The Mind Upload Divorce: A Science Fiction Story

In the year 2064 Jim and Emily Lawson were enjoying the third year of their marriage, which seemed to be going well, even though Emily was worried that her husband might be having an affair with a holographic mistress. On one evening Jim asked Emily to sit down on the couch with him, so they could have a serious talk.

“So you want a serious talk?” said Emily. “Oh God, don't tell me – are you fooling around with a holographic mistress?”

“No, it's not that at all,” said Jim.

“Is it a real flesh-and-blood mistress?” asked Emily.

“No, it's not that either,” said Jim. “It's something deeper. I'm dissatisfied with our marriage.”

“How have I failed you?” asked Emily, crying.

“You haven't,” said Jim. “It's just that I'm dissatisfied with a physical existence in general.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Emily, baffled.

“Haven't you heard about the new thing that's so fashionable?” asked Jim. “It's mind uploading. They connect your brain to some scanner, and then they upload your mind to a big supercomputer. The scanning ruins your brain, but you live inside the computer which received your mind upload. You can then enjoy a wonderful virtual reality better than real life. And it lasts forever.”

“So who's stopping you?” said Emily. “You can wait until you have terminal cancer, and then do that.”

“No, I want to do it now,” said Jim. “Why be stuck in this run-of-the-mill physical existence, when you can have so much fun living in a computer-generated reality in which your every fantasy comes true instantly?”

Emily was shocked by her husband's decision. Jim arranged for a quickie divorce, taking advantage of the laws passed in the 2030's, laws which allowed you to divorce in only a month. Later Jim told Emily that he had arranged for his mind to be uploaded into a computer. The work would be done by a company called Silicon Paradises, Inc.

The company sent Emily a holographic telegram telling her that the mind upload had been done successfully, and that Jim had progressed to a life of eternal computer-generated pleasure. The company told Emily she could even talk to her ex-husband, by visiting the offices of Silicon Paradises, Inc.

A month later, Emily decided to take advantage of the offer. She visited the impressive offices of the mind upload company.

Entering the offices, Emily was taken into an office with a large screen. On the screen she saw Jim's face. Behind him was some strange computer-generated landscape.

“Jim, is that you?” asked Emily.

“You bet it is!” said the smiling face on the screen. “I sure am glad I had my mind uploaded into a computer. I'm having such fun. It's like being in Disney World every day. But there's one thing missing. You aren't here.”

“So you miss me?” asked Emily.

“I miss you like crazy,” said the face on the screen. “Why don't you sign a contract with the mind upload company, the same company you're at now. They can upload your mind into the same computer as mine. Then we can enjoy eternity together.”

Emily had mixed feelings about the offer. It sounded exciting, but it seemed dangerous. But she finally reasoned that if Jim was so happy, she would be happy too. So she went back to the company and signed a contract, choosing April 17 as the day of her mind upload. The contract specified that all of Emily's money would go to the mind upload company.

The fateful day arrived, and Emily nervously went to the Upload Center at the mind upload company. People at the company had her lie on a bed, and told her to relax. While she was lying on a bed, they used some fancy cameras to photograph her. It was almost like having X-rays taken. Emily was puzzled by why the people asked her to smile while the fancy camera was photographing her.

While lying on the bed, alone in the room, Emily got cold feet. She began to feel afraid, unsettled by the thought of the coming end of her physical existence. So she walked out of the room. She walked down the hall, and was startled by what she saw in one of the nearby rooms.

Inside the room was a man. The room had a large screen, and on it she could see a body that looked just like hers. The body was talking.

“I sure am glad I had my mind uploaded into a computer,” the body said. “I'm having such fun. It's like being in Disney World every day.”

Emily was startled. It was just what Jim had said. But now it was coming from a face that looked just like hers. And they hadn't even uploaded her mind yet.

“What the hell is going on?” said Emily. “How can you have a video of me saying that? I never said that.”

The man in the room had a kind of “caught red-handed” look. He then confessed the truth.

