A Virtual Life

I never considered myself an intellectual. I never saw myself as being capable of “deep thoughts,” so on this Saturday, as I sit here with camomille tea, the Decemberists playing, and a rampant disdain for all that is neither real nor virtual, some thoughts I offer up. This should really be considered a continuation of my writing on Crystallization Of Idenity. 

The actual and the virtual are mutually dependant. Neither being meaningful without the other. Every empirical object has its aura of virtuality; every virtual state is grounded in some sort of materiality. The virtual cannot be opposed to the actual in a way that the soul is traditionally opposed to the body. It is better to say, paraphrasing Kant (as we all do), that the virtual without the actual is an empty proposition, while the actual without the virtual is doomed to be blind. Mom can’t put this back together. I would say that the virtual illuminates the actual, but it is nothing without the actual’s support. The relation, then, between the actual and virtual is something like the one between hardware and software. A computer is able to calculate, and thereby to 'Seem'ulate, an indefinite number of possible worlds. But this can only happen if each of these worlds is strictly correlated with a  particular physical state of the machine. Now, these machine states are themselves entirely actual, while the possible worlds that they support are virtual. There two dimensions are coextensive, yet entirely different in nature. Small changes in the actual physical state of the system may correspond to widely different virtual events and even to entirely different worlds which must needs then be mapped. This is why a software program can run, with almost identical results (huge caveats here relative to floating point integers and the way you C# compiler vis a vis you typical java compiler – sorry, rabbit hole, and not even Alice wants to go down that one), the point being those software programs could run on many different kinds of hardware, and why, conversely, a single piece of hardware can run many different sorts of software. Arguing from this theoretical disjunction, futurists like Ray Kurzweil foresee the possibilty of “downloading your mind (not soul), to your personal computer” (Age Of Spiritual Machines, 2000). It’s a question of learning how to copy the contents of your mind in sufficient detail and then installing that copy on a machine other than the brain: “we don’t need to understand all of it; we need only to literally copy it, connection by connection, synapse by synapse, neurotransmitter by neurotransmitter. Kurzweil seems to believe that we can do this without worrying about the underlying hardware of the brain; we can just ignore “much of a neuron’s elaborate structure,” he suggests, since it only “exists to support it’s own structural integrity and life processes and does not directly contribute to it’s handling of information” (Kurzweil, 125). But contra Kurzweil, this distinction is entirely bullshit, for the brains “handling of information,” is itself a “life processes” that depends upon, and in turn effects, the structural integrity of the neurons (see Penrose). Indeed, one could not literally copy it in the first place unless one paid attention to the elaborate structures underlying it all that Kurzweil is so keen to toss out. Kurzweil does entertain the idea that a downloaded mind will need some sort of new body, if only because “a disembodied mind will quickly get depressed” (134). But he fails to grasp the full extent of the reciprocal correlation between the mind and body, or software and hardware, or virtual and the actual.