I’m OK (and You’re even Better ! )

Life is a trap. The ultimate roach motel. With every decision, You lock yourself into another compartment with no apparent exit. And most choices either seem like a good idea at the time; or you are simply forced into them by the willfulness of a more muscular predator. And, of course, time -- outside the realm of quantum mechanics -- only flows in one direction. Even if you could reverse directions, would the past be at all plastic? Could it really be lived out in a different manner? Could one choose new paths? Could one find out what was behind “door number two” instead of having gone through “door number one” as per plan “A” of one’s life. Well, maybe not. I mean what’s done is done. Maybe that path you took is built. In place. Not alterable. Maybe if you altered it, what you would be doing is not really changing the past, but instead living an entirely new life, and so, in the process building an alternative, side by side, life parallel to the one you already lived.

That’s the idea behind parallel universes. It’s like trillions of “you’s” making trillions of decisions about your parallel lives and living them all out in another dimension of hyperspace. But are all those other “you’s” really you? I mean, you are not aware of them now. And if you are unaware of them, and they are not aware of you, then are they you or are you them in any meaningful sense? It’s like having a trillion clones. Or one. No matter how perfect a duplicate, you are still not the same. You don’t share the same conscious memories or awareness of the present moment.

Yes, it’s possible that at some point in time we will be able to share one another’s experiences in a meaningful way, just by “plugging in” to one another’s neural networks. Physically. It involves mapping the human brain much the same as we have already mapped the human genome. And then recreating it in an accessible digital format. It’s the kind of world that guys like Ray Kurtzeil describe. And, then it wouldn’t matter that you aren’t dealing with clones of yourself. You could live other lives simply by sharing the vast archive of human “present moments” that would be storable in digital format. It would no longer be necessary to limit yourself to one life, as we have for all of human history up until the present. In fact, from the moment that the task is accomplished, it will create for us a sort of virtual time travel, back to the point where the first brain copy was created. We would no longer have to speculate or reconstruct history, as we do in today’s fiction and rhetorical academic efforts.

And maybe that’s an essential part of “human nature”, as we call it -- to be able to live multiple lives. To live without limiting our experience to our own streams of consciousness. That’s essentially why we have language. To share with one another that which is not a part of the other’s experience. To end the loneliness of personal existential singularity, by achieving the ultimate communal singularity. To crawl into one another’s heads and see if their lives might have been worth living instead of or in addition to our own. It’s why we have books, literature, libraries, theater and all the exploding choices of media experience that are evolving today. Maybe it’s even why we have cheating husbands, wayward wives.

Of course, our brains are probably too tiny for all of this. And so, that means we will need to enhance them. To merge them physically with artificial intelligence via bio-micro-processing. And given the tendency for micro circuits to become ever more compact (although there are probably quantum limits to how small our digital devices can become) this looks realistically achievable. Just as bionics is enhancing our muscular and skeletal strength toward our becoming a race of “super-people” (and even, unfortunately, “super-soldiers” to better destroy ourselves through war), so too will our rush for singularity take us with ever increasing speed into the future -- one of “super-consciousness” -- the final Singularity. The final coming together of the ancient concept of the alpha and the omega.

And when we have, at long last, lived out all those trillions of alter-lives, will it have finally been worth it? And will we even still have to ask? They say, “if you have to ask…” Well, you know what I‘m saying.
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I’m OK (and You’re even Better ! ) by jimmi malarky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at malarkyspond.blogspot.com.
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