By Niko Ivanovic

…

In order to understand a book about consciousness we first need to understand what exactly we mean by “consciousness”. One common misconception is that self-awareness is a requirement for consciousness. However in the philosophy of mind, and in this book, the more standard way of defining a “conscious being” is just that it has direct conscious experiences: ie that there is something that it’s like to be that being.

Conscious beings might be self aware, but they certainly don’t have to be, and most of them probably are not very self aware. For example you can imagine a simple organism such that what it’s like to be that organism is just to experience red or blue colors. That’s it. No thought or reasoning. No self-awareness. Just flashes of red or flashes of blue. This organism is still conscious: ie there is still something that it’s like to be this organism.

In other words, to be conscious is just to experience: to see color, to hear sounds, to feel a touch, to think a thought, to feel joy. These are all conscious experiences. In fact, everything you’ve ever experienced in your life is a conscious experience. As mentioned last chapter – you, at your core, are a collection of conscious experiences. And perhaps that is all that you are.

The purpose of this book is to explain why the phenomenal qualities of our experiences are the way they are: why color looks like color, why joy feels like joy, etc. For those not familiar with the philosophy of mind, it may be difficult to appreciate how mysterious this actually is. You see, there is no concept of the experience of color in physics, or chemistry or biology. Of course there are photons, and there is a wave-particle duality that allows us to describe light as both a photon particle and a wave, but none of these concepts say anything at all about the human experience of color. All physics describes is a wavelength which somehow our brain turns into the experience of blue. But that process is a total mystery. It’s completely unknown, and almost magical, how the experience of blue just appears in our mind. Similarly the concepts of joy, pain, the experience of sound or smell, these concepts do not exist in physics. This is the hard problem of consciousness.

Proposing an explanation and a solution to this problem is the very purpose of Sciops, and why this new framework is so exciting. By answering the hard problem, Sciops explains on a deeper level explains what consciousness is.

The other topic that is addressed in great detail in this book is personal identity, which is essentially the study of which conscious experiences you personally will experience first hand. Again, this question may seem obvious to someone new to these topics, as you may just think “duh, the ones in my head”. However it’s not so simple, which can be illustrated with a simple but mind-bending thought experiment. So let me take a few pages to tell you a tale of Jimmy and Billy Jameson… 

— — —

Jimmy and Billy Jameson were identical twins from New Hampshire. They were brilliant by most standards, Billy a captivating young politician eyeing a senate race in three years, and Jimmy an up-and-comer in the hedge fund world on Wall Street. They pragmatically dawned crew cuts, jet black, slicked so hard you could break a fingernail combing your hand through it. They were charming, mysterious, sociopaths. They were indistinguishable to even the discerning eye. Billy and Jimmy wouldn’t like this book for one simple reason: it’s not really about them. 

Billy was to get married on Sunday to a moon-eyed brunette with pursed pink lips and a pair of front teeth that grew too large like they were over eager to greet the world. For him she had deep affections, and even deeper pockets: Old money, the kind of stuff elaborate mustaches are made of. Future senator, after all, is a title that doesn’t pay much so it was a perfect match. As if Billy were to remain faithful, the brothers decided to send Billy off to his marital bliss as tradition demands, with a grandiose bachelor party. 

Billy arrived at the rooftop lounge smelling like an alcoholic’s basement, if alcoholics drank four hundred dollar bottles of scotch.  They had a private room with furry indigo walls and dozens of guests hoping to bribe or suckle their way at the power teet. The windows towered above the Manhattan skyline as if to say “we’re better than all of you”. 

Anyway, Billy was an angry drinker, and Jimmy knew this because, well, Jimmy was an angry drinker. So the bottles, by Jimmy’s instruction, had been watered down, giving the illusion of a smoother spirit and the effect of a far more sober and less destructive Billy. He should really be thanking him, Jimmy thought to himself. After all we don’t need Billy or Jimmy going all Wolf of Wall Street all over everyone.

(I promise this story is going somewhere). 

Jimmy may have been a sociopath, but he wasn’t cruel, and he did have another sweet vice for his brother. He unraveled a crumpled, dirty ziplock bag of cocaine from his two thousand dollar maroon blazer and tossed it on the glass table besides his brother. So it’s a surprise really that Billy up to this point never had. You see Billy was a hypochondriac. He always knew something bad would happen to him and he felt like he spent his whole life waiting for that moment. “Well wait no more Billy and try the damn coke,” spat his brother across the couch.  

Billy hesitated but the thing about narcissists is that they are insecure, and the thing about insecure people is that they cave to peer pressure. Billy forcefully snorted three lines like a hyper-allergic ginger kid in a room full of cats. He stood up, probably yelled something nonsensical like they do in the movies after a bump, and headed to the bathroom to comb his hair.

