Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day we wake slightly altered and the person we were yesterday is dead.
John Updike, Author
Nearly all of us begin each day believing we are the same person who began the day before. But are we really? Or could it be true, as Updike suggests, that our daily experiences, no matter how banal, change us into someone new? Is the apparent reality of continuous personal existence merely an illusion? Is the person you were yesterday truly dead?
This morning I saw something I had never seen before. (It doesn't matter what. We see new things every single day.) I learned several new things today. I spoke with a person this afternoon whom I had not previously known. Clearly I have changed, even if only slightly. I am someone different than I was the day before.
So how is it that I can still believe I am me? Why am I not confused and disoriented by these changes? Questions such as these become relevant when we think about taking manifest control of our identities.
As a posthuman, you will be in thorough control of your personal definition, including your physical shape, size, appearance and location. You will be able to predefine your environment, experiences, and sensations, insofar as desired. You will be self-programming, able to define your own identity.
"I do not see myself as a slave to the blind whims of evolution. Evolution is not a sentient process, and can therefore lay no claim to my obedience. I am a sentient being, and therefore by most ethical systems currently in use I should be free to take charge of my own destiny.
"That death may be a convenient means of speeding up the blind machinations of evolution means nothing to me. Frankly, it doesn't have any meaning regarding its 'rightfulness' in the past, either. Rights have to do with sentient beings. Is gravity 'right'? No, it just is. Therefore, when it gets in our way, there is no ethical reason for us not to strive against it."
(Jeff Dee, quoted by Damien Broderick)
“Think about being alive for a moment. You look out. You sense things. All your senses reach and consume, or maybe they just sit and wait for the signal to hit, I don’t know. But you are the receiver and then it all turns to something called ‘you’ inside. And you act, you decide, you love you play you hope you cry. It all turns to these emotions; nothing would get done without emotions. Who would care? Even mathematics gives humans some sort of feeling, some sort of satisfaction, some resonance with pure being.”
(from "Queen City Jazz" by Kathleen Ann Goonan)
Just who are "you" anyway? What is the nature of identity? What does it mean to be someone instead of someone else, or instead of no one at all?
In our present-day lives, it is convenient and practical to believe that we are in control of our identities. (It may even be necessary in order to be classified as "sane".) To simplify our experience of being in the world, our minds also convince us that what we think of as our personal self is a singular thing, a discrete and integrated whole, but is it?
It would be more accurate to define the self as: an assembly of parts; an extemporized dynamic collection of instinct, memory, sensation, and cognition; "an ever-changing collection of beliefs, perceptions, and attitudes...not an essential and persistent entity, but rather a conceptual chimera." (John Allen Paulos)
You are not one thing; you are many separate pieces—conscious and subconscious—masquerading as a single individual. Knowing this, it is easier to understand how we can make the transition to a self-programmed posthuman identity.
When people talk about superintelligence, they often distinguish between a "weak" and a "strong" one. Perhaps it's easier to view intelligence as something that can have many levels of sophistication. There are dumb infants and human adult geniuses. The differences in levels of intelligence are even more evident if in place of the word "infants" we substitute "insects".
Being aware of those differences, seeing them on a daily basis, allows us to imagine better intelligences, far superior to our own. However, if we consider another function of the brain, namely its ability to process sensory input, the differences in perception between an infant and an adult, or even an animal and a human, become blurry. A child may not have the same intelligence as an adult, but its ability to see, hear, feel, taste, and smell is pretty much the same.
If, then, we consider a very simplified model of perception—sensory input data, and the brain with all its specialized regions processing that sensory input, which results in perception—then why shouldn't these components be able to be changed, improved, or even redesigned from scratch?
Using superintelligence as an example, it might be possible to differentiate between "weak" and "strong" sensory systems. Weak sensory systems would be the current human senses, except they would be much more efficient and sharp (some animals might serve as a nice, current example of those improved abilities), without clearly defined limits placed on their "sharpness".
Strong sensory systems might be those not found in nature (maybe that's the reason they seem so abstract) in which both the provided sensory input data and the processing hardware would be totally artificial, giving rise to completely new and profound ways of experiencing the real and unreal worlds. I doubt an SI would still be stuck with a mere five senses, having the means to create millions more "A-senses".
It's easy to imagine a future where our five standard senses might be considered primitive, even obsolete. Perhaps that is one of the many reasons why it's impossible to comprehend, let alone imagine, what the existence of an SI would be like, especially if we throw into the mix their increased bandwidth of perception, and their similarly reengineered systems responsible for pleasure and emotion.
Contributed by Slawek Paliwoda
As a posthuman, you will have the option of choosing any location and any environment in which to exist. You will have the power to create, modify, or replace your surroundings at will (provided, of course, that you do not infringe upon the rights of other sentient beings). You can live anywhere on Earth that you want—or, for that matter, anywhere within the Earth or outside the Earth. You can live on any planet, moon, asteroid or comet within physical reach. You can live grandly or simply, or any style in between.
One of the challenges in thinking about the life of a posthuman is that there are so many potential variables. An uploaded posthuman, for example, will exist as a pattern of data on a super advanced computer network. Being data means we will have the ability to change our software at will (assuming existing laws and our available resources permit it). So we might exist in extremely different forms from time to time. More likely is that we will exist in multiple forms all at the same time. Just as it is possible for you to make a copy of a spreadsheet and change some of the variables so that you can compare the different outcomes, we will probably have the option of making copies of ourselves.
As the amount of computer power continues to increase exponentially, there will be more and more opportunities for data beings to pursue different activities. You might want to download one or more copies of yourself into robots and send them out to explore the asteroid belt, perhaps send another copy to the moon, and send several other copies to different places on Earth. When the copies have acquired the information and experiences they are seeking, they can discard the robot bodies and be merged together again as pure data.
It is also possible, of course, that the concept of individual discrete existence will be supplanted by a paradigm in which multiple beings—previously separate persons—merge into one greater whole. Obviously, it’s hard to say for certain where we are going in the next few centuries. Most likely the outcome will be even wilder than our imaginations can presently conceive.
Ultimately, whatever form of united or separate being(s) we evolve into, it is possible that we could someday exist everywhere at once, experiencing everything, knowing everything, even being everything that exists. Only the laws of physics may limit us, and by that time, even those may have come under our control.