Consciousness and the Social Brain

low-resolution copy of the model that existed in her brain and that she considered to be her consciousness.
    It is trite to say that we live on in the people who remember us. But the theory of consciousness described in this book suggests that there is some literal truth to the idea. Fuzzy copies of our conscious minds exist in all the people who knew us.
    This realization leads to an interesting irony. The materialistic view, in which the brain constructs consciousness, is generally considered to be a bleak one without an afterlife. Death is the end. When the brain stops functioning the mind blinks out. The religious find that prospect horrifying and the atheistic have reconciled themselves to it. Some people may even feel comfort that no more experiences, pleasant or unpleasant or just plain tiring, are in the offing after death. I suppose Shakespeare’s Hamlet in his “To be or not to be” speech is the most famous case of hoping that nothing tooawful comes after death. “For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil…”
    If consciousness is information, if it is a vast informational model instantiated on the hardware of the brain, then it actually can survive the death of the body. Information is in principle possible to move from device to device. The irony is that the materialistic view makes mental survival beyond death much more likely, rather than less likely. Far from grinding its heal on the prospect of existence after death, the attention schema theory, an entirely materialistic theory, suggests that the mind’s survival after the body’s death already happens in a perfectly ordinary way. We get to know each other. We build models of each other. Information is transferred from brain to brain via language and observation.
    In theory we can do even better. I consider it a technological inevitability that information will, some day, be scannable directly from the brain and transferrable directly into computers. As embarrassingly sci-fi as that sounds, no theoretical reason stands against it. If the attention schema theory is correct, then human consciousness is information processed in a specific manner. Don’t want to die? Download your consciousness onto a central server and live in a simulated world with all the other downloaded souls. When your body dies, the copy of your mind will persist. You need not know the difference. If the simulation is good, you should feel as though you are in a realistic universe. You can possess what seems to be a human body and can walk and live and eat and sleep on the familiar Earth, all simulated, all in the form of information manipulated on computer hardware. At the rate technology is advancing, give it a few centuries. (Alas, I’ll be gone by then.)
    One of the more intriguing possibilities is simulating a world of one’s own design. The physics and appearance of the simulated world need not match the real world. Are you obsessed by Harry Potter? Then live in a world where Potter-style magic is possible and you can learn to harness it by attending a school for witchcraft and wizardry. Wish you could live in Middle Earth? Then do so. Train as a Jedi?Why not? Want to get blue and live on Pandora? Go ahead. A Star Trek fanatic? Then live in a universe where the Starship Enterprise actually exists and can actually travel at warp speed. Want diversity? Open a door and move from one invented reality to the other.
    You could even park your simulated self in front of a simulated monitor in your simulated universe and have a Skype chat with the people on the outside, the people in the real world who are not dead yet, who have not yet chosen to download their information. People could talk daily to their dead relatives, provided the relatives have the time to spare among the many amusements of their simulated playground. Or, more mind-bendingly, the simulated you could have a chat with the biological you on the outside, the original you who decided to download your mind mid-way through your life.
    As long as the computer hardware persists, as long as someone or something on the outside maintains it, there is no particular reason for you to die in the simulated world. And never mind people on the outside sustaining the hardware. Build a sturdy, self-sustaining computer architecture, build it deep underground where it can be protected, where geothermal energy could provide it with a thin trickle of energy to keep it going