Means, ends, and bodies

[garote]

Whether you place any value in being alive, beyond the programming of your survival instincts, is based on whether you believe there is a significant difference between these means: The appearance of life generated by physical chemistry, and the appearance of life generated by mathematical simulation.

You can write software that does a pretty great job thinking abstractly. You can write software that paints breathtaking pictures. But these are ends -- of intelligence, evolution, expression. The fact that these ends can be accomplished with either a mind in a living body or with software in a computer does not erase the distinction between the means of a computer and a body. It's worth keeping in mind: No matter how convincing the illusion of intelligence and emotion is when generated by a computer, no matter how much it reminds us of the behavior of a living thing, there is no life involved, because there is no body.

We are all the result of millions of years of evolutionary pressure to develop empathy and group cooperation, and nowhere in that entire span, even once, was there a software simulation of life as convincing as the ones we can generate now, starting in about the last 40 years. Not even close. Talking robot assistants; electronic images of pets that cry when you ignore them; avatars with changeable wardrobes that dance. Is it so strange that we're both delighted and worried by these new things? A modern human can anthropomorphize absolutely anything, especially if you draw a face on it and give it a name. A volleyball named Wilson for example. It's our weakness and our superpower.

Imagine there is a new invention: A teleport device. It works by measuring your body thoroughly, then taking you apart, then building an exact copy of you somewhere else. What happens if you walk into it? You’d be destroyed, but your replacement coming out the other end wouldn’t be able to tell. Go through once and your clone would be convinced: It's a cool new way to travel! You'd feel no hesitation about walking into the equivalent of a meat grinder.

An easy way to break the illusion would be to do the measuring, but not take the original you apart. With the original and a clone of you, standing side by side, you could literally argue with yourself over which of you should be destroyed for the sake of consistency. It wouldn't go well.

This is all just standard science fiction, so far. But here's a nastier premise: Given that you can be cloned and not know it, and be a clone and not know it, how would you know if you were cloned from one instant to the next, without even walking into an obvious portal? Just sitting there in your chair, you could be erased and replaced with a duplicate that only thinks it’s been there the whole time.

We do an abstracted version of this in computers all the time, using data. The computer contains a zillion discrete numbers but the way they're processed presents us with the illusion that there are one or more entities, changing over time. Of course, convincing an observer that a thing exists is not the same as making that thing exist. Subjective is not objective. But the point is, the illusion is based on a massive amount of calculation, done over and over again, from moment to moment. The light you see on the screen is not used to make the next iteration. That light is thrown away and the computer goes back to the numbers.

Given a sophisticated enough computer, any given snapshot of life, frozen in time, could be reduced to a numerical state, which can then be operated upon to produce a life-like effect to an observer. (Assuming you could measure it accurately, which is a giant problem all by itself.) Theoretically, at some intense level of detail, we would have enough numbers that we could feed them all into the teleporter mentioned previously, and construct a working body from them rather than tearing apart a person for reference. And as soon as that body is constructed and set in motion, there would be a living being. Mary Shelley had a field day with this idea about 200 years ago.

If that's the case, what’s special about the continuity of living from one moment to the next, in a living, breathing body? If we could all be built from scratch using math at any moment of our existence, why do we care so much about being alive?

Well, the easy answer is, we care about persisting because we are evolved to care, and because our memory grants us a convincing record of our previous persistence. We believe our bodies were alive up to the present moment, so it's in our interest to continue the trend to reach the next moment.

If you know that your body has been intact for your whole life, would that knowledge be enough to convince you not to step into the teleporter? Most likely. But what if you already remember walking through it before, at least once?

To us, a core trait of a living being is an unbroken chain of physical interaction, consistent form birth to death, between the matter that we were built with, and the matter that remains when we die. It's not the only trait, but it's an essential one. We also expect to find a similar chain, between the physical interaction of offspring and parents, going back countless generations until its origins are lost in primordial chemistry. Physical interaction means bodies spawned from bodies. Seems like a tidy reference to hang your hat on: If you have a body, then you're alive, and if you want to remain so, stay away from suspicious teleporters that will rip your body apart. As soon as you get broken down into numbers, there is no "you" any more. So don't do that, kids. That's bad, mmkay?

The problem is, there will always be limits to how much consistency we can personally account for.

