Is transhumanism possible at all?

A recurrent theme which is inextricably linked to life is, precisely, death, given that as of today it still means the end of life. Medical science has made huge progress in the last 200 years to prevent and cure hundreds of diseases, and many more are now treatable to the point that, where they used to be an imminent death sentence, they now allow sometimes even years of life in reasonable health before the decline becomes catastrophic. And the result is easily quantifiable: the life expectancy in Western countries has grown from roughly 35 years to almost 80 in the last century and a half. However, there is no denying that we sail through life in these perishable vessels that we call our bodies, which are bound to become more and more fragile as time passes, and in spite of all the research that has flowed into the matter there is no cure for aging.

One of the most attractive alternatives to final and irreversible death comes from the philosophical current of transhumanism, whose proponents suggest that the use of technology can improve the human condition including, eventually, overcoming death. Yesterday I was reading the comic series IXth Generation, by artists Matt Hawkins and Atilio Rojo, and found an interesting addendum about the eventual complexities of the cloning of humans into robotic entities. The 9th generation that gives name to the series is a group of super-humans whose conscience is implanted into a new body whenever the old one dies for any reason. The question that arises is: is the conscience in the new body just a copy of the old one or is it truly the old one?

Photo: piqsels.com

The concept immediately reminded me of the Netflix series Altered Carbon, where the conscience of each human is stored in a chip which gets implanted in the body (a "sleeve"). If the body dies, it is always possible to extract the chip and implant it in another one, assuming that you can pay for it and that the chips has not been damaged (the so-called "final death"). One interesting aspect of this proposal is that the chip has to be physically transported from one body to the next, so one might argue that the chip is, your conscience. Later in the series it is revealed that the super-rich have established a "backup system" that saves their conscience every so often, so that even if the chip is destroyed they (but only they) can be rebuilt into a new chip without major loss of information, more or less in the guise of the 9th generation.

The obvious question that arises from the copy (and Matt Hawkins mentions it) is about suddenly having two instances of the same human instead of one. When you have a text document, making a copy has negligible cost and the deletion of a copy is irrelevant as long as there is at least one copy in a known location. But what happens when the copy is a sentient being? As very comically depicted in the American 1996 film Multiplicity, where the main character, Doug Kinney (Michael Keaton), manages to get three additional copies of himself, the clones will have the same memories as the original up to the moment of the cloning, but they will quickly start to diverge the moment they conduct: one will not "remember" a discussion that the other had with "his" wife (Andy McDowell) and that causes a lot of trouble. Also from the legal point of view, would all clones be responsible for the crimes committed by one of them? Would they share the property of the house they live in or will it belong only to one of them? What if one of the clones kills another one (or even the original)? Is that a murder, a suicide, none of the above? And what about unauthorized copies?

Surprisingly, this problem with the cloning come exclusively from the conscience as emerging property of the complexity of our brain, because the fact is that we are all our own clones from the moment we start to grow in the womb of our mothers: we start by being a single cell, which then divides into two, then again and again. And for several generations all cells are exactly identical (indeed this is the origin of identical twins, when these cells lose physical connection and become two separated groups), but that is not a problem because at that point we do not have any kind of brain or conscience of any kind. Later on, once we are born and start to grow, the hierarchy in the organization and the specialization of our "cellular clones" ensures that all of them are part of the same body and not discrete entities. What would happen is the two or more copies fed back one another so that all of them had the same memories? In that case it would probably be irrelevant whether there are one or ten copies of yourself, as they would obviously be the same conscience, share the decision processes, etc. and having one body more or less would just be equivalent to adding or removing one camera in your home surveillance system.

Whatever the implications, it is likely that will not have to worry about them at least for another decade. The state of our mind depends not only on the chemical condition of each neuron, but also on the structural connection among them and even if the technology has advanced a lot we are still unable to count the number of connections that a single cell has to the neighboring ones. The 2045 Initiative keeps woking towards the goal, but it will take some time to happen. Let us see how it turns up. In the meantime, have a nice evening.