Consider the following scenarios.
1.) A man is on his deathbed. He is a wealthy man; a man with the means to hire the best minds on the planet to come up with some way of prolonging his life. One day his most trusted adviser comes to him bearing good news. He tells him that they have found a way to clone him (as a young man of course), and more than that, they found a way to imprint the clone with the man's thoughts and memories. Ah, but the adviser has made a crucial misstep. A clone has already been made, imprinted with the man's memories as fresh as the past 24 hours. The adviser makes the fatal blunder of bringing the clone to the man's bedside to introduce him. The man beholds the clone in horror. He sees in it, not a continuation of himself, but rather a replacement. He knows that the clone is not really him, because although it possesses the imprint of his thoughts and memories, he can not see out through the eyes of the clone. It's mind is closed to him. It is something other...different. It is every bit as much a stranger to him as anyone else in the room, or even the world. He orders the clone destroyed and lapses into deeper despair.
2.) Okay, now this scenario is the same as the first, the same man, the same cloning technology, ect. but without the adviser making the fatal blunder. In this case the adviser simply comes to the man and tells him that they have found a way to transfer his mind into a clone as soon as he dies. "Transfer his mind", those are the words that the adviser uses, but he really knows nothing more about these metaphysical mysteries than anyone else does. He only knows that the man's thoughts and memories will be imprinted on the new clone. He just says, "transfer your mind" to the man to reassure him. And it does reassure the man...for a while. But at night, when he's left alone with nothing but the beeping and pinging of his medical equipment, he begins to have doubts. He ponders his own essence. Will this clone really be him? Will he really be there, or will he be gone, leaving someone else to live his life with his memories? This "not being there" tortures him more than the thought of death itself. He stares up into the dark.
3.) Okay, let's leave the dying man aside for a moment to consider a hypothetical proposition. Suppose that our consciousness isn't the continuum that we think it is, connected from birth until death. Maybe every time we drift off to sleep or fall unconscious our consciousness dies. Maybe it disintegrates when it's not actively sustained. Then when we wake up, it is with an entirely NEW consciousness which has simply inherited all the memories of the old consciousness. In other words, every time we wake up it's as an entirely new person who just thinks they're the person who went to sleep simply because we remember being that person. This is an unfalsifiable theory...or at least apparently so as this point. Still, it's not completely far fetched. What reason do we really have to think that our consciousness maintains a continuity with our identity? Perhaps consciousness is just an abstract commodity, accessed when needed. When you turn your computer on, you find the same stuff in memory, the trusty icons arranged the same way on the desktop, but yet you wouldn't think that this was being powered by the identical electrons in the electrical current, right? What if the vital spark operates in a similar fashion? The dream may even be a kind of booting up process, a side effect of the new consciousness accessing the memory. This would kind of explain why we can never remember our prior waking lives during the dream.
This is, of course, highly speculative. But you notice that it bears a similarity to scenario 2. We've only removed the concept of the clone from the equation. Just like the man on his deathbed, we face the possibilty of "not being there" when we wake up, but somehow it isn't really troubling at all, is it? Why exactly would that be?
4.) Consider an even wilder hypothesis. Suppose that a few years back you sat at the bedside of a dying friend. We'll call him Freddy. You were with him at the very end. Now what if, at the moment of death, the essence of Freddy's consciousness leapt from him and into you, due to your close proximity. This consciousness either supplanted your own or blended with it. But it was only his consciousness, none of his memories. Once he was in your brain, he only had access to your memories. So in effect, from that day forward you weren't "you" anymore, you're now Freddy, but you only remember being "you", and you talk act just like "you", and so you never noticed that anything was different. Again, we're in highly unfalsifiable territory, but yet the idea isn't all that disturbing, is it? Whether your "you" or Freddy or the King of Siam, you're still HERE, still able to breathe the air, and feel the sun on your face, and be thankful for it.
5.) Okay, final scenario. Let's return to our dying man. The adviser comes to see him and tells him that he has found a mystic who claims that he can transfer the man's consciousness into someone else's body, but only his consciousness, none of his memories. The adviser brings a bright-eyed young man to meet the man on his deathbed. He tells him that when he dies he will leap into this young man's mind, seeing through his eyes, but only ever remembering being the young man. The adviser, naturally, doesn't know whether this mystic is a fraud or a fool or the genuine thing, but he senses that it doesn't matter. If the procedure is a success, no one will ever really know for sure. The man on his death bed senses this as well, and he drifts off, his mind finally at ease.
