Chapter
Sixteen
Egos, bundles, and theories of self
Dennett’s is a bundle theory in which the string is a web of
narratives. The sense of unity and continuity is an illusion
abstracted from real words and deeds to the false idea of a
single source. Does this help us understand consciousness?
By denying that there is anything it is like to be an experi-
encing self, Dennett changes the problem completely. For
him, the sense of self does not consist of an actual what-
it’s-like; it is nothing more than a centre of narrative gravity.
Thus, language doesn’t help create the experience, as it
does for most other narrative theorists; instead, it creates
the illusion of experience.
This is how he manages to explain consciousness – or alter-
natively, as some critics prefer to say, explain it away.
FUTURE SELVES
initial downloads will be somewhat imprecise. [. . .] As our understanding
of the mechanisms of the brain improves and our ability to accurately and
noninvasively scan these features improves, reinstantiating (reinstalling) a
person’s brain should alter a person’s mind no more than it changes from
day to day.
(Kurzweil, 1999, p. 125)For Kurzweil, and some other futurists, human selves will one day not be tied to
the survival of human bodies: our immortality will be assured by technological
progress. All we need to do is to increase the speed and accuracy of the scanning
processes already available, copy the relevant aspects of a brain’s organisation
into a computer, and – hey presto – we live on. This dream is brought to life in the
2014 film Transcendence, where Johnny Depp plays an AI researcher who uploads
his brain onto a quantum computer so that his consciousness can survive his
body’s death. As Kurzweil notes, we all change from day to day anyway, so a quick
shift from bio- to silicon body should hardly be noticed.
Although such prospects have long been confined to thought experiments like
those we considered earlier in the chapter, some people now think that it might
really happen, and perhaps we should prepare ourselves. We may ask two ques-
tions. First, will the resulting creature be conscious? And second, will it be the same
conscious person as before? Answers to the first question depend on whether
you think there is something special about biology, or whether organisation
alone is sufficient (as in functionalism). Answers to the second question depend
on whether you are an ego or bundle theorist. If the opportunity ever comes, you
may need to decide whether the operation really will make you immortal or not,
but perhaps by then enough people will already have been copied, and will be
telling you that it’s fine and that they still feel just the same, for you not to care.
Kurzweil is, according to Rodney Brooks, one of those ‘who have succumbed to
the temptation of immortality in exchange for their intellectual souls’ (2002, p.
205). According to Brooks, ‘We will not download ourselves into machines; rather,
those of us alive today, over the course of our lifetimes, will morph ourselves into
REMINDER 2 – AM
I THE SAME ‘ME’ AS A
MOMENT AGO?FIGURE 16.11 • Maybe a self can be snuffed
out like a candle flame, and
rekindled later. Maybe this is
happening all the time even
though we do not realise it (see
Chapter 18).