The Fortunate Man

[onefamiliarface]

At some point, in the distant past, something happened which created stuff. Eventually, through all kinds of weirdness, that stuff became life. Life became sentient. Sentient beings had babies with each other in the right order until they had me, you, and all the people we know. Most importantly, for this story, is that one particular sperm in

Comments

sperm + egg = eternal soul part un

[zigmazag18]

It's a funny thought, the me-ness of a sperm and egg combination. I really have no idea what to think of it. I can reconcile everything about the universe, including theories about how universes can be formed in the first place in ways which escape the trap of an eternal past. I can reconcile intelligence, all human accomplishments, how a brain works, forming memories, thought processes, the nearly infinite recursion of our idea of self, and how THAT fundamentally is our continuous idea of self. But I can't reconcile qualia. I can't reconcile how we seem to have souls, for lack of a better word. 6 billion automatons writing music, poetry, and landing on the moon I can get. But the actual experience of things I don't. I understand the processing, but not the experience.

It's the sense from the famous teleportation paradox, where your brain and body are scanned and an exact replica, atom by atom, is constructed and is functional, acts just like you in every way, reacts to the situation just like you would, grows in life, creates art, maybe raises a family. But that's not you under the hood, behind the curtain. Is it somebody else? Is it empty? I mean, it's not somebody else in the sense that it will go through life -exactly- like you would. But does it experience things? Would it even be capable of knowing whether or not it had qualia? That's a hell of a question, either way. It's still your brain, so one would think it would still claim it had qualia, regardless. But suppose it didn't make such a claim, that'd be as hard evidence as any that the soul concept needs to be taken seriously, whatever that even means.

And suppose we build up some AI intelligence from scratch, as open and self-recursive as ours, give it input sensors, let it pick up language, and ask it if it has qualia. Again, interesting answer either way. If it claims to have qualia, it's inconclusive, because for all we know we're the only ones who actually have qualia, everyone else who ever lived is an automaton, even those who invented the idea of qualia. The gamble is that the AI would, again, claim to not have qualia, and we're back to soul country.

Within the next 50-100 years, given the rate of consistent technological advances, it's plausible we'll be in a position to be capable of "uploading" minds into computers, or to just save it in an extended flash drive until we can figure out how to put them into bodies. So then what matters in immortality? What really counts for something? The you that you've constructed over your entire life, the you with passions, intelligence, values, wisdom, the you that is capable of creating things? All of that could be salvageable. Just not the you under the hood, behind the curtain (presumably, if that even means anything).

For all I know the universe is fertile ground for pan-animism, where absolutely everything has a soul. Not intelligence of course, but a soul. If not then where's the line? Our bodies are teeming with life, trillions of cells working together with their own base-level cell motivations in life. Does there require a central processing area for souledness to develop? That'll go right down evolutionarily to single cell organisms.

But now suppose there is a sort of pan-animism in play here. If we upload our brains onto a computer, it really has a soul, has qualia, even if -I- can't experience what it's experiencing. So what does THAT have to say about the weight of death? The continuity of souledness from one instant to another is another question entirely. Since it seems awfully arbitrary, and anything that moves is capable of having some sort of thing under the hood, behind the curtain, falling short of positing a full fledged metaphysical soul giver and taker, the idea that there is continuity from one instant to another is a bit superimposed, piggy backing along with our extended sense of self.