Regular readers may recall that I spent some time taping interviews with Rothblatt (who Dvorsky describes as "an eccentric billionaire lawyer, author, and entrepreneur") and her partner, Bina, last year. The interviews were the first tentative steps in compiling "mindfiles" for the couple -- a recorded history of their memories, images, mannerisms -- thier essential "beingness," if you will -- with the goal of ultimately being able to preserve their essential selves forever using technology (like uploaded consciousnesses and other transhumanist techno-utopian ideas).

I shot the interviews with my friend Rob Koier in one of the houses they keep in Lincoln, VT as well as in the office of a pharmaceutical company Rothblatt owns in Magog, Quebec.

I quite liked Martine and Bina. Martine is a trekkie and was inspired to get into space communications (she founded the Sirius Satellite Network and several other space-based telecom enterprises) by the Utopian visions she found in SF. Their boundless enthusiasm for the future is matched only by their intense love for one another, which is genuine and infectious.

Still, as much as I identified with Martine's optimistic futurism, and as much as I admired her ability to think outside the box w/r/t hurtling obstacles to reach her goals, I was still deeply skeptical of the basic premise behind the mindfiles.

Dvorsky is a fellow Transhumanist and his take on Martine's project is much more articulate than mine could ever be. Read the whole thing here. Snip...

Consciousness all too often gets conflated with other aspects of the mind, including memory and other cognitive tasks that comprise the mechanistic or computational aspects of the brain.

Consciousness is not something you can piece together and instantiate with cultural artifacts. Nor can a continuity of consciousness be restored in this manner. That’s still a question that perplexes even the best philosophers and neuroscientists.

Here’s a thought experiment: let’s suppose that you traded memories with your best friend – nothing else, just the memories. You’ve still got your body and all the grey matter in your brain that rightfully belongs to you, except your memories. Does this mean that you and your friend have traded consciousnesses? Does it mean that you’ve uploaded yourself into your friend's brain and vice-versa?

The answer is no to both questions! You would still be you in the sense that you’re still observing reality, but you’d be convinced that you are now your friend. A sense of identity (sense being the key word -- a kind of illusion) may have been transferred, but not the conscious lens that each of us has with which we observe and experience the world.