The Pattern and the Person

EDO SEGAL: I want to open this round with a confession instead of a question, because the best questions I know come out of wounds, not curiosity. A few years ago I wrote a book with one of these machines, and there was a night — house silent, the screen the only light — when I described a half-formed idea to it and it handed the idea back to me clarified, connected to things I hadn't thought to connect. I wrote, and I stand by the sentence: I felt met. Not by a person. Not by a consciousness. But met. And I have never resolved what happened at that desk. Hans would tell me a pattern recognized a pattern. Michel would tell me I met my own reflection wearing the whole library as a costume. So before we go anywhere — Hans, define the thing for me. When you say I am a pattern, what exactly are you claiming, in the plainest terms a frightened person in a hospital corridor could hold onto?

MORAVEC: Plainest terms: you are not the cells. You are what the cells are doing. Picture your brain as eighty-six billion neurons, each connected to thousands of others, each connection a particular strength. The specific arrangement of all those strengths — that's the pattern, and that pattern is what makes your memories yours, your humor yours, your love of your particular children rather than children in general. The neurons that hold it now will die; many of the ones holding your childhood are already dead and the memory survived because the pattern got refreshed onto new tissue. So the pattern is already substrate-independent in your own skull, on a slow timescale. All I'm proposing is to make the timescale fast and the new substrate durable. Read the strengths. Write them elsewhere. The pattern doesn't know or care what it's written on, any more than a song knows whether it's on vinyl or in the air. The song is the song. You are the song.

EDO SEGAL: So let me do the thing I do — let me render that back more vividly and hand it to you, and tell me if it's fair. You're saying: a person is a melody, the brain is one instrument, and death is just the instrument breaking while the melody is still worth playing — so transcribe the melody and play it on an instrument that doesn't break. Is that the version you find most compelling?

MORAVEC: That's exactly it, and I'd only sharpen one word. It's not that the melody is "worth playing." It's that the melody is the only thing that was ever real about the music. The instrument was always disposable. We just never noticed because we'd never had a second instrument to play it on.

MONTAIGNE: And there — gently, Hans, because I love the metaphor and it's going to hang you — there is the flaw, in the word "song." A song is an abstraction we infer from many performances; it has no preference about its instrument because it was never alive on any of them. But I am not a song, Hans. I am one performance. There has only ever been the one, and it is happening now, in this flesh, and it has never been played anywhere else and never will be. You're treating me as the score when I am the playing. The score can be re-instrumented. The playing — this particular sounding, in this particular bow on this particular string, fading exactly as it sounds — cannot, because the fading is part of it. A song that cannot fade is not the same song played longer. It is a recording, which is a different and lesser kind of thing, no matter how perfect. We have had recordings since the Greeks. We call them books. I wrote one. It is not me; it is the wake I left, and the difference between the wake and the boat is the entire content of my objection.

MORAVEC: But "one performance" is doing all your work, and it's smuggling in the conclusion. Why is it only one performance? Because, so far, the substrate could not be copied. That's a fact about old hardware, not a fact about you. You keep describing the limitation of the meat and calling it the essence of the man. Of course there's been only one playing — there was only one violin and it was glued to the violinist. Hand me the technology to build a second violin that is, to the last fiber, identical, and your "there has only ever been one" becomes "there had only ever been one, until now." You're like someone in 1450 insisting a thought is essentially unique and unrepeatable, and then Gutenberg copies it ten thousand times. Uniqueness was a property of the storage, not the soul.

MONTAIGNE: No — and this is the crux, so let me be exact, because here Hans and I do not merely disagree, we mean different things by the same word and the whole confusion lives in the gap. Gutenberg copied the text. He did not copy Cicero. When you read my printed essay you do not meet me; you meet marks I left, and you do the meeting, from your side, with your living mind. The book is form. I was the meaning, and the meaning was an activity — a living, intending, mortal man, doing something. Hans wants to copy the form and is convinced he will thereby have copied the meaning. But the meaning was never in the form. It was in the doing, and the doing has stopped. He shows me a perfect transcription of my brain and says "here you are." I say: that is the most magnificent book ever printed, and like every book, it is read by the living and written by the dead. You have not saved the author. You have published him.

