some just to see if they can do it, to the true terrorists that, because of some grudge or religious motive, wants to create as much damage as possible. It is entirely possible that some future man made infectious agent could wipe out nearly all biological human life on the planet. The Russians, at one point in their biological warfare program, may have already created such an agent. In the end, the biological self may be too vulnerable.
Bob: But what about computer viruses?
Ray: Here, at least you can have backups. My advice? Be careful whose software and hardware you select for your next instantiation.
Mrs. Altavine: My head is hurting with all these possibilities. Some very scary. All I want to know is should I have my head frozen in anticipation of getting reincarnated as a machine. And will I be me or will I be someone else.
Rev.: You’ll go to hell!
Mrs. Altavine: I’m a very polite person and I’ve never said this to anyone before but Reverend Faintspell just shut up!
Rev. (turns and walks off yelling) You’re all going to hell!
Bob (half laughing): Well, he seems to be leaving us. Why is it that fire and brimstone preachers can get away with telling people they’re going to hell but the rest of us would probably get sued for saying the same thing?
Carolyne: I told my ex to go to hell and he took my house and car and two million in stock to hell with him. (She laughs and whispers) But I have the last laugh, he took all the dot-com stocks before the bust.
Mrs. Altavine: I can’t for the life of me understand why I invited Reverend Faintspell. I didn’t realize he was so over-the-top, fire and brimstone. I never believed in that stuff anyway, I just wanted a lively discussion so I could get all points of view. (She looks off in the direction the Rev. left with a mild sadness.)
Ray: I think you have nothing to lose and everything to gain if you have your head frozen by a reputable company after you die. If all goes well, you will at least have the possibility of a really interesting afterlife. Be sure to put aside a healthy chunk of cash for your resurrection since it is not likely to be cheap in the beginning unless you have a special talent that someone with the means wants to preserve.
Mrs. Altavine: Well Ray, I already made arrangements to have my head frozen, just in case.
Bob: Mrs. Altavine, before you put your head on the chopping block you might find that when you are brought back to virtual life you’ll be completely irrelevant. The world will have passed you by and will be unrecognizable by you.
Mrs. Altavine: Why Mr. Mover, I didn’t know you as one to step away from a challenge. This is the adventure of all time, for all time. It beats the dickens out of dying and going nowhere.
Carolyne: But what will happen to your soul?
Mrs. Altavine: I don’t believe in this fire and brimstone business. I’ve lived a reasonably virtuous life in any case. Maybe I’ll end up with two after lives. Now that would be a kick wouldn’t it? Oh, I forgot to ask, would sex be possible in this virtual world? That’s one thing heaven, at least J.C. heaven, doesn’t seem to offer.
Bob: J.C.? Jesus Christ?
Mrs. Altavine: No, Judeo-Christian.
Ray: I don’t see any reason why sex wouldn’t be possible. Your virtual body can be the same as your physical one as far as your senses go. Actually this brings up a major issue.
Mrs. Altavine: Hold onto that thought! Nature is calling me. Enjoy the garden. (Deepening her voice) I’ll be back!
Play Pause - Incidental music: “Tinkle Time”
Mrs. Altavine: (Coming into the garden) I see we are minus Reverend Faintspell. I guess he had enough of us.
Bob: Ray, I think you made an enemy for life. He is going to be preaching against you for the next thirty years.
Carolyne: If he chooses to become virtual he could preach against you forever.
Ray: I think there is little likelihood of that.
Mrs. Altavine: Mr. Kurtz, please go on about the down side of sex in the virtual world.
Ray: It’s not so much sex as it is direct excitation of the limbic region of your virtual brain. This is the pleasure center. In the case of rats they will select excitation of this region over sex, eating, thirst quenching, anything except sleep from exhaustion and finally dies if left on his own. This region is what heroin and crack targets indirectly. In the virtual world it will be easy to stimulate this center directly. Those that do will no doubt be contemplating their navel till eternity.
Bob: Ouroboros!
Carolyne: Who?
