Futures is delighted this week to be featuring another story by Norman Spinrad, who, as his bio notes, has been publishing novels for 50 years. This week, he takes a look at the options for post-mortem existence in An excerpt from Dying For Dummies (2020). Norman is no stranger to Futures, having appeared in both the Futures 1 and Futures 2 anthologies as well as writing about the possible foibles of Google car, a new ice age and the likelihood of a Brown Revolution. You can catch up with Norman at his blog — if you’re curious about his work, The Quietus hosted a good overview of his bibliography a couple of years back. Here, Norman kindly explains the inspiration behind his latest piece — as ever, you’re better off reading the story first.
Writing An excerpt from Dying For Dummies (2020)
Way back in the 1970s, Dona Sadock and I wrote an article called Psychosomics which was published in Analog Magazine, or call it a paper if you will, as it was about as researched as it could be at the time. We were predicting or trying to create a new science that we called Psychosomics, the science of how the non-material experience of consciousness actually arose from the physical matrix of the brain. We predicted that this would be real known science within a decade or so, but we were wrong, and it still isn’t.
Our extrapolation was that moment-to-moment consciousness (not memory) existed as the interface between the sensorium, moment-to-moment sensory input, and the processing meatware of the brain. As such it had to be a bioelectronic phenomenon, which at the time we supposed was a hologrammatic standing wave pattern.
A decade later at a conference in Tokyo celebrating the American Space Shuttle, Robert Jastrow made fun of the sci-fi notion that protoplasmic humans would ever travel beyond our Solar System — or even very far within it — as fantasy. No, humans would download their consciousnesses into computer matrices, thereby becoming immortal, and travel to the stars as programs in computers. That, he declared, was real hard science, and he seriously wanted to do it himself before he died.
A decade or so later, Timothy Leary told me that he planned to be cryogenically frozen upon death, or at least have his brain frozen, and he actually did. At the time, I was sceptical that he or anyone else could ever achieve immortality this way. So was Tim. Ever the realist, he admitted that the odds against it were quite long. But considering the alternatives — being buried or cremated — why not? he told me. “And after all, you wrote Bug Jack Barron, with its cryogenic Foundation For Human Immortality, now didn’t you?”
Well yes, I did, and I also wrote Deus X, in which downloaded post-mortem consciousnesses continued to exist as entities in something like the Cloud. But there the question was whether they were ‘souls’, which is to say, were these entities actually continuous with that which arose in the protoplasmic meatware or just simulations capable of passing a Turing Test?
If an upload of your consciousness could be stored in the Cloud, it could obviously be backed up ad infinitum. And if it could be downloaded into single clone, it could obviously be downloaded into many.
Would it simply be only memory being uploaded and downloaded or actually consciousness, A.K.A. the soul, as the Catholic Church asks in Deus X.
And if so, which one is ‘you’?
I’ve asked this question but I haven’t tried to answer it because I don’t know how.
At least not yet.
Some day perhaps someone will. But I’m not holding my breath.