When we talk about the potential in the future of radically extending human life there are 3 major options.

1. Extension of biological life, via therapies or processes designed to halt or reverse the aging process allowing a human to live young and healthy indefinitely.
2. “Re-Life”, where a complete record of your brain, post death, is imprinted on a younger genetic clone  of yourself.
3. Uploading, where your mind and consciousness are transferred out of the organic substrate of your brain into an artificial substrate such as a computer, robot or distributed network.

With the last two options discussion always falls to the problem of “continuity of consciousness”. This is the situation where many people feel that an uploaded consciousness would only be a “copy” or a “clone” of their consciousness rather than a continuation of their self. In this post I will discuss this debate and posit my possible solution to the problem.

The main issue facing the concept of uploading is that most proponents would prefer the process to occur pre physical death. e.g they would like to take their current consciousness and move it into a more resilient or robust substrate.

It’s important to note that, at this time, this is of course a total thought experiment as a technology for copying human consciousness into a machine and sustaining that consciousness in a coherent form does not currently exist. Having said that there are many technologies currently already in use or being trialed that allow for the direct reading of neural signals via electrodes implanted in the brain. At the moment these technologies benefit people with brain injuries and other disorders but one day, with higher concentrations of electrodes and greater computing power, these technologies may allow us to ready every signal travelling through a healthy adults brain. Allowing us to effectively copy and simulate their running mind.

It has already been predicted by some technologists that by 2050 we will have computers powerful enough to simulate every neuron in a human brain and build and maintain a stable simulation of a working human mind. That mind, in essence, will be “alive” while it’s running. But what if we combine these two technologies. The reading out of a living humans brain and insert that output into a running brain simulation. The simulation “becomes” the person the mind is read from and gains a consciousness of it’s own.

This raises a whole set of moral questions of it’s own; is the new mind a different person? Is it murder to turn it off? Does it diverge from the original donor? Who gets to sleep with their wife and is there a USB attachment for that? These are all questions we may actually have to answer in the not too distant future. However this technology almost certainly will become available, and at that time what do we do about people who wish to undergo the procedure to move their mind into a more robust and essentially immortal format?

The problem then becomes; What about the organic source? If nothing is done, all you’ve really succeeded in doing is cloning your mind. “You” would continue on and eventually die in your organic form. It may be comforting to know that “you” would live on in some other form but for many it would not be the “continuation” they would hope for.

One option is destruction of the organic original as the mind is read out. This has a high “ick” factor in that to most people you would be making a copy and then murdering the original. It’s generally an unsatisfying solution for those wishing to upload one day.

Here we have the core of the problem of continuity of consciousness. How to move your mind from one substrate to another without “interrupting” your consciousness, and is the resulting non-organic consciousness really “alive”? Really “you”?

At this point I would like to present a thought experiment I have heard presented a few times that, I think, presents the “cut off point” of the problem quite well.

Lets theorise that there is a person who has sustained an injury requiring the amputation of their leg and it’s replacement with an artificial prosthetic. Is this person still human? The majority of people I have spoken with would say “of course”… Now lets theorise that they have sustained more severe injuries. They now need an artificial heart and all limbs replaced with prosthetics.

Are they still human?

I would still expect most people to reply in the affirmative to this question.

Now lets theorise that the subject has received a major brain injury that stops signals from their motor cortex getting to the rest of their body. Lets also theorise that an artificial “signalling circuit” exists that we can insert into their brain to allow the upper brain to communicate with the rest of their body. Essentially replacing the broken motor portion of the subjects brain. Are they still human?

Part of their brain is now artificial and not organic at all. But it’s only the part that controls signals to his body. I would now also suspect that most people would reply “yes” that they are still human.

Now lets assume The subject has taken a very unlikely injury to their frontal cortex. They essentially still have their base memories and most of their brain is unharmed but there is no part of the mind left to process these memories or interpret the outside world. Now lets say we can replace that portion of the brain with a prosthetic as well, giving their mind something to “run on” again. Are they still human? Has the original person died and now a machine operates in this persons place with access to their memories and motivations? This is where I usually find opinion divides. There is a “break” in consciousness. That which existed before was destroyed, ended, and a new consciousness was raised in it’s place. A person interacting with this subject would not be able to tell the difference between pre-accident and post accident personality but there was a definite break in the flow of mind.

