Robert J. Sawyer

Bio & resources

“Of course, there are many advantages to artificial bodies, even at the current state of technology. Just like our artificial brains, they are virtually indestructible. The braincase, for instance, is titanium, reinforced with carbon-nanotube fibers. If you decide you want to go skydiving, and your parachute fails to open, your new brain still won't get damaged on impact. If—God forbid!—someone shoots you with a gun, or stabs you with a knife—well, you'd almost certainly still be fine.” Mindscan by Robert J. Sawyer

Science fiction writers have always been one step ahead of the technological curve. Although none anticipated the proliferation of personal computers, countless other life-changing technologies first entered our collective consciousness in fictional form. Aldous Huxley, writing in 1932, imagined a world populated by genetically engineered humans twenty-one years before Watson and Crick discovered the double-helix structure of DNA; Arthur C. Clarke famously envisioned the communications satellite in 1945, twelve years before the launch of Sputnik I and nineteen years before the first geostationary satellite was placed in orbit; George Orwell foresaw closed-circuit surveillance technology decades before Big Brother peered at us through electronic eyes in the ceiling of every Wal-Mart store; and in 1984, William Gibson's Neuromancer described a world dominated by a global computer network called “the matrix” nearly a decade before the world wide web went online.

But today, as the rate of technological advancement increases exponentially every year, science fiction (“SF”) writers are facing stiff competition, from scientists themselves and also from that specialized breed of pseudo-psychics known as “futurists.” Yet good SF writers still possess something that most scientists and futurists sorely lack—namely, the capacity to translate a potential new technology into the foundation for a vividly imagined and emotionally engaging world. So last spring, when researching the numerous scientific and futurist claims regarding immortality for this issue of WIE, one question naturally emerged: Who can fully conceive of what will happen to the human race once we're all finally liberated from the ever-looming blight of death?

Enter acclaimed Canadian science fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer.

Sawyer has considered the human implications of various forms of immortality in seven of his seventeen novels, beginning ten years ago with his book The Terminal Experiment. Winning 1995's Nebula Award—science fiction's equivalent of the Oscar—for best novel, the story revolves around a medical equipment engineer who one day stumbles upon empirical proof of the undying human soul. Although the SF genre typically avoids dealing with such transcendental topics, Sawyer's boldness propelled him to the forefront of his field, eventually winning him the Hugo Award (SF's other top prize) for best novel in 2003.

With his latest book, Mindscan, Sawyer puts an intriguing spin on the living-forever theme. Its premise? That in the near future, human beings will be able to duplicate themselves while still alive by copying their consciousness into indestructible robotic bodies, thus ensuring their ability to live dramatically longer lives. But the question remains: Once there are two of you, which is the real you? Like most of Sawyer's work, Mindscan ventures into subjects that few SF authors dare to take seriously—questions concerning the nature of consciousness, the soul, and God—and remains firmly grounded in scientific theory while excelling in the speculative fiction department as well.

Employing that skill to full effect when I spoke with him about this issue's feature topic, Sawyer explained the scientific basis behind some claims of imminent immortality, but he extrapolated well beyond the science into a vision of the future that could stretch even the most avid SF reader's already open mind.

I: Fear of Death, Frozen Heads, and Uploaded Souls

What is Enlightenment: A lot of people probably don't realize that the subject of radical life extension—or even immortality itself—isn't just the stuff of science fiction, but that a growing number of scientists from a variety of fields are taking the possibility very seriously. What do you suppose is motivating the current spate of research into this topic?

Robert J. Sawyer: There is no question that from the moment at which we first became conscious of our own mortality, we've lived in fear of death. A defining characteristic of human consciousness is the ability to think ahead, anticipate what's going to happen in the future, and plan to avoid an unpleasant future or work out a good one. Cows, for example, never sit there asking, “How can I be the best of all possible cows tomorrow?” They're just a cow, day after day.

We have that ability. And so we also foresee the end of our own existence, and dread it. Cows don't fear that eventually they're going to die. They'll certainly be terrified if they see you coming at them with a battle axe, but they're not terrified in a cosmic sense that some day it's all going to come to an end. But we are, from the moment we become aware of our mortality. And so the drive to circumvent death and go to great lengths to avoid it has always been with us—the pyramids are a classic example, but there's also the apocryphal story of Walt Disney having his head cut off and frozen in liquid nitrogen. Somehow the idea of death is so tremendously terrifying that we'll do anything to avoid it.

WIE: Given that in four billion years of biological evolution, nature has never produced a complex life-form capable of living forever, do you think there's a degree of human arrogance involved in such pursuits as cryogenics, in which one chooses to have one's body preserved on ice with hopes of eventually being thawed out?

Sawyer: There is humongous hubris here. The TV series Futurama had great fun with this—all these twentieth-century frozen heads on display in the future. We think somehow that the future would benefit from having the intellect of you or me around five hundred or five thousand years from now. But in fact, with very few exceptions, if you were to go back five hundred or five thousand years and pluck Joe Blow from that era and bring him to the present, there's no contribution of any particular weight that he could make to our culture. Of course, if you could somehow magically revive Isaac Newton or William Shakespeare, there might be some value in that. But it is enormously hubristic and egotistical to think that what the future really needs is Rob Sawyer or Tom Huston. It doesn't. What the future really needs is the people in the future.

