My husband and I are your fans and followers. We are so impressed by the movie Transcendent Man, which we watched the other night. Your personal story touched our lives. Your mission to defy death is a noble one. I, too, fear death the way you do only that I doubt if I am disciplined enough to take 250 pills a day. My background is the humanities and my husband’s business but we both admire science and especially the “science of the future” so to speak. I am particularly fascinated by AI. The idea of having a smart machine understanding our needs and fulfilling them is very tempting. I was wondering if, in theory, one day we could create a man/cyborg/robot/half machine/half man who would encompass several fictional characters gathered from books and films, a so-called prototype of all desired characteristics. I also wish to live at a time where that special robotic blood cell is available for our use…Would not that be lovely if we store no more fat and the Type 1 diabetes my husband suffers from be resolved?

We wonder what your thoughts are on Fusion Power. You mentioned solar panels but isn’t Fusion even better? My husband had interviewed personnel in the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and could not be happier speaking with those great minds. Although I somewhat fear to lose some of our humanity, I am all for “improvement”. Life is difficult enough and I would enjoy a “godlike” existence. I wonder about your views about Jung and the film Knowing, as well as The Road and Limitless. With all the natural disasters going on, do you think we will make it to The Singularity? The film Artificial Intelligence is one of my favorites although it makes me very sad. I think we would need to consider compassion for those “machines” as well, not just for humans. We have watched and read so much by Carl Sagan, Phillip Dick and Arthur Clarke, as well as Asimov and Heinlein. Your work is sacred for us as it can save the human race from itself. Personally, I regard you as our next Einstein and DaVinci if not much better than them.

I wish we could attend the Singularity University but we live on the other coast…Perhaps we could visit you in the MIT for a lecture or a seminar one day? Thank you so much for what you have been doing for humanity. Best Wishes. We hope that your vision will make this world a better place.

This is one of those instances when common sense is going to fail you. A great many things about quantum mechanics belie our everyday common experiences. Ray’s statement is probably a little overdone, but not in the way you think; he’s correct in principle. I suggest you do some research on the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and Schrödinger’s cat. Have fun learning.

Have you ever heard of Schrödinger’s cat? It’s a thought experiment used to demonstrate the “strangeness” of our current understanding of quantum mechanics and, in my opinion, is a petty interesting way to explain what he is probably referring to.

1) GETNET really likes to capitalize the first letters of words.

2) Ray said, “quantum mechanics appears to meld the two views, in that particles do not really manifest themselves until a conscious observer observes them”. This strikes me as highly implausible (based on the ideas that particles probably preceded conscious observers in the Universe, and that particles probably don’t “know” whether they’re being observed by conscious observers or not), but I also don’t know anything about quantum physics. Anyone who knows what he’s talking about care to elaborate on that statement?

I for one would like to see this conversation continue. I appreciate that you’re both very busy men, but I’d be grateful for a further response to the following.

Rigorous philosophical thinking on continuity of consciousness will allow us to make better decisions about which technologies will most likely provide an extension of our current subjective lives, and which ones are likely to be false starts. It is perhaps one of the top-five most important transhumanist challenges. Unfortunately, however, much of the transhumanist community seems to misunderstand the philosophical underpinnings of continuity of consciousness, and uploading is often thought to be something it cannot logically be.

Ray, you assert that “we will have effectively uploaded ourselves, albeit gradually, never quite noticing the transfer. There will be no ‘old Ray’ and ‘new Ray,’ just an increasingly capable Ray” (TSiN: 202) This is philosophically sound in the sense John Locke understood continuity of consciousness in 1689, and I’m aware of no widely recognized refutation to Locke’s thesis of identity since then. This would seem to be a sound model for attaining some level of immortality; it posits no logical barriers, only technically difficult barriers.

On the other hand, “uploading as in the sudden scan-and-transfer scenario,” while it will happen in the technical and objective sense, introduces significant violations of Locke’s principles a continuation of the subjective self; it is the “old Ray” and “new Ray” problem. Sudden scan-and-transfer would seem to be to minds what cloning is to DNA and bodies. It would seem to be a duplication of a pattern, not a continuation of a pattern that is “itself alone” (Locke). There are, of course, even more complex models that blend these two scenarios, but the basic distinction is enough for this conversation.

It is why I believe we should be steering investments toward technologies that will facilitate the gradual change of our substrate, not “sudden scan-and-transfer” (although such technology will happen and will have its uses). It is also why I am hesitant to recognize the value of backing up the mind-file, at least as you present it. If my substrate is destroyed, and my mind with it, a new substrate with a recovered mind from my backup file will not be “old John”, but “new John”. Old John will still be gone… immortality is not a package without some caveats.

Thanks for this site, Ray, for the forum, and for your regular contributions here. They’re much appreciated.

@AeaeaActual
John Barbour, University of Colorado