It’s a tricky question but at this point the subject is not much different to someone who had their mind read out then the original mind destroyed. The order is simply different.

I think, however, that this thought experiment actually presents the solution to the problem in it’s form. It’s clear that when the change is gradual and incremental the line between what was before and what is now blurs. Arguably there should be a granularity at which point the process becomes invisible to the subject and continuity is maintained.

My proposal for the solution to this problem is that for true acceptance of an “uploading” procedure or a migration to a non organic brain we would have to wait for the development of a nano-scale “artificial neuron” that has all the properties and functionality of an organic neuron with the advantage of being electronic based rather than organic.

My scenario would involve the regular injection into the brain or bloodstream of millions  of dormant artificial neurons that remain in the body for a period of time. In the brain, as a neuron dies an artificial neuron moves into the space occupied by that neuron and takes over it’s function in the brain. This could even be facilitated or accelerated by the artificial neurons (at a reasonable pace) moving in on living neurons, making the same connections as it then killing the neuron off itself. Over many years as natural cells die off, or months in the facilitated model, the brain would move from an organic system to an electronic one. The subject themselves would be completely unaware of the process as their thoughts and thought processes would remain totally un-interrupted during the transition.

You,as the person undergoing thus procedure, would be totally un-aware of when the first or last neuron was replaced. One day a scan would simply show that you were now 100% artificial. At that point an interface unit could be implanted that allows the now wholly electronic signal to be read out as a series of information, shutting down the artificial neurons as they are read out. The process is similar to the reading of an organic mind and it’s destruction but for some reason an electronic to electronic transfer lacks the “yuck factor” of “destroying” an organic brain as you copy it.

We understand data transfers, we are comfortable with that. Destroying a brain however seems like murder.

Anyway. This is my solution to the continuity of consciousness problem. I don’t claim it to be original or ground breaking but rather a thought experiment into the potential for making the movement of human minds from the current very fragile, non redundant and ultimately terminal organic substrate to something much more resilient and long lasting. A form of existence where backups and redundancy are a realistic route to virtual immortality and the possibilities for the direct meeting of human minds on a scale never before realised is possible.

The repercussions in the forms of interacting with the physical world, either via machines or android “avatars” is something for discussion on another day, but also very worth thinking about.

Thanks for taking the time to read this entry and I hope it has given you something to think about and I’d love to hear other peoples opinions on the topic and it’s related issues.

AM

Sadly this was not the case and while the breakthrough they have achieved is still very, very exciting I was left, once again, dreaming of the day I can have my puny human blood removed and replaced with something a little more efficient.

I am of course referring to my long time fascination with “Respirocytes”. These are, so far, theoretical nano machines that are designed and built to carry out the actions of the red blood cell component of human blood without any of the failures that natural blood is prone to and in a much more efficient and effective manner.

What the British scientists have achieved is quite impressive. Which is (in theory) a way to produce unlimited quantities of O-Negative (the universal Donor type) blood grown from a single line of stem cells. Thus enabling an inexhaustible supply of human blood that is in no way contaminated by any one of the number of nasty blood borne illnesses we are susceptible to.

This is a giant leap forward, as blood supplies are often limited (due to low donation rates) and there is always the risk of infection with something nasty that gets through screening.

However the only thing that’s really “synthetic” about it is that it’s never seen the inside of a living human. It’s basically bog standard military issue human blood, cloned and grown in vats outside of a human. Nice, but not really anything huge in the field of “artificial”.

Respirocytes on the other hand would be a truly startling breakthrough in the modification and “hardening” of human biology.

The theoretical nano-machine is actually rather simple. It’s a small sphere, with small glucose powered pumps along the periphery that can carry out the business of oxygen exchange in the same manner as a red blood cell.

The beauty of the respirocytes comes in their ability to carry 236 times the same amount of oxygen as a red blood cell in less than a 10th the volume (see top pic for scale). This kind of efficiency would allow a human (if they carried vaguely equivalent numbers of respirocytes as red blood cells) to be able to hold their breath of 4 hours, or run at top speed for 15 min without taking a breath.This comes from their ability to rapidly load with oxygen in the lungs and extract a far higher percentage of the oxygen from that air than a red blood cell can.

