As long time readers know I often take speculative excursions into imaginings of the Singularity (which might better be thought of as the Singularities, but that ends up in semantic contortions, better left unsaid.) One element of the Singularity that is likely to be most difficult for people to metabolize has to do with the ways in which one's identity will be effected by technology. This was recently discussed explicitly by Robin Hanson in his elegant response to Bryan Caplan: [HT:
Bryan, you are the sum of your parts and their relations. We know where you are and what you are made of; you are in your head, and you are made out of the signals that your brain cells send each other. Humans evolved to think differently about minds versus other stuff, and while that is a useful category of thought, really we can see that minds are made out of the same parts, just arranged differently. Yes, you “feel,” but that just tells you that stuff feels, it doesn’t say you are made of anything besides the stuff you see around and inside you.
The parts you are made of are constantly being swapped for those in the world around you, and we can even send in unusual parts, like odd isotopes. You usually don’t notice the difference when your parts are swapped, because your mind was not designed to notice most changes; your mind was only designed to notice a few changes, such as new outside sights and sounds and internal signals. Yes you can feel some changed parts, such as certain drugs, but we see that those change how your cells talk to each other. (For some kinds of parts, such as electrons, there really is no sense in which you contain different elections. All electrons are a pattern in the very same electron field.)
We could change your parts even more radically and your mind would still not notice. As long as the new parts sent the same signals to each other, preserving the patterns your mind was designed to notice, why should you care about this change any more than the other changes you now don’t notice? Perhaps minds could be built that are very sensitive to their parts, but you are not one of them; you are built not to notice or care about most of your part details.
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We have taken apart people like you Bryan, and seen what they are made of. We don’t understand the detailed significance of all signals your brain cells send each other, but we are pretty sure that is all that is going on in your head. There is no mysterious other stuff there. And even if we found such other stuff, it would still just be more stuff that could send signals to and from the stuff we see. You’d still just be feeling the signals sent, because that is the kind of mind you are.
J. Storrs Hall expands on the notion that our mind is essentially the summation of the patterns of connectivity among the elements of our brain:
Cryonics and Philosophy of Mind
I find it interesting that it was Caplan who mentioned philosophy of mind, because the reigning philosophy of mind today is functionalism:
Functionalism in the philosophy of mind is the doctrine that what makes something a mental state of a particular type does not depend on its internal constitution, but rather on the way it functions, or the role it plays, in the system of which it is a part. This doctrine is rooted in Aristotle’s conception of the soul, and has antecedents in Hobbes’s conception of the mind as a “calculating machine”, but it has become fully articulated (and popularly endorsed) only in the last third of the 20th century. Though the term ‘functionalism’ is used to designate a variety of positions in a variety of other disciplines, including psychology, sociology, economics, and architecture, this entry focuses exclusively on functionalism as a philosophical thesis about the nature of mental states.
Functionalism is in a sense the modern version of dualism, the philosophy of mind that holds there are two basic kinds of things, mind and matter. However, it overcomes a host of the logical problems of naive dualism in understanding what “mindstuff” actually is. In older versions, you had the key problem that if the mind wasn’t physical, it didn’t make sense that it could affect what a physical system did; so what difference did it make if there was a mind or not? This led to craziness such as epiphenomenalism.
Robin’s answer is essentially that the mind, as well as the body, is autopoietic: a stable pattern maintained in a flow of actual matter and energy, in which the substrate of real physical stuff keeps changing but the real you, the pattern, remains. It is in fact the pattern that is the “mindstuff” in functionalism.
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As such, we can answer Caplan’s question somewhat more precisely. What you can choose to define as you is limited to a computationally universal substrate (mod storage limits) that is running a process that has various elements of memory and algorithm in common with the ones in the process currently running in your head. How many elements and how closely they have to match is up to, well, you. [Emphasis mine-SW]
I suspect because so many of the theorists of mind come from the computer labs they imagine a sense of clarity to the mind that is hard for those who work in the much messier and inchoate filed of biology to appreciate. While I think the arguments in favor of functionalism are powerful and agree that, in the abstract, mind does not depend on biology, I do have questions about the imagined ease with which we will be bale to divorce our minds from the biological substrate. Perhaps not surprisingly, my reservations emerge from my particular field of expertise.
Our identity, sense of self, and our sense of the outlines and limits of our own minds is primarily determined by its container (our brain and body) but it is clear that the mind can extend beyond the body, can incorporate non-biological attributes, and may be able to exist independent of the body. For example, the familiar experience of phantom limb sensations suggests that the mind persists in maintaining one's self-representation long after a major change in the substrate; such sensations persist long after the sensory neurons and their associated connections in the Central Nervous System have degraded. On a more prosaic level, after Lasik surgery, it took me almost a year before I stopped habitually reaching up to adjust my now non-existent glasses. My glasses, which I had worn since grade school had been incorporated into my body schema and my self-representation included glasses until long after they had become unnecessary.
Recent experiments have shown that out of body experiences can be elicited by the proper stimuli; game makers can be expected to use this to enhance virtual reality experiences within a relatively short time.
More speculatively, if as seems likely there comes a time when we become able to replace our failing neurons with more robust hardware, people will eventually evolve into hardware based minds. As a near one to one correspondence between the dieing neuron and its replacement takes place, there should be continuity of identity such that the mind experiences no serious disruption. However, there are other possibilities that may be much more problematic.
, in his comment to Robin Hanson's post points out the subtext:
Although the argument may seem to be about cryonics on the surface, it is really about the viability of uploading.
Consider the possibility of "uploads" and the significance of boundedness, coherence, integration, and continuity for a healthy mind. We already know that people who have problems with their ego boundaries (appreciating where their mind stops and another's begins) develop major Psychiatric pathology, ie psychosis, including Schizophrenia. Clearly Schizophrenia includes dysfunction of the substrate, but "ego boundaries" exist on a continuum and it may be impossible to tell in advance exactly what level of intactness is necessary to tolerate uploading or even incremental replacement, without precipitating severe disturbance. We could potentially learn that uploads are impossible because a mind that has been disembodied cannot maintain its coherence. This possibility would reflect the fact that the mind and body interact and the mind can and does modify itself in relation to itself and its environment.
Consider problems in integration. Our multiple self-representations must be integrated early in life and incorporate changes slowly as we mature. Changes in self-representation and more generally, our minds, continues as we age and decline. Managing the changes and the failures that occur in our minds' ability to incorporate and metabolize such changes, leads to dysfunction, including serious Psychiatric illness and Severe Personality Disorders such as the Borderline States. The potential for dissociation exists in many (most? all?) people; would their minds survive significant changes in their substrate? The Borderline already experiences himself and others and discontinuous and their funcitoning is severely disturbed as a result.
There is every reason in theory that our minds should persist despite discontinuities. Consider coma patients who awake with their personalities intact after days, weeks, and sometimes months; alternatively, consider those early recipients of transplanted hearts who experienced crises of identify carrying someone else's heart in their chest; how would moving one's mind to a different container be experienced and metabolized? However, it is also possible that the patterns that carry our minds would be intolerably stressed by the kinds of changes in substrate imagined.
It is possible that our minds will require a biological substrate not because of vitalism or some derivative but because our minds are not flexible enough to tolerate dissociating from our bodies. I suspect such questions will only be answered when the experiments can finally be done, but until then thinking about our minds, their vicissitudes, and how such experiences can go awry in the human brain/mind interface should be incorporated into discussions of the Singularity.
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