brain cells are somehow created and placed dormant into the body, and somehow we are able to do it in such a way that it is an exact replica of the original person. (Some might argue that even a body without consciousness has a soul. Like I did with the Terry Shaivo case, I have to disagree. I cannot imagine any God who would create souls that are independent from the human body just to hang around when it is incapable of any consciousness or brain activity.)

So this new person wakes up and everything about them feels like they are literally just waking up after a night of sleep, forgetting a short amount of time. They are as mortal as any human, contain no significant difference, and in fact, since they would require an adult body, the biggest barrier to entry into society would probably be physical therapy to train one's muscles. (though really, if we can duplicate the brain, then why not have the body ready-to-go?)

Should this person be considered the old person? With a version number? A new name? Maybe keep the first and last name, but get a new middle name? Would there be stigma in society to these people? Would the new person visit his original's grave? Would the original even have a grave? Would there be only be graves for people who did not continue on to a new body? (Would you keep a grave for someone resurrected?) Would the person be judged by actions of their past life? (I would think so since they remember them and are basically the same person.) Would they have all the same financial obligations? Would married people become unmarried, and have to choose to continue? Would the process of getting a new body be so expensive than we would essentially have a class of citizens who can live forever (and get richer and richer as they continue to accumulate wealth) or would having your body copied become an inalienable right?

I have far more questions than answers than I can hope to supply.

The Bizarre Scenario: Both Original And Copy Co-exist

So here is where things get really dizzying when contemplated. Take all the same questions posed in my last paragraph, where we assume the original died and the copy continues on. Let's assume we could create copies of ourselves and continue to live. Would we own them? Probably not, if we consider them humans. Would they owe us money or some other obligation for creating them? Would we get the right to name them, would there be a standard renaming system, or would they rename themselves?

Then there's the price issue. Copying one's body and brain to a new human seems like it would be prohibitively expensive. But to preserve someone's life - there are plenty of medical treatments that are far too expensive for someone to normally afford on their own that we do with our insurance system. However, if it wasn't a life-saving procedure, would that mean the rich would be able to afford copies while the poor do not? Would there be legislation and restrictions on the number and frequency of copies?

On the other hand, if we don't have the body-option, and we go digital, it comes back to the issue of Artificial Intelligence. Would the digital copies of you be second class citizens? Or would their ability to expand at the rate of Moore's Law make normal humans the lower strata of society? Would we even recognize their existence as individuals, and if not, would they be property of the original?

Charles Stross imagined this scenario in his book Accelerando, where a digital copy was referred to as a "delta-me". He imagined humans with such sophisticated brain implants that one could spin off delta-yous, have them go do something, and then integrate them back into your own consciousness. And assuming Moore's Law holds up, at some point they will be able to experience time and do things much faster than your human brain could. Imagine spawning off delta-yous to live out hypothetical other lives, and then have them report back to you. Or even doing that as a way to "try everything". Whoa.

Conclusion

It remains to be seen what will happen. And when it does, we may not even know for certain if a copy is a copy or the original. And it may not matter. Looking at these possibilities from our way of life is so foreign to us. It is as if you ask a simple farmer from several thousand years ago what pieces of hardware they want in a new computer. The possibilities of transhumanism are so vastly past our current lives, that its difficult enough to think of the questions we will need to answer, let alone come up with any solutions.