A question that cannot be answered

I've been doing some reading and thinking. I've been reading about computers, and how quickly they advance. I've also been reading some science-fiction short-stories and books about humans and the uniqueness of consciousness.

Religion and spirituality say consciousness is the certain x-factor that makes us special and unique compared to everyone else and everything else. The self is a separate element that "goes on" in certain circumstances. When we die, our bodies stop, but our consciousness goes on into everlasting life. Well...maybe not everlasting life, but everlasting existence. We receive answers to all of our questions we've ever had. We reunite with people who died in the past, usually family members. Sometimes we get reincarnated into new bodies; the same consciousness is still intact, but only different. (If I strip out the "spiritual" aspect of the soul, I am left with a permanent consciousness: Instead of being given answers to our burning questions from when we lived by a superior being, we simply figure them out on our own since we have all this free time; Instead of meeting the souls of people we met in the past, we just reacquaint ourselves with their consciousness; Instead of being "reborn," we instead "reinsert" ourselves into new corporeal beings.) In other words, the consciousness is the self, the soul.

In some science-fiction, the self is something that cannot be duplicated. In the movie A.I: Artificial Intelligence, the advanced robots in the future could clone humans all day long, but to truly resuscitate someone from the past was challenging. The advanced robots told David a space-time filament (which was heavily alluded to be the original consciousness or soul of someone who once lived) could only be used once to revive a personality. After that, it was impossible to revive that same space-time filament afterwards. In "The Jaunt" from Skeleton Crew, people who teleported awake through the jaunting machine would experience trillions upon trillions upon trillions of years of consciousness in a "white void," even though their bodies would appear instantaneously on the other end of the jaunt machine set-up. Their consciousness wouldn't "particulate" even though their bodies would. In the 2001 quadrilogy, David Bowman was incredibly lonely after his ascension because "there was vast intelligence, but no 'consciousness'" in the monolith network. His loneliness was the reason why he ascended HAL at the end of 2010: He wanted a companion.

Of course, religious texts were written before reason, logic, and understanding of our environment and our universe. Good science-fiction was written before the explosion of technology that enabled "fiction" elements in those pieces of literature to become fact. For the most part, the fiction in science-fiction became science fact. Almost every element of modern life was once thought to be science fiction. Science-fiction is a really good predictor of the future. What does science fact say about the human consciousness now? What does science fiction say about the human consciousness in the future? Consciousness is nothing that special or complicated. Go figure.

Science of today says consciousness is an extension of the human senses, but it is only a sense in the fact that it is designed to perceive the universe around us. We see with our eyes. We taste with our tongue. We hear with our ears. We smell with our nose. We touch with our body. We perceive with our consciousness. It sounds complicated, but apparently it isn't. Consciousness is so simple that it is even thought that it can be copied, just like files on a computer, and replicated and altered at will. Apparently, to upload a human to a computer only requires a storage device that can hold one petabyte. Is that it? Can the whole person simply be put on a hard drive and recovered for another day? Can a person's memories, personality traits, loves, hates, phobias -- can the "self" -- simply be copied? According to current science, and the speculative nature of science fiction, it can be copied. If this is true, what does this say about consciousness? What does this say about the uniqueness that is you and me? The reality of advancing technology will probably forever alter the perception of the human consciousness.

Science-fiction goes both ways about the human consciousness, but science fact is pointing to a future in which consciousness can be created at will, copied, uploaded, and downloaded. I read an article that says that artificial intelligence will emerge sometime in the next twenty years. If human consciousness is so unique, wouldn't it be impossible to create artificial consciousness? What would that artificial consciousness perceive about the universe? What would we learn about ourselves? I don't know.

I guess the fundamental question arises: "What is the human soul" or "What is the human consciousness?" Is consciousness simply an extension of the five senses put together? Are humans unique simply because we are? When technology becomes so advanced that we can copy people at will, what will become of us; that is, what will become of that consciousness? Will people add to and subtract from that consciousness like a bad macro? Will it maintain its uniqueness, or will it become as inane (and annoying) as a "lolcat" macro? "Hey, instead of making this person straight, lets make him gay!" "Hey, he hates the color red. Change that preference over to love!" If a person is uploaded, and then later downloaded, will that person still be that same person, or will it be a 95% approximation of the original? If a person is uploaded, and that upload is lost due to computer malfunction, is that person dead, or do they live on as a disembodied consciousness, like religion believes?

These questions can never be answered. I certainly cannot answer these questions.

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