Ghosts Of Our Former Selves: How Scary Can It Be?

You are lying in a bed in a nicely equipped laboratory, where you have volunteered yourself to be an experimental subject. You just finished signing an alarming number of contracts and documents that includes a substantial compensation for your troubles.

Scenario 1.

a. Per agreement you are told that you will be sedated, and your body precisely duplicated down to the sub-atomic level.  With both identical bodies still fully sedated, your original body will be terminated… but your double will be preserved and will replace your original body by occupying the same bed.  You are apprehensive but nevertheless agree to continue and get it over with.

b.  The deed is done.  Your surviving double is awakened and remembers every memory and physical sensation that constituted the original you. There is no difference.  The only additional memory the “new” you has is the realization that you were killed at some point when you were unconscious and that the body you are feeling now is that of a freshly produced double.

c.  You are informed that the experiment was a great success.  Although the original you was killed off, your double is indeed a perfect replica and your awakening as a duplicate should confirm that you feel no difference from before you were sedated.

d.  You stretch, think back on some moments in your life, look at your hands, take a deep breath. For now, you can’t help but agree. The only difference between the old you and the new you is simply the added knowledge that you died in your sleep and awoke in a duplicate body.

Scenario 2.

Same as Scenario 1,  except that at point c. (despite the fact that you are now in your double’s body) you are told upon awakening that there was a problem with the experiment and the duplication had to be aborted.  You are lied to and told that nothing has really changed and that you are still in your original body.

d.  You stretch, think about what it might have been like to be in a replicated body, and are somewhat relieved that the experiment didn’t happen.  So, in this case, you died and awoke in a duplicate body, but that knowledge is not part of your conscious awareness.

Scenario 3.

Same as Scenario 1, except that at point b. the experiment is indeed aborted.  But c. and d. play out identically. The result is that your consciousness state is theoretically equivalent to Scenario 1. but you are still in your original body.

Scenario 4.

Same as Scenario 3, but at point c you are told the truth about the experiment being aborted.  your state of consciousness at point d. is the same as in scenario 2 but physically you are in fact in your original body, consistent with your thinking.

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To summarize:
1. you are duplicated/killed and told truth – physical change (new body), consciousness change (you think that you died and are in a new body)
2. you are duplicated/killed and lied to – physical change, no consciousness change
3. you are not duplicated/killed and lied to – no physical change, consciousness change
4. you are not duplicated/killed and told truth – no physical change, no consciousness change

Notice however that the primary sensory experience in all 4 cases is simply that you go to sleep and wake up.  That’s it.  No fundamental sensory difference in all 4 cases.  No matter how drastic or innocuous each case might be, your bodily perceptions did not change (granted, we can never be 100% sure how being killed and waking up in a different body, albeit a near-perfect copy, really feels like).

Mentally however it is quite a different story.  Depending on each case, you may have future experiences and make entirely different choices in your life, depending on which scenario you were a part of.  An example might be that, going forward, you experience some light-headedness or contract a mild illness.  Depending on your state of consciousness from each scenario you could either shrug these things off (2,4)… or turn into a hopeless hypochondriac constantly worried about the quality of your duplicated body (1,3).  This despite the fact that there is basically zero physical/experiential difference from the original you.

The point is, despite the drastic scenario differences, it doesn’t really matter what happened to you!  You are depending on your present/future sense of well being entirely on what you are told about your past by someone else, whether it is the truth or a lie.  Sound familiar?  We do this constantly to varying degrees in our daily lives… about events in our past that shape our mental state and decision space in the present and future.  In this extreme example, if the experimenters you were dealing with happened to wear red labcoats, seeing a red garment in the future would trigger or reinforce the state of mind from one of the scenarios and likely shift your behavior accordingly.

The fact that you agreed contractually to go through with it certainly will add to thoughts, emotions you experience and the decisions you make.  What if you were informed of the above experiment after the fact, without your consent?  All of the anxieties and thought processes leading up to the event (contracts/duplication/killing) followed by the satisfaction or regret about your strange agreement  would be absent from your psyche.  They would be replaced by other equally strong (but different) thoughts and anxieties (including anger or skepticism) after you realize what happened without your permission.  How would this change how you lead your life going forward?

