After Fifty YearsA few days ago, I acquired the May edition of "Philosophy Now" magazine, where I stumbled upon a community of like-minded individuals. This discovery fills me with a profound sense of admiration. Please permit me to introduce myself in an unconventional manner. I wish to share a memoir that unveils my past, present, occupation, skills, desires, and, most importantly, my vision for the future of myself and humanity. I eagerly look forward to engaging with this esteemed community through your comments, reactions, and valuable suggestions.
"Why can't we live multiple lives at once? Isn't that what being a superhuman is all about?"
Straight out of law school lessons, the gas pedal under my foot, I was a bullet on wheels racing to Aida, my life and business coach. Four minutes early, but we immediately started. She slid a mug of coffee across the table, its bitter aroma kickstarting the evening's mental gymnastics.
Week's recap, since our last session. It was a monologue of self-reflection and self-discovery. I revealed threads of three corrosive thoughts, the termites in the structure of my better self.
But firstly, the grand plan?
Nothing short of superhuman - a stepping stone to my exciting dream of mind uploading, digital consciousness, eternal life. Imagine it - digital immortality.
She already knew all of this. From our previous sessions, we have discussed that a lot, and we found each other when I was stuck in the depths of depression and apathy, feeling that I was still too far from that ambitious goal and struggling to find internal resources within myself to move forward.
Aida emphasized the objective of achieving multi billionaire status as an end goal, but such phrasing wasn't actually correct. I envision myself as a multi billionaire, not for the love of lucre, but as a tool, a lever to move the world, change the status quo, etch my mark on the canvas of history. Already a self-made millionaire from a pit of despair, wealth to me was power, a means to an end.
Our tools of work - cognitive behavioral therapy, neuro linguistic programming (NLP), self-coaching and meditation. Minefields in my psyche, remnants of a childhood soaked in trauma in a place that was a dead-end on the road to anywhere. My scarred psyche bore the imprint of a car accident, a few months after my father, an Afghanistan veteran with PTSD, checked out of his life's hotel. Mother, too weak to carry on, followed suit a few years later. My sister and I yanked her back from the brink. Drunks, they rarely get suicide right on the first go. Dad was no exception. Yes, those were my crosses to bear, but a few sessions in, I flipped the script, told Aida - no more body puppeteering the mind.
My first victory lap in therapy.
NLP was a revelation. It unearthed core-beliefs, negative thoughts, and assumptions, like miners hitting a vein of counterproductive gold. Most importantly, cognitive distortions - mind's funhouse mirrors - were unmasked and reconfigured. The nitty-gritty? That's a story for another day.
On the day's agenda were three parasitic thoughts gnawing away at my psyche.
First, I discovered that my body craves sensory or internal stimulation to engage in tasks like reading, learning, or designing. Whether through shisha, music, or a tailored work environment, these elements fuel my productivity. Furthermore, I mentioned an opportunity to facilitate an entrepreneurial business book club. However, to partake, I must endure the arduous task of reading Ray Dalio's "Principles," which, in my humble opinion, ranks among the top three most tedious books I've encountered. Despite this commitment, I remain curious about the book's unwarranted hype within certain circles.
Second thought? A roadblock of productivity. When Task B beckons, but Task A stands in the way. Task A being neither urgent nor engaging enough to clear the path for Task B. The book was the fly in the ointment, demanding time and effort to complete. I contemplated designing a system for book readers and learners. A system that gamified the process, that made dull reading or learning exciting, that had dopamine coursing through their veins as they memorized and learned.
And the third thought? FOMO. A relentless specter when you're in a constant state of discovery. I had developed an affinity for psychology and coaching. I wanted to devour every book on the subject, enroll in every training, apply the knowledge to every situation. I had charted my educational journey - a master's degree in Law, followed by a PhD in Psychology and Artificial Intelligence. But the decision paralysis was real. Every university, every lab, every book, every field was a fork in the road. I wanted it all. I wanted to explore everything simultaneously.
One life didn't seem enough...
Aida broke it down:
Two sides of me were at war. She painted a picture of a BOY and an ADULT, the latter pushing the former relentlessly.