The original design was to give medical science a fast effective treatment for massive sudden blood loss or as a “stop gap” measure in the case of a lack of transfusion candidates. However, obviously this would have huge implications for human sports and recreation.  A healthy person loading up on such nano-machines would be able to out-perform a normal human in every way due to increased stamina and endurance.

Even if you just consider the added robustness this affords your average human meat-sack the benefits are uncountable.

Fallen in a river and managed to get jammed under a log? Well you’ve got 4ish hours to figure a way out rather than 40 seconds before loss of conciousness.

Going through an environment where a dangerous chemical has been released into the air? Just hold your breath.

Travelling on public transport during flu season? Don’t breath till you get home.

The physical design of the resirocyte is quite well defined. At the moment we are (as with many nano-tech theories) limited by our ability to work with and arrange atoms at that level. But I am hopeful that given time and study we will conquor these issues and bring non-organic improvements such as these to the human condition. Until then the development of stem cell grown global doner blood is a pretty impressive acheivment. Go science!

EDIT! : Found this link which has the full specs and decscription of the devices. Much more informative if you feel like spending an hour or two reading about them. And the Super detailed link with all the maths etc Here.

I don’t want this to become a livejournal clone because I’ve always kind of envisaged it to be a place for me to draw attention to various technologies and ideas which I would like to comment on. But I like to think I have enough to bring to the table that I can make the occasional social commentary without becoming preachy.

On that note I have two things today that I’d like to share, one that I came across today and one that’s been inspiring me in a passive/aggressive way for years now.

I was looking around the net for some transhumanism links when I came across one of those discussions about uploading where the anti-uploading proponent was making the argument :

“If you upload your mind to a machine and then discard your organic body, surely “you” have died and only a copy of you lives on. Your “soul” is dead.”

Despite the inherent fallacy in this argument, if you take into account gradual movement to an inorganic substrate through “upgrades, enhancements and repairs” either via nano-cells or macro-scale electronics, the respondent rebutted with a simple, yet (in my opinion) moving quote.

——-

‘What is a human being, then?’
‘A seed.’
‘A… seed?’
‘An acorn that is unafraid to destroy itself in growing into a tree’

David Zindell, The Broken God

——-

I rather liked that and felt the need to share it here.

On a completely different note… a few years ago I discovered a youtube video. It’s quite interesting from a transhumanist point of view because it talks about people, and what makes us people and what we are despite our greater wishes. All of these topics are common fodder for transhumanist debates and many people have said many moving things about them. However  I think this short video brings the debate to the table in an honest and brutal way that is at the same time uplifting and realistic :

It does however lay this out in such a way that it gives a feeling of great hope and possibility if we can just come to terms with our monkeyness, get beyond it and maybe drop some of our less desirable monkey nature attributes.

So it inspires me in that it says to me “when you know what you are and what motivates you, you can change this and we will” and it depresses me because so far and right now… we really are just dancing monkeys with high speed fibre optic digital technology.

“Dance monkeys dance!”

AM

The main problem we face, as a species, is that at this time in our development we are stuck, strangely enough, in a situation that is the opposite of what we assume has brought us as far as we have, and once again highlights that all things are relative.

The awful blaring truth that we need to face, is the fact that we live in an age of scarcity. It may not feel like it and it especially may not seem like it to many westerners with their ample power, food and water. But we have to face it that as a species we do _not_ have as much as we might think.

Sure compared to 200+ years ago we have a plethora of energy and resources. But these are concentrated in the hands of the few.. and even then (this is not a tree hugging “think of the poor” rant) we don’t actually have as much as we think we do. We do live in a world where over a fifth of the population do not have access to clean drinking water.

“Well what about the cheap, portable water purifying devices that are starting to appear?” you might ask… Things like the excellent slingshot water purifier by Dean Kamen? Well that’s all well and good but can we pump out the thousands of these that are needed and power them for practically nothing? No. Resources are scarce.. even for the truly global lifestyle improvement devices.