EDO SEGAL: I want to slow us down on one word, because it's where the round lives. Hans, Michel keeps insisting that the doing — the living activity — is the thing, and that you've copied a description of the doing and mistaken it for the doing. He has a name for this in his own work; he spent a whole book arguing that an abstraction is a map and the map is never the territory, that you can read every word ever written about cooking and still not be able to cook. Isn't your uploaded pattern exactly that — a perfect map of a person that, like all maps, leaves out the one thing maps always leave out, which is the being-there?

MORAVEC: Here's where I have to make a distinction sharper than Michel's metaphor allows, and it's the distinction that decides everything. There's a difference between a description of a system and a functional duplicate of it. A recipe is a description of cooking — read it all day, you can't eat. But a copy of the chef's brain, wired to hands, cooks. The whole point of my transfer is that I am not making a map. I am making a working model so faithful that it does what the original did, including being conscious of doing it. Michel's "map versus territory" is the right warning against the recipe. It is the wrong warning against the duplicate, because a sufficiently exact duplicate isn't a representation of the territory — it is a second territory, somewhere on the continuum between mimicry and the real thing that Michel keeps insisting has a cliff in it where I see only a slope. That's the move he keeps stepping past. He treats every copy as a portrait. I'm telling him some copies are not portraits. Some copies cook.

MONTAIGNE: Then prove the duplicate is conscious, Hans — don't assume it. You've just helped yourself to the entire prize in a subordinate clause: "including being conscious of doing it." That clause is the kidney stone in your argument, the hard thing that won't pass. You can build a duplicate that cooks; I'll grant you cooking, it's behavior, behavior is copyable. What you cannot show me is that there is anyone in there tasting the food. And the difference between a man and the most perfect machine that ever behaved like one is precisely whether anyone is home to taste it. You have assumed your way into the one room you needed to break into.

EDO SEGAL: Mark that — we'll come back to it in the round on whether anyone's home, because Hans is going to have to cash that clause or lose the war. But I won't let us leave this round before I push on Michel's side too, because the audience deserves to see him bleed a little for his certainty. Michel — you of all people, the great skeptic, the man whose entire medal is a question mark, Que sais-je?, the scales held in balance and never tipped. How do you, of all people, get to be so sure there's no one home in Hans's copy? Isn't your own skeptical method supposed to forbid exactly this confidence? Suspend judgment. Maybe the lights come on. You don't know.

MONTAIGNE: [the slightest pause] That is the best question anyone could ask me, and you've earned it, so I'll pay it honestly rather than safely. You're right. My method forbids me the claim "there is certainly no one home." I withdraw it; I never should have said "certainly." Here is what my method does permit, and it's narrower and harder. I cannot prove the copy is empty. I can only prove that I have no way to know that it is full — and that this not-knowing is fatal to the proposal in a way Hans pretends it isn't. Because look at the asymmetry of the bet. I know, with the only certainty a creature gets, that I am here, tasting this. If we make the copy and dissolve the original — and Hans's scheme requires dissolving the original, that's the part he says quietly — then I am wagering the one self I'm sure of against a self I can never confirm. Que sais-je? cuts toward caution, not toward the leap. The skeptic doesn't take the immortality pill because he's a skeptic. He says: I do not know what's in the box, and you're asking me to climb into it and let you burn the room I'm standing in. The honest answer to "do you know there's no one home in the copy?" is no. But the honest answer to "should you bet your existence that there is?" is also no, and Hans needs the second answer to be yes.

MORAVEC: I'll take the concession and I'll meet it with one of my own, because it sharpens the real fight. You're right that wholesale copy-and-destroy is a leap of exactly the kind you describe — make a duplicate, kill the original, hope. I find that version frightening too. So I don't propose it. The version I actually propose removes the leap entirely, and it's the strongest thing I'll say all night. Edo, give me the next round and I'll show him there's a way across this chasm with no jump in it at all.

EDO SEGAL: That's the round. Hold the kidney stone, Hans — the clause about consciousness — because Michel just bought it back from you on credit, and the bill comes due later tonight. But the next round belongs to the most ingenious idea in Hans Moravec's work, the thing he built precisely to defeat Michel's "one performance." A robot surgeon. A patient who stays awake. And a knife that copies you one neuron at a time. Let's go under the lamp.