Lane Jennings

SOUL-SEARCHING (2055)

QUESTIONS:

1) Would you transfer the contents of your brain into a machine as an alternative to death? Would you still want the power to switch yourself off

2) If transfer between machine and body were reversible would you consider it moral to use the machine as a holding area (prison, nursing home, pleasure resort) between periods of normal existence? How would you feel about exchanging bodies temporarily—for education or amusement? Or voluntarily giving up your life identity so that your body could be used to house the mind of some great artist, thinker or leader with unfinished business in the world?

By Lane Jennings

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And here is the commentary that was originally included with the poem when it appeared in my book Virtual Futures.

NOTES:

The process of mind transfer into a computer is outlined by Hans Moravec in The World of 2044 edited by Charles Sheffield, et al. (Paragon House, 1994). The idea of mind vacations, and visiting inside the computer, parallels the practice of requiring a period of crossdressing and social/psychological adjustment before committing to a sex change operation. Adjusting to existence as the soul of a machine could be at least as difficult as changing sexual identities.

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Neither the poem or these comments have appeared in print anywhere else.

--Lane

You’ve been Inside before, just visiting, “cross-dressing” so to speak. But this is different.

Of course, the terminally ill can’t be too choosey, you suppose...but permanent neural transfer? You’d be...out of your mind!

Is that so bad though, really? Bodiless awareness: all your senses harmonized, no need to breathe, or defecate; no pain.

Your eyesight widened up and down the scale from VLF to gamma-rays; your hearing sharpened, filtering out unwanted noise at will; your robot fingers tuned so finely they can crush a rock, or thinly slice a lightbulb like a hard-boiled egg.

And taste, and smell...You know, you’ve strolled the fields of virtuality before, for an hour, or a night.

But this...? You can’t stop wondering about what might get lost in your translation.

After they’ve scanned and mimicked every synapse, every nerve, preserved and packed the contents of each neuron, drained the empty wetware off, and spun you, line by line, into your hard-wired cocoon,

will you still recognize the one you were inside the one you have become?

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