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Who Am I? What Am I?
Ray Kurzweil

Why are you you?

The implied question in the acronym YRUU (Young Religious
Unitarian Universalists), an organization I was active in when
I was growing up in the early 1960s (it was then called LRY,
Liberal Religious Youth)

What you are looking for is who is looking.

Saint Francis of Assisi

Im not aware of too many things

I know what I know if you know what I mean.
Philosophy is the talk on a cereal box.
Religion is the smile on a dog
Philosophy is a walk on the slippery rocks.
Religion is a light in the fog
What I am is what I am.
Are you what you are or what?
Edie Brickell, What I Am

Freedom of will is the ability to do gladly that which I must do.

Carl Jung

Original publication details: Who Am I? What Am I?, Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is
Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Viking, 2005, pp. 3827. Used by permission of
Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence, Second Edition.
Edited by Susan Schneider.
2016 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
100 Ray Kurzweil

The chance of the quantum theoretician is not the ethical freedom of

the Augustinian.
Norbert Wiener

I should prefer to an ordinary death, being immersed with a few

friends in a cask of Madeira, until that time, then to be recalled to life
by the solar warmth of my dear country! But in all probability, we live
in a century too little advanced, and too near the infancy of science, to
see such an art brought in our time to its perfection.
Benjamin Franklin, 1773

We talked earlier about the potential to upload the patterns of an individual

mind knowledge, skills, personality, memories to another substrate.
Although the new entity would act just like me, the question remains: is it
really me?
Some of the scenarios for radical life extension involve reengineering and
rebuilding the systems and subsystems that our bodies and brains comprise.
In taking part in this reconstruction, do I lose my self along the way? Again,
this issue will transform itself from a centuriesold philosophical dialogue to
a pressing practical matter in the next several decades.
So who am I? Since I am constantly changing, am I just a pattern? What
if someone copies that pattern? Am I the original and/or the copy? Perhaps
I am this stuff here that is, the both ordered and chaotic collection of
molecules that make up my body and brain.
But theres a problem with this position. The specific set of particles that
my body and brain comprise are in fact completely different from the atoms
and molecules that I comprised only a short while ago. We know that most
of our cells are turned over in a matter of weeks, and even our neurons,
which persist as distinct cells for a relatively long time, nonetheless change all
of their constituent molecules within a month. The halflife of a microtubule
(a protein filament that provides the structure of a neuron) is about ten min-
utes. The actin filaments in dendrites are replaced about every forty seconds.
The proteins that power the synapses are replaced about every hour. NMDA
receptors in synapses stick around for a relatively long five days.
So I am a completely different set of stuff than I was a month ago, and
all that persists is the pattern of organization of that stuff. The pattern
changes also, but slowly and in a continuum. I am rather like the pattern
that water makes in a stream as it rushes past the rocks in its path. The
actual molecules of water change every millisecond, but the pattern persists
for hours or even years.
Perhaps, therefore, we should say I am a pattern of matter and energy that
persists over time. But there is a problem with this definition, as well, since
we will ultimately be able to upload this pattern to replicate my body and
 Who Am I? What Am I? 101

brain to a sufficiently high degree of accuracy that the copy is indistinguish-

able from the original. (That is, the copy could pass a Ray Kurzweil Turing
test.) The copy, therefore, will share my pattern. One might counter that
we may not get every detail correct, but as time goes on our attempts to
create a neural and body replica will increase in resolution and accuracy at
thesame exponential pace that governs all informationbased technologies.
We will ultimately be able to capture and recreate my pattern of salient
neural and physical details to any desired degree of accuracy.
Although the copy shares my pattern, it would be hard to say that the
copy is me because I would or could still be here. You could even scan
and copy me while I was sleeping. If you come to me in the morning and say,
Good news, Ray, weve successfully reinstantiated you into a more durable
substrate, so we wont be needing your old body and brain anymore, I may
beg to differ.
If you do the thought experiment, its clear that the copy may look and act
just like me, but its nonetheless not me. I may not even know that he was
created. Although he would have all my memories and recall having been
me, from the point in time of his creation Ray 2 would have his own unique
experiences, and his reality would begin to diverge from mine.
This is a real issue with regard to cryonics (the process of preserving by
freezing a person who has just died, with a view toward reanimating
him later when the technology exists to reverse the damage from the early
stages of the dying process, the cryonicpreservation process, and the
disease or condition that killed him in the first place). Assuming a