“Looks like you're on to us, so I'll spill the beans,” the man said. “The truth is: we don't really upload minds to computers. We just kill the people who pay for mind uploads.”

Emily put her hand over her mouth.

“You see it works like this,” explained the man. “Before we kill one of the persons who paid for a mind upload, we do a photographic scan that allows us to create a 3D CGI image replication of that person. We have that 3D image thing hooked up to some chat-bot software. So it's easy to create a computer-generated 3D image that looks just like the person who requested the mind upload. After we've got that person's money and killed him, we use the chat-bot 3D image to lure in new customers. That way it's easy to lure in relatives and friends of the poor slob who paid for a mind upload, but only got a bullet in the head and a cremation. Those relatives and friends are our next victims.”

“So my Jim is really just dead?” sobbed Emily.

“Just like you'll be soon,” said the man, calling in some co-workers.

They were about to kill Emily until she stopped them cold by telling them she was wearing a necklace miniature video camera, and that she had been live-streaming on the Internet everything that had happened since she entered the office.

A manager at the mind upload company put on a fake smile, and tried to pretend it was all just a misunderstanding.

“My colleague was just joking when he told you that we don't really upload minds,” said the manager. “I'll have to fire him for making such stupid jokes. Come back tomorrow, and we'll get this all straightened out, so that you're a happy customer.”

Emily came back to the company the next day, but she came with two police officers and a detective. But the policemen were unable to make any arrest. When they reached the offices of the mind upload company, they found the offices had been hastily vacated. All of the files and the computers had vanished. All that was left lying around was some office furniture, and a company sign that proclaimed:

Don't worry about your eternity ending – our company will be around forever.

The 40-Year Bum Steer of the Food Experts?

For decades food scientists have been telling us that saturated fat in food is bad for your heart. You can read the same story being pitched on current web sites of some of our leading authorities. For example, a page on the site of the American Heart Association tells us that saturated fat is bad for your heart. It says:

Eating foods that contain saturated fats raises the level of cholesterol in your blood. High levels of LDL cholesterol in your blood increase your risk of heart disease and stroke.

Later the same page makes a recommendation:

The American Heart Association recommends aiming for a dietary pattern that achieves 5% to 6% of calories from saturated fat. For example, if you need about 2,000 calories a day, no more than 120 of them should come from saturated fats. That’s about 13 grams of saturated fats a day.

How much is that 13 grams? You would exceed that 13 gram limit by having three slices of pizza, or a cheese danish. For decades Americans have been told such limits are necessary for healthy eating. But a major new study suggests we have long been given a great big “bum steer” on this topic.

The new study was published in the British medical journal The Lancet, and is entitled Associations of fats and carbohydrate intake with cardiovascular disease and mortality in 18 countries from five continents (PURE): a prospective cohort study. The study looked into the dietary intake of 135,335 individuals (a very large sample size for studies like this).

The study reached these startling conclusions:

Intake of total fat and each type of fat was associated with lower risk of total mortality...Higher saturated fat intake was associated with lower risk of stroke...Total fat and saturated and unsaturated fats were not significantly associated with risk of myocardial infarction or cardiovascular disease mortality.

Such conclusions are in complete opposition to what we have been told about saturated fat for forty years. The study finds that eating more of any type of fat (including saturated fat) results in a lower risk of you dying. The study finds that eating more saturated fat decreases your risk of having a stroke, by 21%. The study finds that eating more saturated fat does not increase your chance of dying of a heart attack.

It seems that our food experts have been giving us faulty advice for the past 40 years. During this time, while people have been looking for foods marked “low fat” in the supermarket, people have been shoveling in more and more carbohydrates, leading to an obesity epidemic. Carbohydrate intake was the one thing the Lancet study finds is associated with total mortality.  

Will the new study cause the American Heart Association to update its page on saturated fats, by giving a contrite admission of error like the one below?

No, that will never happen. It might be that the American Heart Association will cling stubbornly to its dubious recommendation, or perhaps it will change its recommendation. But if the recommendation is changed, you can be sure that the page will not tell people how a very different recommendation was given for several decades recently. Our scientific bureaus don't want the people's confidence in them to be shaken.

