Dick Pountain - 03/04/95 17:18 - Idealog 8
I'm writing this column a couple of days after April
Fool's Day, but I don't feel as though I missed anything;
the media are so full of fin-de-siecle weirdness at the
moment that every day feels like April 1st. In the last
few months I've been exposed to, among other things,
Douglas Rushkoff's 'Media Viruses' and Frank Tipler's
'Physics of Immortality', both of which prophesy a coming
cyber-rapture where everyone will be absorbed into some
sort of huge cosmic intelligence (to be fair, Tipler's
Omega Point happens a couple of jiffys before the end of
time). Frankly I preferred the original version of this
story in the Book of Revelations - it's scarcely less
plausible and far more excitingly written. What seems to
be happening is that the boundaries between science and
science-fiction are crumbling - people seem to believe
that if you can write it down then it must be so.
However, as with climbing Everest, you need high tech
hardware to achieve the ultimate heights of weirdness, and
so for this month's sermon I turn to an American sect
called the Extropians, as featured recently in the
Observer's colour magazine. The Extropians like to pose in
dodgy swimwear, freeze their heads in liquid nitrogen and
then - the crux of the matter - intend to download their
minds into computers and live again as software agents in
the Net (I should add that the freezing and downloading
are meant to be posthumous and some time in the future;
DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME KIDS). For me the article inspired
mixed emotions; a sadness that people so young should
already be so preoccupied by death; a certain amusement as
I wondered who they are going to trust to do their backups
("Hey don't record the Superbowl on that tape, that's my
Dad"); but mostly irritation at the sheer banality of the
idea and the failure of imagination that it reveals.
The idea of downloading depends on a worn-out metaphor
that compares the human brain to a computer, very like a
PC, with the mind being the software that runs on it;
hence if you get a big enough DAT drive you can back it
up. Science is still a long way from knowing in detail how
the brain works but we already know enough about it to
rule out this sort of simplistic dumping. The metaphor is
true to the extent that the human brain has computing
abilities, and that much of what we call 'mind' is an
effect of its computations, but there the analogy with a
PC (or any von Neumann computer) stops. The brain doesn't
rigidly separate computation (the CPU) from storage (the
RAM) the way a PC does. The 3 billion or so neurons that
make up your brain are most decidedly NOT just simple
flip-flops that store a 1 or 0 bit, and your memories are
not just compressed bitmaps (just as well or Unisys might
try to levy royalties on them).
What you might call a 'mind-state', the computational
state of the brain at a given moment, is likely to be
represented more by the strengths of the connections
between neurons than by the neurons themselves. Thanks to
medical imaging technologies like Proton Emission
Tomography, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance and SQUIDs
(sensitive superconducting magnetic sensors) we can now
see animated pictures of the working brain. But wonderful
as these pictures are, they still only show gross global
activity - say oxygen consumption - not the actual
detailed topology of the neural networks, which is what
you'd need to download.
The human brain was not designed, but rather shaped by its
environment through evolution - unfortunately downloading
was not a feature of that environment, and so evolution
forgot to create a SCSI port or to put any comms software
in ROM. To extract the information that comprises a
'mind-state' you'd need some kind of magnetic or
electrical holographic technique of unimaginable
sensitivity. Even supposing the laws of physics would
support such a technique, which is unlikely, what is there
to suggest that mind-state can be captured by a
snapshot? The brain is a dynamic device that has much more
in common with a signal processing system than with a PC;
it constantly monitors and processes input streams from
the body and the senses (and when we are asleep it makes
up inputs to keep itself busy). Even our memories are
likely to prove to be dynamic reconstructions rather than
static data. The mind is more than that lump of grey
grease called the brain, it encompasses your whole body and
a good chunk of the outside world as well; when you learn
to ride a bike you are computing and remembering with
every muscle.
So how long would this recording have to be made to 'capture'
the essence of you? My guess would be somewhere around a
lifetime. More to the point, what sort of recording would
you get from a disembodied head that's been stored with
the fish fingers for 50 years?
I'm truly sorry if anyone should feel that I'm trying to
snatch away their hopes of immortality, but there is a
crumb of comfort I can offer. Evolution in its blind, dumb
wisdom did actually provide the human brain with a few
workable I/O channels for dumping its contents - they're
called speaking, writing, singing, painting, dancing,
sculpting and so on. I suppose their drawback for
post-modernists is that they all need to be worked at.
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