Mistaken Identity

Sometimes intuition is wrong

In Singularitarian / SL4 circles, the question of identity comes up a fair bit, often in relation to "uploading". A typical scenario goes like this: we develop upload technology that can scan your brain and make an exact functional copy on a computer. If the upload process destroys your original brain, is the version on the computer still "you"? What if the upload doesn't destroy the original? What if you make 25 copies of the uploaded brain?

I believe that our whole concept of identity is based on a flawed set of basic assumptions about the world. Those assumptions have worked well for us so far, but will start to fall apart as we start to develop AI in its various forms. Let me try to explain by analogy to our concept of species.

The idea of "species" is fundamental to our understanding of biology. To a first approximation, a species is a set of organisms that share common characteristics and can breed amongst themselves but not with other organisms. Wherever we look, we find that organisms are always ordered in species, and species dynamics drive numerous basic biological phenomena, from evolution to ecology. Examined closely enough, however, the concept of species gets a little blurry.

For example, it's possible to find animal populations spread across a geographic region where the animals at either end of the region don't and/or can't interbreed, and would probably be considered separate species. In between those two extremes, however, a smooth gradient exists, with individuals that can't readily be classified as belonging to either species. Human breeding, also, has produced populations with wildly divergent characteristics which can still readily interbreed, as well as numerous hybrid organisms. Going further, it's easy to see how sufficiently advanced biotechnology will allow us to completely void the concept of species, should we choose to do so. We could engineer, for example, a savannah where lions could only breed with zebras, or indeed where each animal was utterly unique and had a completely arbitrary set of possible mates.

The point is that although the concept of "species" is a tremendously useful one in our current world, it's important to remember that it's merely a handy way of approximating certain phenomena, and not a representation of an absolute physical law. Similarly, I believe, the concept of "identity" is a nothing more than a tremendously handy mental shortcut. The question of whether or not an uploaded Matt is the "same person" as the biological entity it was copied from is ultimately no more meaningful than the question of whether a lion that can only mate with zebras (producing giraffe offspring) belongs to the lion species or the zebra species.

Ultimately, we will need to choose what kind of consciousness we want to be. We may choose to have numerous individual "people" that are clearly separate from each other. We may choose to have a single uber-consciousness. We may have countless micro-consciousnesses that flicker in and out of existence, sometimes branching into numerous forks and sometimes merging with one another. The point is that our current arrangement is purely an accidental artifact of our present biological substrate. While we may choose to emulate it, I suspect that we'll come up with something better.