The gradual replacement of Ray results in Ray, so consciousness and identity appear to have been preserved. However, in the case of gradual replacement there is no simultaneous old me and new me. At the end of the process you have the equivalent of the new me (that is, Ray 2) and no old me (Ray 1). So gradual replacement also means the end of me. We might therefore wonder: at what point did my body and brain become someone else?
On yet another hand (we’re running out of philosophical hands here), as I pointed out at the beginning of this question, I am in fact being continually replaced as part of a normal biological process. (And, by the way, that process is not particularly gradual but rather rapid.) As we concluded, all that persists is my spatial and temporal pattern of matter and energy. But the thought experiment above shows that gradual replacement means the end of me even if my pattern is preserved. So am I constantly being replaced by someone else who just seems a lot like the me of a few moments earlier?
So, again, who am I? It’s the ultimate ontological question, and we often refer to it as the issue of consciousness. I have consciously (pun intended) phrased the issue entirely in the first person because that is its nature. It is not a third-person question. So my question is not “who are you?” although you may wish to ask this question yourself.
When people speak of consciousness they often slip into considerations of behavioral and neurological correlates of consciousness (for example, whether or not an entity can be self-reflective). But these are third-person (objective) issues and do not represent what David Chalmers calls the “hard question” of consciousness: how can matter (the brain) lead to something as apparently immaterial as consciousness?15
The question of whether or not an entity is conscious is apparent only to itself. The difference between neurological correlates of consciousness (such as intelligent behavior) and the ontological reality of consciousness is the difference between objective and subjective reality. That’s why we can’t propose an objective consciousness detector without philosophical assumptions built into it.
I do believe that we humans will come to accept that nonbiological entities are conscious, because ultimately the nonbiological entities will have all the subtle cues that humans currently possess and that we associate with emotional and other subjective experiences. Still, while we will be able to verify the subtle cues, we will have no direct access to the implied consciousness.
I will acknowledge that many of you do seem conscious to me, but I should not be too quick to accept this impression. Perhaps I am really living in a simulation, and you are all part of it.
Or, perhaps it’s only my memories of you that exist, and these actual experiences never took place.
Or maybe I am only now experiencing the sensation of recalling apparent memories, but neither the experience nor the memories really exist. Well, you see the problem.
Despite these dilemmas my personal philosophy remains based on patternism—I am principally a pattern that persists in time. I am an evolving pattern, and I can influence the course of the evolution of my pattern. Knowledge is a pattern, as distinguished from mere information, and losing knowledge is a profound loss. Thus, losing a person is the ultimate loss.
MOLLY 2004: As far as I’m concerned, who I am is pretty straightforward—it’s basically this brain and body, which at least this month is in pretty good shape, thank you.
RAY: Are you including the food in your digestive tract, in its various stages of decomposition along the way?
MOLLY 2004: Okay, you can exclude that. Some of it will become me, but it hasn’t been enrolled yet in the “part of Molly” club.
RAY: Well, 90 percent of the cells in your body don’t have your DNA.
MOLLY 2004: Is that so? Just whose DNA is it, then?
RAY: Biological humans have about ten trillion cells with their own DNA, but there are about one hundred trillion microorganisms in the digestive tract, basically bacteria.
MOLLY 2004: Doesn’t sound very appealing. Are they entirely necessary?
RAY: They’re actually part of the society of cells that makes Molly alive and thriving. You couldn’t survive without healthy gut bacteria. Assuming your intestinal flora are in good balance, they’re necessary for your well-being.
MOLLY 2004: Okay, but I wouldn’t count them as me. There are lots of things that my well-being depends on. Like my house and my car, but I still don’t count them as part of me.
RAY: Very well, it’s reasonable to leave out the entire contents of the GI tract, bacteria and all. That’s actually how the body sees it. Even though it’s physically inside the body, the body considers the tract to be external and carefully screens what it absorbs into the bloodstream.
MOLLY 2004: As I think more about who I am, I kind of like Jaron Lanier’s “circle of empathy.”
RAY: Tell me more.
MOLLY 2004: Basically, the circle of reality that I consider to be “me” is not clearcut. It’s not simply my body. I have limited identification with, say, my toes and, after our last discussion, even less with the contents of my large intestine.
RAY: That’s reasonable, and even with regard to our brains we are aware of only a tiny portion of what goes on in there.
MOLLY 2004: It’s true that there are parts of my brain that seem to be somebody else, or at least somewhere else. Often, thoughts and dreams that intrude on my awareness seem to have come from some foreign place. They’re obviously coming from my brain, but it doesn’t seem that way.
RAY: Conversely, loved ones who are physically separate may be so close as to seem to be part of ourselves.
MOLLY 2004: The boundary of myself is seeming less and less clear.
RAY: Well, just wait until we’re predominantly nonbiological. Then we’ll be able to merge our thoughts and thinking at will, so finding boundaries will be even more difficult.
