When are you not you?

HalcyonDays — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 16:30:00 GMT

Lets say that we have the technology to constantly back up our brains onto a computer through some wireless connection so that at any one time the computer has a snapshot of your brain in its current state. Now lets say that you get in an accident and 50% of your brain is damaged, so they take that backup and use it to replace 50% of your brain. Would you still consider yourself to be you and not some copy? what about 40% or 20%? What about 5%? Are you still you?

Lets say that you get in an accident and need 95% of your brain replaced and you use the backup image of your brain, are you still the original? Lets say that you get in an accident and are killed and lose 100% of your brain. But doctors take the image of your brain and put it into a new body that is exactly like your old body with all your memories right up to and including the accident which caused your death, are you still you? What if they replaced your brain while you were still healthy?

Consider now a future technology which allows for the slow conversion of your brain from flesh and blood to hardware. It's a slow process taking up to 3 years, no one really knows when the process is entirely finished. You notice no difference in your daily life as the process occurs but at some point in the future your brain goes from being 100% natural to being 100% artificial. Are you still you? Are you still the original? You obviously feel like the original but your brain is no longer original it's just a pattern of your old brain running on hardware.

Generally speaking a person would be far more accepting of the slow replacement that isn't noticeable over a complete replacement at one time but the two processes give the exact same result. It's a pattern of your flesh and blood brain in hardware. So why is it that people have such a difficult time with the idea of mind uploading? It seems like the issue in the end is that people want a sense of being original. That is to say when you go to sleep and then wake up in the morning you believe that you are the same person that went to sleep in the same bed last night, but what if you aren't? Would it really make any difference as long as you thought that you were the original?

Image that when you die you wake up in a new body right after you die and you say, oh shit I just died. But you are on a bed in some room in a building with a new body but all your memories including every memory up until the moment of death are in your mind and you start thinking about how much it sucked to die but how happy you are that you woke up in this bed and are alive and well. How is that any different than the idea of a soul being transfered at the moment of death from one body to another? Your soul if there is such as thing is nothing more than the sum total of who you are so it would be essentially the same thing? Your are just transferring the essence of yourself.

If you have brain damage you are no longer yourself, it's your mind not your body that makes up the essence of who you are, so why fight mind uploading when it makes so much sense?

Religion in the 21st century

HalcyonDays — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 08:37:38 GMT

Lately I have been pondering the recent uprising of the Christian right in America. I am cynical enough to believe that it is only the last gasp of a dying group of people, but is it? We have seen schools in Kentucky being made to teach "Intelligent Design" (what an oxymoron that is) by Religious people who are fed up with religion being taken out of school. We have also seen President Bush doing everything possible to hurt the area of stem cell research, his advisors are of course led by Leon Kass whom we all know and love.

It is my argument that these so called christians are nothing of the sort. That they are not following their beliefs but are instead following a new form of religion, one based on extreme nationalism, extreme xenophobia, mixed with a good portion of luddism.

I was a christian for 17 years, and in all of those years not once did I ever read of Jesus being a political activist. Sure he denounced the way people lived, but did he ever once say to do something about it? I know some people would mention the money changers and throwing over their tables, but applying that little story to justify forcing prayer and the teaching of creationism in the guise of intelligent design is a bit of a stretch.

Christians are supposed to be in the world but not of it, they are not supposed to be calling for assassinations of foreign presidents, or campaigning for political leaders, they are supposed to worry about living their lives righteously. It strikes me as most unchristian like to go around forcing people to live the way you want them to live.

Now what does any of this have to do with Transhumanism? Well, some christian leaders, those that know of our movement, believe we are the greatest current threat to humanity. They fear that we will remove what makes humans human. I don't know what that is exactly, other than our genetic code, and if that is the case then sure. I have no problem removing my so called humanity. If it makes me better, faster, stronger, smarter, more ethical (in a humanist sense). Basing a lifeforms worth on if it is human or not is rediculous in my mind. Intelligence should be the main factor in worth, and even then I have a problem with killing whales, and other higher mamals including the great apes. It will be a great day when we no longer need to rely on animal testing to continue to progress scientifically (neccessary evil at the moment).

I know I am an idealist and a dreamer, but I like to think of a time in the not too distant future when humans have allowed themselves to evolve past our current limitations, when sickness and death are essentially a thing of the past and we have returned our planet to it's natural state and moved on into the cosmos. I know that humanity is capable of this feat, but it will take a great deal of effort on our part, a great deal of support from all of us to make this happen. Because we have all those religious and secular bioluddites who can't stand the idea of humans being anything more than we already are.