the sum of one’s parts

I was always a lonesome person. When I was young, I thought that there was something wrong with me; some reason why I didn’t understand the social protocols of other kids. I just didn’t care about what they did; I cared about designing things, building things, understanding things so that I may design and build better. I knew what Bernoulli’s principle was in the 3rd grade, but I didn’t have my first kiss until the 10th.

For as long as I can remember I had periods of severe self-loathing, periods in which I’d rather not have been born. Even as a pre-teen, the weight of the world was unbearable. Somewhere around the 4th grade I became dissatisfied with my own mortality; unlike most children, and even some people my age now, who view themselves as indestructible, I had a pretty good grasp of death, and the means by which it could come about. This was also about the time when I first started to get into computers for reasons besides Oregon Trail.

Being a firm advocate of movies like Robocop, The Terminator, and The Lawnmower Man, I began to wonder if it would be possible to create a body from a machine and transfer a mind to within it. I wanted a new body, one that looked how I wanted to look, and would not age or die. I believed that the mind is ‘data’ that exists within the physical structure of the brain. I wondered if a brain could be virtually modeled within a computer program, then the mind transferred from the brain of a living body to the virtual one.

However, I quickly ran into a philosophical hang-up. On a computer, when transferring a file from one location to another, the data is not moved; it is copied to the new location, then the original copy is destroyed. I didn’t know much about computers back then, but I knew that much. The same, sample principle would be true when transferring a mind. Even if it were possible to virtually model a brain, a living mind could only be copied onto it, not transferred. There would now be two instances of the same person; the original living being, and the virtual copy, both of which would have shadow copies of the same mind. I never really came up with an answer to that paradox; but rather I decided to start learning about computers. I loved video games, robots, and artificial intelligence so computer programming was right up my alley.

It’s been roughly 12 years since then, making me about twice as old. I have a Bachelors Degree of Science, in Computer Science and I am an avid reader of philosophy. After my family’s considerable loses in the stock market due to the recent economic turbulence, I have begun work on a piece of artificial intelligence software to help tilt the odds towards my interests in the market. I have been reading my old notes about Neural Networks and Genetic Algorithms from my senior year Artificial Intelligence class to aid in developing this software. However, about a week ago, I began to digress into studying real neurological sciences; this has excited my old interests in the subject of modeling a brain, and housing a mind in virtual space. I now possess the knowledge, and the tools, to make a valiant effort in the subject.

I have run across the same paradox. How does one transfer a mind? Even if you could copy the neurological states to another brain or medium, the original person and mind would still exist. I believe that destroying that after copying would kill the original person and you are merely left with a copy, though mentally the same person, the original is dead. Instead of that, let us say the technology exists to replace one neuron at a time within the original brain with a new neuron. The replacement process is instantaneous due to a breakthrough in teleportation, teleporting the original neuron out and the new one in without the brain skipping a beat. Over the course of a few minutes we replace all the neurons until the brain is entirely new. We do this through the entire body, revitalizing it to it youth.  Have we killed the original person in this case? Is the pile of dead neurons and cells we teleported out of the original person, the original person himself?? I submit to you that it is, we just killed him one cell at a time, and the remaining person is another copy, built one cell at a time.

My final point, that I’m hoping, and fearing, may be the case, is that perhaps there is such a construct as a soul, external to the body. If this were the case, then we can create as many instances of the original mind and body, and destroy as many instances as we see fit, because one soul is shared between them and that is the person. It may be the case that only one body may be insouled at a time, but perhaps, as soon as the original copy is destroyed, the new copy is hooked to the soul.

It seems to take more than the right combination of parts and algorithms to create life. But perhaps we are merely the sum of parts, free to destroy, harvest, and replace as necessary. The latter would make eternal life possible, but would that really be the type of life we’d want to live?

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