What if we had complete control over our environment and ourselves?
What if we could solve the endless problem of dissatisfaction?
What if we could end suffering?
There’s a solution that could address all those problems, and much more. By digitalising our brains, we would be able to transcend the realm of the physical world. Nearly everything would be possible.
Having full control over ourselves
The main benefit of digitalising our brain is to allow us to change how it works.
We don’t have control over how brains evolved, that’s why we are so badly adapted to our environment. We have a hard time making rational decisions (see Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman). We have so many issues with mental health (see Acceptance and Commitment Therapy by Steven Hayes). We spend so much time and effort to control our emotions, our motivation, to master ourselves so we can do what we want to do.
The more control we have over our environment, the less we are adapted to it. We face dissatisfaction, we always want more, or different, we lose focus easily, we fall into addictions, we undermine one other… The list of problems is endless. We can fight against the consequences in various ways, but why can’t we focus on the cause itself?
You might argue that the aim of personal and emotional development is to overcome those limitations. But it takes a lot of time, effort and experience. And the truth is, while you can diminish some of those shortcomings, you can never remove them completely.
Even sheer will cannot erase a memory.
Once the brain is digital, it’ll be possible to modify it as you want. A few exemples:
- You can choose to be motivated by what you want
- You can choose how you feel
- You can increase your intelligence
- You can consciously choose what you want and don’t want
- You can control semi-automatic processes, like thoughts and feelings
- You can add more types of perception
- You can fix any mental disease
- You can decide how you feel about other people and ideas
Isn’t suffering helping us to grow?
There’s a positive interpretation of suffering: it helps us to grow. But this is only the best excuse for now.
When you don’t have a choice, the best you can do is find a positive interpretation. We feel what we believe is. The best way to cope with suffering is to create a story that makes suffering necessary, that makes you powerful, and that in the end makes you stronger.
But if we had the choice… this reason would vanish.
We would have the benefit without having the problem.
Suffering would lose all its meaning. And we would be free.
Living in a Digital World
To go one step further, once the brain is digitalized, it becomes possible to live completely in a virtual world. It doesn’t mean there would be no connection with the physical world anymore, but virtual worlds allow more choices.
Our current world can’t accommodate what we want. Everything is scarce, and our actions on the environment are self-destructive.
We can’t decide what we want. We lack resources. We have diseases. We lack space. We die…
Everything would be fixed by living in a digital world, at least once we ensure that the physical hardware works well and is protected from malfunctions and external events.
In a digital world, everyone can fulfil their desires. Nothing would be scarce anymore. You can even change what you want yourself.
Additionally, it would make it possible to defy the laws of physics, allowing us to be limited only by our creativity.
Redundancy
Adding physical redundancy, copies that can take over in case there’s an alteration of the data, would make you basically immortal, or at least increase your lifespan by a few orders of magnitude.
Real immortality might not be possible due to the laws of thermodynamics, but this is as far as we can get.
This very elongated life span would allow us to progressively discover all of what existence can make possible.
It would be possible to take the time to know one another individually, to pursue science, mathematics, to live in any type of world, within any type of physical laws.
What would we do once we’re there?
Most of our time might be spent in creative activities and play.
The funniest I can think of would be to play a game in which our level of understanding and awareness increases progressively over time. Until we become fully aware of everything, with full control over our environment. It would be a lot more interesting to discover and experience things progressively, rather than being served knowledge and capabilities.
We could design and create any type of new experience. We can even alter our memories to spice things up.
Finally, if we feel done with all the possible interactions and experiences, we could merge our consciousnesses together.
How far are we from this?
A single neuron is a very complex biological entity. The complexity of how a neuron works is a few orders of magnitude higher that what we call neurone in machine learning models. Simulating a complete brain with 100 billions of neurons, and an average of 1000 connections per neurons, seems like a very hard task. It is not obvious how we can simplify it while conserving who we are.
We seem to be very far from a technological point of view. That being said, this could change if we reached AI singularity, meaning developing an artificial intelligence that is able to create a better version of itself, engendering an explosion of technological advances. In this case, this could go faster.
It is also possible that we find a way to increase our own intelligence along the way, or just giving us more control over ourselves, making it easier to reach the next stage of technological advancement.
A potential danger: The fight for computational ressources
A virtual world would allow you to get anything you want, but we can imagine that having access to more computational resources would give you more possibilities. You can get smarter, solve bigger problems, or just get access to a higher variety of experiences.
More computational ressources could even make your brain go faster, outsmarting everyone around.
This could potentially turn into an all in war, where the first to get upgraded will want to dominate or annihilate everyone else to get everything. My hope is that this would make the whole game uninteresting, and that we will find ways to remove incentives to do so. It is difficult to know in advance what advantages more computational ressources would give. But we can imagine there will be a race between individuals towards more ressources. Why would this change? So we better have to think about it in advance.
Potential Traps
Having full control over your own circuitry can cause problems:
- What if you make a mistake when you modify your brain, and can’t recover from it?
- What if you get stuck in an infinite reward loop?
Techniques coming from software engineering can mitigate those issues. We can simulate modifications, test them before they are fully integrated. We can keep older versions if we need to revert changes. It is possible that we end up developing a system that allow us to bootstrap subsystems of consciousness with different abilities, different memory…
And what about security and privacy in such a world?
Hacking someone’s brain can mean being controlled or death for the receiving part.
It is also difficult to predict how we will identify an individual in order to make collective decisions, and how private would our inner world be, including thoughts and memory.
The benefits that lie on the way
Brain digitalisation isn’t all or nothing.
We can imagine a number of states in between were we can already modify some part of our brains.
Getting more control over ourselves, increasing our intelligence, curing mental health issues and ending suffering could be a lot easier than digitalizing all the brain. Removing, inhibiting or modifying the right circuits in the brain could already allow us to choose how we feel, and make us better at making collective decisions.
Conclusion
Brain digitalization has the possibility to remove almost all limitations, providing us with endless choices. There are a number of problems that comes with it: the risk of being controlled, security, privacy and integrity issues.
Even if it seems far away from today’s technology, we can’t ignore the possibility of exponential technological advancement, whether with the advances of AI, or by increasing our own intelligence.
The idea of removing suffering is as old as civilisation, but this would make it a reality instead of a dream.
Why wouldn’t it become a right to be able to live without experiencing suffering?
Existence is the biggest mystery of all. Wouldn’t going in this direction be the best way to glorify it, becoming everything we can imagine becoming, experiencing everything we can imagine?
But why wait? We already have ways to get more out of life and to reduce suffering today. I chose to teach public speaking, psychology and coaching skills, in the hope that one day, it will be possible to push those same benefits without any limits.