Chapter
Sixteen
Egos, bundles, and theories of self
An interesting question then arises. Who, or what, is con-
scious? Is it you, the web as a whole, the group of people
using it, or what? According to GWTs, information becomes
conscious when it is made globally available to the rest of
the brain. In this speculative future, the whole of the web is
globally available to everyone. Does that mean it would all
be conscious? And if so, to whom or what? The notion of ‘con-
sciousness as global availability’ seems to provide a curiously
literal conclusion here.
If consciousness is unified by a (real or illusory) self, then
nothing much changes by adding more memory, but once
people are so intimately linked with each other, the whole
concept of self seems under threat. What would make an
item of information ‘my’ memory rather than yours? Perhaps
having a physical body is still the anchor to which a sense of
self adheres, but that too may be threatened.
SELVES IN CYBERSPACE
A teenage girl, pretending to be a boy, flirts in an internet
chat room. Most of the other people she meets there are just that – people – but
some are chatbots: programs designed to generate text and appear to be people.
Virtual warriors inhabit millions of home computers, winning and losing battles
in countless games, and acquiring personalities that are known the world over.
Virtual actors live and die in films. A virtual television presenter stands in the stu-
dio, enthusiastically introducing a real, live human. A neural network translates a
sentence from one language to another by generating its own third language, or
‘interlingua’. Crawlers amble around the world wide web collecting information
on behalf of search engines or communications companies. They are autonomous
and go where they like. All of these entities depend on physical substrates for their
existence, but none has a permanent physical home. Could they be conscious?
These few examples raise again the question of what kind of thing can be said to
be conscious. We often say that a person is conscious, or wonder whether our dog
is. Nagel asked ‘What is it like to be a bat?’, not ‘what is it like to be a computation?’,
‘what is it like to be a bat’s idea of a bat?’, or ‘what is it like to be a virtual self?’ David
Edelman was sceptical that anyone would ever seriously pose the question ‘what
is it like to be an octopus tentacle?’ Several authors have argued that conscious-
ness can arise only in physical objects that have boundaries and interests of their
own, such as organisms and robots (Humphrey, 1992; Cotterill, 1998). Perhaps
this is not true. Here we mean not free-floating psychic entities or astral bodies,
but the possibility of conscious software agents that exist without being tied to
one particular physical body. For example, they might be distributed across many
machines. What, then, would give such entities any coherence, such that they
could reasonably be said to be conscious selves?
According to meme theory (Chapter 11), memes tend to clump together into
memeplexes regardless of the substrate supporting them. So we should expect
increasingly well-structured memeplexes to form in cyberspace and compete
with each other for survival. They would be purely informational entities with
FIGURE 16.12