This seems to be the only place where someone is thinking about the meta-abstraction of self in virtual worlds - I continue my discussion of identity and self - might as well since everyone seems asleep at the wheel
Fantasies of downloading the mind into a computer seem to depend on a top down and overly simplisitc extrapolation from the idea that the same sequence of code can run on many different machines. In fact, this scenario of mind transfer is about as plausible as the claim, made in a television commercial by IBM in 2001, that you can “download an entire warehouse” over the Internet. Such operation siwll only be possible when nanotechnology allows for the “nanofaxing,” or precise replication over distance, of complex physical objects, as in William Gibson’s All Tomorrows Parties (268-269).
To duplicate my consciousness, or to transfer it to another location, I will need to know how to reproduce the biological hardware of my brain and spinal cord, as well as the mental software containing my memores, sensations, experiences, emotions and thoughts as well as the virtual cartographies of connections my mind has modeled of the real world. In the meantime, it might be best to forget about running the same software on many pieces of hardware and focus instead upon the converse idea of running multiple software program at once on a single piece of hardware. Why worry about transporting myself into another body when I still haven’t realized how many different selves are porsent in this body that I already have.
I explored a bit of this in a much earlier piece on fractal spirals of selves evolving and replicating in multidimentions of space-time. People with multiple personality syndrome are said to display different physiological patterns – different voices, different pulse rates, even t different levels of cholesterol – depending on which personality is in the forefront at a given moment. Thus the same actual body can support many different virtual selves. I would argue that elsewhere that the phenomenon of multiple personalities, along with Pierre Klossowski’s notion of demonic position, gives us a better paradigma for a concept of pre-Sim subjectivity than anything we can get from psychoanalysis. You cannot be one without being at least two. We are all at least potentially multiple, even if most of us do not suffer from the oppressive consciousness of being so. In recent years, increasing numbers of multiple “households” themselves have come to reject the idea that their multiplicity should be regarded as a medical “disorder.” In particular, they resist the received psychiatric dogma that the experience of multiple personality syndrome either can or should be “cured” by integrating all the personalities into a single construct of self. More is lost than gained from such a normalizing reduction. The point is not to eliminate these multiple identities, but rather to get them to talk to one another and to find ways for them to continue cohabitating with each other, in their one shared body, without too much distress or conflict.
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Comments: 9
Joking aside, interesting discussion on multiplicity of consciousness, with questions I've often wondered about.
"People will NEVER need a microcomputer with more than 64K of memory." - Bill Gates
History is littered with very smart people saying what will and will not ever be possible. The fact is, we have no concept of modeling the soul. We may get to a point of being able to perfectly model intelligence, and perhaps consciousness will arise out of that, but I would say that although far-fetched - we just don't know. We can't apply the scientific method to understanding if/how/where the soul is, how it is tied to consciousness, and what it entails. Like super string theory - if we can't test it, reproduce it, then it's just a hypothosis. Science and innovation require these things. So from a purely scientific perspective - if we can't verify, quantify, and normalizeda theory of the soul - of course we can't reproduce a soul in 0s and 1s - but then again, we can't even proove soul to begin with - if you can't proove the existence of something - you can't reproduce it - a silopsistic argument - just like if you can't proove strings, you can't test strings, and the converse is true.
I agree with you about the impossibility of downloading or otherwise transferring a human mind (expressed as instantiations of different types of organized experience, or consciousness, on a spectrum from completely asleep to extended unitive cosmic consciousness), Will.
But the multiplicity of human traits, "subpersonalities", modalities of expression versus feelings, are quite different than the phenomenon of self (an embodied self within a body) as the overall functioning survival agent of the organism with a boundary. There is only one self per body, in this sense, and this predetermines both the order and disorder in the functionality of the mind, which is why Multiple Personality Syndrome is a relatively rare phenomenon, though each one of us can indeed fragment into various competing and opposing "agencies of the mind" (Minsky's term) when the integration of the extended consciousness is depreciated in the pursuit of multiples.
We create our own disparate heavens and hells and forms of enjoying or being disgusted by them, and we can split ourselves as much as we want in hiding in virtual identities for example online, but that is different from running quickly when someone attacks us with a knife, or getting inside in an electrical storm. I would argue that this sentience which emerges from our own chaotic fragments of belief, memory and habit enacted(what you call multiple selves here I would call my different traits in action) into a deeper human perception--this whole greater than thought, feeling, emotion or action in the world--is what can't be replicated.