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I watched Jordan Peterson’s interview with Elon Musk recently and to be fair it was pretty interesting, but I was staggered to hear that one of Elon’s Friends, namely Larry Page, the co-founder of Google believes in a future in which we will all just upload our minds into a computer and just be robots…
These are the people running the world. Elon wants a chip in your head whilst Larry wants you to be all chip, to exist in the infrastructure of the internet, presumably within the data centres and machinery of a big corporation like google, so you probably won’t even own your own robot body, but will you still be you? Will there be room for a soul in the machine, will it just be a thing that speaks and talks and acts like you, but is not you, a poor copy, devoid, not only of self-awareness, but the awareness of being aware?
How can we prove that a machine is conscious? How can I even prove to you that I am a sentient being? I can’t, you just take it as an article of faith that I am, but I might not be, I may be a philosophical zombie, someone that speaks, talks and responds appropriately to the environment around me, but nevertheless is lacking an inner life, like CHAT-GPT in a robot body.
These are big philosophical questions, but one thing is certain, the second our minds are digitised and hosted in a machine somewhere, a server farm, a data centre or even a robot body, we’ll cease to be human. This stab at life extension is either way, one in which you must die to achieve it. What happens if someone pulls the plug? What happens if a coronal mass ejection fries the machinery of immortality? What happens then? These things, the natural outgassing’s of our beloved Sun are already a danger to satellites, we’re all just waiting for a big one to fry most of the world’s communications apparently, so these things do need to be considered, but it’s the consciousness problem that bothers me most.
Is the fear of death so great within humanity that people would willingly kill themselves in order to live forever, to digitise their personas which is merely one shard of mind, the Jungian shadow, anima and animus being some of the others, not to mention the unconscious, both personal and collective? Is the thought of having a robot you running around decades or centuries after your death comforting? Is this true immortality or is it something else?
What happens if somebody is able to edit your mind, after digitalisation? Whoops, the machine ‘you,’ the imitation man, has just offended someone, better delete those words and sentences so that your automaton will never be able to say them again. Not that it will matter much, I doubt you’ll be around to experience it, at least in any form that is conscious enough to care, but that’s just me, what are your thoughts? Please let me know in the comments below…
Link to the philosophical zombies page on Wikipedia.
Still image of Elon Musk and Jordan B Peterson taken from their discussion on X
