Ray Kurzweil's Transcendent Man - why transhumanism has some problems

As I explained at another article about Ray Kurzweil, I watched the film "Transcendent Man" recently. I had read some of Kurzweil's writing previous to that, and I do believe that the "uploading" of human brains to hardware may someday be possible (though I emphasize "may" and doubt that his time frame is possible).

However, I see problems with the transhumanism "Transcendent Man" concept that I did not see addressed in the film. I did some Googling about and, while I certainly did find plenty of folks denying transhumanism for various reasons, I didn't find anything like what first popped into my mind.

That doesn't mean nobody has every thought of this, of course. It just means that I couldn't find it.

The Upload

Let's just get the details out of the way for those who are not familiar with it.

Ray and other transhumanists envision being able to completely "scan" a human mind to extract its information content. That is, some yet to be invented scanning technology will determine the physical, electrical and chemical state of an entire human brain - the interconnections, the hormone levels, everything.

Such a device is beyond imagining now, and the difficulties of that information capture are what bothers many who dismiss all this as ridiculous.

Those naysayers are absolutely correct: such a device is far beyond anything we can realistically imagine. But the technology of an MRI is far beyond anything Hippocrates could have dreamt of, so let's allow it as at least not being beyond logical possibility.

Given this digital data, we then need hardware that can replicate the function of the brain. That is, given the same inputs, this hardware will now react as the biological brain did. This is quite a leap by itself, but I'll let that pass as history is littered with those who insisted that this or that would always be impossible. I'll say that if it ever is possible, I think that day is a long, long way in our future.

Nonetheless, should you accomplish these two marvels, you apparently now have the ability to replicate a human brain. The "new" brain wouldn't know that it hadn't been transplanted to a computer and would believe that it had once experienced a biological existence.

Let's just carelessly sweep aside all the philosophical bantering about "is this really the same person". Those are legitimate questions, but there is no satisfactory answer, so I'll leave that argument for those who want to argue about it. I do not.

The Borg

Some critics say that (assuming this is at all possible) a "Borg" or "Hive mind" would be the natural result of such an upload. Indeed, some transhumanists seem to be looking in exactly that direction themselves, so we can hardly fault the critics for bringing that up.

At first glance, that's trivial to dismiss. After all, I created both this article and every other article I wrote here using the same tool, but that doesn't make them a "hive". Each article is a unique combination of words and thoughts and each uploaded brain would be the same. Individuality is maintained.

Connections

Or is it? The other promise of transhumanism is the extension of our abilities. In this imaginary hardware, we would have immediate access to all the accumulated knowledge and experience of all humans. To extend that web page article analogy, it's as though every individual article now has every other article imbedded within it. The articles become identical, and the transhumans would also become identical.

The problem, then, is not really the "hive" mind but that the uploaded versions of you and I now have access to the same knowledge and access to the same computing power. The only thing that could possibly cause us to come to a different decision on any point would be some difference in our original biological state. Obviously some decisions are "wrong", so if our original state consistently caused us to err, we'd fix that - and further blur any difference between us.

As we are reaching the same decisions, the problem is not that we became a hive mine, but rather that most of us would be redundant. Not only redundant, but retardants: what is the point of having several billion individual minds reach identical decisions and feel identical satisfaction? Why bother with individuality at all as we all converge on the same goals and aspirations?

That's the question I have not seen explored. I'd love to be pointed to anything like that should you be aware of it, of course.

Omniscience

I suspect that if we ever reached that point, we'd want to retain individuality. I think we'd give up the transhuman power of omniscience (in the sense of knowing all that is collectively known). However, given infinite time, we'd tend to accumulate that anyway, so some better solution would have to be devised.

The only solution that comes to my mind is death or its equivalent: hardware reset to a previous state. Those with a mystical bent can probably take that idea and fly to ideas that could make for fun movies or at least long discussions, but that doesn't interest me.

Ultimately, I see the problem of omniscient redundancy as the true Achille's heel of transhumanism. Even if we can do this, I don't think we'll like it.

Death or a reboot is not "eternal life". Transhumanism leads me to either those or the singular mind instance as an inexorable result. Neither situation is desirable, I think.