Volume 2, Issue 1 
1st Quarter, 2007


The Role of AGI in Cybernetic Immortality

Ben Goertzel, Ph.D.

Page 2 of 7

Identity and Other Illusions

Thinking about the notions of identity and awareness in the context of uploading brings up the fairly well-known fact that these are, in a sense, illusory concepts.   These are ways that we have evolved to fool ourselves about the nature of ourselves.   Most of the time we think we're enacting free will; we're really enacting neural programs that our consciousness, the reflective part of our brain/mind, isn’t aware of. 

There's a whole history of work in cognitive neuroscience by Michael Gazzaniga[1] and a host of others, demonstrating that when people believe they're acting according to free will, often the decision was already made by some other part of their brain beforehand.  I don't have time to go into that in detail but it's really fairly strong evidence. 

And there's a good book by a guy named Thomas Metzinger called "Being No One,"[2] which integrates philosophical and neuropsychological evidence pointing to the conclusion that what we think of as our self, our identity, the phenomenal self, is a kind of neurologically constructed illusion. 

It's a very useful illusion, thinking of ourselves as a coherent identity.  Thinking of ourselves that way is useful.  Thinking of ourselves as having a continuing stream of consciousness, of being fairly fully self-aware -- this is useful, but not necessarily accurate. 

This leads to very interesting questions regarding uploading and the move from human to transhuman awareness.  It may be that if you upload yourself and then improve yourself so that you have a better rational understanding of what is going on inside your own mind, this could lead to the loss of these illusions. 

If will, awareness and self are, in most part, illusions that we construct because of our evolutionary heritage, and our limitations; then maybe, once we get smarter and more aware, we'll get rid of them.  That gets back to Randal’s earlier question of, you know, do we want subjective experience to be preserved? 

Aspects of our subjective experience may come to seem quite idiotic to us, once we get a little smarter.  And of course, being a good old American individualist, I would rather see each sentient mind able to make that choice for itself -- and if desired, to make multiple choices in parallel.  Some minds may retain the illusion of being someone – the illusion of having will, and self, and self-consciousness -- and others may grow beyond this level. 

I think these are all very interesting issues.  I've explored some of these in a recent book called "The Hidden Pattern,"[3] which tries to present a patternist philosophy on mind.  You can look at a mind as a system of patterns associated with some physical or computational system.  A mind is a system of patterns that achieve goals by recognizing patterns in themselves and in the world -- and in that sense cyber-immortality is just a matter of the set of patterns that constitutes a given mind being replicated in some other means. 

And if you look at mind as being about the emerging patterns rather than about the substrate, cyber-immortality is not really a big deal.  On the other hand, you can also see that moving a mind to a different substrate which is more flexible, may allow the set of patterns that is the mind to evolve in a direction that it could not have evolved in, in its original substrate. 

Next Page

Footnotes

[1]. Michael Gazzaniga - a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he heads the new SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind. In 1961, Gazzaniga graduated from Dartmouth College. In 1964, he received a Ph.D. in psychobiology from the California Institute of Technology, where he worked under the guidance of Roger Sperry, with primary responsibility for initiating human split-brain research. In his subsequent work he has made important advances in our understanding of functional lateralization in the brain and how the cerebral hemispheres communicate with one another. Wikipedia.org February 8, 2007 1:24 pm EST

[2]. Thomas Metzinger’s "Being No One” http://www.philosophie.uni-mainz.de/metzinger/publikationen/BNO.pdf February 8, 2007 1:16 pm EST

[3]. Goertzel, Ben. The Hidden Pattern . BrownWalker Press, 2006. A Patternist Philosophy of Mind, “The Hidden Pattern presents a novel philosophy of mind, intended to form a coherent conceptual framework within which it is possible to understand the diverse aspects of mind and intelligence in a unified way.” www.brownwalker.com February 8, 2007 1:36 pm EST

 

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Next Page>