You and I spend most of our day working so we can earn money to pay for things like gas to travel, food which requires energy to grow, transport and distribute. Sure, we have access to a very cheap form of energy in gasoline, but we _know_ that’s going to run out and it’s only cheap relative to other sources at the moment.

What we need is an endless, clean, easily distributed source of energy that is centred in the regions that need it most. There are, of course, a legion of suggested options in this area; geothermal, solar, hydroelectric and many, many more but all of them have their own problems and limitations. Either via manufacturing, maintenance, scale or location.

Solar needs cheap, efficient, panels and while they are “getting there” the cost of building and maintaining big solar farms are prohibitive. Not to mention many of the nasty chemicals that go into high efficiency panels.

Geothermal and hydroelectric are obviously limited to the areas where there is geothermal activity or big accessible rivers.

Wind is more ubiquitous but again highly variable in it’s delivery and speed.

There is however an option I’ve been following for some time with high levels of optimism and to be quite honest am reasonably upset that it’s not gotten a bigger following (I have suspicions why not but don’t want to sound like a conspiracy theorist). My personal pick for “power generation of the future” is the “Solar Tower” currently being championed by enviromission.

Their design for power generation operates on the two very simple principles that a greenhouse gets hot, and hot air rises.

The design basically revolves around a really tall tower with a slanted “skirt” greenhouse made from either glass or long lasting clear plastic leading up to it. The air under the skirt gets warm, heating up to a max of 86 deg C, and rushes to the center. Once there it travels through 32 turbines at the base of the tower (at up to 49 feet/sec) and rises up the tower, cooling as it goes.

A nice “glory” video of it’s operation can be seen in this youtube video

The standard design for this tower can generate 200 megawats (the amount of power deployed by a standard coal powered plant) and needs little maintenance once built outside giving the windows a wee wash now and then and oiling the turbines.

The power it generates (once cost of building is paid off) is essentially “free” and multiple towers can be built in appropriate areas. What’s more they are ideal for areas that are poor and unable to produce food due to say, desert like terrain. Locations such as Australia, the western US, Africa and other equatorial desert regions could become the major power generating centres of the world. This could give poorer nations the option of “bootstrapping themselves up” by being power providers to the richer nations to the north.

What is especially frustrating about this idea and it’s lack of realisation is that it’s not all fantasy and theory. A prototype was built as far back as 1982 in Spain that generated a maximum power output of 50kW at a meagre 1/5th the size of the proposed full sized models. This is also not taking into account better understanding of heat generation and storage developed since to allow the tower to produce more consistently and at night.

I personally feel… no hope, that this is the technology that will help us start to get over this hump in our development. Allowing us to have cheap plentiful electrical power that can then roll over (in  combination with the improved battery and energy storage technologies that are on the horizon) into all areas of our lives. Giving us truly electric cars, transport, and food production. Once the price on these essentials of living can start coming down… once people can be given clean water, cheap transport and in the case of the lucky societies that have massive industrial infrastructure, more time to sit around and think about things, we can finally start to advance as a people into a future that includes us all in a true and equal age of plenty.

AM

I was extremely excited when I did hear about it since it seemed to have as interviewees some of the greats of the topic; Ray Kurzwiel, Henry Markram, Miguel Nicolells and more.

I managed to “find” a place I could get a copy of the documentary and fired it up with much excitement and anticipation.

Unfortunately I was to be greatly disappointed. The documentary spent less time with the likes of Ray Kurzwiel and more time covering the unabomber (there is actually a sentance about how he might be heralded as a “hero” by future generations) and people like Hugo De Garis talking about how “Artilects” will kill us all and laugh while they do it.

The pro-singularity researchers were shown in the worst possible light; with Ray being made to look like a pill popping, twitchy, naive optimist and repeated playing of Seth Lloyds (admitably annoying) nervous laugh over all his segments.

The creepy music played whenever they covered something like peoples minds being simulated on computers and the disturbingly impassive black eyed “future children” playing in a virtual forest all came together to give a wholly freakish image of our possible future with machines.

