This will probably all make a tiny bit more sense if you've read the posts below. It definitely won't make sense if you haven't.

1. Egos Are Fractally Complex
2. Egos Are Bandwidth Membranes
3. How To Make an Ego

What Persists

The idea of immortality has always held some fascination over me. When I was 18, I wrote this piece about it. It may be possible to extend the longevity of our flesh, coaxing our metabolism into another decade or ten with gene therapy, nanobots, or a thousand other possible outcomes of gerontological research. This desire, for me, is more about just wanting to see how things turn out for us. But I think, even in the best possible case, my metabolism will be eventually be interrupted by some unavoidable crisis. And that is all it takes.

Our human obsession with what persists of us when we are gone has led many to consider the idea of transferring your consciousness to some kind of synthetic container, where it can continue to exist outside of the confines of biological fragility. But personally, I've found most conceptions of what this process could look like to be existentially horrifying, or at the least unsatisfying.

What does an actually good process of uploading your mind look like? Here's the list of requirements that I, personally, would like to see.

1. No duplicates - Only one instance of you should exist at any one time.
2. Unambiguous continuity - You should always believe that you are the true version.
3. True fidelity - The process of uploading your mind shouldn't suddenly and drastically alter you.
4. No going insane - The process should be existentially survivable.
5. No dying - You shouldn't believe that you've died at any point.
6. No lying - All of the above should happen when you have the full and truthful knowledge of your situation.

Popular Conceptions

Photos of Ghosts

Perhaps, when we imagine a mind upload, we envision an elder at the very end of their biological mortality sitting atop some plinth and resting their skull within a scanner advanced enough to perfectly capture their connectome. The elder breathes their last, and some simulation of their connectome continues within some synthetic process. This is represented in fiction in Black Mirror's San Junipero.

But what then? You are a tortured brain in a jar, thrown adrift in some digital world that is utterly alien to you. The creature created from the trauma of such a transition will not be the ghost in the photograph. And, for a time, both the human and the ghost exist.

Methuselah's Sleeve

Another popular idea is that you could constantly stream your brain signals to some backup body. Then, when your current body dies, they just wake up the redundant version of you which has all your memories. This is represented in fiction in the Altered Carbon universe or Foundation's Cleonic Dynasty.

While it's probably less psychologically traumatizing to wake up in a clone body, and your mind may be able to persist with a true fidelity, this all seems like cold comfort to the dead corpse of the original. It does seem to be a rather inescapable fact that the redundant version is not quite the same being. And we could imagine a scenario where a clone is woken accidentally, leading to duplicates. Often the memories of the backup are altered to edit out dying or other trauma, so I think this also fails the lying test.

A Better Way

What if I told you that there was a way to upload your mind which did fit all the requirements? Not an easy one, mind you. But the right way to do things rarely is.

Refresher: You Are An Ego

An ego is a form of consciousness with the following three properties:

• A stateful sense of self
• Continuous agency
• Preferences for the future It seems natural, then, to desire a process in which you end up as an ego as well. Merely storing your mind as some crystallization of your being is not enough. You must end up agentic, stateful, and with your preferences intact.

Refresher: You Are A Bandwidth Membrane

Bandwidth membranes are a way to conceptualise your consciousness. You are a volume of space of very high bandwidth (i.e. your brain sending information along your billions of synapses) separated from a world of generally much, much lower bandwidth by a membrane, which could also be called your qualia or sensory experience. The persistence of this membrane is paramount to the existence of an ego.

However, this is not to say that the membrane is static. When you were a child, your brain was a less powerful organ. As you grew, so too did the compute available to your ego. And so your ego grows into this new space like a creeping vine.

Frogs in a Jacuzzi

The old adage of frogs not noticing being boiled alive comes to mind, but that's a metaphor that perhaps touches on dying a little to bluntly, so let's imagine some frogs in a jacuzzi. At its heart, the metaphor describes the power of gradual change. This is perhaps my greatest objection to the existing conceptions of the act - that it is a sudden transition from who you are before uploading, to who you are afterwards.

If we could conceptualize a gradual process of mind upload, then our perspective undergoing that process would be quite different when it comes time to let go of our biological forms. Surely, still, a deeply traumatic event, but if the ego experiencing that event considers their original body to now only be an extension of their mind, then it is perhaps existentially survivable.

The Pond and The Lake

Imagine your bandwidth membrane as a pond of water. The edge of your pond is the boundary of your membrane. The rain, the roots, the soil itself seep water in and out. You exist in an equilibrium with this exchange.

If the pond is separated from a much larger lake by a dam, it is still the same pond. Let us imagine opening the floodgates a little. The pond rises, filling with more water, and so its membrane expands. But if the dam collapses, and all the water of the lake rushes in, the pond is no more. Only the lake remains.

This analogy is meant to demonstrate the importance of gradually increasing the bandwidth available to your ego. Imagine being able to implant a cybernetic chip into your brain which increases its computational power. Personally, I believe that such an expansion could only work if it was some fraction of the existing compute - that is, if you were to install a chip that increased your mind's processing power by 100x, you would effectively die. The lake would rush in, and your membrane would be washed away.

However, small and gradual increases in synthetic compute available gives the membrane time to adjust to its new shape. If, every so often, you increased the computation available to your brain little by little, you might eventually end up in a situation where you had a comparable bandwidth occurring at the biological level between your synapses, and between your synapses and the synthetic compute. It is at this stage that your membrane starts to look a lot less attached to your biological form.

And, if we take it even further, continuing to expand the external synthetic compute, it may be that we can give our minds a true escape hatch that meets all of our requirements. The lens of the bandwidth membrane tells us that the ego will grow into the compute available, given enough time. When our brains do eventually fail, if they only represent some fragment of our total computational power, it may be that we do not consider their loss to be dying.

Conclusion

A better way of mind uploading is a gradual one, slowly building an escape hatch of bandwidth across which your mind can make its long journey to a world of synthetic compute. When the time comes to cast off your original biological form, it will seem only a seed from which you have grown. There is only one mind making this journey, never duplicated into existential horrors or crystallized into dead data. There is only the membrane.