Consciousness and Death

 

Consciousness arises in the physical brain but is not a physical process. It is a “program” that runs in the brain. And this program is not linked with the brain/body in any fundamental way apart from the fact that it runs on a particular brain situated in a particular body.

This may sound something simple, but the implications are profound. And that explains a lot of the struggles of us conscious beings. Consciousness is not so much a biological evolutionary process – it does not degrade with age as the brain/body does (the degradation that happens in old age is again due to degradation of the hardware). It is an abstract thing – not physical – so there is no such thing as degradation. Prime numbers do not degrade over time, music does not degrade over time – the physical instantiations surely do, but the abstractions do not.

So, consciousness, as an abstraction, does not have “degradation” built into it. But the brain/body does. And therefore death i.e., death of the physical brain/body is such a tragic thing. It is purely a “hardware” death. It is almost like a movie, say “the godfather” is stored on one computer (or one set of reels). And it cannot be copied anywhere because we do not have the technology to do so. Sooner or later the physical computer will degrade and with it “The godfather” will be lost forever. How tragic is that?

But the same thing happens in every human being. It has happened a 95 billion times by some estimates (the total number of humans who have ever lived). What makes it even worse is that the conscious being must make sense of it and knows it will happen. Animals do not “know” they will die in the sense that we do. They do not contemplate death like we do. Because we know, we know that some day this body and brain will stop working and along with that we will stop to exist as well.

We have come up with many different ideas to deal with this and make sense of it. Religions have come up with many ways to handle the idea of death. And it “works” if you believe in it. If you believe that there is an afterlife of some sort, or there is heaven where good people go, then that is a way to make sense of death. But these are just beliefs – they are not theories that are difficult to vary and that have predictive power. So, if epistemology is true, then we cannot take them seriously and I do not.

I used to think that as people get older, they kind of naturally accept their own death as it draws closer. And then when it is time it is much easier since consciousness will have aged in parallel with the body. But, as I have argued above, it is not what happens. Sure, you can incorporate certain ideas into your consciousness which can have the same effect i.e., being better able to accept death. But these ideas are more like “patches” – or painkillers. They do not get to the bottom of it – which is that it is just a tragedy that consciousness must die along with the brain/body i.e., the program must die along with the hardware.

Now, after this somber reflection, comes the optimistic part – there is no law of physics that prohibits consciousness from being downloaded to another hardware. In fact, we know that it must be possible given the universality of computation. It is just a matter of figuring out how. I really do hope this happens in our lifetime (though we cannot predict when it will happen). I for one will sign up for it.