Mind Uploading, Cloning, and Personal Immortality

 

Arthur C. Clarke's 1956 novel, The City and the Stars, describes city a billion years in the future where the inhabitants are minds downloaded into artificial bodies from files stored in a central computer. They live a thousand years in each body, after which their minds are stored as computer files--there are more uploaded minds than there is space for host bodies--for eventual future downloading.

Less than sixty years after Clarke's book, in 2013, a New York conference sponsored by Russian multimillionaire Dmitry Itskov promised that something like this would become reality by 2045. Martine Rothblatt, a tech company CEO, predicted the imminent development of "mindclones" run on "mindware" that would be genuinely alive and conscious. Though arguably only computer simulations of their originals, such electronic mind-copies could, in theory, be replicated indefinitely. Uploaded into any suitable host machine, a person could live, if not forever, far beyond the limits of biological bodies and without risk of dementia.

Does this mean that thousand-year lifespans, at least as brains-in-chips, are around the corner? And would this amount to personal semi-immortality? Rothblatt's prediction is probably wildly optimistic, of course. The human brain has some 86,000,000,000 neurons, each of which has about 7,000 connections to other neurons--that is, half a quadrillion synapses that, unlike digital computers, are not simple on/off switches but respond to degrees of stimulus. Of course, many of these neurons control bodily functions and would be superfluous to a digital mind, but which ones? And what sort of sensors could sift through the thicket of even a fraction of all this potential and actual neural activity, even assuming that consciousness is reducible to a digital process? I doubt that our century, or maybe any century, will see artificial minds as wastefully complex as biological ones. But suppose that Rothblatt's mindclones were realized and were so convincing that the mindware exclaimed, "Damn, this is just like being alive again! Hey, baby!"

Suppose that you are dying of cancer and avail yourself of a new mindclone machine, lying under a sensor for days while an incredibly fast algorithm uploads a copy of all your mental functions to a supercomputer with a full set of artificial senses, a robotic body. Finally, the whirring stops. "Are we done?" you ask. The technician nods and boots the program. A copy of your mind is running in the computer. Is it self-conscious? Is it you? You test this by having a conversation with it. Maybe it passes the Turin Test in spades, talking exactly like you and reacting exactly as you would, at first surprised to see you "out there" but then recalling your mindcloning project. (In the South we'd say y'all's mindcloning project because you're plural now, two minds beginning to move down two different and inevitably divergent paths.) 

        But the real question is whether you experience any real difference in your life because a functioning copy--a digital one--exists and is, at the onset, identical. Is it any more your mind than a hologram of you is your body? Now, while you're lying there on the mindclone table, talking to yourself, suddenly the cancer bursts and you die. Are you any less dead because a hologram of your mind hums beside your corpse? It may sing at your funeral. Your survivors may be comforted to have "you" digitally present, a memento of your life, a remarkable one keeps up with the news. But you still died. You're as dead as if you'd never had a mindclone made. The kind of immortality you have is the kind that comes from a good portrait or a life that people remember--and inferior to those if all it does is sit in a computer all day and burn electricity.

Christopher Nolan's cryptic film, The Prestige, imagines a similar situation. Robert Angier is a stage magician obsessively competing with Alfred Borden to perform the ultimate trick, a magician disappearing from one location and instantly appearing at another. Borden, unknown to Angier, works this with an identical twin, but Angier resorts to more radical means. Nikola Tesla has invented a machine creates nearby an exact duplicate of any object, and Angier uses it to create an exact copy of himself--what is popularly called a clone--while drowning his original body in a tank of water under the stage. My inner science nerd must observe that this is bad physics. The energy equal to a man-size mass is on the hydrogen-bomb scale, not to speak of problems of its transmission and encoding it contrary to entropy, but the trope is the price of admission to Nolan's steampunk tale, and as a thought experiment it is chilling. 

