Dilemma

My post yesterday touched glancingly on some dark topics. Today’s post is a kind of response to myself, with a little twist of SciFi.

Presumably, at some point research in artificial intelligence is going to go beyond its current mimicry stage. In one scenario, researchers will start to get a handle on deep modeling of human cognition and eventually sentience.

If that occurs, it might be possible to create a kind of psychic clone of yourself. It would be you in every way, except in a computer rather than in a biological brain.

The big existential question then is “Who exactly is that?” The computer will most likely say “Yep, it’s still me. I’m right here, inside this machine.”

But the biological version of you might not agree. You might not view this particular continued existence of your “self” as a solution to your own desire to continue to exist, but rather as a replacement.

This dilemma will continue as long as your biological self is still around. Ironically, the moment the “real” you goes away, the dilemma goes away as well.

The “you” that is in the computer will happily affirm that you are still here, and that you are doing just fine. You might even find it amusing that for a brief time there were two of you in existence.

And you will have all of eternity to appreciate the joke.