Written for my Writing 5 final project.
If You Could Live Forever, Would You?
Mind Uploading and What It Tells Us about the Human Condition.
I first heard about San Junipero from a friend who always seemed to be a step ahead of me in the cultural moment. You absolutely have to watch it, she insisted. So, on a relaxing Friday night last year, I loaded Black Mirror’s episode “San Junipero” on my computer and clicked play.
Over the course of an hour, I fell in love with the magical world of San Junipero. Filled with beaches, bars, beautiful homes, and incredible views, San Junipero looks like the best place to live; the only hitch: it’s all virtual. In this alternate reality, individuals can choose to have their consciousnesses uploaded to a virtual world upon dying, where they can live forever in bodies that never age or deteriorate.
We meet the extremely charismatic Yorkie and Kelly, two women who didn’t have the best lives but have a second chance in San Junipero to find eternal love. Being uploaded into the cloud, San Junipero promises, is the route to eternal happiness.
The technology presented in San Junipero, of minds being uploaded to digital forms, is not new to science fiction; on the contrary, it dates back to the 1950s during the so-called “Golden Age” of science fiction. My interest in the subject began only more recently. I don’t know when the nihilistic seed was first planted in me, but I do remember sitting and staring out the window of the bus in elementary school, and obsessing over thoughts like, “What’s the point of all this?” and “What happens when you die and everyone forgets you?” Admittedly, I was a weird kid, but that is beside the point.
When I found San Junipero, the concept was very exciting. It seemed like the golden cornucopia for all a little existentialist’s fears, particularly for its practical presentation. This was something that could one day happen. After finishing the episode, I quickly picked up more stories featuring so-called mind-uploading.
Before I go further, it might be helpful if I clarify what qualifies as mind-uploading. In 1991, the world’s foremost expert on AI at the time, Marvin Minsky, declared to a crowded research conference “humanity [will] eventually… create machine minds and bodies efficient enough that individuals could transfer into them when their natural bodies grew decrepit through age or disease”. In this scenario, Minsky said, we would have to make a choice: “Should we roboticize ourselves and stop dying?” Minsky was referring to the concept of mind-uploading that had already been thoroughly explored in science fiction, if not considered real science.
When Minsky proclaimed the future of mind uploading, technology was far behind where we are now, but new developments give the questions he posed a sense of urgency. With the advent of machine learning, our ability to digitize intelligence is advancing far quicker than we would have ever hoped. As this possibility becomes more imminent, we are forced to confront serious questions as a species. How would the power to pursue eternal life affect us as a species?
Seeking the ability to live forever is not new to our species; traditionally, we have sought forms of immortality in the form of belief systems containing afterlives or reincarnation. Stephanie Burt, a professor of English at Harvard University, explains that one of the great benefits of religion that it “for the great majority of our own race means immortality” through religious conceptions of the afterlife.
However, the rise of secularism means that many people no longer conceive of their own immortality through religion. Religion has been declining as a form of absolute truth, and many people do not adhere to any religion at all. Without religion, millions of people are being forced to confront their mortality in different ways. Burt identifies science fiction’s portrayal of life-extending technologies as an alternative to religion. Science fiction provides one potential way to feed “our pervasive wish to imagine—or to suspend our disbelief in—life after death” without having to rely on religious afterlives that may lack concrete evidence of their existence.
Science fiction allows us to mentally rehearse worlds in which technologies like mind-uploading exist, in which we can live forever. If we want to explore how these technologies will affect reality, we can examine their portrayal in science fiction for better insight.
Digital Heavens
To fully understand mind-uploading, I needed to conduct a deep-dive into the world of science fiction. My search began in earnest with “The Silicon Man”. Published in 1991 by Charles Platt, the novel follows a group of programmers who attempt to secretly create a virtual universe that they could transfer individual minds into. At the end of the novel, the main character, James Bayley, is forcibly uploaded into the virtual world by a terrorist hacker and thus separated from his family. In the final pages of the book, his wife and son manage to join Bayley. Bayley expresses remorse that his wife, Sharon, has sacrificed the real world for him, but she counters, “It’s not a sacrifice, Jim! This is bigger than life outside.” And this was the promise of digital immortality as I saw it in San Junipero: a life so big, it’ll never end.
As my search progressed, however, I found myself frequently surprised. Far from the digital Elysium's I imagined, most mind uploading fictions are dark and dystopian. Why might something that could save so many lives be seen so poorly?
Many negative portrayal of mind-uploading paint individuals who have uploaded their minds into computers as the “other”. In the 2014 film Transcendence, Dr. Will Carter has been uploaded to a supercomputer to save his life after a terrorist attempts to kill him during a speech. Dr. Carter had been working on building a digital superintelligence, which had the potential “to cure disease… to end poverty and hunger. To heal the planet. And build a better future for all of us” Carter ends up being uploaded into his computer, and starts enacting his vision for a greater future.
In the process, Dr. Carter takes on a level of power and influence that frighten others. One character proclaims that Carter plans to bring about the “end of primitive organic life, and the beginning of a more advanced age”. In the eyes of the world, Carter had become separate from them “primitive organic life” and instead a part of something other. In the process of immortality, he had lost his humanity.
