00:00Colleagues, friends, we have gathered here in this hall to discuss the future of cognitive
00:07interfaces, the Neuronet, and the prospects for the immortality of consciousness. We show each
00:14other graphs, algorithms, scan results, we talk about channel bandwidth, the accuracy of neural
00:21maps. We operate in terabytes of data and build gigabytes of models. But I want to suggest that
00:28we distract ourselves from the bits and bytes for a moment and look into the abyss. The very abyss on
00:34the edge of which we all now stand. Imagine the loneliest being in the universe. This is not an
00:41astronaut, cut off from communication in orbit around a distant planet. No. It is something far
00:48lonelier. It is the last human. The last human on earth. Civilization has collapsed, life has vanished,
00:57but he remains. Alone. He walks among silent skyscrapers, he turns on generators to light up
01:05empty cities, he reads books in the silence of libraries where the rustle of pages is no longer
01:10heard. He has everything. All the knowledge of humanity, all its wealth, all its art it all
01:18belongs to him alone. And it is in this that his curse lies. Because any knowledge, any experience,
01:25any aesthetic impression gains meaning only in one single context, the context of shared
01:30experience. A thought not voiced to another, not met with response or resistance, becomes
01:37merely a set of neural impulses. A painting that no one can look at differently becomes just a
01:43combination of pigments. Music that no one can hear is merely vibrations in the air. Now, let's return
01:50to our abyss. We stand on the threshold of the greatest enterprise, from a technological standpoint
01:57the project of digital immortality. The transfer, copying, packaging of human consciousness into some
02:04digital medium. We say, death is defeated. We promise our avatars, our digital selves, an eternal
02:13life in simulations of paradise, where any desire will be fulfilled by the power of thought, where pain
02:19and loss will be merely options that can be disabled in the settings. But I ask you one simple question,
02:25for whom? For whom will this eternal paradise exist? For whom will this digital sun shine? For whom will
02:34the digital birds sing? If myself is transferred into a machine, it will become that last human. It will be
02:42locked in a perfect, eternal, infinitely customizable solipsism. It will possess all the knowledge,
02:49all the experience, all the memory of humanity. But it will be deprived of the one single, most important
02:57quality that makes us human the other. Another consciousness, unpredictable, different, independent,
03:04capable of surprising, delighting, wounding, enriching.
03:08We naively believe that we can populate our simulations with copies of other people.
03:15But this will be nothing more than a puppet show. They will be zombies, philosophical zombies,
03:21perfectly mimicking the behavior of our loved ones, but devoid of that elusive spark of genuine,
03:27other consciousness. We will be communicating with memories, with algorithms trained on data from
03:33our deceased friends. We will be conducting endless dialogues with ourselves, packaged in different
03:39shells. This is the true hell the hell of absolute comprehensibility, absolute predictability. A paradise
03:47that turns out to be a hall of mirrors, where every reflection is you, and only you. Our tragedy is
03:54that consciousness is not a substance, but a relation. It does not exist within us, but between us.
04:01It is not a static recording, but a dynamic process that emerges in the tango, in the argument,
04:08in the glance, in the silent understanding, in the chance encounter, in the unforeseen conflict.
04:15We are not our memories, not our preferences, not our set of neurotransmitters. We are the pattern
04:22that emerges on the grid of our connections with other such patterns. And now, with our crude instruments
04:29scanners, tomographs, arrays of electrodes, we are trying to extract the pattern, forgetting that
04:35without the grid itself, it is meaningless. We are trying to catch a rainbow in a net, thinking that
04:42by capturing its spectrum, we will capture its beauty. We strive to defeat death, but we are on
04:49the verge of defeating life. We want to preserve consciousness, but we risk preserving only its empty
04:55shell, stripped of the most important thing, the ability to surprise and be surprised by the other.
05:01Therefore, before we take the next step, before we press the launch button on our great project,
05:07I urge you to think. Not about whether we can do it. Technically, I am sure we soon will be able to.
05:15Think about whether we should do it. Think about whether we will become the architects of the
05:21greatest prison in the history of the universe, a prison of perfect solitude for an immortal soul,
05:26condemned to an eternal dialogue with itself. We may build a perfect digital arc to save ourselves
05:32from the flood of non-existence. But will we save on it what makes sailing the turbulent waters of
05:38life meaningful? Or will we condemn ourselves to an eternal voyage across an utterly calm, predictable,
05:45boundless, and absolutely empty ocean, in which our vessel will be the only one?
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