The Process of Capturing a Human Soul
There are three basic ways that parts of a human soul can be captured.
· By examining and analyzing the external informational products of a soul;
o Remembrances and recollections of friends, relatives and colleagues
o Remembrances and autobiographical writings
o Works of literature, music and art or of engineering, construction, design, inventions or discoveries etc.
o Recorded discoveries in science, philosophy, mathematics etc.
o Tales of deeds, accomplishments, acts of heroism or leadership
o Books, recordings, videos, and other recorded media that is relevant.
· The decoding of the DNA of that soul.
· A future informational process that accomplishes for a living human mind something akin to getting a backup tape from an operating computer system along with the design details of the computer.
By carefully examining an integrated circuit chip with high-powered microscopes, it is possible to deduce the detailed logic design of the chip. From that design we can make a replica chip. It can be done but it is not easy. In the old Soviet Union, in the city of Zelenograd, a secret industrial enterprise existed to decode the logic design of foreign computer chips and to re-implement the design so as to produce locally made versions. One can often deduce the intent of the designers and the purpose of various subparts of the chip, however being able to do so is not necessary in order to make a faithful replica that performs exactly as the original. It is even possible to conduct a microscopic examination of a processor chip while it is operating. This includes the possibility of being able to detect and measure the electrical signals as they propagate through the circuitry. In a similar fashion, we can imagine that brain science could advance to the point where we understand the functioning of the most primitive logic and communication elements. If we could also create a technology to produce a complete wiring diagram of all such elements in the entire body nervous system of a person whose brain still retained its full complement of information, then it would be possible to create P, the information that defines how the brain-body processes information. This would allow the creation of an interpreter (program) that could process information in the identical way. Despite having such an interpreter, we might still be unable to understand how the brain did it. Understanding how the brain did it could be useful and interesting, it’s just that it is not necessary.
The methodology of getting the detailed wiring diagram of the brain might be similar to current MRI technology that generates 3‑D pictures of the brain. In this case, the level of detail would be enormously greater, but the principle of obtaining information internal to the brain in a non-invasive fashion would be the similar. Further developments of similar technologies would allow for the extraction of contents of the brain's memories, the evanescent information of memories and learnt skills that decay with advancing age.
So, the process that creates a copy of P, might also create a copy of Q. Q is the information that represents the state of mind of an individual (a major part of the soul) at a point in time. Q is the information that is processed by the brain, along with sensory inputs, in order to determine the state of mind at a future time. Part of the evolution of Q with time is called “consciousness”. The rest of the evolution involves the workings of the unconscious mind. Capturing Q may be much more difficult than capturing P. Further, the information in the brain that represents Q may not last long after death. It may be like the information stored in integrated circuit memory chips. Most such chips loose the information stored very quickly if the power supply is interrupted. Of course, there are other kinds of memory chips that continue to retain information without being supplied with external power. It is most likely that the preservation of the information in Q will someday be possible despite the very recent or immanent body death of the person. Thus we have a situation just the reverse of what we are used to in normal organ transplants. Normally the doctors wait for a potential donor to become brain dead before they begin to harvest his or her organs for transplanting. It will most likely require heroic action prior to brain death in order to save the entirety of a person’s soul, when and if it becomes possible.
Let us assume for the moment that future technologies for obtaining high fidelity copies of both P and Q are developed in the following ways:
· Similar in application to MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging or NMR)
· Non-invasive and non-injurious
· Capable of determining the wiring and logic of the brain
· Capable of determining the state of all information (other than short term memory) stored in the brain
· The whole process should only take a few hours.
Having the capabilities listed above would mean that the state of almost the entire soul of a living person could be extracted. Having done so, it could be incarnated into an advanced computer system and presented to the owner of that soul so as to allow for some verification of the fidelity of the process. Being confronted with what is essentially one’s self may be a strange experience, but like many things something that society and its individuals might be able to get used to. This could be done a number of times during a person’s lifetime, sort of like making a backup copy of the state of a computer, so that if the person dies suddenly, recent additions and changes to that person’s soul would not be lost. Of course, a person’s views change over time, but given that that is recognized, it shouldn’t pose a problem. It might be comforting for someone on his or her deathbed to have with them the dynamic copy of their soul, watching and listening to what is happening.
Computer Hardware Needed to Support One Soul in Real Time.