1.) A man is on his deathbed. He is a wealthy man; a man with the means to hire the best minds on the planet to come up with some way of prolonging his life. One day his most trusted adviser comes to him bearing good news. He tells him that they have found a way to clone him (as a young man of course), and more than that, they found a way to imprint the clone with the man's thoughts and memories. Ah, but the adviser has made a crucial misstep. A clone has already been made, imprinted with the man's memories as fresh as the past 24 hours. The adviser makes the fatal blunder of bringing the clone to the man's bedside to introduce him. The man beholds the clone in horror. He sees in it, not a continuation of himself, but rather a replacement. He knows that the clone is not really him, because although it possesses the imprint of his thoughts and memories, he can not see out through the eyes of the clone. It's mind is closed to him. It is something other...different. It is every bit as much a stranger to him as anyone else in the room, or even the world. He orders the clone destroyed and lapses into deeper despair.
2.) Okay, now this scenario is the same as the first, the same man, the same cloning technology, ect. but without the adviser making the fatal blunder. In this case the adviser simply comes to the man and tells him that they have found a way to transfer his mind into a clone as soon as he dies. "Transfer his mind", those are the words that the adviser uses, but he really knows nothing more about these metaphysical mysteries than anyone else does. He only knows that the man's thoughts and memories will be imprinted on the new clone. He just says, "transfer your mind" to the man to reassure him. And it does reassure the man...for a while. But at night, when he's left alone with nothing but the beeping and pinging of his medical equipment, he begins to have doubts. He ponders his own essence. Will this clone really be him? Will he really be there, or will he be gone, leaving someone else to live his life with his memories? This "not being there" tortures him more than the thought of death itself. He stares up into the dark.
3.) Okay, let's leave the dying man aside for a moment to consider a hypothetical proposition. Suppose that our consciousness isn't the continuum that we think it is, connected from birth until death. Maybe every time we drift off to sleep or fall unconscious our consciousness dies. Maybe it disintegrates when it's not actively sustained. Then when we wake up, it is with an entirely NEW consciousness which has simply inherited all the memories of the old consciousness. In other words, every time we wake up it's as an entirely new person who just thinks they're the person who went to sleep simply because we remember being that person. This is an unfalsifiable theory...or at least apparently so as this point. Still, it's not completely far fetched. What reason do we really have to think that our consciousness maintains a continuity with our identity? Perhaps consciousness is just an abstract commodity, accessed when needed. When you turn your computer on, you find the same stuff in memory, the trusty icons arranged the same way on the desktop, but yet you wouldn't think that this was being powered by the identical electrons in the electrical current, right? What if the vital spark operates in a similar fashion? The dream may even be a kind of booting up process, a side effect of the new consciousness accessing the memory. This would kind of explain why we can never remember our prior waking lives during the dream.
This is, of course, highly speculative. But you notice that it bears a similarity to scenario 2. We've only removed the concept of the clone from the equation. Just like the man on his deathbed, we face the possibilty of "not being there" when we wake up, but somehow it isn't really troubling at all, is it? Why exactly would that be?
4.) Consider an even wilder hypothesis. Suppose that a few years back you sat at the bedside of a dying friend. We'll call him Freddy. You were with him at the very end. Now what if, at the moment of death, the essence of Freddy's consciousness leapt from him and into you, due to your close proximity. This consciousness either supplanted your own or blended with it. But it was only his consciousness, none of his memories. Once he was in your brain, he only had access to your memories. So in effect, from that day forward you weren't "you" anymore, you're now Freddy, but you only remember being "you", and you talk act just like "you", and so you never noticed that anything was different. Again, we're in highly unfalsifiable territory, but yet the idea isn't all that disturbing, is it? Whether your "you" or Freddy or the King of Siam, you're still HERE, still able to breathe the air, and feel the sun on your face, and be thankful for it.
