View from the Cheap Seats is kind of an extension of the newsroom. Whenever our three regular reporters, Calvin Daniels, Thom Barker and Randy Brenzen are in the building together, it is frequently a site of heated debate. This week: If the technology was available and you were given the opportunity to have your consciousness transferred to a computer or robot before you die, would you do it?
Medicine, not tech
When I first proposed the topic of whether we would want to have our consciousness transferred to a machine, I thought it would be a no-brainer.
The idea of immortality, or rather living for centuries is very appealing to me, but when I really got down to thinking about it, the idea of simply being a mind in a box really started to seem less than ideal.
Although I do live a lot in my head, my enjoyment of life is so intricately connected with the physical I don’t know that I would last long before a yearning for death set in.
It is also terrifying to think about what could happen in a e-life. To have any kind of life at all, one would have to be connected to the Internet with all the inherent risks of having your brain hacked. Imagine the nasty crap a malicious intruder might stick into your consciousness.
Nevertheless, I think I may want to try it if there were significant enough safeguards that someone, being of sound mind and having no body, would be able to pull the plug.
Now, if we ever got to the point that we could clone “blanks,” like in the Schwarzenegger movie The 6th Day, and transfer consciousness to a new body, I’d be all over that in a heart beat.
More likely, though, a form of enhanced longevity will come from medical science discovering how to reverse or prevent aging, clone vital organs, cure fatal diseases and repair ourselves with nano-technology.
Cambridge University geneticist Aubrey de Grey has famously stated: “The first person to live to be 1,000 years old is certainly alive today.”
I hope it is me.
- Thom Barker
Hit delete
My consciousness uploaded to a computer was an idea I initially thought was an easy idea to accept.
The idea of in essence achieving a kind of immortality as part of a computer held a great deal of allure. Longevity is of course what lies at the heart of such thoughts. It is why people seek to find fountains of youth, to grow replacement organs in jars, and yes to escape our bodies as a means to immortality.
A computer mainframe seems like a rather straightforward path to a longer life, and I was ready to hit the upload button on this imagined scenario.
But reservations seat in upon reflection.
The idea is to have eternal life out of the upload, and that left me questioning what our lives are really about.
Our life experiences may be little more than electronic impulses in our brains, but they come from how we interact with the world around us.
Is it life without our senses? Yes we adapt and do quite fine when we lose a particular sense.
But, what if we can no longer touch our world, the soft skin of a new baby, the fur of our favourite pooch etc.
And there is no longer the taste of red wine and poutine, or anything else for that matter.
The fragrance of fresh bread, brewed coffee, and spring flowers gone.
And on the list goes.
Have we a life as memory files on a computer hard drive? And if we remain self-aware, does the lack of interaction with the world we knew eventually cause our files to corrupt?
Is that how someone within the mainframe pushes machines to take over so they can escape beyond a laptop, in an attempt to recapture more of their humanity, but by then their corrupted mind takes us down the road of Terminator movies.
Perhaps we live finite lives for a reason — hit delete now.
- Calvin Daniels
