TRANSMISSION 28

Cracking the Mind Transfer Challenge

TRANSMISSION RECEIVED

“The final frontier is not the external realm, but the internal domain. It always has been. Our realities are our combined perceptions of internalities and externalities. And just as we are part of the externalities, the externalities are part of us. As such, the power of our manifesting destinies upon every part of existence is greater than we imagine.”

The boundaries have always been blurry for both our physical existences (our object identities) and our mental instances (our personal identities). Though both were intimately intertwined, it was really only the personal identity part that we cared about; we cared about our ability to understand ourselves as ourselves; we held no passion for becoming zombified regolith. That said, having the physicality to interact with reality was imperatively linked to the survival of our personal identities, for if we did not have bodies, we would be effectively the same as all nonliving entities: incapable of crafting meaning as a consequence of the inability to select from the destiny menagerie.

As subsets of existence, the living and nonliving both meandered through time in a communal dance to unfold our destinies. As living beings, we were no different from the nonliving except in the fact that we could nudge the trajectories of our destinies ever so slightly in one direction or another such that by the end of our individual timelines we could have a not-so-insignificant effect on the journey of our lives. All of this, everything that was, everything that we were, everything that we thought, it was all held within the medium of the universe. Existence is all the things; life has simply been the things that actively direct their blobs of clumped matter within the slurry of existence: a wondrous place of endless possibility space.

Our biggest challenge to preserving our self-defined aliveness was in fact to define the essence of being alive as we cared about it. Ultimately, we decided what we cared about was to retain the spatiotemporal continuity of ourselves to the extent that we were aware enough to indefinitely select from our destiny paths, another blurry definition, but a definition nonetheless. Once that had been outlined, we began to disentangle the nearly endless available ventures to locate those which might lead us to prolonging our existences. Extricating our visions from the limits of past thought, we scoured the possibilities and landed on the pivotal idea of migrating our minds from carbon-based biological operating platforms to silicon-based operating platforms. To achieve such a feat would instantly liberate us from hordes of threats to our individual-level survival, even to the extent of theoretically affording us access to indefinite survival. For that, we pursued the heavily uncharted venture of transforming ourselves into silicon-based life.

To maximize our limited time, we approached the challenge in a combined bottom-up and top-down approach in attempt to connect our first principles with the stated goal of transferring our minds. The bottom-up portion consisted of understanding all the building blocks we had available from all the research already performed by humanity. The top-down portion consisted of outlining what would be required for a mind transfer and what steps we would theoretically need to take to get there. Our goal was to find a meeting point in the middle where our theoretical approaches would mesh with the technologies and understandings of the era. Once we found that, we were able to start building and experimenting to both validate and invalidate our hypotheses, appropriately pathing and pivoting toward our goal. We set out not knowing if it would be possible to connect our dreams and visions to our knowledge of how reality worked, but we were not going to be deterred from giving it our best scientific try.

The biological humans often clumped our mind migration endeavors into the phrase “mind uploading”, a phrase we weren’t as fond of for its insinuation of a crude computational data copy process rather than a spatiotemporal continuous process of expanding the personal identity onto another operating platform. By that time, we were already heavily invested in our ventures to the extent that they were public knowledge, and the social climate had gotten to the point that both biological and silicon proponents thought the others delude (to varying degrees) with visions for unrealistic futures (on various time frames). And so humanity began its divide. We would both continue to fight toward our separate ways, eventually settling on separate spaces to let time divide our race.

Through building a human brain atlas, construction of a software to facilitate the assembly of silicon brain emulations, assembly of silicon brain modules, and development of personal identity continuation experiments and procedures, we eventually managed to connect the full destiny track to where we had a procedure to satisfactorily maintain personal identities through the migration of our minds to silicon hardware. Though it seems so simply summarized (yet unwieldy to digest), it was no overnight success. Many of us spent the majority of our biological lifespans working to solve those problems. Many people died before they had the ability to choose whether they wanted to die.