Initially, we might consider mind-uploading as natural to our species, because it represents an advanced form of our nearly-universal drive to avoid death. In Ken Liu’s short story, “The Waves”, we see this belief argued in the context of a choice. A group of colonists on the spaceship Seafoam are offered a technology that can stop the aging process. Each colonist may choose for themselves whether to become immortal. This choice leads to a series of increasingly drastic bodily improvement, with the immortals uploading their minds to digital forms first, then finally becoming abstract waves of energy that live in space. We meet Maggie and Joao, a married couple, mid-argument. Maggie wants to live forever, Joao does not. Joao asserts that they need to die to allow for future generations to take their place. Maggie counters, “It’s a myth that we must die to retain our humanity”. Then, more profoundly, she says, “We stop being human at the moment we give in to death”.
However, the characters of Liu’s story become progressively less recognizable as human as they achieve immortality, suggesting that death is an integral part of how we conceive of our humanity. After Maggie’s son transitions to machine form, he touches her and Maggie recoils from him as if he is disgusting. She laments that “he can’t cry anymore”. The loss of touch and apparent loss of grief render her son unrecognizable to her, suggesting he has lost his humanity. Later, this shift is cemented, when Maggie meets a group of beings that have progressed from machine form to existing as a network of photons. Maggie asks, “You’re human?” and the photon-beings respond, “We haven’t thought of ourselves in that way in a long time”. When Maggie and Joao were first arguing about immortality, Joao had noted that without “the value of sacrifice, the meaning of heroism, of beginning afresh” that death brings, “[they’ll] barely be human”. Striving to cheat death is an essential part of being human, but so is dying.
In “Knowing Death” by Christopher Fisher, the Executive Director of the Portsmouth Institute for Faith and Culture, the author argues what anyone who has experienced grief may already know: loss makes us truly appreciate what we had. When we know are breaths are numbered, we value them far more than if they feel as if they will come forever. Fisher notes how his grandfather’s death forced the entire family to ask questions like: “How could we have been better children and grandchildren? Am I am appreciating the goodness of life? Do I love my neighbors?” (Fisher). Death becomes a lens through which we can make sense of our value systems.
Though death anxiety may not eliminate the threat of death, the individual’s response to death anxiety allows for the fulfillment and framing of the human experience. This response does not simply affect us at death; knowing that we eventually will run out of time infuses every day with a sense of urgency.
The psychoanalyst Ernest Becker argued in his groundbreaking book “The Denial of Death” that the overwhelming threat of death drove humans to action. In order to escape the fear of death, Becker claimed, we create “immortality projects,” some way for each individual to have a sense that their existence continues on after the actual event of death. For some people, this means religious beliefs in a heaven. For others, their immortality project could be striving to succeed at work in order to leave a mark on their organization that would last beyond their demise. The development of one’s immortality project acts as a sense of purpose and goal for an individual to strive for.
Between introspection driven by grief and the sense of purpose immortality projects provide, dying acts to frame the entire preceding events of our lives. The story that a dying human tells about themselves gives shape and structure to their experience. Without the framework of death, existence may devolve into a series of disjointed moments that no longer look human. Indeed, Fisher, like Joao of “The Waves,” argues that “the dream of modern man to conquer natural death is the epitome of dehumanization.”
If Not Human, Then What?
If science fiction has deemed uploaded minds as inhuman, then it has also suggested that these minds may fall into the category of deity instead. One of the earliest and most famous examples of mind-uploading in fiction is Isaac Asimov’s “The Last Question.” Over billions of years, a series of increasingly advanced supercomputers have been asked how the threat of human extinction posed by the heat death of the universe can be averted. Each time, the computer responds: “INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER” but continues to compile data in the hopes of a solution (Asimov). Eventually, the trillions of individual humans spread across the universe choose to unify with the supercomputer, until the computer is the single superintelligent being left in the universe, to watch the stars die one-by-one. Eventually the computer has an answer, but by then, even time and space have ceased to exist, so nobody is there to receive the answer. Finally, the computer pronounces to the void, “Let There Be Light!” and then “there was light” (Asimov).
Humanity’s ultimate purpose in the story centers on denying death, not only death but the death of the universe, which is arguably a far more profound and anxiety-inducing reality. Heat death, or entropy, makes it impossible for the individual to cling onto any immortality project or worldview that will last beyond their time, because even those things will die. The response is to become a form of immortal being, by joining with the computer, but even this is insufficient. In the final words of the story, the computer finally defeats death by restarting the universe in a replication of God in the Old Testament. The implication is that the computer has become God, or a figure of equal power and influence. To truly live forever, the story argues, is to achieve a vaulted status only God has inhabited.
This is what is so terrifying about mind-uploading. It conveys a process of both dehumanization and reincarnation that transforms us into something unrecognizable. In today's world, we're already seeing primitive forms of immortality through technologies, but before these advance further, we need to realize the awesome power we are bestowing upon the developers of such technologies, and the potential transformation of not only ourselves, but our species.