Is Something Paranormal Involved in a Small Child's Language Acquisition?

There are two great mysteries involving language. The first is how language was ever able to originate. The mystery is highlighted by a 2014 scientific paper by leading linguists, which states, “The most fundamental questions about the origins and evolution of our linguistic capacity remain as mysterious as ever.”

The Mystery of How Language Originated

Explaining the origin of language involves the same type of severe difficulties involved in explaining the origin of vision and the origin of flying. In all three of these cases there is the difficulty in explaining the origin of functionality which requires many different parts and a high degree of complexity and coordination before any survival value reward can be produced. In the case of vision, before any survival value reward can be produced, there needs to be a highly complex setup consisting of a preliminary eye, extremely complex biochemistry, at least one highly specialized protein for capturing light, an optic nerve, and very substantial brain changes needed to meaningfully process visual input. In the case of flying, before any survival value reward can be produced, there needs to be a highly complex setup consisting of wings (or a wing-like appendage), and very substantial brain changes needed for either flying or gliding to occur. In the case of language, before any survival value reward can be produced, there needs to be a highly complex setup consisting of changes in the vicinity of the mouth, changes in the brain needed to articulate speech, and changes in the brain needed to process speech spoken by others.

We cannot explain the reaching of any of these initial functional thresholds by evoking Darwin's idea of natural selection or survival of the fittest, because there would be no survival benefit until these complex functional thresholds were achieved, each involving a complex arrangement of parts incredibly unlikely to occur by chance. For example, natural selection would presumably not have rewarded some preliminary version of language functionality consisting only of no language-related brain changes, and merely a larynx and pharynx which would have allowed people to only speak as crudely as if they had their mouths filled with rocks.

In the case of the origin of language, there are no less than 4 different things that need to be explained:

1. How could changes in the vicinity of the mouth have occurred, in order to enable human speech, presumably before such changes were rewarded by offering an increased survival value?
2. How could changes in the brain have occurred, in order to enable meaningful articulation of speech, presumably before such changes were rewarded by offering an increased survival value?
3. How could changes in the brain have occurred, in order to enable meaningful interpretation of speech spoken by others, presumably before such changes were rewarded by offering an increased survival value?
4. How could any language have come into existence, when it seems that the only way to establish a language (including verbs, grammar rules, adjectives and adverbs) would be if some language already existed?

The difficulty of explaining the origin of language is only one of the two great mysteries involving language. A separate difficulty is: how is that very young children are able to learn how to speak a language so quickly?

The Mystery of How Small Children Acquire Language

If you are an adult studying a new language, you are instructed in the rules of grammar used by that language. But a small child receives no such instruction, because it is impossible to explain such rules to someone who doesn't already know a language. Instead, a small child seems to pick up language purely by listening to people speak. Consider what a wonder that is. Imagine if you were placed in a remote village in Russia, where no one spoke English, and you had to pick up Russian purely by hearing other people speak it. This seems like an impossible task.

It has been extensively argued by leading linguists such as Noam Chomsky that the average young child is not exposed to enough examples for the child to be able to generalize rules of language. This is known as the “poverty of stimulus” argument. The acquisition of a language by very small children seems all the more amazing when we consider that many children raised in bilingual households (such as my two daughters) managed to pick up two different languages before even starting public school, without any formal instruction.

To explain the wonder of a small child's language acquisition, some have advanced the idea of a genetically-based language instinct. The idea was popularized by psychologist Steven Pinker in his book The Language Instinct. The idea is that you have some genes that make it easy for you to learn language and grammar.

The idea seems to make no sense, because genes are just recipes for making proteins. A gene can only specify a protein that will be used as a building ingredient for the human body. It seems that there is no way for a gene to specify any specific mental ability. Imagining a gene for language understanding seems to be another example of the widespread fallacy of attributing abilities to genes that are beyond their structural limitations.

