102. Electronic cortex

I copy myself, immersed in degrees, layers of separation, and wonder right away whether I can be considered the same as the original me. And will minds identical to mine ultimately emerge, reconstructions elsewhere, other embodiments, somehow a new substrate to my image? Can I, then, communicate with myself? Neuron-by-neuron? And will the pronoun “I” be the ultimate fixed point for all my replicated identities?

I close my eyes and I see them: My future machines. Colossal knowledge scanning, digitalizing a human profile, my brain the biological child of an artificial intelligence. Genetic data encoded within a virtual reality.

I close my eyes and I feel it: Personalities evolving inside endless online spaces, outsourcing love and pain to external secondary systems made with the dust of flesh, clouds of upgraded representations of who we claim to be.

Memory pixels allowing avatars of myself to role-play alternate individualities. Neuromorphing software to capture my complete state of mind. Uploading exabytes of existential questions for my progeny to answer.

My physical experiences of the world reproduced, and then getting lost - a lack of interest from meta-search engines eye-tracking nothing else but meaningful fantasy platforms.

Will they get confused, permutated, the different people I can be? Incorporeal souls caught in cybernetic ecosystems, masses of programmed ideas and concepts reaching maturity as computer-generated life-forms, the databases of our ethereal properties having acquired self-transformative powers.

I promise. I will sacrifice primary consciousness for a user-generated environment. I will open a can of computer worms. I will hack and counter-hack clusters of differences all made of silicon. I will reverse-engineer a lifetime’s worth of knowledge. I promise. I will be born and contribute to problem-solving from day one. With a keyboard, I will maintain poetic illusions about a singular self whiling away its time.

I will reproduce my mammalian brain a trillion times. I promise. It will not be possible to distinguish this sudden amplitude from the presence of magic.

There will be, I promise, no signs of alien life in any of my futuristic realities, no cyborgs, only self-directed evolution. Only a colonized imagination, the painstaking process of data analysis preparing for anomie, and, of course, post-human changes.

Help me baby. Sometimes, I’m taken straight to the binary frontier of what’s possible. Where I instantly evaporate, somewhere, on my way from zero to one.


Laolao