Robert Sawyer - Mindscan

“Good? You’re torturing these people.”

Smythe looked unfazed. “I’m doing research that needs to be done.”

Before I could reply, Brian Hades spoke for the first time in several minutes. “Please, Mr. Sullivan. You’re the only one who can help us.”

“Why me?” I said. “Is it because I’m young?”

“That’s part of it,” said Hades. “But only a small part of it.”

“What else is there?”

Hades looked at me, and Smythe looked at Hades. “You spontaneously boot.” Hades said. “No one else ever has.”

I was completely baffled. “What?”

“If you, as an upload, lose consciousness, you don’t stop for good,” Hades said. “Rather, your consciousness comes back of its own volition. No other Mindscan has ever done that.”

“I haven’t lost consciousness,” I said. “Not since I uploaded.”

“Yes, you have,” said Hades. “Almost as soon as you were created. Don’t you remember? Back at our facility in Toronto?”

“I … oh.”

“Remember?” said Smythe, standing up straight. “There had been a moment when something had gone wrong. Porter noticed it—and was amazed.”

“I don’t understand. What’s so amazing about that?”

Smythe spread his arms as if it were obvious. “Do you know why Mindscans never sleep?”

“We aren’t subject to fatigue,” I said. “We don’t get tired.”

Smythe shook his head. “No. Oh, that happens to be true, but it’s not the reason .”

He looked at Hades, as if giving him a chance to cut him off, but Hades just shrugged a little, passing the floor back to Smythe.

“We’ve all been following the trial up here, of course,” Smythe said. “You saw Andy Porter give testimony, right?”

I nodded.

“And he talked about competing theories of how consciousness is instantiated, remember? Of what the actual physical correlates of it are?”

“Sure. It could be anything from neural nets to, ah…”

“To cellular automata on the surface of the microtubules that make up the cytoskeleton of neural tissue,” said Smythe. “Porter’s a good company man; he made it sound like there’s still a question about this. But there isn’t—although we here at Immortex are the only ones who know that. Consciousness is cellular automata—that’s where it’s embodied. No question.”

I nodded. “Okay. So?”

Smythe took a deep breath. “So, with the Mindscan process, we get a perfect quantum snapshot of your mind at a given moment in time: we precisely map the configuration of—to use Porter’s metaphor—the black and white pixels that make up the fields of cellular automata that cover the microtubules in your brain tissue. It’s a precise quantum snapshot. But that’s all a Mindscan is—a snapshot. And that’s not good enough. Consciousness isn’t a state, it’s a process . For our snapshot to become conscious, that snapshot has to spontaneously become one frame in a motion-picture film, a film that’s creating its own unscripted story, unfolding into the future.”

“If you say so,” I said.

Smythe nodded emphatically. “I do. The snapshot becomes a moving picture when the black and white pixels become animated. But they don’t do that on their own: they have to be given rules to obey. You know, turn white if three of your neighbors are black, or something like that. But the rules aren’t innate to the system. They have to be imposed upon it. Once they are, the cellular automata keep permuting endlessly—and that’s consciousness, that’s the actual phenomenon of self-awareness, of inner life, of existence being like something.”

“So how do you add in rules that govern the permutations?” I asked.

Smythe lifted his hands. “We don’t. We can’t. Believe me, we’ve tried—but nothing we can do gets the pixels to start doing anything. No, the rules come from the a lready conscious mind of the subject being scanned. It’s only because the real, biological mind is initially quantally entangled with the new one that the rules are transferred, and the pixels become cellular automata in the new mind. Without that initial entanglement, there is no process of living consciousness, only a dead snapshot of it. Our artificial minds don’t have such rules built in, so if the consciousness ever halts in a copied mind, there’s no way to start it up again.”

“So if one of us were to fall asleep—” I said.

“He’d die,” said Smythe simply. “The consciousness would never reboot.”

“So, why is this a big secret?”

Smythe looked at me. “There are more than a dozen other companies trying to get into the uploading business; it’s going to be a fifty-trillion-dollar-a-year industry by 2055. They can all do a version of our Mindscan process: they can all copy the pattern of pixels. But, so far, we’re the only ones who know that quantum entanglement with the source mind is the key to booting up the copied consciousness. Without linking the minds, at least initially, the duplicate never does anything.” He shook his head. “For some reason, though, your mind does reboot when it’s shut off.”

“I’ve only blacked out once,” I said, “and that was just after the initial boot-up. You can’t know that it always happens.”

“Yes, we can,” said Smythe. “Copies of your mind manage to generate rules for their cellular automata spontaneously, on their own, without being linked to the original. We know, because we’ve instantiated multiple copies of your mind into artificial bodies here on the moon and down on Earth—and, no matter when we do it, the copies spontaneously boot up. Even if we shut them down, they just boot up again later on their own.”

I frowned. “But why should I be different from everyone else in this regard? Why do copies of my mind spontaneously reboot?”

“Honestly?” said Smythe, raising his platinum eyebrows. “I’m not sure. But I think it has to do with the fact that you used to be color-blind. See, consciousness is all about the perception of qualia: things that only exist as constructs in the mind, things like bitterness or peacefulness. Well, colors are one of the most basic qualia. You can take a rose and pull off and isolate the stem, or the thorns, or the petals: they are distinct, actual entities. But you can’t pull off the redness, can you? Oh, you can r emove it—you can bleach a rose—but you can’t pluck the redness out and point to it as a separate thing. Redness, blueness, and so on are mental states—there’s no such thing as redness on its own. Well, by accident, we gave your mind access to mental states it had never experienced before. That initially made it unstable. It tried to assimilate these new qualia, and couldn’t—so it crashed. That’s what happened when Porter first transferred you: it crashed, and you blacked out. But then your consciousness rebooted, on its own, as if striving to make sense of the new qualia, to incorporate them into its worldview.”

“It makes you an invaluable test subject, Mr. Sullivan,” said Brian Hades. “There’s no one else like you.”

“There should be no one else like me,” I said. “But you keep making copies. And that’s not right. I want you to shut off the duplicates of me you’ve fraudulently produced, destroy the master Mindscan recording, and never make another me again.”

“Or…?” said Hades. “You can’t even prove they exist.”

“You think messing with the biological Jacob Sullivan was hard? Trust me: you don’t want to have to deal with the real me.”

Oh, my God!