LOOK! NO GOD!

Trogs - Electronic Copies of Humans

This article looks at the idea of making electronic copies of humans by brain uploading
and its implications for consciousness and identity.

Trogs

One day, humans will quite likely have the technology to slice up someone’s brain, scan the neuron connections and synapse characteristics, and build a functionally identical electronic device which emulates that brain's electrical and chemical activity.

Let’s call such a device ‘a trog’. As it is the neuron connections and synapse characteristics that constitute a person's mental capacity, thinking processes and memories, and, presumably, their consciousness and identity, then the electronic device should think and feel like the human on which it was modelled.

The trog could be fitted with electrical connections to the outside world which would allow sensory input to be sent to it and motor output to be received from it. The trog could then be connected via these to an environment server computer. This server would contain the details of an environment, say a night club. It would feed the same sensory input to the trog that it would receive through it's peripheral nervous system if it were a human in that same night club.

The trog would be in a virtual reality, one that incorporates all senses, not just vision and sound, making it appear to the trog in every respect that it is actually in that nightclub.

The motor neurons emerging from the trog would feed their signals into the same computer, and the computer would then calculate the movements of the trog and adjust the sensory input accordingly. The trog would thus live in a virtual environment with which it can interact in the same way that humans interact with their environment.

Several trogs could choose to be in that same night club. They would all then be connected to the same night club server. The server would know where all those trogs are and what they were doing and could include them all in the sensory data it sends to each trog. This would allow the trogs to see, hear, feel and interact with all the other trogs in that nightclub.

When a trog chooses to leave the club and go into a different environment, say out into the street, then its connection to the nightclub server would be closed and it would connected to a new server. The transfer would work in the same way as following a hyperlink on the Internet.

Once sufficient environments have been developed and programmed, trogs could live in a world that feels just like the world in which humans live and is just as rich (if not richer) in terms of the available experiences and the people to interact with. The advantage of the trog world would be that the trogs could choose from whatever environments and experiences have been developed and needn’t go through bad experiences like pain or boredom, being old, unfit, sick, fat or ugly – or dying. And they needn't spend hours sitting on a plane to get somewhere a long way away. Trog life could be fairly ideal.

How trogs work and the trog life are described in more depth in the novel Empyrean.

The Big Question

Let’s assume a person is just a bunch of atoms and that their mind/consciousness is an emergent property of the electrical and chemical activity in their brain. They have no soul.

Let’s also assume that one day, trogging does become possible, is tried, and seems to work in that verbal interactions with a trog seem pretty much like interactions with another human.

Most people who accept the bunch-of-atoms view of humans will also accept that, if a human (let’s call her Lisa) is trogged, the trog will feel like she is still Lisa, continuing her life, just in a different place.

A fundamental question on which there is little broad consensus though is this: Does the human Lisa’s life continue, or does she die, a new person being created which just happens to be the same as Lisa? If you were Human Lisa and you thought life would be better as Trog Lisa, would you go under the slicer?

Arguments that you should

You are not the same person that you were when you were younger: your personality and kowledge are different, though many of your memories have continued and developed through the intervening period. It is the continuation of those memories that make you continue to be you. If you lost all your memories and had to start all over again, the new person wouldn’t be you, but would be someone different. They would have the same DNA and body, but would be no more you that your identical twin is you.

Your body and brain are not the same now as when you were young either. Most of the atoms in your body and brain have been replaced. Your mind has a different substrate, though it continues to be you because the memories continue. In the same way, Trog Lisa's mind will have a different substrate, but the same memories. Human Lisa’s life would continue.

If you doubt this, then consider replacing your neurons one at a time with silicon ones and being conscious between each replacement. Neurons die all the time, so replacing any one neuron should make no difference to whether you are you. Even if you eventually had all your neurons replaced, there would be no point during the process where you would stop being you and start being someone else. The process doesn't seem to involve you dying and one would think that you would be ok with it. Would it be any different if your neurons were relaced 10 at a time? 1000 at a time? a million at a time? or all at once?

Arguments that you shouldn’t

If you knew that there was a parallel universe somewhere with an identical copy of you, would you be happy to be killed here, knowing that your life would continue there? Probably not.

There is also the fact that we can't know for sure that trogs are conscious - even if they talk to us the way a human does and seem to know and feel what a human knows and feels. Afterall, a trog is just a machine - an electronic device. Admittedly, we can't know that another human is conscious, but that does intuitively feel more likely than a trog being conscious. And, after all, you are not faced with a decision as to whether to become another human.

