Let’s Talk About Consciousness vs. Memory
(Originally written in 2020)
Do you ever try to think about conversations from the other person’s perspective? Or try to understand a topic from an opinion point that is not your own? To that end, I like to think about topics on the side of the “Devil’s advocate” - not because it is necessarily my own opinion, but because I am trying to see all sides of the topic, even the sometimes uncomfortable ones. Now, I don’t think that is the same as to consider the things that are inherently evil as coldly logical or that which is morally lacking as a valid point. I’m not interested in “abnormal psychology”.
However, because I think this is a conversation that will come up more and more as scientists work with creating Artificial Intelligence and because of my recent Agents of Shield binge watch, I’ve been thinking about this old conversation on consciousness… and I’d like to dive in from a few different points.
To briefly show you where my thoughts begin, I’ll explain that there is a scientist on the show who gets ahold of an ancient book that basically reads the person as you are reading it, and gives out some dark and very advanced secrets. The why and how don’t matter for this, just that he takes those secrets to work with his android Aida to make her extraordinarily advanced – and then uses that same method to make “Life Model Decoys” of some of the other human agents in the show. These “LMDs” are so complex because they have human DNA as part of their machinery as well as “quantum energy storing data- as if synapses are interacting to function like a biological brain” to create “quantum brains” that include everything in the original brains (memories, knowledge, and desires). They can walk around and act authentically like the original human, therefore it’s hard to know that they are not their human counterparts; even they seem to get confused about if they are made or born.
So. Here is where we can start going a little deeper. You’ve probably heard of the scientists or influencers (even if you’ve only heard it in movies) who idealize the concept that we could become more than our bodies, to “download our consciousness” into a machine and “live forever”. Or something to that effect, but it’s usually kind of eerie and morally questionable. The most common argument has been that “well, the reason it is morally wrong is because that machine can’t possibly have a soul”. The writers of A.o.S. had a witty response to that in episode 4X12, and one of these LMDs responds “How can you be so sure that I don’t have one? If a soul doesn’t come from your flesh and blood or my ones and zeros, then it has to come from somewhere else, somewhere unrelated to our physical bodies… If you can have one, so can I.” This statement is such an interesting position on souls and how we attain one, that it has given me true pause. Most people consider their souls given from a Higher Power, from God, from the Universal Consciousness, or something else to that effect.
Most believe we have “souls”, although we can’t really explain what that means other than it is a feeling that we know we have something more within us, something beyond our minds and our bodies. I’ve also heard some people say they don’t necessarily believe in souls, but they believe they “have a consciousness”. I guess souls are sort of our question-card, our personal Dark Matter (we know more about what we think it isn’t than what we know it is). Looking at souls/ consciousness from this perspective, how do we humans know what something as intelligent as a “Universal Consciousness” has in mind to create more consciousness? Maybe it is as naïve to say that it is impossible that these things could have consciousness as it is to say that there are billions of planets out there, but we are the only intelligent life-form that exists. To quote Contact (1997), “The universe is a pretty big place. If it’s just us, seems like an awful waste of space.”
Or maybe it really is just humans playing God and messing with things we can’t hope to understand. Making robots and androids to prove that we are smart; smart enough to mimic real life. (Also, the fact that the doctor in A.o.S. was duplicating already living humans and holding them hostage to create the duplicates… well. That’s pretty bad in and of itself.) And, why do we need to live forever, or create beings that live forever? I think that a lot of this “downloading consciousness” concept comes from a strong fear of death… the unwillingness to complete the natural cycle of life. A little bit from the Ego too, believing that we will have purpose and use beyond our natural life cycle…
Here’s part two of this. Are souls different than consciousness? And what is the difference between consciousness and memory? Dictionary.com defines memory as “the mental capacity or faculty of retaining and reviving facts, events, impressions, etc., or of recalling or recognizing previous experiences / a mental impression retained; a recollection…” ...and consciousness as “the state of being conscious; awareness of one’s own existence, sensations, thoughts, surroundings, etc. / awareness of something for what it is; internal knowledge.” If we take that last bit, how do we become aware of something for what it is? Does that come from a memory?
Now let’s take the definition of morals: “of, relating to, or concerned with the principles or rules of right conduct or the distinction between right and wrong; ethical / capable of conforming to the rules of right conduct.” If we go back to the original train of thought about why an android or robot like this might be “morally wrong”, we can look to that last definition about morals and being capable to be able to distinguish between what is right and what is wrong. Something like an android has a maker, another human who coded them, with their own personal agendas. In the movies about the “robot uprisings” in the last 30 years or so, usually what happens is the maker maybe has a good intention or a bad intention, but the robot becomes smarter than the human and learns that they want to have power or maybe they are mad because they were made and not born but they want to live, so they take their revenge, etc. … you name it, and it’s probably been made into a sci-fi or horror film. What if there were no agendas? Well, then why make it, right? There is always an agenda to something like that. Do we have agendas, as human beings? Do our souls and consciousness give us “agendas”? We like to fight about what is right and wrong a lot. We like to start wars over it, too. I’m not saying it’s an agenda, but we do like to be right (technically, I think that is an Ego argument, not an argument about our souls’ agenda).
My favorite teacher, Dr. Joe Dispenza, talks about memories being our programming, and one of the best things we can do is to overcome the habits that have put us in a perpetual state of suffering, and to become more than our emotionally-charged memories. To imagine, through expansive meditations, who we really would love to be, what life we really want to live, and to become that person. It’s a beautiful healing that occurs when we become more than our memories and our past becomes wisdom. (This has nothing to do with uploading ourselves into robot form, to clarify.) It’s the science behind being stuck in a pattern that does not serve us or no longer serves us.
It did make me think about how much of our lives are memories, good and bad. If you lost all of your memory… who would you become? I’ve watched multiple family members become unrecognizable because they had Alzheimer’s, and had forgotten almost everything and everyone that was a part of their lives. It’s quite haunting, to think that one day that could happen to us. Emotionally, I believe they still had a consciousness, still had a moral compass somewhere inside of them, still had those connections to people in their hearts. Logically, I have a harder time explaining the differences between those concepts.
Who are we to know what goes on within another person? Who are we to say that we understand what is right and what is wrong, about everything? How much of us comes from memory, from upbringing, from location, from age? We change our minds, we fail and we grow and we get up again to fight another day, we try to help those that we know and those that we don’t know to get up again and fight their own battles, to love, to feel, to learn from our mistakes, and to try and do better. I don’t know how we are meant to react to things that test our understanding of the core of life itself. I don’t have a definitive answer on most of these topics… I can’t claim to truly know that my answer today will be the same answer in 20 years. And that’s good, in my opinion. We are meant to grow, not to be born into the world believing we already know it all. That is the true myth of a moral code. We try to do what is “right” in that moment in time, and in retrospect we can have the privilege of knowing that we were in the “wrong”. We must be flexible, but strong in the places we believe we cannot allow compromise without damaging our very souls… even if we aren’t quite sure what they are yet.
Where can you look at something from a side that bends your understanding of life, as you knew it?
Where can you look into something potentially uncomfortable so that you can come out the other side seeing why it made you uncomfortable in the first place?
What can you learn about yourself when you are trying to learn about others?
& P.S.
#QuaketotallyISmyhero
#PhilCoulsonhasbeenresurrectedmoretimesthanJesus
2021 update: Just watched the second What the Bleep Do We Know: Down The Rabbit Hole — which wasn’t easy to find!) and they really get into exactly these concepts of memory and consciousness and the Observer, etc.!! I also think Candice Pert's definition of “consciousness being the point of view of the Observer” is helpful when we consider our questions.