I Never Thought I’d Live to Be a Million

The Moody Blues, on their superb To Our Children’s Children’s Children album, have a 40 second track called I Never Thought I’d Live to Be a Million. Perhaps musically it is the least significant track on the album, but the title raises issues.  Now that our race is seriously discussing the transfer of human consciousness into computers or into artificial bodies, it seems to me that these issues are worthwhile pondering.

How much of human personality arises from our bodies and the bio-chemical processes within them? A lot, methinks; otherwise, drugs would have little effect on our moods and motivations. One of the issues surely has to be psychological. Would we even feel and behave like humans if we resided within a practically immortal coil?  What would we feel towards humans who did not elect that path? Would we see them as our brothers?  Or, would they seem as another species to us.  Perhaps they would be pets? Or perhaps we would view them as predators? 

If you are going to live inside a computer, who will control the switch? What steps would you take to secure power intake and preservation of your memory files in the event of a reboot or power outage? Would you feel fear over the risks, or would you even have the capacity to feel fear?

Would you become a procrastinator?  I probably would.  Well, I already am (been meaning to write this post for several days now), but if I was immortal, I think I would be a BIG procrastinator. Why bother doing now what can be done a million years from now?

How would I treat the environment if I was in an indestructible body or a computer?  Would I care about pollution? What would it matter to me if the air was a destructive of lungs and if the water could digest stomach acids? If I really loved nature, I could inhabit a virtual world of gardens and wilderness. What would abandoning being grounded with the earth do to me in that circumstance?

I suspect that an immortality that is currently envisioned by those predicting the Singularity would be the creation of new persons and the destruction of those who think they are gaining that immortality. In short, we would no longer be us.