Three hours passed. You would think his brother and best man, a week before his wedding, would notice poor little Billy lying dead on the bathroom floor a tad sooner. But in truth Jimmy, with his equally charming brother out of the room for a moment, had been far too much enjoying being the center of attention to notice. There were women (strippers), fine spirits (vodka water) and drugs (a dirty and now half empty ziplock bag of cocaine), how could he resist?

You see the thing about narcissists is that they become dopamine addicts. With long term healthy streams of serotonin and oxytocin nowhere to be found, a short little boost of dopamine is their molecule of choice. It makes you wonder what percent of the world’s assholes are just overly addicted to dopamine doesn’t it? 

Eventually Jimmy waddled his bursting bladder over to the urinal, only to notice a few rebellious specs splatter onto his brother’s cold dead hand as it stretched across the bathroom floor and out from the stall’s grasp. 

Jimmy, of course, was shocked and devastated, stomach churning at the sight of his poor lifeless brother… was the script he immediately conjured up in his head for when people would inevitably ask. But then the events of the past few hours occurred to Jimmy. The cocaine. Shit the cocaine. My cocaine, he thought. No it can’t be, cocaine is harmless isn’t it? Maybe it was suicide? But that would tarnish the family image, which arguably was even worse than manslaughter. Either way this was bad. 

Turns out our beloved Billy had a rather uncommon case of a rather common heart condition: preventricular contractions, or as the cool kids call them, PVCs. The heart gets a mistaken premature signal from the neurons that control its contraction rhythm. The ventricle fires too early, attempting to push out a completely empty chamber of blood, like that last hopeless squeeze of toothpaste out of the now deformed container. Meanwhile blood builds up pressure behind it.

PVCs are typically harmless, but in rare cases, the problem can escalate, and one premature fire becomes fifty in a row, as the heart helplessly flaps the dry air. Stimulants, unbeknown to the sociopath brothers, aggravate the problem. So when the cocaine seeped into Billy’s bloodstream, his poor little heart was doomed.  

Jimmy didn’t know about his brother’s PVCs, but he was high, paranoid, and scared. Manslaughter doesn’t hold up well on a resume. So he hid the body in the stall, locked it from the inside and climbed over the door, only to return in the morning. 

A call was made to a friend of the family. The next day the two brothers found themselves in a neuroscience lab in upstate New York; a giant, cold, metal facility; the kind of place you imagine aliens are kept. A tall gaunt figure slouched his lanky head through the sliding glass doors. His glasses were plain and to the point, he was clean shaven, hair silk white, and bags swell under his eyes despite the otherwise look of a younger man. 

“Dr. Kippers” Jimmy nods to greet the man with a resentfully reminiscent tone. 

“Yes, James. Well, enough of the small talk. Let’s have a look” Kippers remarks, annoyed at even the prospect of pleasantries, aren’t we all. 

Kippers leaned over Billy’s dead body like a praying mantis. “We’ll have to do an M.R.I. first” he muttered. “Make sure the brain is still intact”. Jimmy cleared his throat in nervous approval. 

“We’ve had an issue a bit with our cloning techniques as of late,” Kippers continued. “The cloned brains have turned out, slightly… asymmetrical.” 

“What does that mean?” Jimmy spouted impatiently. 

“It means I can’t simply take a few neurons from your brain like I would normally. I need to take half. Exactly half in fact. Not an atom more, not an atom less.” 

“What does that mean? Cut my brain in half? You’re joking!”

“Your brain will be frozen before the incision so you will not be awake during the procedure. Then we will perfectly clone the other half of each, creating two perfect replicas of your brain. We put one inside Billy’s skull, and the other back in yours. Simple really.” 

Jimmy was taken aback, but it was the only way to fool the police, Billy’s wife-to-be, their father. The world needed to believe that Billy Jameson was still alive, and the narcissistic icing of a second Jimmy in the world, masquerading as another body, was tempting way to top the cake. 

“Fine” Jimmy replied, a ridiculously fast and unrealistic conclusion that would only happen with the half-assed story telling of this book. 

 The procedure began as planned. First they scanned Jimmy’s brain, and mapped every neuronal connection. Yes, every last neuron. Then they carefully severed the brain perfectly in half with a robotic laser. Next Kippers placed each half of the brain in a stem cell solution and used the neuronal connection information from the scan to create a scaffolding to paste the stem cells onto, thus perfectly recreating Jimmy’s brain in two. 

When Dr. Kippers’ assistant veered for the storage container where Billy’s body was stored, Kippers stops him. “You didn’t really believe we were going to just stick the brain immediately back into the skulls did you?” 