Now I’ll be the first to be realistic about the future and the fact that it’s not all going to be roses and asimov robots carying our groceries for us while we zoom around in our non polluting jet cars. But seriously? “Artilects” swatting humans like bugs? I’d be interested to see that trick from a simulation being run on a mainframe in a rack mount supercomputer in a lab. Sure it could hack things and make mess all over the internet but hey.. we have 13 year old boys doing that for us now. So arguably the difference would be unnoticeable.

All in all I was exceedingly disapointed with this documentary. I’m all for balanced views on this kind of thing.. and I’ll agree that some of the scientists involved have overly rosy views of the possabilities. But generally people like Kurzwiel deal in facts and numbers for their (usually quite accurate) predictions of technology trends. To put people like De Garis and his “OMG TEH CoMpuTers will EaTs UR minds!” cometary opposite these people is kind of embarrassing for all involved.

I’m afraid I’m having to rate this “F-negative will not watch with again”. You have been warned.

AM

I read an article today on the BBC site about tissue regeneration that I felt was worth mentioning here.

Regeneration research has been going on for quite a while now and various groups have had varying degrees of success with the process. Regeneration research is generally based on the question; “Lower organisms quite often have the ability to repair/replace perfectly, large (or whole) parts of their body should they become damaged or lost, so why don’t we?”

Examples of common regenerative organisms are the starfish, which can regrow lost limbs and in cases where the lost limb has part of the disk intact, even grow a new starfish from that, or the salamander which can regrow a lost tail or limb. Many other simple organisms also have this ability and in some, such as certain nematode worms, they even maintain a constant number of cells in their body, down to the single cell.

There are various theories about why more advanced organisms don’t have this ability and external papers have a lot more to say about this than I can cover here, but they can generally be summarised into “it might cause uncontrolled cell growth (cancer) in higher organisms” or it’s too much energy to expend when it’s not really needed for procreation.  At a species level having organisms not die out and make room for further generations can be argued to be detrimental at a resource level but that’s a bit suspect to me if you believe in “the selfish gene” explanation of evolution.

Research in this area varies but many scientists think that, thanks to the “scaffolding” style of gene mutation and development, many of us still have the genetic sequences or metabolic pathways for regeneration which are simply switched off or dormant.

It’s an area of research I’ve been keeping an eye on for the last few years, and quite a few researchers have been working on ways to re-activate these genes or pathways. The above article cites a particular case of a man who apparently re-grew an amputated finger tip that I had actually read about a few moths ago in a smaller paper. I had dismissed it at the time as it was not widely followed and the language of the text, “I used my pixie dust”, really screamed “hoax or lie” to me.

However, it turns out, in this far more detailed article, that the powder used is actually engineered by a reputable science department at the University of Pittsburgh.  The powder is in fact an “extra cellular matrix” which the cells on the edge of the damaged region can use as a substrate to encourage cellular growth rather than scar tissue formation. (our “advanced” bodies standard response to damage these days)

This is very exciting in many ways in that is shows that there is a framework or metabolic pathway there that can be stimulated into activity and repair, at least in some cases, gross bodily damage.

They admit themselves that there are possible limitations and drawbacks to the system but it offers an exciting insight into the (hopefully) soon to exist possibilities for people to regenerate lost body parts, damaged organs or eternal scarring.

This is especially poignant for people like me who have non immediately life threatening organ degeneration. I personally have “primary sclerosing cholangitis” which is where the ducts in my liver, slowly over time, get scar tissue building up on them due to repeated damage (no not drinking, auto-immune). This has the effect of decreasing the function of the liver to the eventual point of failure and transplant.

A regeneration “powder” or technique would allow people like me to have a series of operations where say 25% of my liver is removed, (the body can gt by for a while with about 50% working)  encouraged to grow back new and shiny, then another 25% and so on and so on until a full new liver is in place.

So in summary, not groundbreaking or world changing yet. But quite a nice step on the way to making our bodies far more repairable and possibly even rejuvinateable to a younger, healthier age point. I’ll be keeping a keen eye on how this and related research pans out.

AM

For me, my main areas of interest are enhancing my enjoyment and experiance of the world around me. This is a fairly broad requirement and actually covers everything from life extension (gives me more time to experiance and appreciate the world.) to more base hedonistic experiences.