Pinker's claim of a language instinct has been rebutted by Vyvyan Evans, who is actually a professor of linguistics, which Pinker is not. Evans is the author of the book The Language Myth: Why Language Is Not an Instinct. Evans states his views in this essay and this essay.

Evans states this:

For a Universal Grammar to be hard-wired into the micro-circuitry of the human brain, it would need to be passed on via the genes. But recent research in neurobiology suggests that human DNA just doesn’t have anything like the coding power needed to do this. Our genome has a highly restricted information capacity. A significant amount of our genetic code is taken up with building a nervous system, even before it gets started on anything else. To write something as detailed and specific as knowledge of a putative Universal Grammar inside a human infant’s brain would use up huge informational resources – resources that our DNA just can’t spare. So the basic premise of the language instinct – that such a thing could be transmitted genetically – seems doubtful.

This argument is based on capacity, but a similar but better argument would be based on expressive capability. The only thing you can state in DNA or genes are groups of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. This is an extremely narrow and special-purpose type of expressive capability, as narrow as some minimalist language capable of expressing only sandwich ingredients. Neither genes nor DNA have any broad or general expressive capability of the type that would be needed to state grammatical rules.

When I go to the index of The Language Instinct and look up “genes and language,” I find only 16 pages in his 500-page book are trying to present evidence of a genetic link. None of these pages present good evidence that genes give us any language ability. The most relevant evidence presented is a claim that something called Specific Language Impairment “runs in families.” But Evans tells us it “turned out that SLI is really just an inability to process fine auditory details,” undermining Pinker's insinuations that SLI is some evidence of a gene-grammar link. Seeing how meager is the evidence Pinker presents to back up his thesis, we may wonder whether the popularity of his The Language Instinct book mainly stems from his skill as a writer rather than the evidence he has presented.

No grammar gene has been found, leaving the idea of a genetically-based language instinct on poor empirical ground. On page 12 of the postscript of a paperback version of The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker says, “Though no single gene specific to grammar has been found (and perhaps none ever will), it is increasingly clear that sets of genes will be tied, with varying degrees of specificity and overlap with other functions, to aspects of language ability.” The latter part of the statement is so hedged and qualified that it is basically meaningless. The important part is the first part of the statement, the admission that no grammar gene has been found, which undermines the whole thesis of The Language Instinct.

If you do a Google search for “language gene,” you will find various press reports referring to the FOXP2 gene as a “language gene.” But a book on child language acquisition says this about calling FOXP2 a language gene:

Subsequent research has robustly debunked this claim. The gene (FOXP2) is actually a gene that regulates the behavior of many other genes. It has an effect on the development of many organs, including the lung and the gut, not just those important for language...

Similarly, the National Geographic blog here refers to the FOXP2 gene as “the 'language gene' that's not really a language gene.”

If the idea of a gene-based language ability is not convincing, in what other ways might we explain the rapid acquisition of language by small children? We may need to go far out of the box, and consider offbeat explanations.

Paranormal Hypothesis #1: ESP-Aided Acquisition of Language

Here is an interesting hypothesis. It could be that small children acquire language partially through extrasensory perception (ESP). Humans might be born with an ESP capability that diminishes after early childhood. When you were a child, and your mother or father spoke to you, you might have been able to telepathically know what they were thinking. This may have made it relatively easy for you to learn your first language.

There is strong experimental support for extrasensory perception in adult humans, as discussed here, here, here, here, and here. Although almost all testing has been done with adults, there is some empirical support for the idea of extrasensory perception in children. Besides this compelling evidence produced in the USA, an entry in the Psi Encyclopedia on psychic research in China tells us this:

Using more advanced training methods, Dr Chuang Chung in Taiwan and Professor Tai-Chun Yang in Sichuan with Lady Tang Kai-Ting have further improved the ability of blind children to ‘see and read’ through skin contact. Some children can now ‘skin read’ the colour, number and figure (animal shapes) on separate cards in some cases at up to 45 cards per minute, often with 100% accuracy.