5.) Okay, final scenario. Let's return to our dying man. The adviser comes to see him and tells him that he has found a mystic who claims that he can transfer the man's consciousness into someone else's body, but only his consciousness, none of his memories. The adviser brings a bright-eyed young man to meet the man on his deathbed. He tells him that when he dies he will leap into this young man's mind, seeing through his eyes, but only ever remembering being the young man. The adviser, naturally, doesn't know whether this mystic is a fraud or a fool or the genuine thing, but he senses that it doesn't matter. If the procedure is a success, no one will ever really know for sure. The man on his death bed senses this as well, and he drifts off, his mind finally at ease.
Thoughts?
This post is a result of an email I sent my friend Vincent a few months ago (in somewhat edited form.)
ReplyDeleteDon't let the presence of a new post, or the radical redesign of the site fool you. I'm not planning any kind of full-fledged return to this blog at this time. I just plan to toss up the occasional odd little brain child like this or perhaps a series on something or other from time to time. Like the Night Owl blog, posting here will be sporatic, but hopefully enough to keep this blog from slipping away from me entirely.
I think I shall actually give this some serious thought and get back to you, after finishing the second writing of tales. Good to see you back here if for just a little while.
ReplyDeleteI've often wondered about the state of sleep anyway, and why doctors recommend we get, at least, eight hours of it, if we want to feel refreshed the next day. It's like charging the internal spirit battery as directed, otherwise, one might wake the next day feeling outside themselves. Perhaps this is a spiritual warning that we are truly not alone in the world and the only reason we feel like individuals is because our defense shield gets fully charged when the sun goes down.
ReplyDeletescenario 4 seems more likely to me than all the others simply on a spiritual interconnected (the universe and all within it, including us, is god)hippie vibe. One dies, but another is born kind of thing. The shitty part to this theory is adding in all the murderous assholes who have been put to death, but, then again, this might explain why we sometimes "snap" and spray a mall with emotionless ammo. Anyway, this is proof that you and that Vincent character delve deep into the think tank of infinite possibilities only to emerge angry and slightly moist in the palms.
The other day in Cleveland here a man met his estranged wife and daughters at a Cracker Barrel for his daughter's birthday. During the meal the wife brought up the matter of divorce. The man went out to the parking-lot and came back with a gun. He shot the wife and THEN tracked the daughters in other parts of the restaurant and shot them. The police showed up and the man pretty much forced them into a position where they had to take him down.
DeleteI'm not sure what my point is, but something like this is just...unacceptable. You just can't process it.
Ah, after giving it some thought, I think I do know what the point was. You were saying that scenario 4 would be unfair to Mr. Cracker Barrel here, and I totally agree. But then when you think about, what theory of time & space, life & death, really would make such a thing fair and balance the scales? You just look at this, and grope in vain for some way to make it right and there just isn't. It's so horrible. You think about that little girl, sitting down to a nice birthday dinner, and then her mother is killed and she's fleeing through the restaurant for her life from her own deranged father...and even then, she doesn't make it. What can you do about that?
DeleteAnyway, I guess that's a whole other can of worms.
Have you watched the 13th day starring Arnold Shwarzlnigger?
ReplyDeleteI saw the 6th day. Did they make seven sequels to it? :)
Delete(I had to give you a hard time on that one, sorry.)
I certainly had a sense of deja vu when I read the post above. You have improved it somewhat since the version you sent me.
ReplyDeleteOur sense of what's troubling or bizarre is to do with conditioning. When I drive a car these days, especially at high speed on a busy motorway, I do it fairly nonchalantly, because of the familiarity. But when I distance myself from the sense of familiarity, I know I would never do it: far too scary and dangerous. In this instance it's probably age-related; but it seems to me that what holds us together with the sense of self-continuity is precisely familiarity. As if we are programmed to detect familiarity/difference, and derive comfort from it. "Everything the same? OK, I can relax." So when your colleague or even spouse has changed hairstyle for example, it's a nice joke to say "You look different!", and make one or two wrong guesses, intentionally or otherwise.
I'm not sure that we are really capable of pinpointing the essence of "I"-ness. But the thing we can be sure of, that's relevant in practical terms, is that dying is unfamiliar, the total stripping-away of familiarity.
"To die will be an awfully big adventure" says Peter Pan, expressing his eternal boyhood in all its audacity. To call it an adventure might be another way of denying its reality.
