The concept of the “self” has always fascinated me. What is it that defines you or I? What applies to all of us, but is unique to each of us, and describes any of us as a “self”?
The book Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card turned me onto the concept of controlling more than just your body with your mind. We have made drone warfare a reality. Also, via video games and mind-filing we’ve extended and enhanced our “realm of self” to include engaging activities and environments that do not utilize our physical body.
The future will have a vastly different conception of self than the past or even the present. The inevitable future self will extend far beyond our current physical limitations and include out-of-body experiences, both spiritual and technological hard-to-fathom given our current abilities.
In the film, Surrogates, starring Bruce Willis, life is no longer lived personally but through remote control of androids acting as extensions of the self. This allows one the choice - what self does one want to be today? Indirectly portrayed in this movie is the question: What if you choose to have a plural self?
How will this evolve? People will initially think that life is just fine with only one self, but then they’ll discover advantages to plural selves. For example, it will allow people to look deeper inside their selves by experiencing first hand from other perspectives their own actions. Eventually, people won’t find themselves complete as only one individual.
If you simultaneously occupied and controlled multiple bodies, you could exist as both man and woman at the same time. You could therefore masturbate through traditional intercourse. The boundaries of gender and sexuality would fall instantly as it would be impossible to tell what is in the mind of any body.
Will we solely interact with our own “selves”? There’s a great threat of that, especially as many already have a diminishing desire to interact with others. At first it will be a novelty, but then most of us will truly desire to interact with others. I believe people will thrive in a diversity of perceptions. Diversity of thought is as important as diversity of genes in survival.
Assuming we can agree on what the self is, and that it can be duplicated - if you’re not sharing all the same data in real time, just from the nature of being in two different positions, the beings will evolve differently. Two perceptions of the same incident can be radically different when observed from different perspectives or contexts.
Identical twins raised in the same environment develop individual traits. It seems necessary that for the extension of self to include plural dimensions there has to be a capacity for the simultaneous processing of multiple inputs.
We do this already with multiple senses. If trained, perhaps each section of the brain that focuses on a certain sense could then be trained to focus or interact with a remote self. Are we mentally capable of operating two people at the same time? The biggest question is: is the mind ready to take in that much info? (Remember what happened to 7of9 when she tried assimilating all of Voyager’s records through a Borg data module?)
Multi-tasking has become not just commonplace, but an expectation. Many of the tasks we perform require little focus, our bodily functions are largely autonomous anyways, or can be trained that way. While asleep your mind can be incredibly active. It is conceivable that you could operate another self while you are asleep, or in some form of lucid state. It is possible to operate another being when we’re doing activities that put our mind on “autopilot.” I daydream frequently… oops! there I’ve done it again.
Scientists or hobbyist might choose to do this first. You could be your own pet, exist as a falcon or a whale, a fantastical conception, a spider, or even experience plant life. The possibilities for observation and entertainment are endless. The first realizations of this will likely be simple creations, like remote control vacuuming or lawn mowing.
Commercial applications might first appear in the airline industry. What if the pilot and crew were all one person? There are a number of cases of pilots getting drunk or falling asleep and overshooting destinations due to boredom from idle time in the cockpit. Today pilots take off and land the planes, but the rest of the time the plane is on autopilot. The flight staff secures the cabin and alerts the captain they are ready for ascent or descent. They then sit quietly while the pilot becomes active; the two rarely are engaged in activity at the same time. Why couldn’t flight attendants oversee take off and landing procedures, then tend the cabin?
In the next few years, commercial airlines could be remotely piloted from the towers. As the plane approaches the runway the air traffic controller will land it like drone pilots do today. One hurdle to this happening will be public fear, easily overshadowed by considerable economic incentive. Cutting two to three people off each airplane’s staff, half the crew (pilot, navigator, flight attendant, etc.), would make the industry more profitable, and airlines using this method far cheaper.
These uses of technology are well underway and not in threat of declining their pace of accelerated growth. Once a certain level of familiarity is achieved people will begin to perceive their surrogate(s) as a true extension of their self. Loosing your smart-phone today can be paramount to going deaf to many people, can we successfully argue that surrogate(s) are not a philosophical if not legal continuation one’s self?
Today, when we say “me” or “I” we mean our physical bodies, however this will change.
The adaption of prosthetics is already changing our notion of what the self is. Our surrogate body parts or organs are as much “I” as the fleshly parts are. The very concept of self has changed before, as it is now, in accordance with philosophies of property. Native Americans saw the self as being one with the land and the tribe. Ants are an excellent example of the possibility of multiple selves, when referring to individual bodies controlled by a central system.
My friend and colleague Linda Chamberlain told me of a book she is reading Mindscan by Robert J. Sawyer, where when people got old, their bodies were replaced by androids. Another friend and colleague Mike Clancy offered the short story by David Brin entitled Stones of Significance where people have augmented abilities allowing for greater powers of perception and processing of data. Both excellent reading when contemplating these questions of “self.”
We are heading into a world where the self is expanding and multiplying. Are “you” just “you”? Where does your body begin or end? What philosophy/theology of property makes you think that? Are “you” what you’re born as, or is it what you are capable of? If you can operate five androids simultaneously, are they all you? Is in invalid therefore not a self at all?
Inquisitive minds would like to know.
IEET Blog
The best story I’ve read so far about multiple selves is “Glasshouse” by Charles Stross. It deals with multiple selves, multiple mind uploads into animated objects (tanks, etc), merging memories from multiple versions of the self, “tainted” minds (which you don’t want merged into the “master record”), instances created for short-lived missions (kamikaze), etc.
I think once you’ve been uploaded once, the uploaded self knows he’s an upload and has to accept the existential implications: broken continuity means that he’s a distinct mind from the original meat-self, immortality of the mind is not immortality of the self (in terms of “individual”), a substrate-dependent relationship with Time, and varied limitations and possibilities in regards with physical/virtual realms.