Will you upload your consciousness to the matrix?
Theology is an amazing thing. Even though we Christians study a book that hasn’t changed in 2,000 years, and a God who has never changed, the big questions we ask about him often do. Questions that seemed like silly fantasies in 1818 — like that of life on other planets — are now real questions that we have to consider theologically. Stuff that was pure science fiction, or thought to be settled philosophy, is now coming to the forefront of our discourse. And one of the things that is fast approaching reality is the idea of being able to simulate the human brain.
Simulating the human brain is something scientists and inventors have been striving toward for the last century. As AI has been getting smarter and smarter, it’s been seen as an inevitable accomplishment. We’re still a long way away — as recently as 2013, it took the K Supercomputer 40 minutes to simulate 1 second of 1% of human brain activity — but it’s assumed by pretty much everyone that it will happen eventually. There’s even a term for the moment that AI becomes more intelligent than humans: the technological singularity. Some have claimed this will occur as early as 2029.
What’s not often mentioned is that these notions are coated with naturalism and materialism. It’s assumed that by simulating the physical activity of the human brain, you can also simulate the human mind. Not too long from now, we Christians will be forced to grapple up close with a theological question that most of us outside a university classroom have never had to deal with: What is the relationship of the mind to the body? What is the soul? Is simulating the activity of a human brain equivalent to simulating a human being? With the advance of AI, I think that within the next decade, these will not only be philosophical questions, but pressing ethical ones.
One of the big assumptions that accompanies this materialistic view of the human mind is that the entirety of our self-consciousness, including thoughts and memories and intentions and beliefs, could be extracted from our brain and converted into data just like that of a machine. It could then be placed on a hard drive or in some other storage, in the hopes that it could then be downloaded into a new brain and body. It’s the perfect, dream scenario for those seeking immortality, and some are speculating it could be a reality within the next 50 years. For my generation, which will be reaching the final stages of life at that point, this could mean big questions about life and death.
I tend to think of the soul and the mind as one and the same — that center of consciousness outside of our body. It’s what contains the contents of our thoughts and beliefs and intentions and free-will choices, which can’t be discerned by the measurements of chemicals and electrical signals in the brain. I question whether these things can be accurately reproduced in non-human entities, and I certainly question whether the “self” — the soul — can be copied like computer data. I suspect that even if a brain or its contents could be duplicated, it might appear to be the same person, but it would not be. If your brain were cloned a million times, you would not be in a million different places at once.
So would you upload your consciousness to the matrix if given the opportunity? Would you take the opportunity to live out another life in a new body — even at the risk that it would not truly be you, but a clone of you? I think it would be a tempting choice for any of us. We could practically choose when we die. It sounds amazing. It’s a computerized fountain of youth. We could even take it a step further and transfer ourselves from a body that’s merely undesirable into one we like.
It would be a strange world indeed. We could basically choose when we die, transferring ourselves from one body to another for 500 years, or saying “I quit life” after 70. We could go as long as we wanted, until I suppose a brain-destroying accident befell us. We could transfer from one body to another based on physical strength, or physical enablement, or even something like gender, race, and age. Eventually we could likely construct bodies that were basically superhuman. The possibilities would be nearly endless, and humanity might finally achieve its dream of immortality.
If you are your brain. And that’s a big if, especially if you’re a Christian and believe we are both material and immaterial. And to add to that difficulty, the soul is not scientifically testable. If we are both body and soul, no experiment carried out could ever verify for certain that the transference of the brain’s data equals the transfer of the person. This would have to be decided in the theological and philosophical arena (a fact which, incidentally, illustrates very well the crippling limitations of science in determining truth).
It’s my opinion that Christians may want to be ahead of our time in our thinking, something we don’t tend to have a reputation for. But forget about the future. This means something for us now, too. Because what would you do? If we uploaded our cerebral contents to the matrix, what would that say about our faith? We are promised eternal life with the God who made us, and would we choose to prolong our existence in the material world for centuries more? Would we bet our souls on the idea that they can be stored like a computer program?
Furthermore, does hearing about these things — the possibility of material immortality and free transference of the self — excite you? Does it excite you more than the possibility of eternal life with the God who made us? That, I think, is a question worth asking, because it reveals something about where our priorities are now. Would we resort to such uncertain, untested and untestable means to hold onto this world for 10,000 years? If we would find such a determination in ourselves, could that indicate a lack of faith? A lack of assurance of salvation? A lack of love for Christ as our highest treasure?
Much like my previous post, I don’t know what the answer would be. But this is the type of question that I think we would do well to give a little thought to, because it has something to say about who we fundamentally are, body and soul — and where our real treasure lies — even now.
I’ve read nearly every post and love everything. I’m almost finished with the blog but not yet; and so you may or may not have touched on it already – the closest I’ve read from you on the topic so far, is when you discussed hypocrisy in ‘The Way to Be Authentic is to Be Holy’. Anyway: This piece about AI reminds me of the hypocrisy of loving God/claiming Christianity/etc. yet being afraid of death – a topic ‘the pandemic’ has made abundantly visible as well. From this piece, I also think of the discussion around ‘your body is your temple’ – so even if you could or could not transfer your brain and mind – how would you justify swapping bodies – which also bleeds into plastic surgeries/medically invasive surgeries (not wheel chairs but heart pacers/transplants), etc. I’d love to read a post about some of this from your perspective.
Thank you for reading! These are all very interesting and complex issues you raise that will probably make their way into popular thinking in the future, maybe nearer than we think. I have been looking for inspiration for months on topics to write on, and your comments have given me a lot of ideas.
Great, I’m glad to hear it! I look forward to reading new work from you. I respect and enjoy your perspective very much. Congratulations on the wife & baby too!