But she had it backward. The BOY was the one with boundless ambition, wanting to live a millions lives at once. He wasn't content with idle dreaming - he yearned to bring dreams to life. He was the one constantly questioning - "Why can't we live multiple lives at once? Isn't that what being a superhuman is all about?" The ADULT was the taskmaster, the handler, feeding the BOY's insatiable curiosity. Despite his flaws, the BOY refused to accept limitations. He'd turned his weaknesses - Math, Computer Science, English, Physics - into strengths. Into weapons in his arsenal, arming him with financial wealth. Once a task was accomplished, the process of exploration offered new toys for the BOY to play with, to invent wild things. The ADULT catered to the BOY's whims. And that?
That had always worked.
In our quest to unearth the 'SELF', we discovered a partnership between the BOY and the ADULT. Aida asked, "Who is SELF?" We agreed that the SELF was the BOY, and the ADULT was an internal coach, a Jarvis of sorts, catering to the BOY's desires. To validate this, Aida suggested a hypnotic meditation exercise:
The exercise was a journey back in time, to childhood memories, or imagination, where self-awareness first took root. I saw my younger 10yo self wandering through abandoned factories, past rusting trains, a concrete fence, an overgrown bread factory – my childhood home was nearby. The BOY was content. He didn't seem surprised at the sight of his future self. His focus was on the boys playing football on the mowed field nearby. He sat with me briefly, muttered an excited expletive, hopped off the fence, and dashed off to join the game.
Aida then steered my thoughts towards a traumatic moment. A time when my parents had left me, a 6yo boy, alone for several days while they were in the hospital caring for my sister. I woke up one deep dark night, alone, locked in our barracks-like house, hungry and scared. Anxiety gnawed at me. I roamed the house, trying to calm myself, but the loneliness and fear were overpowering. I thought of knocking on the neighbors' wall – I could hear their TV. I found my father's hammer and started banging against the wall. I banged so hard that the plaster crumbled, leaving dents. I couldn't step outside – it was winter, and the snow was piled high, blocking the door and windows. I was terrified. Looking through the eyes of my younger self, I didn't feel panic. Instead, I felt like the voice inside me advising not to panic, go to sleep instead, and wait for morning.
After this, I couldn't hear my coach’s voice anymore. I thought that these emotions no longer mattered, and I let them go. It was just a memory that shaped my character. It’s not existing anymore. It’s irrelevant.
Knowing that the coach would start visualizing me fifty years into the future, I bid goodbye to my younger self and imagined meeting my future self.
It was exhilarating:
I saw an organization of my clones, situated in space. A spaceship hosting thousands of versions of myself – some biological, some android-like, some virtual, and some beyond our current comprehension. I saw myself strolling through the spaceship, exploring various architectures, gardens, playgrounds, labs, and factories. I couldn't distinguish myself from the other versions of me interacting with the organization through a direct brain stimulation chair. I didn't dwell on these details. They were all plausible, but insignificant in the grand scheme of things. The conversation with my future self, the organization me, was what mattered.
One of my future selves, a version housed in a body, be it biological, hybrid, or virtual, told me that my BOY had cracked the mind-uploading paradox. That conundrum of digital consciousness, where infinite cloning is feasible, and the existential question of 'who am I?' becomes near impossible to answer.
My future self, my organizational self, explained that the paradox was unnecessary if I redefined how I viewed myself. He said that there had always been numerous versions of 'you' in your consciousness, connected by goals, emotions, shared memories, knowledge, and desires. This wouldn't change post-mind uploading, and the transition from biological to digital could be seamless, if you thought of yourself as an organization of multiple agents, with a synchronized global consciousness.
He thanked me for my desire to simultaneously live infinite lives. This was the disruption of the status quo, where most people resigned themselves to a single life.
I saw thousands of versions of myself. They looked like 40yo, in perfect physical shape, serene, and content. These versions simulated emotions, which was crucial for the transition from biological bodies to hybrid and digital entities. They formed a decentralized, utopian society inhabiting thousands of spaceships, satellites, planets, comets, and asteroids, all sharing a collective consciousness and a sort of telepathic communication.
When I asked if it was akin to an ant or bee colony, they responded with a firm no.