MOLLY 2004: That actually sounds kind of appealing. You know, some Buddhist philosophies emphasize the extent to which there is inherently no boundary at all between us.
RAY: Sounds like they’re talking about the Singularity.
The Singularity as Transcendence
Modernity sees humanity as having ascended from what is inferior to it—life begins in slime and ends in intelligence—whereas traditional cultures see it as descended from its superiors. As the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins puts the matter: “We are the only people who assume that we have ascended from apes. Everybody else takes it for granted that they are descended from gods.”
—HUSTON SMITH16
Some philosophers hold that philosophy is what you do to a problem until it’s clear enough to solve it by doing science. Others hold that if a philosophical problem succumbs to empirical methods, that shows it wasn’t really philosophical to begin with.
—JERRY A. FODOR17
The Singularity denotes an event that will take place in the material world, the inevitable next step in the evolutionary process that started with biological evolution and has extended through human-directed technological evolution. However, it is precisely in the world of matter and energy that we encounter transcendence, a principal connotation of what people refer to as spirituality. Let’s consider the nature of spirituality in the physical world.
Where shall I start? How about with water? It’s simple enough, but consider the diverse and beautiful ways it manifests itself: the endlessly varying patterns as it cascades past rocks in a stream, then surges chaotically down a waterfall (all viewable from my office window, incidentally); the billowing patterns of clouds in the sky; the arrangement of snow on a mountain; the satisfying design of a single snowflake. Or consider Einstein’s description of the entangled order and disorder in a glass of water (that is, his thesis on Brownian motion).
Or elsewhere in the biological world, consider the intricate dance of spirals of DNA during mitosis. How about the loveliness of a tree as it bends in the wind and its leaves churn in a tangled dance? Or the bustling world we see in a microscope? There’s transc
endence everywhere.
A comment on the word “transcendence” is in order here. “To transcend” means “to go beyond,” but this need not compel us to adopt an ornate dualist view that regards transcendent levels of reality (such as the spiritual level) to be not of this world. We can “go beyond” the “ordinary” powers of the material world through the power of patterns. Although I have been called a materialist, I regard myself as a “patternist.” It’s through the emergent powers of the pattern that we transcend. Since the material stuff of which we are made turns over quickly, it is the transcendent power of our patterns that persists.
The power of patterns to endure goes beyond explicitly self-replicating systems, such as organisms and self-replicating technology. It is the persistence and power of patterns that support life and intelligence. The pattern is far more important than the material stuff that constitutes it.
Random strokes on a canvas are just paint. But when arranged in just the right way, they transcend the material stuff and become art. Random notes are just sounds. Sequenced in an “inspired” way, we have music. A pile of components is just an inventory. Ordered in an innovative manner, and perhaps with the addition of some software (another pattern), we have the “magic” (transcendence) of technology.
Although some regard what is referred to as “spiritual” as the true meaning of transcendence, transcendence refers to all levels of reality: the creations of the natural world, including ourselves, as well as our own creations in the form of art, culture, technology, and emotional and spiritual expression. Evolution concerns patterns, and it is specifically the depth and order of patterns that grow in an evolutionary process. As a consummation of the evolution in our midst, the Singularity will deepen all of these manifestations of transcendence.
Another connotation of the word “spiritual” is “containing spirit,” which is to say being conscious. Consciousness—the seat of “personalness”—is regarded as what is real in many philosophical and religious traditions. A common Buddhist ontology considers subjective—conscious—experience as the ultimate reality, rather than physical or objective phenomena, which are considered maya (illusion).
The arguments I make in this book with regard to consciousness are for the purpose of illustrating this vexing and paradoxical (and, therefore, profound) nature of consciousness: how one set of assumptions (that is, that a copy of my mind file either shares or does not share my consciousness) leads ultimately to an opposite view, and vice versa.
We do assume that humans are conscious, at least when they appear to be. At the other end of the spectrum we assume that simple machines are not. In the cosmological sense the contemporary universe acts more like a simple machine than a conscious being. But as we discussed in the previous chapter, the matter and energy in our vicinity will become infused with the intelligence, knowledge, creativity, beauty, and emotional intelligence (the ability to love, for example) of our human-machine civilization. Our civilization will then expand outward, turning all the dumb matter and energy we encounter into sublimely intelligent—transcendent—matter and energy. So in a sense, we can say that the Singularity will ultimately infuse the universe with spirit.
Evolution moves toward greater complexity, greater elegance, greater knowledge, greater intelligence, greater beauty, greater creativity, and greater levels of subtle attributes such as love. In every monotheistic tradition God is likewise described as all of these qualities, only without any limitation: infinite knowledge, infinite intelligence, infinite beauty, infinite creativity, infinite love, and so on. Of course, even the accelerating growth of evolution never achieves an infinite level, but as it explodes exponentially it certainly moves rapidly in that direction. So evolution moves inexorably toward this conception of God, although never quite reaching this ideal. We can regard, therefore, the freeing of our thinking from the severe limitations of its biological form to be an essentially spiritual undertaking.