As a result I’ve always been fascinated in things that let me sample and experiance the world in ways my normal biology doesn’t allow, such as insane jealousy of the multi-spectrum vision of the predator in the movies of the same name. Much to my delight there have been a couple of modern forays into this type of enhancement that I’ve been following with interest and I will detail them here…

The Gift of Magnetic vision : As detailed in this article here. Some body modification enthusiasts have come up with a way of adding an additional “sense” of magnetism to our standard run of sight, sound, touch, etc. Admittedly it’s really just a tie in with our existing sense of touch but the possibilities and the enrichment of the human experiance are belittled by calling a simple “trick of the mind”. To sum it up, they have had small rare earth magnets inserted into their fingertips. These obviously have the benefit of reacting to magnetic fields and other magnetic items. In our modern world there are an “assload” of devices, locations or situations where we experiance magnetic fields we are completely un-aware of. Some examples from the article include the ability to tell where, in a machine, the electric motor is (through sense of the magnets in it), the ability to detect the fields in the store doorway anti-theft devices, and even the ability to tell if a wire carrying electricity is live or not through the magnetic field it generates.

To me these seem like a fantastic additions for a modern person in a modern environment. If not simply for the added awareness of the world around you, as something that extends possibilities for such interaction. (even sexual as they detail in the article).

As with any new body modification there have been problems with some of the initial implants. It seems it is difficult to get the bio-neutral covering on the magnet to be strong enough not to tear and expose the magnet, and when exposed to the body the magnets obviously rust. Rather obviously having that crap in your system is not healthy ™. There is a follow-up article written in 2006 detailing some of the issues involved.

However I have since e-mailed Jesse Jarrell and she assures me that as of 2008 her thickly coated implant is still functioning well and still appears sealed away from her body.

Wired magazine also did an article on this which I think was well worded and positive

I think I’ll wait on this one for a little longer than I did before my RFID implant for the simple reason that I don’t want to be sticking rare earth metals in my body, until I’m very sure they are well sealed, for medical reasons. But this is absolutely an implant I am keen on and would like to experiance.

Another “enhanced awareness” project that has been keeping my interest going is this one…

The Feelspace belt : This is a belt (or some similar device touching the body) that has a ring of small vibrating buttons around the circumference similar to the ones found in cell phones.The idea is that this, coupled with a GPS unit and/or electronic compass, give you a physical indication as to which direction is physically north and/or what direction you need to go to reach a destination.The article is most interesting in how quickly the trial users integrated this new unerring sense of north into their standard suite of senses. The users said they felt “great” and “omnipotent” in their newly found perfect sense of direction.

The effect was so deeply integrated into their senses that (from the article) :

“When the original feelSpace experiment ended, Wächter, the sysadmin who started dreaming in north, says he felt lost; like the people wearing the weird goggles in those Austrian experiments, his brain had remapped in expectation of the new input. “Sometimes I would even get a phantom buzzing.” He bought himself a GPS unit, which today he glances at obsessively. One woman was so dizzy and disoriented for her first two post-feelSpace days that her colleagues wanted to send her home from work. “My living space shrank quickly,” says König. “The world appeared smaller and more chaotic.”

I think it says a lot about the plasticity of the human mind and the ability of our bodies to be enhanced to accept new input. This (for me) gives a great sense of hope that we are _not_ at the peak of our evolution and still have a massive amount of wiggle room when it comes to going further, even with what we have now.

There appears to be a few other people trying to make similar units such as the “active belt” which, like the original, are pretty bulky and ugly. However I hold out good hope for such devices becoming smaller and more functional and eventually even implantable.

So there you are, a couple of technologies I’m following keenly and keeping in mind for possible personal enhancement in the future (assuming kinks/bulkiness is worked out). I hope you found it interesting and if you have any links to similar things and or commentary feel free to add it.

AM

There are plenty of examples of it in other areas of human endeavour; athletes who attend the Olympics get the 5 rings tattooed on themselves, members of various millitaries get them to signify branch and service. So it got me to thinking about a similar symbol for Transhumans.