What a hot mess.  Right?  Yet physically, via sensory experience and via conscious awareness there is no difference to what happened to you.  No trauma.  The mental torture is all manufactured from an induced perception that is completely external to ourselves and our sensory experience.  Again I turn to observing some of the parallels in our daily lives.  Nothing new really… somebody walking down the street can experience the world around them quite differently depending on whether they just lost their job or won the lottery.

Ok, so? Where is all this rambling going?  Well… we are rapidly approaching a reality where scenarios similar to the above could actually play out in our lifetimes.  As choices involving life extension and other remarkable advances become more real and more fundamentally transformative, our ability to bring our mindstate into the right gear and not feel like a runanway train becomes more and more challenging. So above and beyond the “catastrophe of life” that we all experience presently, the complexity of the future may be even more daunting.

Deeper questions arise to the sense of continuity of the conscious experience in scenarios 1 and 2, and how one might handle them.  It would be kinda hard to “let go” and allow everything about you to be terminated… your very existence completely snuffed out, with the faith that your surviving duplicate would really “be” you, and pick up where you left off.  Would you really be yourself?  Strictly speaking the answer is no.  The new “you” is, indeed, a copy of “you”.  Not the original “you”.  The original “you” really did die and your copy was just born yesterday.  Hard to say how this death/birth experience would really “feel” like, for lack of a better term.

During initial human trials of consciousness “transfer”, a fundamental question with regard to consciousness may come to light:  whether consciousness emerges from within the physical brain’s skullbox, or if it transcends the current cosmic physical model such that it is not necessarily created or destroyed at birth and death.

A plausible scenario (however remote it might be in mainstream scientific circles) is the presence of a consciousness entity capable of a disembodied existence (from our present physics) that is currently aggregating an experience within it’s present human body (or brain).  A perfect biological replica (like Scenario 1 above) or a computer memory that fully represents the complexity of the biological body-state is created.  Now, in theory, the destruction of the original would not be a problem if the disembodied entity has the presence of mind to “look around” and find nearby the new vessel that is a replica of the original.  It could then “jump in” and pick up right where it left off in terms of it’s last worldly experience… thus transcending (in terms of a life extention strategy) whatever event/illness that caused the original body’s demise in the first place.

As you can imagine there are other endless ramifications depending on all the very different human belief systems that is simply too much to cover in this short little post (e.g. will another consciousness entity take over?  Will a new consciousness entity be created?).  The innumerable conjectured outcomes across cultures and religions are perhaps not as crucial as the ultimate mind-state of the individual after experiencing the projected uploadings, body transfers, enhancements etc. etc. that are looming in our not so distant future.  How do we handle the additional mental input, not the least of which could fundamentally change our belief systems and everything we know to be our realities or truths?  And what if original and successive copies of ourselves are preserved?  How do we potentially handle multiple versions of ourselves (maybe even hundreds or thousands) walking around or floating inside machines?

Perhaps the best equipped to handle such mind-boggling futures are people that are comfortable with continuous change in their lives and that maintain a strong sense of identity… of mindfulness.  Maybe for starters, if people define themselves less by their material possessions (e.g. houses, cars, clothes) or what their bodies look like or who they hang out with… it might be less shocking of a change when they are considering a choice like duplicating their body, finding “themselves” into a completely different one, uploading “themselves” as a ghost into a machine and interacting with others that have/have not chosen to do the same.  As we say (for now):  Time will tell.

For more reading on the subject of mind uploading check out these fascinating papers:
Personal Identity and Uploading by Mark Walker
Why Uploading Will Not Work, Or, The Ghosts Haunting Transhumanism by Patrick D Hopkins
When Should Two Minds Be Considered Versions Of One Another? by Ben Goertzel

And thanks to Patrick Daniell for a fun conversation about the various scenarios and thought experiments that helped to shape this post.

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