The Einstein Pool: A Christian science fiction novel by Jake Danger
Trans-humanists predict that within a few decades we'll be able to have our brains scanned so thoroughly that our neural patterns can be reduced to a an algorithm that can be uploaded into a virtual environment. They claim that in this way, each individual human consciousness will migrate into a virtual environment, allowing us to live essentially forever, in a world just as perfect as the system administrator wants it to be. The scary part is that this reasoning better be right -- the brain scan that extracts the neurological information used to construct the algorithm is likely to be so intense that it kills your physical body.
The trans-humanist position described above assumes the truth of the functionalist school of the philosophy of mind -- the idea that consciousness is an emergent property of a particular complex arrangement of matter and energy, and is independent of the nature of its building blocks. In other words you could be just as conscious with a brain made of electrical ones and zeroes as you could be with a brain made from carbon, hydrogen and oxygen molecules. It also assumes that consciousness, defined as subjective awareness, is nothing more than an emergent property of time, space, matter and energy, so that you can be reduced to an algorithm that would automatically produce your consciousness.
The zombie objection to the functionalist school of the philosophy of mind asserts that subjective awareness cannot be reduced to ones and zeroes -- there is a "ghost in the machine", and recreating the machine in a virtual environment does not necessarily mean the ghost will follow. So, according to the Zombie Objectors, if you tried to upload your mind into a virtual environment using a brain scan that killed your physical body, you would just simply wink out of consciousness, and your online avatar would perfectly mimic the continuation of your personality without having any inner awareness of its own. And nobody would be able to tell the difference.
According to the Zombie Objectors, then, any attempt by the human race to assure collective immortality through mind uploading would result, instead, in mass suicide. Funny, isn't it, how in a few decades, the answer to a formerly arcane philosophical question -- whether or not the zombie objection to the functionalist philosophy of mind is true or not -- might determine the fate of the human race.
The Einstein Pool: A Christian science fiction novel by Jake Danger $0.99
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