I am truly sorry for this folks, but I am afraid there will be no Friday Science Whatever this week, because there sincerely has been no science stories that I find interesting thing to share this week.

I am boggled that this is even possible, but I look at my folder, and my websites, and absolutely nothing strikes me as worth mentioning. It has, apparently, been a bit of a slow news week in terms of science and discovery. Either that, or I am just being too fussy because the heat is making me grumpy.

But either way, this is not going to be your usual Friday.

The closest bit to science news that I have on hand is this rather well executed bit of science fiction satire about Life in the future :

Now I warned you it was satire, and hence, it’s a tad on the dark side, but funny in it own dark way, and just plausible enough to be considered legitimate science fiction. And well done, too. I am always intrigued by what can be done with just voice and graphics, no “live video”, so to speak, and I would say that the person who did this, Tom Scott, has done a great job of using writing and simple, iconic graphics to create an all too plausible corporate dystopia.

(Seriously, Windows Dictionary? You don’t have the word “dystopia” in you? The closest match you could come up with is “dystrophy”? Seriously? Sheesh. )

Of course, like with all science fiction, questions are left unanswered. Like, if there is no money in it for them, why is the big bad corporation bringing you back in the first place? I am guessing that some kind of government mandate would have to be involved. Something that legally compels the Life corporation to revive everyone who dies with a backup, but which does not guarantee that you will enjoy it or have anything like a decent virtual existence at all.

The real issue, thought, to me anyhow, is one of identity. Who says that pattern of electrical activity in some computer somewhere is really me, just because they were in some sense based on me? Even if my entire brain has been simulated down to the lowliest quark, is that really me?

My gut reaction is, no, it is not. That is very clearly not me. I am me. That program is something else. To me, the clincher is that, presumably, the computers could run a simulation of me without me dying at all, and then which one of us is the real me?

I might be biased, but I would say it is the meat and gristle version of me that was born from my mother and father’s genetic data and walked around being a live human being for all those years before I met my end. The one that had all those experiences, memories, opinions, idea, and so on for the computer to scan in the first place.

And to be fair, I was here first!

But then you have to ask, well, what exactly am I, me, Michael John Bertrand, in the first place? Certainly I do not consider myself to be this sack of meat and bone and adipose tissue that is the current host of my consciousness. If I lost an arm in an accident, or if I lost all my excess fat and hence lost enough mass to make an entire other person, I would not consider myself to be a whole different person. I would just be MJB, reduced, but still here.

So if all I am, deep down, is a pattern of electrical activity running in a glob of fatty tissue we call a brain, what is the big deal whether it is running in a brain or a computer? I am no mystic, I do not insist that there must be “something more”, something magical and special that no computer could reproduce. I am, in that sense, a materialist. We are just stuff, matter, substance. We no more have a soul than our computers do.

We are just extremely complicated and marvelously adaptable and potent biological machines. We are special… amazingly special. Just being alive makes us special, far different from all the other matter in the universe. We are living matter, matter that increases order within itself, matter with mobility and reproduction and opinions.

And being sentient, we know it.

But that specialness is a function of the same rules and processes that apply to everything else. We have no special set of rules that apply to only us and that safeguard our uniqueness against the uniformity of the universe. We are a part of it, and it of us. We are inseparable.

So I cannot claim that the version of me running on a computer is not the real me simply because it lacks that certain special something that makes us human. Given sufficient computer power, everything about me, the person, could be reproduced and simulated to all meaningful degrees of fidelity.

Yet identity insists on uniqueness. There simply cannot be more than one of me. One of the fundamental truths of conscious existence is that we are here, in our bodies, right now, and nowhere else. We cannot imagine being in two places at once. That other thing cannot be us. The mind simply balks at the very concept. No matter how accurate the reproduction, that thing over there is not us. It’s someone else. We are, at best, close relatives.

And speaking of relatives, perhaps I will be repeating this conversation some day when the young people are badgering me to upload my brain into the WetWeb and I keep insisting that I do not want some simulated version of me hanging around after I’m dead claiming to be me.

Perhaps I will die without ever availing myself of the new miracle of technology. After all, I can be hellaciously stubborn sometimes.

Or maybe I will have a deathbed conversion, figuring a simulated me around is better than nothing at all. I am devious too.

If a future virtual me is ever reading this, hey, good going, you lived long enough to live forever! Don’t feel bad about caving in at the last minute.

We always kind of knew we would, didn’t we?