To Join the Sea of Electrons...

I was poking around TV Tropes http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HomePage  last night prompted not by boredom (as I usually am) but by someone giving me (and a blog I was on in general) a recommendation for a fan fiction for a fandom I'm not in but have read listed around the 'net.  (Apparently, it's pretty popular.  If I were a reader of the books it was based on and not just a casual watcher of the movies who forgets most of their content, I might give the fic a shot)...  Anyhow, since it's been Troped, I was clicking links from it about the author and such, as what happens when one browses TV Tropes, and wound up round-about reading about Transhumanism and the scientific quest for immortality...

... I remembered a PBS special I saw a long while ago that was narrated by astronomer/physicist Degrasse, I think... all about this thing and and shaking my head at one guy who was trying to extend his life by taking hundreds of vitamins and supplements every day to ward off aging and thinking "That guy's gonna get hit by a car."

Yes, I'm a stupid dumb-dumb non-scientist and a bit of a cynical bitch. Live with it.

Anyway, the special had all kinds of other physical immortality bids, including brain-uploading to software.  This very thing has been explored in some of the animes I've watched and loved. The title of this post is a reference to an episode of "Cowboy Bebop"   http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Anime/CowboyBebop?from=Main.CowboyBebop  .  One I've seen that takes it to 11 is Kaiba http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Anime/Kaiba?from=Main.Kaiba  (Linked from Tropes rather than main Wiki because I have the window open and it's handy). 

In addition to that, I remember recently reading a couple of articles about this stuff  (half news, half opinion) on Huffington Post regarding scientists thinking we are on the very cusp of just this sort of thing.  It's a pretty interesting idea, but I can't say I'm not a bit suspicious of the "Singularity" just because I can see it being the domain of the privileged that leaves out the disadvantaged (This was a major theme in "Kaiba" listed above.  I recall there being a revolutionary group dedicated to killing the physical souls/memories of the dead that existed in that universe just to get rid of the inequality of the rich abusing the system.  Death may be a bitch, but at least it's equal). 

My thoughts on the subject of death are rather weird... I *do* want to live forever, in a way,  but I trust a divine hand/spiritual matters for that more than I'll ever trust even the smartest of humans or machines. Even if the divine/spiritual does not exist, mankind has hurt me too much to have a lot of trust for it (yes, if it came down to it, I can easily see myself trusting in Nothing more than Humanity, especially since I suspect "eternity" might be subjective/a matter of perception, anyway).. Machines, well... I can't even trust those with my art files:  http://shadsie.deviantart.com/#/d5d09x9 Also, yesterday, I accidentally overwrote my awesome maxed-out I-can-climb-the-impossible-tower! save-file on "Shadow of the Colossus" because I wasn't paying attention, so.... trust my consciousness to a computer or to people running one?  Urgh!   Anyway, I probably don't deserve to live forever,  anyway.  I'm one of those cracked/insane people they'd weed out of the program real early...

That said, if I ever get the IQ-boost I need to write a decent fiction story on such a complex and genius-philosophy subject, I'm tempted to write something in which we're all minds uploaded into a massive computer-database or free-floating on the Internet or in the "sea of electrons"  and since we're all immortal and cannot kill each other anymore, we've achieved an unprecedented level of peace until... 

A million-year-long flamewar breaks out about whether or not Smurfs lay eggs. 

Or people's entertainment preferences. 

Or people get so bored that the collective computer consciousness starts increasingly becoming composed of  people doing nothing but sharing videos of cats and the occasional cat-brain that's been uploaded interrupting peoples' free-floating philosophy-sessions with plaintive cries of "Tuna!" or "Ear itchy! Scratch now!" (It doesn't matter if the cat has no body and no ears anymore... cats are cats).  



... Yeah. I'm too dumb and nuts to deserve to have my mind live forever in the material / electronic world. I sometimes think even self-awareness itself for me may be more of a curse than a blessing.