preserved person is ultimately reanimated, many of the proposed
methods imply that the reanimated person will essentially be rebuilt
with new materials and even entirely new neuromorphically equivalent
systems. The reanimated person will, therefore, effectively be Ray 2
(that is, someone else).
Now lets pursue this train of thought a bit further, and you will see where
the dilemma arises. If we copy me and then destroy the original, thats the
end of me, because as we concluded above the copy is not me. Since the copy
will do a convincing job of impersonating me, no one may know the differ-
ence, but its nonetheless the end of me.
Consider replacing a tiny portion of my brain with its neuromorphic
equivalent.
Okay, Im still here: the operation was successful (incidentally, nanobots
will eventually do this without surgery). We know people like this already,
such as those with cochlear implants, implants for Parkinsons disease, and
others. Now replace another portion of my brain: okay, Im still here
andagain . At the end of the process, Im still myself. There never was an
old Ray and a new Ray. Im the same as I was before. No one ever
missed me, including me.
102 Ray Kurzweil

The gradual replacement of Ray results in Ray, so consciousness and

identity appear to have been preserved. However, in the case of gradual
replacement there is no simultaneous old me and new me. At the end of
the process you have the equivalent of the new me (that is, Ray 2) and no
old me (Ray 1). So gradual replacement also means the end of me. We
might therefore wonder: at what point did my body and brain become
someone else?
On yet another hand (were running out of philosophical hands here), as
I pointed out at the beginning of this question, I am in fact being c ontinually
replaced as part of a normal biological process. (And, by the way, that
process is not particularly gradual but rather rapid.) As we concluded, all
that persists is my spatial and temporal pattern of matter and energy.
Butthe thought experiment above shows that gradual replacement means
theend of me even if my pattern is preserved. So am I constantly being
replaced by someone else who just seems a lot like the me of a few
momentsearlier?
So, again, who am I? Its the ultimate ontological question, and we often
refer to it as the issue of consciousness. I have consciously (pun intended)
phrased the issue entirely in the first person because that is its nature. It is
not a thirdperson question. So my question is not who are you? although
you may wish to ask this question yourself.
When people speak of consciousness they often slip into considerations of
behavioral and neurological correlates of consciousness (for example,
whether or not an entity can be selfreflective). But these are thirdperson
(objective) issues and do not represent what David Chalmers calls the hard
question of consciousness: how can matter (the brain) lead to something as
apparently immaterial as consciousness?
The question of whether or not an entity is conscious is apparent only to
itself. The difference between neurological correlates of consciousness (such
as intelligent behavior) and the ontological reality of consciousness is the
difference between objective and subjective reality. Thats why we cant pro-
pose an objective consciousness detector without philosophical assumptions
built into it.
I do believe that we humans will come to accept that nonbiological
entities are conscious, because ultimately the nonbiological entities will
have all the subtle cues that humans currently possess and that we associate
with emotional and other subjective experiences. Still, while we will be able
to verify the subtle cues, we will have no direct access to the implied
consciousness.
I will acknowledge that many of you do seem conscious to me, but I
should not be too quick to accept this impression. Perhaps I am really living
in a simulation, and you are all part of it.
 Who Am I? What Am I? 103

Or, perhaps its only my memories of you that exist, and these actual
experiences never took place.
Or maybe I am only now experiencing the sensation of recalling apparent
memories, but neither the experience nor the memories really exist. Well,
you see the problem.
Despite these dilemmas my personal philosophy remains based on
patternism I am principally a pattern that persists in time. I am an evolving
pattern, and I can influence the course of the evolution of my pattern.
Knowledge is a pattern, as distinguished from mere information, and losing
knowledge is a profound loss. Thus, losing a person is the ultimate loss.