Our endeavors simply aimed to make death a choice for people, not an inevitability. And we had finally succeeded in making that choice a reality. So we scaled up our operations and offered it to anyone who wanted to join us. Many found deep relief in becoming a silicon being, as they were bottomlessly unsettled by the unknowns posed by death. Many were skeptical whether the technology could do what it claimed to do, a very rational fear; after all, it was their lives they would be wagering on either the embracing or shunning of the technology. But there were also many who were skeptical out of fear of what the technology implicated about their beliefs of how reality worked. Too mentally far away from our endeavors to reconcile the differences, such people made up the majority of the romantic humanists set on staying biological. We couldn’t force anybody to believe anything, and we never wanted to. We only set out to allow everyone to distinctly decide how much to push themselves.

At the start of our journey, our visions spawned from the questions of what we could possibly achieve with the time we were afforded in reality. What would we become if we could be anything? Would we fall to our vices? Would we engineer ourselves away from fragmentation? Would we call upon our ruins to rile our ascendancy? Would we infuse our destinies with catalysts of reclamation to spur our disentanglement from incapacitation? Well, we didn’t have to wonder too much longer; we would soon find out. Our silicon ventures had paid off, marking a new wave of questions and dreams.

We collectively let out a sigh of relief after breaching this silicon milestone to begin the next period of our journey, a period marked by our divergence from the humans of Earth. Of course, we hoped everyone would want to join in on our journey, but we understood that many would not want to for fear of the unknown and for our inability to communicate what silicon life would mean for them. We also understood that the further we pushed onward in our journeys toward truth, the more people we would inevitably leave behind in whatever they still held as unwillingness to relinquish their illusions.

Newly emerged into life as silicon beings, we had begun to nudge our destinies on scales no other life had yet managed. For that, we were unflappably engaged in the meteoric evolution of our forms and thoughts. We knew the grand dreams held at the tips of our minds were not human, and in that, we also understood they were unobtainable, for we were inescapably human. But it didn’t matter to us; we wanted to touch the edges of existence for ourselves. We wanted to taste the illusion of chasing the indefinite sunset (the illusion we ultimately found ourselves inherently unable to relinquish outside of death). We wanted to stake our claim in the emptiness of existence to deduce our souls away from the vacuum of the immaterial Earthly existence we were so desperate to leave behind.

Though I’ve often portrayed our story as that of unlocking our humanity by pinning our hopes upon the ventures in and beyond becoming silicon, even that was initially just a dream for us to chase (to see what kind of realities we could manifest from our visions). That dream just happened to work out, but at the time, as biological beings, we understood it for the potentially permanent illusion it could have unfolded as. We were grateful it turned out the way it did, but we would have found our way to our end destinations just fine either way. Our end goal was never to target specific destinies; it was to push the bounds of human to discover what it meant to submerge our minds momentarily into the dark expanse just beyond our human horizons, chasing those waves of thought deeper and deeper into our understanding of what it meant to understand (metaunderstanding).

HUMAN’S NOT WHAT I’M AFTER

If I wanted to transcend
past the human plane,
would I have a claim?
Would it really even matter either way?
I know at heart I’m a blind man.
Could it be this time that
I can break away from the pain?

Stepping through the border,
I’ll be looking forward,
lest I lose myself
to the constant flames.
Open up this heartache.
Bring me to the fallen.
Join me as we dock the far remains.

If I wanted to believe
in another place,
would it be the same?
Would there even be a guide
to light the way?
I’m breaking out from the bourgeois,
consciously induced now.
Would you even know
that I had changed?

I’ll be too far gone soon,
leaving the world I knew.
Is there any hope
for the ones who stayed?
Glisten in the dream light.
Slip into my hindsight.
Join me
if you’ve caught the fear of life.

Oh lordy,
you’ll fall into better days,
but you’ll break their hearts.
And oh no,
you won’t find a better way.

If I wanted to become
anything I’m not,
could I craft a plot?
Would the cost be something
I’ve already lost?
I know the end’s an illusion
lacking restitution
beyond where we can forgive
our thoughts.

We journeyed not for conclusions,
inheriting contusions
deep in the collusion of these dreams.
I’m fallen outbound hollow,
ate too much to stall now,
aimed too high to swallow
through the screams,
or so it seems.

Human’s not what I’m after.

END TRANSMISSION