In Jack McDevitt's Seeker, one of the main characters is searching
for a lost colony. To try to understand where it might be located, she
calls up the Avatar of the colony's founder. This avatar is created by the
computer from historical data: newspapers, documented speeches, television, photographs and other documented media. A 3D hologram
is created of the person and he can have conversation with our intrepid detective.
In Douglas Hofstadter's I am a Strange Loop, he brings up the concept that inside each of us, are the active consciousness of others. He uses his wife, who had died, as an example.
"I keep trying, though, to figure out the extent to which I believe that because of my memories of her (in my brain or on paper), and those of other people, some of Carol's consciousness, her interiority, remains on this planet. Being a strong believer in the noncentralizedness of consciousness, in its distributedness, I tend to think that in one particular brain, it is also somewhat present in other brains as well, and so, when the central brain is destroyed, tiny fragments of the living individual remain - remain alive, that is." (IAASL, p 230)
People talk about the Singularity as the time when computers will be able to hold a downloaded human brain. And the underlying assumption (I get) from this magical time, is that we'll be able to download our brain/intelligence/consciousness into a computer and be able to cheat old age and death. We'll be able to "live" on in the computer hardware infrastructure (or augment/evolve our organic brain).
One of the things the singularity will facilitate (because I do think we can do this now) is to help us create more complete avatars of ourselves. This will help us understand ourselves.
I agree with Hofstadter - there are people who are not myself in my head. People who inspire me and remind me what I think is right. ("WWJD" is a great example of this.) I remember my dead grandmother, her advice, what she loved. I was obsessed with Bruce Chatwin for about a year and read everything I could about him. He's still rattling back there in my brain (and often eggs me on to find his dreamlines in Australia). I've replayed conversations I've had with people. I know people who try out their conversations with their version of the person in their head before having the conversation with the actual person.
I'm sure algorithms exist that can scrape your blog, social network feeds to create an avatar of you - or at least a marketing demographic. The next step it seems to me - is to scan your brain. This would be a fascinating discovery. Are you really who you think you are? What is the composite creation of yourself? (Based on your brain scanned data? based on external data? based on brain scanned data of you from other brains?)
Talk about amazing 360 degree feedback. And talk about creating a digital representation of yourself. I think this is not only possible, but will happen. And some people will love this (for the history books) and others will go offline even more.
Comments