Ant or bee colonies were subject to a centralized entity, the queen, with the rest of the colony dedicated to her protection and the propagation of new generations. In contrast, my future self, my organizational self was a decentralized, interconnected society that represented one person's life, a life they had always dreamed of and designed for.
I posed another question: what's the purpose of living now? Now that we've achieved the goal of digital immortality and eternal life.
But I was interrupted. My organizational self corrected me:
We had achieved digital immortality, true, but not eternal life.
The distinction was crucial. With the invention of the technology, a race for expansion and occupation of resources in the solar system and beyond had begun. Given the technological limitations and the incomplete transition from biological to digital and hybrid forms, a war of sorts had erupted among different person-organizations. Humanity was still very much present, with most people remaining biological or hybrid entities. There was an 'HR-war' to recruit the best talents and integrate them into person-organizations, not as subordinates but as augmented entities. This process was difficult to comprehend. It wasn't eugenics, but a method of identifying the most promising, creative, intelligent individuals, and children. Their consciousness would be uploaded into a virtual world, and billions of simulations would be run to design the perfect diverse society. Indeed, such a prospect appeared to be galaxies away from the moral compass that guides humanity in the present day. Most of those lives were simply simulations, their existence measured in nanoseconds.
This was a race against other person-organizations. The primary objective was to transcend the physical constraints of galactic space, the limit of light speed, and to shape the cosmos to favor the achievement of eternal life and the transition from biological to hybrid and after to digital organizations.
I understood then, the future me, my organizational self, didn't want to be erased due to cosmic circumstances or physical obliteration by other person-organizations. They reassured me: once we push past the limits of this galaxy, resources will be plentiful enough that we can coexist without conflict and continue to evolve.
The future-me showed me some oddities. My organizational self informed me that most of the people I had loved had not taken digital immortality seriously or understood its implications. They chose to live traditional lives, with grandchildren, old age, and ultimately, death. Those friends who had once shared my dreams now had their own self-organizations. We interacted, formed agreements, but our relationships resembled international unions more than traditional friendships. All other emotions - parenthood, friendship, romance - were fulfilled by different versions of me within the organizational self.
It was important to note, and this was where the ant analogy became relevant, no one feared death. Because each individual death didn't affect the organizational self. They weren't separate entities. Death held no power in the face of decentralized consciousness. It was like thoughts. You could conjure an image of yourself, and if that image vanished, nothing happened. If one agent, physical or digital, died, everyone else continued their life unimpeded.
I asked about my original, human body. What happened to it? My organizational self explained: my body had been divided thousands of times among all the semi-digital clones. The cells and biological tissues, too, had been cloned millions of times, so technically, they were distributed across millions of 'mes'. Eventually, there would be no need for a biological substrate at all. It would either disappear or transform into something currently unimaginable. "We're working on it," my organizational self said.
With a gentle voice, Aida instructed me to take a deep breath, to awaken, to open my eyes. I complied, and as my eyes flickered open, a smile spread across my face. Somehow, in the corridors of my mind, I had untangled the Gordian knot that was the philosophical paradox of digital immortality. I recognized the colossal mountain of work that lay ahead from a technological perspective, but I felt a sense of proximity to my goal. I was convinced that the interplay of quantum computing, decentralization technologies, artificial general intelligence, and the disciplines of neuroscience, psychology, law, and philosophy would eventually yield the answers we sought.
I bid farewell to my coach, her words still echoing in my mind, and sauntered over to a nearby cafe. I settled into a comfortable corner, my laptop perched on the table before me, the crisp white screen glaring back at me. My fingers began to dance over the keys, eager to pour out the tale that had just unfolded in my mind. And so, I began to write this short piece of memoir.
I decided to call it "After Fifty Years".
…..
One thought plagued me relentlessly: what becomes of the mental imperfections of our human psyche, such as Dissociative Identity Disorder? How will they manifest in a future where an individual is a super-technological colony of interconnected clones, person-organizations? How shall consensus be achieved then?
What myriad of mind-boggling scenarios shall we bear witness to, extract wisdom from, and hone our superhuman potential amidst?
…..
In the unrelenting pursuit of igniting the souls of visionary artisans who shape the very fabric of our future, those relentless warriors in the quest for the transcendence of super-humanity!
Sincerely,
Alex P.