Imagine you are a living being but then flash-frozen, stopping all your metabolism at once, or slowing it down to almost nothing and then to actually nothing, like some living creatures do in advanced states of hibernation. Now imagine you are brought back to full consciousness ten years later. Would you still be the same entity? It’s reasonable to say yes. But now suppose that while you were in hibernation, a tiny machine went crawling through your whole frozen body and replaced each molecule with an equivalent one. Then, after ten years of this, your replaced body was re-started.

Just like in all the other examples, the “you” that awakened would be a clone, but none the wiser. Just like the previous scenario, the so-called original you would be effectively killed. Your clone would be indifferent, and the original you would conveniently not be around to comment.

The main point of this variation on the previous scenario is that it's a less efficient version of the process of replacement that would happen when you walk into the teleporter -- but it's also a less efficient version of the process that happens constantly when you are alive; a process that may sound familiar and that all living things do, called metabolism. New matter is integrated and old matter is excreted, relentlessly. In this scenario, a device is doing the replacement while you are unconscious, but metabolism does it constantly while you are awake.

Now consider another thing we all do: Sleep. While you are unconscious - or perhaps dreaming - your body goes through a whole cascade of house-cleaning routines, most of which involve collecting waste material for disposal. Some fraction of your body is replaced with fresh material. Sleep is essential, and we all accept this little slice of death as the cost of surviving. But it also means that a big gap in our consciousness is inserted once every 24 hours. The very best any of us can do, in terms of remembering a truly unbroken line of activity in our living bodies, is a fuzzy one less than one day old.

For all we know, we drop into that horrifying atomic teleporter every single night. Why not walk into it during the day too?

So we are faced with two extremes: The continuity-assuring state of consciousness in a body, and the unseen, undetectable murder lurking potentially at the end of every day, where for all we know, we could be reconstituted from a pile of numbers or just thrown out entirely. Worse yet, we are forced to acknowledge that the terrain between extremes has huge holes in it. We could drop through moment by moment, and there is no ironclad reassurance that we haven't. A metabolism that is fast enough, and a memory that is clear enough, conspire to convince us we are on the living side of that extreme, but it could easily be just that: A conspiracy.

Time to freak out?

That's always a choice. A good existential freak-out can be refreshing sometimes. But there's more to think about.

Consciousness is the reflection dancing on the surface of the past, as the future rains onto it. It has no thickness at all. The only thing you can rely on - insofar as your senses are accurate - is that there is a now, and you are now in some particular state. Sitting rather than standing, in one room rather than another, facing east instead of west, et cetera. Plus countless other facts that you cannot so accurately perceive, but are on paths you could walk towards in the future. This is a state derived from your past choices, and offering you specific new ones, in this moment of now.

Your consistent existence in the physical world only has meaning in context: Where are you? Why are you here? What can you do now?

A great thing about being alive is that those questions have extremely complex but discernible answers, based on the history - ancient and recent - that brought each of us to our place. A deep investigation of those answers reveals something vital, that is also unique: We are bodies that evolved straight out of fundamental properties of chemistry and physics, and embedded directly in the flow of time. No programmer or designer is required to wind us up, or make us operate. And since one is not required, it is legitimately possible - perhaps not ultimately guaranteed, but possible - that we are not numbers in a machine built by some capricious god for inscrutable reasons.

By apprehending the wonder of this situation, and how thoroughly it differs from any simulation of life we have been able to electronically assemble by intelligence and technology, we can truly appreciate the value of being alive. In a chain of gods creating gods, the physical world and the phenomenon of time grant us a unique ability to be the first link. It's still possible that we are each blasted apart and rebuilt from numbers moment by moment, but unlike any simulation ever devised, crude or magnificent, we do not have to be. Our senses can be flawed and inconstant, but that's in comparison to the world they sense, which all our experiments are telling us, actually sustains itself*.

You could convince yourself that you are a simulation anyway, and embrace the bizarre misanthropy it leads to, along with all the robot assistants, electronic pets, and dressable avatars designed to prey on your empathy. But that would be the lazy choice, wouldn't it? The much more interesting and challenging truth is all around you: This is not a game. You are not alone. Your choices matter more than anything.

-;-;-

(* Here's the part where some people drag in the whole "big bang" thing, and shout about what happened "before" it. Sadly, Stephen Hawking is no longer around to patiently enlighten these people. But his books still are!)