WIE: Do you believe that soon we will have technologies available to us that will prevent us from dying in the first place, making us truly immortal?

Sawyer: Well, first, we should define our terms. When we talk about immortality, if we mean actually living forever—i.e., you will survive as long as the universe survives—I don't think any of the technologies on the horizon are going to do that for us. In terms of substantially prolonging the human life span, I do think that biotechnology will make that possible. The fact that the human body decays after a handful of decades is an unfortunate fact of nature, but it's hardly an immutable law of the universe that bodies have to rapidly wear out and die. I don't know that it will happen in my lifetime, but I recently told my best friend, who just had a baby boy, “You and I are probably not going to live to see the twenty-second century, but there's no question that your son Sebastian is. In fact, I'm willing to bet that Sebastian is going to live to see the twenty-third century.” In other words, that he's going to live to be a couple of centuries old.

WIE: You've written in your novels about a number of different methods for prolonging life, including genetic engineering and nanotechnology—the idea that we can build molecule-sized robots to live inside our bodies and continuously repair any routine wear and tear. Are there any other technologies that you see emerging as serious contenders for our ticket to immortality?

Sawyer: Here we come to a fork in the road, because there are two ways you can look at profound extension of human life. One is to try and make this flesh and blood container last as long as possible. And I think I recently read a statistic that there are now over a thousand people on the planet earth who have documented proof that they're over 110 years old. Well, about 110 years—maybe 120, if we're really lucky—seems to be the maximum that our human bodies can survive without wearing out. Biotechnology and nanotechnology might give us 50–100, maybe even 150 years of additional life. But still, we are talking about something that's made of fundamentally fragile material. There's a reason that if you fall out of a forty-story office building, you go splat.

So the other possibility is to say, “No, the substrate, the flesh and bone infrastructure on which our consciousness rests, is inherently not durable over long time scales—century, millennia, epoch time scales. It is not good enough for that.” And then you get into the really radical notions of life prolongation, which involve the wholesale, total replacement of the body with something that's robotic, something that's mechanical, something that's durable and is designed to last on mind-bogglingly long time scales.

WIE: You're referring to the popular concept of “uploading consciousness,” which your new novel Mindscan explores. Can you say a bit more about the possibility that somehow, we'll soon be able to copy our carbon-based minds into silicon machines?

Sawyer: Yes. Mindscan takes as its starting point something that Ray Kurzweil said in his book The Age of Spiritual Machines: that by the year 2019, we will have sufficient technology to scan with absolute fidelity everything that physically constitutes the human brain. That is, we will be able to map all of the interconnections, all of the synapses, and all of the neurotransmitter levels that are instantiated in each of those synapses. These days, everybody knows that you can digitize any kind of information to any degree of resolution you want. You can have a crappy MP3 recording of a song, or you can have a really full-bodied CD-quality recording. So the idea is that if you could make a high-resolution map of the brain, you could digitize it, and if you could digitize it, you could copy it somewhere else. And if you can put it somewhere else, you can put it inside a robotic body with cameras for eyes to look out on the world.

WIE: I suppose that might be better than biological immortality, at least in terms of physical durability. It certainly worked for Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator. But what do you think about the scientific plausibility of this concept?

Sawyer: It will absolutely be possible to scan a human brain and reinstantiate that brain inside a computer within the next twenty years. I don't think anyone seriously disputes that. Even today, with our MRIs and our CAT scanners, we're getting very good at being able to map how the brain stores some codes of information. The question is whether there's something beyond just Newtonian mechanics, and/or beyond just neural nets, that makes up consciousness. Is what we see when we look at networks of synapses the actual consciousness, or, to use Roger Penrose's phrase, is it just a “shadow” of the real consciousness, which we haven't yet located? A shadow can be a good imitation of a substance, precisely mimicking its movements, but it isn't the same thing. So even though we might indeed scan the neural nets and neurotransmitter levels perfectly, we might not be copying everything—some ineffable part of what we are might still be lost.

Will people opt for this technology? Absolutely. Will many people be happy with the results? Most transhumanists, who are reductionists to the core, will be. Will something nonetheless be lost in the copying? I suspect so. Still, a copy that is 99.9999 percent you is way, way more you than any child you might ever have, who, at best, is just fifty percent you. And parents talk about their children as being their immortality.

WIE: Okay, but even if we did have the ability to copy our minds into machines, what would happen to our souls?

Sawyer: Well, I hopefully demolished that problem in Mindscan. Though I personally do not believe in souls, I do believe that the logic of how we define souls does not preclude their transportation to somewhere else—whether it's the Hindu version of the soul that says it can be reincarnated in another body, the Christian version of the soul that says it can go to heaven or hell after death, or the more generically spiritual version of the soul that says it can leave this plane of existence and move to another.

Here's the argument: The soul clearly can exist separate from the body; we know that if we believe that the soul goes somewhere after death. We know that the soul has volition; God does not judge physical bodies. He doesn't say, “Bad hand, bad hand that hit that person.” It was the bad soul that motivated you to hit that person. So we judge the soul on the basis of the fact that it can make choices. If you accept those two premises—that a soul can do what it chooses to do and that the soul can leave the body and go somewhere else—then when you transfer your consciousness into the android body, if it was your soul's wish to do this, your soul can just as easily move over and take up residence in the android body. There's no theological barrier to the soul following the digitally copied version of your mind to wherever that mind goes.