Consciousness
arises in the physical brain but is not a physical process. It is a “program”
that runs in the brain. And this program is not linked with the brain/body in
any fundamental way apart from the fact that it runs on a particular brain
situated in a particular body.
This may
sound something simple, but the implications are profound. And that explains a
lot of the struggles of us conscious beings. Consciousness is not so much a
biological evolutionary process – it does not degrade with age as the brain/body
does (the degradation that happens in old age is again due to degradation of
the hardware). It is an abstract thing – not physical – so there is no such
thing as degradation. Prime numbers do not degrade over time, music does not
degrade over time – the physical instantiations surely do, but the abstractions
do not.
So, consciousness,
as an abstraction, does not have “degradation” built into it. But the brain/body
does. And therefore death i.e., death of the physical brain/body is such a
tragic thing. It is purely a “hardware” death. It is almost like a movie, say “the
godfather” is stored on one computer (or one set of reels). And it cannot be
copied anywhere because we do not have the technology to do so. Sooner or later
the physical computer will degrade and with it “The godfather” will be lost
forever. How tragic is that?
But the
same thing happens in every human being. It has happened a 95 billion times by
some estimates (the total number of humans who have ever lived). What makes it
even worse is that the conscious being must make sense of it and knows it will
happen. Animals do not “know” they will die in the sense that we do. They do
not contemplate death like we do. Because we know, we know that some day this
body and brain will stop working and along with that we will stop to exist as
well.
We have come
up with many different ideas to deal with this and make sense of it. Religions
have come up with many ways to handle the idea of death. And it “works” if you
believe in it. If you believe that there is an afterlife of some sort, or
there is heaven where good people go, then that is a way to make sense of
death. But these are just beliefs – they are not theories that are difficult to
vary and that have predictive power. So, if epistemology is true, then we cannot
take them seriously and I do not.
I used to
think that as people get older, they kind of naturally accept their own death as it
draws closer. And then when it is time it is much easier since consciousness
will have aged in parallel with the body. But, as I have argued above, it is
not what happens. Sure, you can incorporate certain ideas into your consciousness
which can have the same effect i.e., being better able to accept death. But
these ideas are more like “patches” – or painkillers. They do not get to the
bottom of it – which is that it is just a tragedy that consciousness must die
along with the brain/body i.e., the program must die along with the hardware.
Now, after
this somber reflection, comes the optimistic part – there is no law of physics
that prohibits consciousness from being downloaded to another hardware. In
fact, we know that it must be possible given the universality of computation.
It is just a matter of figuring out how. I really do hope this happens in our
lifetime (though we cannot predict when it will happen). I for one will sign up
for it.
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