         Put yourself in the position of Angier staging the trick every night. Regardless of the fact that his doppelgänger will live on, he knows that he will experience death by drowning--asphyxiation followed by heaven, hell, reincarnation, or oblivion. The fact that Herr Tesla's machine has made a copy of him is no more relevant to this than if Mr. Edison's camera had made a movie of him. A copy is a copy, not the original. Greater love has no man than that he will lay down his life for his clone.

         The transporter in Star Trek presents similar problems. The concept is that it "dematerializes" people, converting them into an energy pattern, and then beams them to a target location where they are "rematerialized." In other words, it destroys them as material beings and, an instant later, creates material objects resembling them in new locations. This mysterious process--invented when models of shuttles called for in early scripts weren't ready in time--is much less traumatic than the nightly drownings in The Prestige, but the principle is the same. Kirk's body is destroyed, his mind is transferred to doppelgänger at another location. The Kirk who enters the transporter room dies. What else is destruction of his physical body? The creation of an accurate copy a few seconds later doesn't change this. 

         Even though the rematerialized Kirk on the planet Sarpeidon shares all the memories of the one that the transporter disintegrated, what we have here is the equivalent of a Xerox machine that burns its originals. If there is such a thing as the Pearly Gates in Federation space, there will be a queue of James Kirks at the registration desk, one for each time he is dematerialized--that is, if doppelgängers have souls.

According to the Star Trek mythos, the transporter stores a digital copy of everybody beamed so data lost in transmission can be restored, but transmission wouldn't be the main source of error. When we sample continuous phenomena to discontinuous digital data, the rounding-off process produces the so-called Butterfly Effect--tiny variations in data that are compounded into great differences in outcomes. There is no such thing as a perfect copy. And, besides, a snapshot of a mind, even if accurate, is past, not future--a frozen state. Even if you care deeply about the mindclone uploaded as you die of cancer, even if its ongoing life validates you, you may worry that process will save a copy of your death agonies endlessly looping.

If we give up on uploading our minds and try for immortality by self-duplicating the natural way, with DNA, there are difficulties. The second Robert Angier in The Prestige can be loosely called a clone, but such "clones" are fantasy constructs--like the Arnold Schwarzenegger character in The 6th Day, who believes a clone has replaced him but then discovers (ta-dah!) that he's the clone. In reality, having a clone would be, at best, like having a younger twin. The process that produced Dolly the Sheep involves transferring the nucleus from a cell of a donor into an egg from which the nucleus has been removed. With luck, the egg begins to divide and is placed in the uterus of a surrogate mother. After nine months (again, with luck) a child is born with cellular DNA more-or-less identical to the donor, essentially a delayed identical twin.

But an ordinary identical twin is a better approximation of a "second self" for several reasons. First, a twin comes from the same mother and has the same mitochondrial DNA. Also, even if the cloned egg does begin to divide, DNA is introduced into it by a microscopically disruptive process and may be damaged or modified. Given the high rate of false starts and birth defects, even surviving clones are likely to be flawed copies. Then there is the intrauterine influence of the mother, whose hormones, nutrition, and stress--not to speak of chemicals in her bloodstream--affect traits such as size, intelligence, and sexual orientation. Finally there's the influence of early childhood conditioning and growing up different eras and homes--of being teenagers with different friends in different popular cultures. Whatever's the matter with kids these days would be the matter with a clone. Even childhood trauma spared a clone will make it different from its donor in unpredictable ways. Plans to clone a Mini-Me will be frustrated.

    A pair of identical twins a year behind me in high school usually dressed alike, and I never learned to tell them apart. Now, I could share picture of them from Facebook (but won't without permission) showing apparent brothers, yes, but old men noticeably different--modified by sixty years of divergent lifestyles. Beyond shared cellular DNA, they had identical mitochondria, intrauterine conditions, birth dates, friends, homes, and cultures, but the mature adults still look different. If you want earthly "immortality," I'd give up on cloning and fall back on doing something memorable or sharing your life with children produced the ordinary way.