MOLLY 2004: So, do you believe in God?
RAY: Well, it’s a three-letter word—and a powerful meme.
MOLLY 2004: I realize the word and the idea exist. But does it refer to anything that you believe in?
RAY: People mean lots of things by it.
MOLLY 2004: Do you believe in those things?
RAY: It’s not possible to believe all these things: God is an all-powerful conscious person looking over us, making deals, and getting angry quite a bit. Or He—It—is a pervasive life force underlying all beauty and creativity. Or God created everything and then stepped back. . . .
MOLLY 2004: I understand, but do you believe in any of them?
RAY: I believe that the universe exists.
MOLLY 2004: Now wait a minute, that’s not a belief, that’s a scientific fact.
RAY: Actually, I don’t know for sure that anything exists other than my own thoughts.
MOLLY 2004: Okay, I understand that this is the philosophy chapter, but you can read scientific papers—thousands of them—that corroborate the existence of stars and galaxies. So, all those galaxies—we call that the universe.
RAY: Yes, I’ve heard of that, and I do recall reading some of these papers, but I don’t know that those papers really exist, or that the things they refer to really exist, other than in my thoughts.
MOLLY 2004: So you don’t acknowledge the existence of the universe?
RAY: No, I just said that I do believe that it exists, but I’m pointing out that it’s a belief. That’s my personal leap of faith.
MOLLY 2004: All right, but I asked whether you believed in God.
RAY: Again, “God” is a word by which people mean different things. For the sake of your question, we can consider God to be the universe, and I said that I believe in the existence of the universe.
MOLLY 2004: God is just the universe?
RAY: Just? It’s a pretty big thing to apply the word “just” to. If we are to believe what science tells us—and I said that I do—it’s about as big a phenomenon as we could imagine.
MOLLY 2004: Actually, many physicists now consider our universe to be just one bubble among a vast number of other universes. But I meant that people usually mean something more by the word “God” than “just” the material world. Some people do associate God with everything that exists, but they still consider God to be conscious. So you believe in a God that’s not conscious?
RAY: The universe is not conscious—yet. But it will be. Strictly speaking, we should say that very little of it is conscious today. But that will change and soon. I expect that the universe will become sublimely intelligent and will wake up in Epoch Six. The only belief I am positing here is that the universe exists. If we make that leap of faith, the expectation that it will wake up is not so much a belief as an informed understanding, based on the same science that says there is a universe.
MOLLY 2004: Interesting. You know, that’s essentially the opposite of the view that there was a conscious creator who got everything started and then kind of bowed out. You’re basically saying that a conscious universe will “bow in” during Epoch Six.
RAY: Yes, that’s the essence of Epoch Six.
CHAPTER EIGHT
* * *
The Deeply Intertwined Promise and Peril of GNR
We are being propelled into this new century with no plan, no control, no brakes. . . . The only realistic alternative I see is relinquishment: to limit development of the technologies that are too dangerous, by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge.
—BILL JOY, “WHY THE FUTURE DOESN’T NEED US”
Environmentalists must now grapple squarely with the idea of a world that has enough wealth and enough technological capability, and should not pursue more.
—BILL MCKIBBEN, ENVIRONMENTALIST WHO FIRST WROTE ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING1
Progress might have been all right once, but it has gone on too long.
—OGDEN NASH (1902–1971)
In the late 1960s I was transformed into a radical environmental activist. A
rag-tag group of activists and I sailed a leaky old halibut boat across the North Pacific to block the last hydrogen bomb tests under President Nixon. In the process I co-founded Greenpeace. . . . Environmentalists were often able to produce arguments that sounded reasonable, while doing good deeds like saving whales and making the air and water cleaner. But now the chickens have come home to roost. The environmentalists’ campaign against biotechnology in general, and genetic engineering in particular, has clearly exposed their intellectual and moral bankruptcy. By adopting a zero tolerance policy toward a technology with so many potential benefits for humankind and the environment, they . . . have alienated themselves from scientists, intellectuals, and internationalists. It seems inevitable that the media and the public will, in time, see the insanity of their position.
—PATRICK MOORE
I think that . . . flight from and hatred of technology is self-defeating. The Buddha rests quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer and the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha—which is to demean oneself.
—ROBERT M. PIRSIG, ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE
Consider these articles we’d rather not see available on the Web:
Impress Your Enemies: How to Build Your Own Atomic Bomb from Readily Available Materials2
How to Modify the Influenza Virus in Your College Laboratory to Release Snake Venom
Ten Easy Modifications to the E. coli Virus
How to Modify Smallpox to Counteract the Smallpox Vaccine
Build Your Own Chemical Weapons from Materials Available on the Internet
How to Build a Pilotless, Self-Guiding, Low-Flying Airplane Using a Low-Cost Aircraft, GPS, and a Notebook Computer