The idea of ESP between family members seems very plausible to me partially because of my own personal experiences. I once played a guessing game with my sister. One person would think of an item around our house, and the other person would try to guess it, after asking a few questions that must be answered “yes” or “no.” As soon as there was a “no” answer, a round was considered a failure. There were at least eight consecutive successful rounds, in which the item was correctly guessed, with the guess preceded by only “yes” answers to the “yes” or “no” questions. My sister and I alternated as the guessers, so it couldn't have been a case of her simply pulling my leg by always answering “Yes.” The odds of getting eight successful rounds in such a game is about 1 in 2 to the twenty-fourth power, or 1 in 16,777,216. I have had equally striking experiences suggesting extrasensory perception between me and my daughters.

Paranormal Hypothesis #2: Past Lives Helping Small Children to Acquire Language

Here is a different hypothesis to explain the wonder of a small child's language acquisition: it may be relatively easy for a child to pick up language because the child may have reincarnated, and may be remembering language he or she used in a previous life.

University of Virginia researchers such as Ian Stevenson and Jim Tucker have done extensive research on alleged reincarnation cases involving children. Many cases have been compiled in which young children seem to report details of the life of someone who previously died, details they could not have known through normal means. When a child reports these accounts that are called “past life memories,” the alleged memories will only persist for a few years. After the age of 10, there is usually no such recollection.

Such cases suggest that some children may have been reincarnated. But what if all of us are reincarnated? Then it might be that reincarnation plays a key role in a toddler's acquisition of language. In China a toddler may pick up Chinese easily because it lived a previous life as a Chinese person; and in America a child may pick up English easily because he or she lived a previous life as an English-speaking person. 

Besides being of potential value in explaining language acquisition, the hypothesis of reincarnation might be useful in explaining homosexuality, under the assumption that a homosexual man is a reincarnated person who had a previous life as a woman.  As discussed here, existing explanations for homosexuality are very unconvincing.  

Paranormal Hypothesis #3: Morphic Resonance

The hypothesis of morphic resonance has been advanced by the biologist Rupert Sheldrake. Although he doesn't call it a claim about the paranormal, it postulates something so strange that it can be called paranormal. Sheldrake's web site describes the theory like this:

Morphic resonance is a process whereby self-organising systems inherit a memory from previous similar systems. In its most general formulation, morphic resonance means that the so-called laws of nature are more like habits. The hypothesis of morphic resonance also leads to a radically new interpretation of memory storage in the brain and of biological inheritance. Memory need not be stored in material traces inside brains, which are more like TV receivers than video recorders, tuning into influences from the past. And biological inheritance need not all be coded in the genes, or in epigenetic modifications of the genes; much of it depends on morphic resonance from previous members of the species. Thus each individual inherits a collective memory from past members of the species, and also contributes to the collective memory, affecting other members of the species in the future.

We can roughly think of the idea of morphic resonance like this: there is kind of a global or cosmic information field, which gets added to whenever any natural thing has an experience; and natural things can draw from this information field in a way that makes easier that which might otherwise be very hard. Under such a theory, for example, the first time a spider made a spider web it might have been very, very hard; but all subsequent attempts might be easier; and the more spider webs that had been made, the easier it might be. In this document, Sheldrake claims to have various forms of evidence in support of the theory of morphic resonance.

If such a theory is true, it might help explain the acquisition of language by a very small child. Under the morphic resonance idea, such a thing might be easy because it has been done so many times before by previous children. As Sheldrake says on page 30 of this document:

According to the hypothesis of morphic resonance, that which has been learned by many people in the past should be easier for people to learn today. Everyone draws upon and in turn contributes to a collective human memory.

Paranormal Hypothesis #4: External Endowments

The hypothesis of external endowments is the idea that there is some external non-human information facility that gives humans skills that they would not otherwise have. Such a hypothesis may come to mind after you study the history of savants, many of whom have astonishing skills that seem impossible to explain through normal means, often combined with severe mental handicaps.  An example of a savant is the late Kim Peek, who could accurately recall the details of 10,000 books he had read, despite having an IQ of only 87. Other examples are Tony DeBlois, who can play 8000 songs from memory, and Derek Paravicini who can play a piece after hearing it only once, despite having a severe learning disability.

