Ooo, that beautiful dream of uploading our minds to the cloud! Eternal life, never-ending bliss, and absolutely no boundaries: skydiving into lava streams, picknicking on top of the Twin Towers, and making love with Venus herself — the goddess or the planet, whichever you like. What a brave new world that has such wonders in it! Where can I sign up?
According to technologists, it is only a matter of time. Decades, centuries maybe, but hardly more than that. The argument, like most predictions, is quite simple: If functionalism is true, that is: if we are nothing but a set of functional states and the substrate of these states does not matter (and if those states consist in designate and finite information), then in principle those states could be transfered to any other substrate, and that is: to the cloud. Getting there is then just an engineering problem.
I don’t know whether this is the case or not. Nor do I know what the future brings if it is. But let’s imagine it for a moment: Here are, I think, some things we should keep in mind before dreaming away.
Step 1: We Already Did
Close your eyes. Imagine you are floating up to the ceiling, seeing yourself from above. Or enter a stage. Feel yourself watched with your stained shirt through the eyes of three-hundred people. Or get into your car and drive home. Your mind is not in your hands, turning the steering wheel. You become the car itself, touching the street, going round corners. And it almost physically hurts when you scrape the corner of your garage when you finally park it unsuccessfully.
We are out of our bodies all the time (even when we are in them). Our brains as well as our selves are just half of what we are — the other half are the things we extend ourselves into, and the things we react to and act upon. Relations to things in the world give our minds and consciousness its shape in the first place. To be and feel as anything we have to be in something tangible, as well as something we are not.
Step 2: Your Mind in the Cloud
That sense of being beyond what we are has gotten quite a boost lately. Since we live online, and through our phones, we are spread much wider and thinner. Our mind is in that ever present circle of friends ready to read from us, that ever present, judging audience of our posts, that future for which we take that photograph: It has never been easier to forget we even have bodies, here and now.
But of course all these experiences are still just software running on the good old wetware that we call a brain. Just wait and see what happens when we physically catch up with what we have mentally been doing all along — would it not just be same, only feel more real?
But well — that’s a common mistake, no? Conceiving future physical progress within the mental categories of the current age. As if emails just made us send elaborate letters more quickly, or as if social media did only accelerate but not fundamentally change the way we communicate and feel about ourselves.
Step 3: The Membrane Bursts
Bill Gates and Eric Schmitt won't be riding together. Max Tegmark, in his well-selling book Life 3.0, brought up this example when he discussed uploading our minds (or at least the minds of rich people) to the cloud: How fun it would be that then people could go and have all kinds of adventures together at an instant (simulated of course, if that then still means anything). But I think Tegmark wildly underestimates the adventure he has us embark on. When we are uploaded, there is no need to sit on separate horses anymore. We can share the experience itself with one another. We can directly share our thoughts, perceptions, and other states of mind that we don’t yet have a name for.
But when quite literally I can feel your pain or joy — then the distinction between “I” and “you” becomes blurred — and maybe will eventually stop making sense altogether. The fact that minds have been confined to bodies, separated by that cumbersome interface of verbal and non-verbal communication has also, more or less, safeguarded our integrity as individuals. When we upload these minds, the concept of plurality of minds is probably in jeopardy.
And if it is true what philosophers say, that difference and interaction is what constitutes us as persons, meaning that mirroring ourselves in otherness is an integral constitute of the self, then any clear form of personhood will be in jeopardy as well. Given that Hegel’s master-slave dialectics already manifests itself in the psychology of couch-potatoes, what will happen when that membrane that surrounds our rudimentary personhood finally bursts?
Maybe some of the hallmarks of individuality — desire, aims, ambition- will have a hard time, when there is no clear unity within and difference between single minds. Maybe the mesh of molten intersubjectivity will end up as a shapeless, aimless mass, one and many and none of it — or in short: Maybe Stanisław Lem put his finger on something in his description of the Solaris creature. At least in gloomy moments I do think that this is the most likely solution to the Fermi paradox: We don’t see evidence of alien civilisations because through technology any civilisation will finally lose all cohesion and end up as an aimless mental goo.
Step 0: We Never Left
But well, it’s still all just a dream. I have no idea where we go even in the next ten years even with these slow, small, chemical (and terribly fragile) brains of ours. Functionalists are philosophers, but so is Merleau-Ponty and others who find bodily experience quite more constitutive of our minds than technological dreamers do. This does not contradict functionalism but it raises the stakes for the engineering problem quite a bit. But as of now, it is not even impossible that the fact that we are chemistry may matter after all. All I know is that we have not left our bodies yet, and that any attempt of leaving them may have a few surprises in store for us. And if we compare it to that other ancient human dream — that of flying — it looks quite likely that there will be quite a lot of bitter as well as comical failed attempts, before we are finally vanishing in the clouds.
