Flashforward (Pt I)

"Infinite are the arguments of mages."

We are, as a people, quite obsessed with what will happen to us after death. Many, if not most, of us need to believe that we are certain about what will happen to us when we die. Whether the 'afterlife' is a non-corporeal paradise called Heaven, or a futuristic utopia here on Earth, we seem desperate to want to ensure our continued survival in it.

Survival for the pragmatic atheist means technology that extends or revives one's life in the face of death. Two increasingly-popular approaches to death nullification are cryonics and the idea that one's consciousness could be uploaded to a computer. Ironically, embracing these technologies doesn't always come with a corresponding interest in studying consciousness to make sure that nothing would be missing when one's mind is uploaded to computer, or revived from cryogenic stasis. (sigh)

From a 5-dimensional viewpoint, I see several obstacles to successfully preserving/continuing the 'self' in these ways. These obstacles aren't necessarily consistent with each other, but in light of the model that's developing, I feel there is some potential benefit in attempting to work through them.

The first obstacle involves the very idea of 'self'. We have a very strong, persistent, subjective feeling of being an independent and self-contained 'self'. I'm not talking about a sense of identity that is defined by socially-contingent labels, but rather a sense of being separate from that which is around us. This sense of self exhibits a strong continuity that 1) defies physical damage or illness, and 2) (usually) reconciles contradictory information and personal actions in a way that doesn't damage itself. (If you are tempted to argue that the sense of self is an unimportant epiphenomenon, then I have to wonder what it is that you are arguing for preserving.)

If the sense of self is an epiphenomenon, then are we sure that we understand the primary phenomenon that gives rise to it? We don't (generally) feel as if any portion of our expression of self arises as a result of any non-local connection to others. We tend to assume that the locally-isolated brain is solely responsible for our feelings and actions as a 'self'. But what if our expression of self were entirely (or even partially) a function of our non-local connection to others? If I, as an isolated observer, can choose/create which outcome I experience, then is it not possible that I in some sense am a product/expression of similar choices made by others? What if the very heart of multiple-observer interactions tells us that we are creating each other in the same way that we 'create' our experience of coincidences? And the critical question for technological-survivalists... If this were true, what would happen to my 'self' when it is displaced in time to a point in the future where no one who knew me exists?

The thing that bugs me about the arguments for cryonics is that they tout the fact that "dynamic brain activity can be lost and regained without loss of personal identity." (q) (My emphasis.) However this argument doesn't recognize its own limitation... To date, we have only ever succeeded in reinserting a person back into the information/observer grid that contained enough information about the person to enable such a comparison. Without such a network of other observers who have information about me - who are perhaps creating their consistent experience of me - will the 'who' that wakes up in 200 years be the same? If the surviving/revived consciousness has a sense of self, who would know (and how) that it was exhibiting the same personality for the same reasons as it did before?

(I have previously expressed skepticism about technology that would interrupt our connection to this admittedly poorly-defined grid. When I begin to think about longer intervals of time, I am confronted with the idea that the information contained within the grid might change significantly or, if no information is lost, that its availability/accessibility has been altered in some way. Yeah, I know - that's too vague to be useful at this point.)

That a sense of self can arise from the appropriate re-electrolyzation of a brain is not the argument I'm attempting to have here. And I can't say what, if not the brain, is the substrate of consciousness, or how another observer would hold the information that enables them to influence my expression of self. I suspect much of the problem in defining/identifying these things has to do with our limiting perception of time. Time - specifically, accessing information from the future - is the next stop on this flash forward vision of technological survival.

And time is the one thing that I don't have more of right now, so I'll sign off.

Yours truly,

Rational, With Different Data