You see this was a groundbreaking experiment, and Kipper had no intention of actually helping Jimmy the asshole. And of course the nonsense about asymmetry was all a ruse, but the research paper he could publish on this amazing split brain experiment would certainly justify the means. 

Kippers instead placed Jimmy’s two brains in their own, totally isolated, black boxes. There was no light, or sound in the box. This was intentional as Kippers wants to have full control over their conscious experiences. And as the brains, Jimmy 1 and Jimmy 2 sat in the box, they began to slowly thaw. 

As the frozen crystals of water inside the neuronal cell membranes began to crack, and the ions were free again to move in the fluid, the neurons started to fire again. They continued exactly where they left off with Jimmy’s memories, base neuronal firing, etc. Jimmy still couldn’t hear or see anything, and there was no input at all from the outside world. To Jimmy now, the world outside him was just black nothingness. Because we cloned the brains exactly, Kippers pointed out, gesturing to the EEG graph of each brain (which measures neuronal firing), the brain activity is exactly the same. 

After a solid baseline was maintained, Kippers began the experiment. He inserts an electrode into the visual cortex of each brain, but at different points. We don’t really know exactly what part of the brain he stimulated that day, but for the purpose of our discussion we’ll say that in Jimmy 1 he stimulated a neuron that tells Jimmy’s brain that he is seeing a red light. And in Jimmy 2, a blue light. Unsurprisingly, the EKGs were now different. One Jimmy was experiencing blue, and the other red. Both have all the memories of the original Jimmy. 

Next Dr. Kippler introduced sound to the experiment. He sent both brains the message “what’s your name?” and measured the activity to decode the response. “Jimmy” they both said. 

“Fascinating,” Kippers remarks. 

“What is it?” questions the assistant.

“It’s fascinating Sven. Think about it: which one is actually Jimmy?”

…

Much of the science in this story is of course not realistically practical, but it is in theory possible, so the philosophical point remains: if we really did split Jimmy’s brain in two, clone the other halves so they are both full copies of the original brain, and then wake them back up. Which one would be the original Jimmy?

And when we say which one is the original Jimmy, we of course don’t mean which one possesses his personality, or memories, or sense of self. Clearly they both would. Instead we mean which brain will the original Jimmy wake up as: which will he experience first hand?

It seems we are stuck with only a few, equally frustrating options, hence the paradox:

1. Jimmy arbitrarily transferred his consciousness into one of the two brains, totally randomly (because the brains were cut 50/50). At the same time, a new consciousness was born out of nothing, and became the other Jimmy. 
2. The original Jimmy “died” and now there are two new conscious beings birthed. In other words, the original Jimmy never wakes back up and his stream of consciousness does not continue.
3. Jimmy is somehow both Jimmy’s at the same time. The original Jimmy has now become two consciousnesses operating at the same time. He wakes up as both of them. 

Furthermore, as Kippers would find out, both brains would behave 100% as if they were the original Jimmy, and there’s nothing we could decipher by studying Jimmy’s behavior that could help us answer the question. So as you ponder the bizarre scenario laid before you, I ask again, which one is Jimmy? 

Now you may be thinking “but does any of this crazy hypothetical philosophy mumbo-jumbo even matter?”. After all, we’re never actually going to split brains in half and clone them, right? 

But what if, in 50 years, when you’re old and dying, you want to upload your brain to a computer, like they do in SciFi TV shows? Will that work? Will your stream of consciousness be transferred to the computer? Even if the computer perfectly recreates your thoughts and personality and memories, will it be you that experiences it first hand? Or some other conscious being?

And what if your physical brain and consciousness is still alive when we create the digitized “you”, will you be  conscious as both at the same time? Or will your physical brain have to die first? And what if the digital recreation isn’t perfect. Realistically it probably won’t be. Encoding not only every single neuronal connection, but all the subtleties of each voltage potential, each bucket of ions, and the exact initial values of each neuron is probably practically impossible. There will be some error. So what if the digital you is actually just 98% you? Or 75%? Or 50%? Will it actually be you experiencing this, or another conscious being, an imposter in your digital brain? 

Even if we don’t end up uploading our brains to a computer, maybe we figure out how to clone our physical brains as a backup, so when you die at 85 of a heart attack, ceasing the flow of oxygen to your brain and causing catastrophic neuronal decay, we have a brand new and perfectly intact clone of your brain ready to go. But will “you” get to actually experience that new brain? Will your stream of consciousness continue? What if it also is not perfect, or perhaps a snapshot of an earlier you? 

Many of you may be tempted to think that an artificial version of you running on a computer won’t actually be experienced by yourself first hand. But we have to ask why we would assume that? Is it because it’s running on a computer chip instead of on biological neurons? But should that really matter? Especially considering at a fundamental level, according to physics, both are made of the same types of quantum fields? It seems this is the next question we need to address…