In the case of savants, it is as if some external agent gave some special endowment to partially make up for the mental handicap.  Such a hypothesis may be broadened to cover the case of language acquisition. It may be that every time a small child learns a language,  there is assistance from some mysterious external information facility. 

He's Viewing Extraterrestrials Through Rose-Colored Glasses

The cosmologist Ethan Siegel has a new post in which we once again see a scientist passing off some dubious armchair reasoning as “science.” The post is entitled, “Afraid of Aliens? The Science Doesn't Back You Up.” Siegel argues that we have nothing at all to worry about if extraterrestrial spaceships arrive in our solar system. He states:

For a species to come as far as an intelligent, spacefaring alien would have come, they must have figured out a solution to a whole slew of problems that humanity clearly still grapples with. Meeting a civilization such as this could only have positive outcomes for our own.

Oh really, Ethan? But what about if visiting extraterrestrials want to conquer us, enslave us, exterminate us, or vastly reduce our numbers, putting the few remaining humans in zoos or reservations? The idea that science backs up the claim of friendly extraterrestrials is rather laughable. Science consists of what we have observed. The only things that are arguably observations of extraterrestrials consist of a wide variety of people reporting alien abductions that were usually not very pleasant. You could argue with just as much force that the empirical evidence suggests we should be afraid of extraterrestrials.

Below is some of Siegel's reasoning on this matter:

If they were hostile to humans, or indifferent to our lives but interested in something present on our world, there might be no way at all to save ourselves. It might be humanity's demise. That's exactly the fear that many among us possess. But is that fear based in reality, and is that a legitimate reason to not send our messages, spacecraft, and information to the stars beyond our reach? Absolutely not.

So extraterrestrials might cause our demise, but this is “absolutely not” a reason we should worry about sending out messages announcing our existence, messages that might attract visitors? That doesn't make sense.

Siegel paints this rosy picture of human contact with extraterrestrials:

The possible benefits to humanity of making contact are immeasurable. It would be like receiving a great galactic teacher, advanced thousands of years beyond our own scientific and technological capabilities. It would be the ultimate cultural exchange ever experienced on Earth.

There is no logical or scientific basis for concluding that arriving extraterrestrials would be like benevolent teachers. Scientifically speaking, the only evidence we have relevant to such a matter is evidence from history in which visitors from one civilization arrived on distant shores to discover some very different civilization. This has almost never been a pleasant case of benevolent teachers arriving, and has often been a case of the arriving civilization having a deadly impact on the civilization it visited (as in the case of the Conquistadors arriving in Mexico and Peru). 

Given the age of the universe, if we were to receive benevolent extraterrestrial visitors, it seems likely that they would be so vastly more advanced than us that they would have little interest in playing "great galactic teacher" to us -- just as a tenured college professor has little interest in teaching multiplication tables to little first-grade children.

Given the seemingly miraculous luck needed for life to originate, there is reason to suspect that life may be very rare in our galaxy. So imagine if a spaceship from another planet arrived here, after a very long journey in which no life was found. The visitors would probably regard our planet as a very rare wonder, like some oasis swimming pool in the middle of the Sahara desert. So they might well think: let's end our space voyage, stop right here, and make this planet our new home. Having decided that, their next steps might be:

1. Vastly reducing the human population, freeing up the planet for their own colonization.
2. Confining the remaining human population to reservation areas, similar to the Indian reservations set up in the US.
3. Removing most human buildings, preserving a few as historical reminders of the past.
4. Terra-forming the planet so that it became more like their own planet, which might involve lowering or raising the temperature, or increasing or decreasing the oxygen levels.

After they were finished, the map of the eastern United States might look like the one below, with all of the non-circled areas being bulldozed areas reserved for colonization by extraterrestrials.