Musing on the Techno-Resurrection and Consciousness Metaphysics

A few nights ago, I finally got around to watching something on Netflix. It was a show called “Altered Carbon”. You might have heard of it, it is Big. The basic premise of the show is that in some distant future people have a device inserted into the connection between the spinal cord and the brain called the “Stack”. This “Stack” stores all the electric signals that happen in the brain. When someone dies, his “Stack” gets inserted into another body and animates the brain. As such the other body will have the consciousness of the previous person and so, they claim, people end up living forever. Of course, with sci-fi scenery, sex, drugs and violence you suspend disbelief and get on with the story, which is entertaining. But this post is not about entertainment, it is about a branch of philosophy long seen as a form of mental masturbation: Metaphysics.

So, let us step in the world of the consciousness metaphysicist armed with his favorite tool: A thought experiment. Let us imagine that last night, a very powerful being scanned your brain and was able to reveal all the intricacies that is you. She was able to get all your thoughts, all your hopes, all your memories and most crucially your consciousness. The being made a copy of it on its super computer disk. She then proceeded to kill you and make a clone of your body with the same specifications and measurement. An exact clone that can’t be told apart from the real you that was instantly grown in its artificial lab. It then rewired the clone’s brain to meet the specifications and of the scans it took of your brain. Put that clone in your bed sleeping. The next day, he wakes up. Can someone tell he is not you? Can he tell he is not you? Is he you?

The answers to those questions are: no, no and no. As you are going to sleep and as the moment of your death approaches you will have some form of consciousness. The stream of it wouldn’t have been interrupted until that moment you die. You won’t know of your death (assuming that death is the end of existence and that there is no afterlife). The next morning your clone – lets us call him You2 – will wake up with no idea that it is brand new. Given that can we ever discount that we die every time we go to sleep? Can you discount that at this moment you are You2? Well no, you can’t. But would that imply that in this thought experiment you actually came back to life?

To an outside observer, the wife of You2 for instance, it doesn’t matter. Even if that outside observer could peer into the consciousness of You2, she wouldn’t be able to tell that she is looking into the mind of a different person. But to You1 or the original you, it matters a whole lot. You have stopped existing last night. You ended. You are no longer in this world. Your shoes are filled by an imposter, and your bed by a fraud. And while hard to express in words, it is intuitively obvious. Let’s look at it another way: How many copies or clones can the very powerful being made of you? You2, You3, You100000, YouInfinity? While more Yous will reveal to the world what happened, there indeed is no limit of how many copies can be made. And unless we believe that a single human consciousness can extend across multiple bodies, we intuitively understand that none of those Yous are You.

In the first episode of “Altered Carbon”, it gets revealed that some rich man has a device to copy his “stack” (the device that copies his consciousness) and therefore rendering himself hard to kill. Yet this infinite capacity to copy oneself doesn’t seem to affect the character’s notion that they live forever through their stack. Indeed, this might have been the only mechanism the writers found to create technological immortality. They might have been influenced by the writings of Computer Scientist Ray Kurzweil, who claims that in a few years we will be able to download our consciousness into computers.  Yet this downloading of consciousness only serves a purpose for the people around us and not to ourselves. Once dead we are dead. This is also a way to understand the mind-body problem and who and what we really are. We are not our Mind software that is running our brain hardware, but both at the same time. Stop the machine once and all is lost.