The dilemma

Depending on how one thinks about it, it can seem that you continue your life quite happily as a trog, or that you die and someone else like you lives instead of you. Can both be right?

We tend to think of one's consciousness being transferred from the human body into the trog. It is probably more realistic, though, to assume that the human's consciousness is destroyed and a new consciousness (which just happens to de descriptively the same) is created in the trog. The prospect of one's consciousness being terminated is not an enticing one. But once the job is done, the trog would presumably be very glad that they took the step. There would be no one around lamenting the fact that they no longer existed.

It may be that the question of whether Lisa dies or lives on is not a real one in the sense that the two possibilities are different. It maybe that she both dies and lives on. It probably comes down more to a philosophical perspetive than to a decision that can be made scienticically through experiment and deduction.

Maybe the problem lies at the more fundamental level of our concept of identity, of what it is to be me or not to be me. I am still trying to think this through.

Beam me up, Scottie

The same issues arise in Star-Trek style matter-transfer machines in which people are dismantled atom by atom in one place, the information sent to another place and the person reassembled, exactly the same, there. This type of technology might be more familar to Star-Trek fans, though it is probably less feasible, at least in the foreseeable future.

Duplication

Of course, when someone is trogged, there is nothing to stop the technicians making two copies of the trog from the one person, or indeed from making an exact copy of a trog after they have been converted.

This raises some interesting questions. If they made a copy of me as a trog, the original trog and the copy would both be me with my identity, my memories etc. But they wouldn't be each other - they would be two separate and independent people, each with their own identity and able to go off and live quite different lives. Even after they have lived different lives and become quite different from each other, they would still both be me.

If at some stage they told the copy that they were going to kill it (turn it off permanently and destroy the data), how would it feel? Presumably the same way as the original me would feel if they said that to me. It wouldn't see it as a good thing. But, after the copy was dead, would anything bad have happened in the process of reproduction and disposal? Things would be exactly the same after the process as they were before, so, in a sense, no. Neither trog would be unhappy or have any regrets about what had happened. I would still exist as I did before.

Conversion to spirit form

Consider someone who believes in the afterlife and who takes the view that, after conversion to a trog, the orginal person is dead and a new person is formed. They might be expected to have the same problem when thinking about their physical body dying and themselves being converted to a spiritual person in heaven (or wherever). Why would the spiritual person be a continuation of the original person while the trog wouldn't?

The Future of Humanity

Different people take different views on the big question. If the technology were available, some would be trogged for a better life; some wouldn’t. Certainly many people with a terminal illness but a sound mind would take the option – they would have little to lose. So, if they become technologically possible, trogs will happen.

As well as interacting with their own community, trogs could also interact with the human world, so humans could see what a trog life is like. This might make more humans willing to take the plunge.

Trogs will accumulate. As they don’t have to die, eventually, trogs could outnumber humans. In addition to conversions, new trogs could be created as babies which then grow up into adult trogs, never having known human life.

Trogs will be able to do much of the work that humans presently do and this would make life easier for humans. As trogs would have control over the details of their own mental functioning, they would be able to adjust their mood at will (a bit like taking drugs, but done electronically). Thus they would be able to enjoy the work, however mundane and unintersting. In the same way, trogs would be able to take over the development and programming of trog environments and experiences.

In terms of resources, trogs would need no more than a cubic metre of space and a few watts of electricity – a small price for humans to pay for the work the trogs do. Trogs could even be connected to avatars, which could then do the dangerous work that humans presently have to do like mining and fighting wars. For these reasons, humans will have a vested interest in looking after trogs, and of course trogs would have a vested interest in looking after humans.

Eventually, the trog avatars would be able to look after the trog world without the need for humans, but as long as neither group saw the other group as a threat, there is no reason they couldn’t continue to co-exist for mutual benefit.

Religion

The one thing that could make co-existence difficult is religion. Many religious people would see trogging as wrong and might see it as their duty to put an end to the trog world. With the use of avatars and the support of those who see trogs as a good thing, trogs would need to defend themselves from such action. Conflict might be hard to avoid.

Image Acknowledgements

Machine: Photo by Charlss GonzHu on Pexels
Nightclub: Barcelo.com
Twins: Lucid-AI on DeviantArt