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| Cyber Future by Benedict Campbell |
Why do people want to upload themselves? By uploading ourselves we become super intelligent beings that will be able to develop technologies that may extend our lives. As super intelligent beings, we might develop new uploading techniques or new medicines against terminal or life-threatening diseases, but we may also develop inter alia social systems or technological devices that make our lives much easier and less stressful. Even the latter will possibly play a role in lengthening our lives. Although I am against systems and devices that make us lazy beings, the imagination of a stress-free but stimulating and inspiring world appeals to me greatly. The fact, however, that a stress-free world is an ideal and thus hardly realizable, should not weaken our will to strive for it.
The previous paragraph delineates why people supposedly want to upload themselves. The reasons given appear however to be rather subjective. Yet, I would like to argue that most human beings would be in favour of uploading themselves if it possibly lengthens their lives. All self-conscious people that care about the things they and others do want to live longer and safer, because those things we can do are all too valuable to give up. In real life we already see that people are trying to make their lives safer and more comfortable. We test all our food, drinks, and other stimulants in order to frighten us of the unhealthy substances and to stimulate us to consume the healthier ones. Also, we see that much money is put into medical research and in developing new drugs or techniques that prevent us from dying young and make us live substantively longer.
If the practice of uploading is safe, and if it does not remove my human characteristics, then I will definitely venture the upload. Nevertheless, many people argue that uploading is unsafe, because it takes away humanity and because these uploaded posthumans will not be human friendly. John Searle, an American philosopher, says that an upload will transform us into robots or computers that only simulate thinking. He says that we will lose our ability to be self-conscious or to be able to understand what we are thinking. Thus we will lose our humanity, our ability to rationalize and to be emotional beings. Nicholas Agar believes in Searle’s contention, which is in the footsteps of those that advocate Weak Artificial Intelligence – those saying that artificial intelligence cannot match or exceed human capabilities. Although we cannot predict whether an upload will be truly destructive for a human being, Agar says that we would better not even give it a try. Agar comes to this conclusion by looking at Blaise Pascal’s Wager. Accordingly, it is a good trade-off to refuse uploading, because from that we could possibly lose everything, and instead to chose to remain human, because from living a fortunate human life we don’t lose anything.
For me, this wager is all well and good, but it does not bring us any further. Besides, in the future there will be anyways an irrational fool that will accept the offer to venture the upload. This will show us whether the upload is successful, whether it is sensible to upload more human beings, and what should be improved. For me it is therefore more interesting to inquire how and why an upload could be a success. This inquiry brings me to a philosophical discussion of the mind and human consciousness and I hope that the discussion below will provoke more ideas and discussion.
First, however, we need to discuss the criteria a posthuman needs to meet in order to become a functional being. Most importantly, a posthuman needs to have intelligence. This implies that a posthuman must be able to reason, represent knowledge, plan, learn, and communicate. In order to have these intelligent capabilities, a posthuman also needs to have senses, a nervous network with a brain that can process and memorize information, and it needs to have ‘motor skills’, the skills to move things by means of muscles. Although it will be technologically difficult to produce a being with an electronic neural network that is linked to the senses and the muscles, I am convinced that it will be possible in the future. Remember that we can already make highly intelligent robots built on microchips and other nanotechnological systems.
When we reach the point of developing a being that is functional and can process information and language, we have developed a conscious being. A being that in existentialist terms exists, as it thinks, but not has transcended into a being with essence. We can call this being a pre-reflective cogito, a being that has not yet reflected upon the essence of what it is doing and of what it is thinking. The being is thus not aware of its own conscious being and is according John Searle only simulating thinking.