It is natural to ask “How much computational resources (processing and memory) are needed to handle the computational load of one person in real time?” The answer with regard to processing seems to be about equal to the power of a few high end processor chips. Today, a single CPU chip (the heart of today’s PCs) can do about one billion instructions per second. However, the organization of that chip is optimized for the kinds of numeric and symbolic computation done by today’s computers. One such chip would be useful but the other chips, of equal size and amount of digital logic, would need different architectures in order to work with images, sounds, and to perform certain cerebral tasks. We don’t yet know how to do these tasks, but it is possible to judge the amount of silicon that will be sufficient despite our lack of detailed knowledge of what methods are to be implemented. Instead of just being a general purpose computational engine, most of the silicon would be better dedicated to specialized functions. With regard to memory, about 1 GB of RAM and 64 GB of slower (disk) memory are clearly more than sufficient. These numbers require that we understand clearly what needs to be programmed and how to program it. This is not the case today. What is often true in such cases is that the first working systems will use much more in the way of computer cycles and amounts of memory (due to our primitive understanding of how to program what's necessary) and later systems will more closely approach the amount of resources that is truly necessary.
Appendix B gives a detailed accounting in support of all of the above numbers. Today (2000), $3,000 can purchase a computer system with such capabilities. What is inescapable is that the cost for a given amount of computational resources decreases by about a factor of two every two years. Therefore, within 20 years, $3,000 will buy about 1,000 times the necessary computational power.
Once Phi has P and Q, then given the same sensory inputs, Q will evolve in Phi along the same path as Q would have evolved in the living human soul.
How can we know whether we have captured a human’s soul?
This fact is important, for it lets us understand all of the possibilities of the human soul.
First of all, we will think about the soul in quantitative terms.
Assume for the sake of argument that the Pythagorean theorem was discovered and communicated to others by Pythagoras. If you have just learned the theorem, then a bit of what was the soul of Pythagoras becomes part of your soul. This transaction can be viewed quantitatively; first from the perspective of the recipient and second from the perspective of the soul of the source.
We need a word to represent the informational aspects of a fragment of a human soul. I suggest “soulelcule” to represent a single molecule of a human soul. The number of possible distinct soulecules would be similar to the number of possible distinct molecules. Examples of soulecules and their sources are:
· “To be or not to be, that is the question” – William Shakespeare
· “Given a right triangle with sides a and b and hypotenuse c,
c2=a2 b2” -- Pythagoras
· “E=MC2” -- Albert Einstein
· “Blood, Sweat and Tears” – Winston Churchill
· The image in the painting The Scream. – Edvard Munch
· “do la fa mi so fa do do re re mi mi fa” Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart at age 7.
A measure of the informational content of a fragment of a soul appears necessarily complex. Consider the Pythagorean Theorem. Understanding it and being able to prove it cannot stand by themselves but must be a part of a complex of other informational constructs. First of all there are the informational definitions and procedures associated with common sense notions about space and distances, lines and points. Then there is the idea of geometry. While the axioms and postulates are at the base, the whole process of doing geometry can itself be viewed as an informational construct. Then, there is a handy library of already proven theorems we can draw on, so as to not need to always start from the beginning. All the Geometry you learnt in school shares in making use of certain kinds of informational constructs that are common to the various theorems you might know. These are often associated with common sense concepts, including ideas such as that of the point, straight line, arc, etc. along with axioms, postulates and procedures such as those common to constructions. There are procedures related to vision in general that assist in understanding a visual geometric diagram. There are general procedures that motivate one to start and continue a process such as learning a method, solving a problem, etc.
Much of what we know is very likely to be efficiently coded by making references to other things that we know. To measure how much information is used to learn something new, we have to not only count up the direct representational information, but we must also credit the measure with some share of the common informational resources that are being shared with other things already learnt. By that method, equally complex concepts would have the same measure whether learned early or late. On the other hand, it also means that sometimes when we learn something new, the informational measure of each related thing already known might decrease, e.g. the new information might be the key to allowing more efficient representation of previously learned knowledge. For example, one might remember a great deal of anecdotal information about how to reset the clocks for daylight saving time. Once one knows the phrase "spring forward, fall back", it becomes possible to better understand the process while using less information.
If we chose to only take into account the correct incremental information added by learning one more thing, then the sum of all the incremental information would always give the correct total but nearly identically complex concepts would have different measures depending on when they were learned.