There is of course the widely used “H+” tag, but while I _do_ like this as a simple symbol signifying transhumanists I think for people external to the whole idea of transhumanism the “+” can seem to mean “superior” or “better” than normal humans and possibly alienate people.

To those inside transhumanism it obviously is an inclusive tag, Showing that we believe _everyone_ can do and be better than they are now. But to others I think it can come across as a little eugenics-y.

Not only that but other than a _very_ few who have some kind of enhancing implant, most of us are only philosophically transhumanist, It would feel a bit “fake” getting “H+” on my body which is, so far, still bog standard natural issue. If I had actually made some changes I might feel a bit more comfy with that, and who knows at sometime in the future I might feel ok with such a mark. But for now I’m not comfortable with it for those reasons.

So what can we do to adorn ourselves with a mark that signifies our ideals, is interesting, poignant , and relevant to our goals in life?

I let the idea percolate in my mind for a year or two and then, one day, it came to me with the discovery of this : Freedom-2 Ink. A permanent tattoo ink that specially designed to be responsive to laser removal for simple, scar free tattoo changes.

Since this enables us to “update” a tattoo easily , through removal and re-addition of a part of it, then why not a versioning system for our physical forms?

The result :

I feel it’s a tattoo that symbolises my interest in technology, art, and physical change. It’s simple, but inspires discussion and explanation in those that see it. It’s non confrontational, universally understood and (for me) very motivating. I was able to quickly create a personal rule system around the versioning, with the basis being that everything after the one is an “organic” version and as such only the digits after the “.” need to be in temp ink.

When an “upgrade” is achieved (which I view to be an integration of technology into my physical sphere (technological implants such as my RFID chip) or change in my biological make-up (such as gene therapy) the digit is erased and indexed. I will need to ascertain as I go how much a particular change is “worth” but It’s a basic framework. The theory being that version 2.0 would be a complete release from biological substrate or a complete re-creation of my genetic code into a new form. I assume that each persons values for versioning and change would be fairly personal and slide upon some internally created scale.

I was pleased and surprised to have my non transhumanist friends actually getting quite interested and amused by it and suggesting problems and loopholes via mooted test cases…

“What if you get a clone? Are they version 2?”
“What if an “upgrade gets removed… to you version down?”
“What about temp implants? Are those beta versions?”

…to just list a few.

The first and second were easy to answer. A physical clone, or mental clone (separate upload), would immediately be a different individual with their own goals and life, this would result result in in them being version 1.0 of themselves.

If an upgrade gets removed (as with my RFID chip) I “revert” to the version before the upgrade.

Temp implants were a bit trickier, I suspect I would simply hold off versioning until I am fairly sure an implant is semi-permanent.

This all probably sounds quite mad to the outsider and possibly some insiders but it has been an interesting thought experiment for me as far as how upgrades affect self worth and as an excellent motivator to move ahead. (Not to mention a fun bit of body art) Every time I see my plain old v1.0 in the mirror I am reminded of my mortality and lack of alternatives for longevity other than my organic form.

So I submit this to the transhumanist community, as a suggestion to those who are interested in body art and would like to wear their goals on their sleeve (or chest, or whatever, as the case may be). Why not a versioning tattoo to self-inspire, create discussion and educate? It would create a sense of community among those who carried it and perhaps help us be a little more motivated in our day to day lives as a constant reminder of what we want our lives moving towards.

If anyone else finds this idea appealing and tries it out I would love to hear from you or receive a pic of your tat and as much of your face as you would like to show and I will add it to a gallery here.

AM

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/10/26/cosmetic-surgeon-wil.html

http://www.modernplasztika.co.hu/audioful_eng.html

One one hand I am glad that we are finally reaching a stage in our social and scientific development where our physical form is becoming more fluid and subject to individual aesthetics.

On the other hand you _know_ that this and similar procedures are primarily going to appeal to and be used by people like this…

http://joi.ito.com/archives/cosplay5.jpg

“I cast magic missile on your heart!”

*sigh*

I think overall I’m glad to see it as it’s one more step towards us shirking off these boring old standard forms for far more interesting things but it’s not going to be a pretty transitional period.

*shudder*

Live vicariously through me! I demand it!