New Orbit Magazine: Issue 04, October 2018

human world when a newborn baby was
swapped out by malicious beings for a fairy
child, physically identical to the original but
cursed and inhuman.
Today, we struggle with new forms of selfduplication.
Is that connection between
today’s me and yesterday’s me broken if I
suffer a significant enough brain injury? If I
die for a few minutes and am successfully
resuscitated? What about the ever-increasing
popularity of cryogenic freezing? Will the me
that resurfaces in 100 years’ time have any
connection to the me that they freeze?
Start-up company Humai is making their
own attempt to hack into human mortality by
measuring and quantifying the way one’s
living brain works, and then after death,
transferring that brain into a robotic body and
replicating the collected actions and
behaviours to approximate a resurrection. In
their own words:
True, we already have prosthetics and robotics
that can be controlled with input from human
brainwaves, and nanotechnology already exists
for some forms of microscopic biological
repair, however almost none of the technology
required to transcript the patterns of the
human brain (nor to replicate it on a
functional scale) yet exists. Despite this, CEO
Josh Bocanegra has claimed that his team will
have resurrected their first human some time
within the next 30 years.
The Arnie Greensway we meet in Happy First
Day! is one product of a technology like this.
Interestingly, he is little preoccupied with his
identity as a single token of a well-populated
type. After all, as the outcome of such a
problem, not its originator, the fear of
replacement completely loses relevance; I have
everything to lose in transferring my
consciousness into a new body, if it turns out
that a new consciousness is created and mine
extinguished, rather than my original one
being moved. The new consciousness,
however, not only
identifies as me, but
has already been put
into the new and
improved vessel. She
has nothing left to fear.
Can we say that this
consciousness, because
it is new or a duplicate,
has any less value than
the consciousness of
an original human?
Outside of our integral
human anxiety about
replication and being
replaced, there’s not
really any reason that
we can. My new and
improved clone is a
person just as much as
I was, with thoughts