Bob: Ouroboros. That’s the snake symbol who is swallowing its own tail. It’s an ancient Egyptian symbol of eternity and rebirth. Perhaps an apt symbol for this enterprise. It can also stand for extreme self-indulgence; in this case, a short cut to nirvana until those circuits burn out and the money runs out to replace them.
Ray: I’m sure those building these machines will be cognizant of this problem and will try to avoid it. After all, what good is a virtual human that is no longer producing anything?
Bob: Even today religions support monks whose only goal is to reach nirvana or some enlightened state and produce nothing. I don’t see this a much different. If, like you say, we can fit everyone in a soup can what difference would it make if some just want to contemplate their navel.
Ray: I guess not much. It just shouldn’t be too easy to do. It could be just too strong a drug for anyone to resist if made too easy to access. Our reward system should be proportional to accomplishment or effort and should be adjusted to make that optimal. Our biological systems would have been very short lived if internal rewards were easy to come by.
Bob: I can certainly see the Darwinian aspects of that. A civilization of esthetic monks would die off very quickly. A hundred years later you wouldn’t even have known they existed since they would have accomplished nothing of lasting value. Well, I guess that’s not quite true. The monks of the Jewish sect who produced the Dead Sea Scrolls and preserved them in clay jars certainly did something memorable.
Mrs. Altavine: Heavens, you two do go on and on. I want to know what I will be able to do in this virtual world besides becoming birds and planes. I want to visit other planets and the stars.
Ray: Now you’ve hit a favorite point of mine. Space is a hostile place for humans. They get zapped by Cosmic rays and solar flares. They lose bone mass and get nausea at zero gravity. On the other hand a radiation hardened neural emulator could go anywhere and take any amount of time. No problem except boredom, in which case you could just turn yourself off for a while.
Mrs. Altavine: What if I want to bring the soup can with me?
Ray: Those who want to go with you or clones of them certainly can.
Mrs. Altavine: Clones?
Ray: Yes, it will be an easy matter to clone a virtual person and make any number of copies.
Mrs. Altavine (puzzled): But then which one is a continuation of the original?
Ray: They all are. They will all rightly believe they are the original. In a way, they all will be since they will be indistinguishable from the original unless purposely altered.
Mrs. Altavine: Yes, you sort of went over this before. This is the hardest part to grasp. I can’t imagine myself going on as two people. I see consciousness as a fluid flowing forward in time. I could perhaps grasp this fluid going from person to machine but not like a river being split in two. It seems like I would end up being two half-wits.
Bob: I see what you mean Mrs. Altavine, conservation of consciousness.
Ray: I believe the real problem is you see consciousness as a thing, as matter. Consciousness is a dynamic state of matter, the matter here being the neural emulator. Copying this dynamic state from emulator to emulator will be as easy a loading a computer from a backup. It is just information, sort of a program and data combination.
Mrs. Altavine: It is still hard to grasp a continuation of someone who splits in two.
Ray: You’re right. We’re too close to the problem and there’s nothing analogous to this in our experience
. Another thing like this is quantum mechanics. Lots of things happen at the quantum level that defies any physical analogy. At the quantum level we can have time go backwards, we can have one particle linked to another even if it is on the other side of the universe to call attention to a couple of the stranger ones.
Bob: Now that you mention it I’ve heard people that I consider to be thinkers, say that they feel that the brain operates on quantum principles.
Ray: I’m acquainted with this line of thought. First of all this doesn’t have to be true to explain the complexity that we see and all current research tends to show that this isn’t the case. If we were endowed with even the tiniest quantum computer we would be able to do some rather fantastic things like crack encryption codes and solve a twenty destination traveling salesman problem without hardly thinking about it. Fact is we can’t. Some have postulated that thinking is quantum based in tiny tubules that form in axons and dendrites. A more plausible explanation is these tubule structures are used to transport building materials for axon and dendritic growth to make new connections.
Bob: I’m thinking of quantum phenomena being more related to our spiritual nature and free will.
Ray: If you are familiar with chaos theory you know that very small changes can cause very large changes over time in even very simple systems. Very simple formulas can exhibit this behavior. It is sometimes referred to as the butterfly syndrome.