To measure a soul (quantitatively), we start with the total genetic information. Just knowing the base pairs is far from sufficient. A full understanding of protein synthesis is necessary but again not sufficient. We must be able to understand the informational processes that make use of the DNA information and which translate it into all the things that are fully expressed and exist in an adult. To that we must add the proper measures of the entire set of informational content added to the brain since conception and then subtract what has been lost through forgetting. A most dramatic loss of soul is the process known as infantile amnesia. Its as though we must lose our intellectual baby teeth in order to make room for adult thoughts since many of the memories of early childhood may have little useful evolutionary benefit. The implication is that the brain only has so much capacity for the storage of memories. Another informational loss occurs continually as most of what is in our conscious mind and short-term memories is discarded as inessential. Only a small fraction is saved into long-term memory. Some informational gain is incredibly slow. One can serve, by carefully swinging a tennis racquet 1,000 times a year for 10 years and actually learn a little bit each time (on average). Thus the parts of one’s soul that develops skills at serving and volleying can continue to increase in informational measure over a very long time despite the likelihood that the totality of the informational measure distilled out of all that practice is fairly small. What’s important is that over time it becomes more of the right information.
Finally as we age, the process of loosing information gains headway over the process of learning new information and the measure of the totality of ones internal soul starts to decrease. Obviously this occurrence is sometimes pronounced and sometimes too small or too subtle to notice.
To simplify our measures of the number of bytes needed to represent a soul we will look at the soul of a 21 year old person blind from birth. Here we will not separately consider the amount forgotten but rather only count the net amount added to permanent long-term memory. One must remember that calculating the net amount involves estimating the rough efficiency of the low level and high level encoding schemes (data compression) that are undoubtedly at work.
1. The number of days is approximately 7500; waking seconds, 7500 days x 18 hours/day x 3600 seconds/hour=approximately 0.5 billion seconds.
2. Imagine an average learning rate, committed to long term memory, of 40 bytes per second for half the waking day. (Not the raw data rate, but the nearly optimally encoded data rate. This is a sustained rate that is probably beyond anything that can be demonstrated in an experiment.) This gives 10 GB of input.
3. We can imagine that other learning from other experiences along with mental reflection to come to another 10 GB. That gives a subtotal for non-visual inputs to long term memory of about 20 GB.
4. If our example person recovered his sight at age 20, one would expect that within a year, he could be said to have an essentially normal soul, only with respect to the amount of required memory. It is very hard to do reasonable estimates of what goes into long term memory on account of having one’s eyes open, but it seems doubtful that even in this extreme case that it would result in a peak average rate greater than 10 KB per second with a sustained 18 hour per day average that is dramatically lower; probably below 400 bytes per second. These numbers could be more accurately determined by means of a few carefully designed psychophysical experiments. At 400 bytes per second, we have 365x18x3600x400=about 10GB.
5. For a normal person, because of high level encoding schemes, we would expect the total long term memory from visual inputs of a normal person to vary from the estimate given above by no more than a factor of 10 either way (which shows the amount of estimated precision in the estimates!).
6. For the DNA, the information in 3x109 base pairs (2 bits each) equals about 6 gigabits or about 750 megabytes. This includes the basic design of the brain.
7. Thus we have a grand total of about 40GB as our estimate. Using the uncertainty factor mentioned in item 5 above, the best guesstimate of the bounds for about a 50% probability of having the right number might be a range from 100GB to 16GB.
8. On the issue of processing power, again it is useful to exclude visual tasks in a first estimate.
What is fascinating is to consider are measures of the contribution to the collective soul of mankind. Consider a Mozart soulecule as expressed in a melody remembered by millions of people. One measure that makes sense is to compute the total of all contributions over all time to all souls of a given Mozart soulecule. Another measure is the current value, which is the same sum but restricted to currently active (living) souls.
Of course, not all solecules are equal. The value of a soulecule transferred from one person to another depends on the state and future experiences of the recipient, as well as the inherent value of the solecule. Some soulecules are worth little, nothing or even less than nothing. Others can act like a key or a catalyst, bringing great value by connecting different soulecules into new informational structures. There are good examples from physics where abstract mathematical discoveries turned out to be the key to understanding processes in science. A good example is the concept of imaginary and complex numbers which started out as strange mathematical curiosities and ended up as essential to electrical engineering and quantum mechanics.
Three categories of worth are:
· Soulecules that extend the length of the recipient’s life.
· Soulecules that increase qualitative aspects of the recipient’s life.
· Soulecules that result in the recipient having enriched his own soul.
A measure of a teacher.
Perhaps one could consider the solecules that are added to the souls of the students.
Two functions of a teacher; a facilitator of two processes:
· The transfer of soulecules to students.
· The generation in the future of new soulecules by the students.
The informational function of art.
· Artists engage in the creation of external solecules that are the works of art.
· Art can enrich the souls of others through the direct absorption of soulecules from the work of art and followed by the possibility that the recipient creates new soulecules as a consequence.
Of course, an artist can aim to maximize the near term effects or create works for posterity.
Fame versus Notoriety