Well, you know they say that most car accidents happen X amount of miles from home (I'm not sure exactly how it goes.) The point being, though, that we let our guard down as we get closer to home and familiar surroundings.
DeleteAs I said in our emails, the big thing for me with death, and I imagine for many other people, is that fear of nor being there anymore. This is tied into our "I" or ego, of course, since it's "I" who won't be there, and others who will go on. This "I" is two-fold in a way. There's everything that's hung on my awareness like clothing: my name, my history, ect. And then there is the thing that the clothing is hung on: the thing that experiences all that. I guess that lurking around the outskirts of these scenarios is the hope that somehow the latter might transcend the former, like a cup of water taken from the ocean. The cup may be crushed and discarded, the water spilled and lost. But eventually the water becomes part of the ocean again, while the cup gets buried in a casket in the ground.
It’s funny that most people probably never think about it. “Sure I would love to have my memories transferred at the point of death.” A clone is a copy, not the original thing; so getting cloned, as your first point proves, is of little value to the original. Copied memories are not transferred memories. If the memories could be transferred, not copied, to the clone, would it be any different? Whether we are copying or moving files, the destination looks the same. The source is what changes. Transferring the memories would delete them from the source, as nature is about to do anyway. If copying the memories does not make the clone you, then transferring them may not either, which comes back to your next point, I suppose: once memories are dormant, are they copied or transferred to the future you?
ReplyDeleteThis concept was addressed in movie, The Prestige. If you have not seen the movie and want to, do not read any more of this comment. In the movie, the protagonist was performing a trick where he appeared to be two places at the same time. The trick was that he cloned himself, and as part of the trick, the double dies. He confesses that he is truly dedicated, declaring that he has no way of knowing whether he is the clone or the original.
I started a post when my wife conceived a child based on a discussion I had with my niece. She said that she misses her son, the baby son that once was.
I realized that the death of a child and the growth of a child are similar things in practice. A newborn will grow out beyond the human that she is, and she will never be that newborn again. The newborn will no longer exist. Ceasing to exist is death. At every stage, or even every moment, my child dies. My child will keep dying until soon, I will turn around and poof, there is no child. In her stead, I will have a daughter of 22 years, one who has wrecked several of my cars, and is off to college funded with my retirement. My child will have passed away long ago, right before my loving eyes.
Yes THE PRESTIGE is a fine example with whole question of whether he's the man in the prestige or the man in the box.
Delete(I'd have more to add to this but I'm responding from my phone at the moment.)
The fifth scenario disturbs me. Along with the whole idea of amnesia. If I don't have my memories, am I still me? The ME in my head I mean. If you wipe my slate and start over, am I a new person? It would seem less a continuation of consciousness than one consciousness dying and one being born anew.
ReplyDeleteHi, by the way :)
Well, hey, you've got nothing to worry about, right? You told me you were going to live forever.
DeleteAlso, in your absence, I started a new blog www.sunnystrangers.blogspot.com that you might interested in. (Like I needed another one.) Anyway, I think you'll like it.
Welcome back, by the way. You are back, right?
So, every mood of Bryan's has its own blog, and every blog has a mood :) Nice.
ReplyDeleteAs for me, it is a tentative comeback. Sort of just tipping my toe back in the water. I'm working at a new job and don't have as much free time as I did. We will see. If nothing else, I plan to at least READ blogs more often.
If I were that dying man, I don't think I would take any of those options. Don't think I could bear a clone inheriting this fracked up mess I already have in my head along with the attendant problems. Or taking up residence in someone else's head and shooing out what might be a nice normal well-rounded mind.
ReplyDeleteHopefully when the time comes I'll just choose to find out what happens next with a smile on my face.
There always is a certain curiosity about it, isn't there?
DeletePlease delete after reading. Please accept my apologies regarding the message you received. Someone has taken great exception to a post I wrote a couple of weeks ago criticizing Hong Kong politicians. I originally answered the [anonymous] criticisms as I would any comment on my blog, i.e. politely, but when I received a comment, again anonymous, that impugned my personal integrity I replied, rudely, that I wouldn't be accepting any more comments from this person. Thank you for letting me know about the message you received. At least two other people have received the same message, and I'm now wondering how many other people this person has inconvenienced. I'm really sorry this has happened to you.
ReplyDeleteNo problem. It was the highlight of my day ;D
Delete