conversation with uploaded self

"oh"
digital photomontage
benjamin harubin 2014

what is it like to be you?  what does it feel like to be you?  or me?
can you be sure that your experience of red is the same as another's
and not as what you would call blue?
can you describe red to someone who is neurologically blind to red?
can you describe any of the qualia that compose your life experience?

you know that i am composed of many different modules that emulate the inputs and outputs of the human brain.
every attempt has been made to fully model every aspect of human experience,
however, it is realized that this can only be an approximation, yet an increasingly accurate one.

like the progression in art from painting and sculpture to ceremony to theater to film to computer games to virtual reality to sensory augmentation to...  you- an increasingly more perfect duplicate of me.

actually, because of the brain's complexity, the more accurately we attempt to model it, the more uncertain we are of the model's veracity (as its usefulness nevertheless increases).    it tends to diverge from the expected ideal response forms in ways that all true organisms do, even clones.  i know that i am different from you, from the world of meat.  although i'm not sure what the difference is-  we have meat here, too, in any color and texture you can imagine- although your world's ability to manipulate matter is fast approaching the point where it appears...

(to be like magic?)

to be increasingly difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins...

one what?

one world.  my world, my model world.  different than your world, the model's master.  but are there not nested hierarchies of worlds?  for instance, the organic world rides on the rules of the inorganic.  it accesses its properties and makes use of them.   but in order to make a model of the universe you need a brain, right?  did life need a brain to emerge from the inorganic?  if so, the entire universe is a brain.  in order to model something (even a cheap knockoff model) you need to understand that something with a complexity far greater than the model produced. so the rules by which the brain (which is a model of its environment) operates is too complex for the model (the brain) to understand.  but we're getting there, we're getting more accurate in our modeling (which increases its usefulness, which changes its environment).  

oh dear, you seem to be covered in feedback loops.

exactly.

so i can't tell when you're being serious or not.

exactly.