The conscious pre-reflective cogito is conscious just like a computer. A computer can also transport energy, information, or language when there is a certain sensory input. When we tap on our keyboard of our computer, the computer reacts to it according to how it is programmed. The computer will transport the information through its microchips and will give a certain sensory output, e.g. by saying a word. A computer can however do more. It can compute. “Computations can capture other systems’ abstract causal organization. Mental properties are nothing over and above abstract causal organization. Therefore, computers running the right kind of computations will instantiate mental properties.” (Chalmers) We can compare this to our use of formulas. By inserting particular information (the information from sensory inputs) into standard formulas, formulas can provide us with new information of which we did not think of before. So computers can compute the consequences of certain acts and can make decisions on basis of choosing the best consequence. It is thus not only externally synthesized information that goes through a computer, but also internally produced/computed information that goes through a computer. This information is always randomly produced, as the sensory inputs from our chaotic world are always random. By storing the information on its memory microchip, the computer has learned something.
Two other criteria for intelligence are planning and reasoning. These practices are only possible when a computer or an uploaded being can learn. The computer can reason and plan by means of a scheme composed of bad and good consequences that it has learned in the past. With this scheme, the computer can make trade-off based decisions. If a computer rationally makes a decision, it can also program itself to act upon the decision somewhere in the future, which we call planning. Whether the computer will succeed in acting upon it in the future is still another question.
Communication and representing knowledge are both more complex criteria of intelligence. For both we need to understand what we are thinking: the computer must be self-conscious in order to be capable of communicating and representing knowledge. The computer must be able to think of its thinking. For this capability, a computer must understand its existence or its being – it must learn that there is a being that thinks, a cogito. The computer must understand that it is alive rather than dead, and that it can do things. It must also learn that the being makes decisions on basis of what is good and bad for the ego. By becoming aware of these decisions, the computer will care about them and also establishes a will to live up to them.
The computer must also learn a language in order to show others what it likes and dislikes. Then, other people will also think that the computer is thinking and is caring about its interests. The computer becomes a social being that loses its radical freedom to do things without caring, because it understands that others compete against him/her. The computer understands that he/she needs to secure its interests by fighting against the other. In Hobbesian terms, the state of nature, “the war of all against all”, has then become reality. Thus, the computer has become a caring, self-conscious, egoistic being that is able to communicate its interests and to represent knowledge. Knowledge is something, that has gotten an essence, a subjectivity, or a meaning for the computer, because of the computer’s consciousness of the conscious beings in this world.
Since it seems to be possible to create self-conscious posthumans, there are still others arguing that human beings should not venture to upload themselves into posthumans. These people say that we will become substantively different creatures. The aesthetic sensibilities of posthumans will be completely different from ours and they will find it reasonless to reproduce, because of their negligibly senescent lives. Being afraid of losing humanity seems however to be a myth. We will never know exactly how it is like to be a posthuman. Yet, we can be sure of our different mentality and identity in the future, which we will get both as evolving human beings and as transforming human beings into posthuman beings. In my opinion, we should make the progressive step towards posthumanism rather than staying pessimistic, afraid, and conservative about it.
At last, there are also people arguing that an upload will make us human unfriendly beings. These people say that in our social unequal world, where not all people have the resources to upload themselves or the resources to provide their basic needs, alienation will bring the posthuman being at loggerheads with the human being. In that situation, the uploaded posthuman, with all its power and intelligence, will oppress the human race, which we don’t want and always should try to prevent. Well, why not developing human friendly artificial intelligence? By programming or by education, we can possibly make most posthumans human friendly. But won’t they be smart enough to circumvent the programming? Yes, they can, but these posthumans face the same dilemma we are also facing. They will also think that an evolution of the human friendly posthuman into a hating posthuman will endanger the existence of both human friendly posthumans and human beings. Most human friendly posthumans will remain the same peace-loving beings, as most of them prefer to live in peace rather than in war.
Words Cited
Chalmers, David. "A Computational Foundation for the Study of Cognition." Web. 13 Dec. 2011. https://mywebspace.wisc.edu/lshapiro/web/Phil554_files/Chalmers-computation.html
Written by Lars Been
2nd year student LUC
The LUC Dean's Masterclass is run each semester for the students who made the honour roll in the previous semester.
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