Alive to Life: Parting the Clouds 1
A cheerfully reserved man in his early 40s, he spoke in the punctilious staccato of a non-native English speaker who had long mastered the language. As we parted, he handed me his business card and much later that evening Iremoved it from my wallet and had a proper look at it.
16 Bible verses about Clouds, God's Presence
The card was illustrated with a picture of a laptop, on whose screen was displayed a stylised image of a brain. Underneath was printed what seemed to me an attractively mysterious message: Realistic Routes to Substrate Independent Minds. Randal A Koene, founder. It seemed that I had met, without realising it, a person who was actively working toward the kind of brain-uploading scenario that Kurzweil had outlined in The Singularity Is Near. And this was a person I needed to get to know.
Koene was an affable and precisely eloquent man and his conversation was unusually engaging for someone so forbiddingly intelligent and who worked in so rarefied a field as computational neuroscience; so, in his company, I often found myself momentarily forgetting about the nearly unthinkable implications of the work he was doing, the profound metaphysical weirdness of the things he was explaining to me.
The odds seemed pretty long from where I was standing, but then again, I reminded myself, the history of science was in many ways an almanac of highly unlikely victories. One evening in early spring, Koene drove down to San Francisco from the North Bay, where he lived and worked in a rented ranch house surrounded by rabbits, to meet me for dinner in a small Argentinian restaurant on Columbus Avenue.
The faint trace of an accent turned out to be Dutch. Koene was born in Groningen and had spent most of his early childhood in Haarlem. His father was a particle physicist and there were frequent moves, including a two-year stint in Winnipeg, as he followed his work from one experimental nuclear facility to the next.
And much of this had to do with the culture of techno-progressivism that had spread outward from its concentrated origins in Silicon Valley and come to encompass the entire Bay Area, with its historically high turnover of radical ideas. In his early teens, Koene began to conceive of the major problem with the human brain in computational terms: Koene saw nothing in this idea of reducing human beings to data that seemed to him implausible and felt nothing in himself that prevented him from working to bring it about.
His parents encouraged him in this peculiar interest and the scientific prospect of preserving human minds in hardware became a regular topic of dinnertime conversation.
Clouds, God's Presence
Computational neuroscience, which drew its practitioners not from biology but from the fields of mathematics and physics, seemed to offer the most promising approach to the problem of mapping and uploading the mind. The path he had chosen was a difficult one for a scientist and he lived and worked from one small infusion of private funding to the next. There were people there or thereabouts, wealthy and influential, for whom a future in which human minds might be uploaded to computers was one to be actively sought, a problem to be solved, disruptively innovated, by the application of money.
This language struck me as strange and unsettling in a way that revealed something crucial about the attitude toward human experience that was spreading outward from its Bay Area centre — a cluster of software metaphors that had metastasised into a way of thinking about what it meant to be a human being. Finally, you emulate all of this on a third-party non-flesh-based substrate: The whole point of substrate independence, as Koene pointed out to me whenever I asked him what it would be like to exist outside of a human body, — and I asked him many times, in various ways — was that it would be like no one thing, because there would be no one substrate, no one medium of being.
You can be a lion or an antelope, a frog or a fly, a tree, a pool, the coat of paint on a ceiling. What really interested me about this idea was not how strange and far-fetched it seemed though it ticked those boxes resolutely enough , but rather how fundamentally identifiable it was, how universal. When talking to Koene, I was mostly trying to get to grips with the feasibility of the project and with what it was he envisioned as a desirable outcome.
But then we would part company — I would hang up the call, or I would take my leave and start walking toward the nearest station — and I would find myself feeling strangely affected by the whole project, strangely moved. Because there was something, in the end, paradoxically and definitively human in this desire for liberation from human form. In the weeks and months after I returned from San Francisco, I thought obsessively about the idea of whole brain emulation.
One morning, I was at home in Dublin, suffering from both a head cold and a hangover. I lay there, idly considering hauling myself out of bed to join my wife and my son, who were in his bedroom next door enjoying a raucous game of Buckaroo. I realised that these conditions head cold, hangover had imposed upon me a regime of mild bodily estrangement. I felt myself to be an organism with blocked nasal passages, a bacteria-ravaged throat, a sorrowful ache deep within its skull, its cephalon.
I was aware of my substrate, in short, because my substrate felt like shit. And I was gripped by a sudden curiosity as to what, precisely, that substrate consisted of, as to what I myself happened, technically speaking, to be. New American Standard Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and thus we shall always be with the Lord.
Jubilee Bible then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air, and so shall we ever be with the Lord. King James Bible Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: American King James Version Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: American Standard Version then we that are alive, that are left, shall together with them be caught up in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: Douay-Rheims Bible Then we who are alive, who are left, shall be taken up together with them in the clouds to meet Christ, into the air, and so shall we be always with the Lord.
Darby Bible Translation then we, the living who remain, shall be caught up together with them in [the] clouds, to meet the Lord in [the] air; and thus we shall be always with [the] Lord. English Revised Version then we that are alive, that are left, shall together with them be caught up in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: Webster's Bible Translation Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: Weymouth New Testament Afterwards we who are alive and are still on earth will be caught up in their company amid clouds to meet the Lord in the air.
World English Bible then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air. Young's Literal Translation then we who are living, who are remaining over, together with them shall be caught away in clouds to meet the Lord in air, and so always with the Lord we shall be;.
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And I saw One like a Son of Man coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into His presence. If anyone serves Me, the Father will honor him. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.
‘Your animal life is over. Machine life has begun.’ The road to immortality
Whether it was in the body or out of it I do not know, but God knows. The things he heard were too sacred for words, things that man is not permitted to tell. And all the tribes of the earth will mourn because of Him. So shall it be!
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Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers. Young's Literal Translation then we who are living, who are remaining over, together with them shall be caught away in clouds to meet the Lord in air, and so always with the Lord we shall be; Study Bible The Return of the Lord … 16 For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a loud command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will be the first to rise.
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Treasury of Scripture Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: