Ishtar and Mind Uploading
There is something wonderfully reassuring about losing a watch. It may be expensive, sentimental, inherited from a grandfather whose taste improved considerably after his death, but the philosophical consequences are negligible. The watch is gone and you remain. A telephone presents a slightly more interesting case because we have spent the last twenty years transferring an alarming proportion of our lives into small rectangles of glass. Photographs, correspondence, calendars, passwords, directions, lovers and occasionally our ability to remember our own telephone numbers now live there. Drop one into the sea, however, and nobody standing on the pier will seriously suggest that you went into the water with it.
A coat is easier still. Jewelry presents no difficulty. Glasses may briefly complicate the walk home, but not the identity of the person making it. We know how to distinguish between ourselves and our possessions with such confidence that the question seems almost childish.
This confidence is useful because it allows an experiment to begin somewhere harmless. The trouble starts only after we discover how many times we can answer the same question.
Remove something.
Still you?
Yes.
Very well. Remove something else.
An Experiment Older Than the Laboratory
Several thousand years before anyone proposed scanning a human brain, Mesopotamian literature had already constructed a remarkably elegant machine for subtraction. In the Descent of Inanna, the goddess travels toward the underworld and encounters a succession of gates. At each she is required to surrender something associated with her dress, authority or divine status. The precise interpretation of these objects belongs to Assyriology rather than futurism, and there is no sensible reason to pretend that the people who transmitted the story were secretly debating neural emulation.
That would actually make the story less interesting.
What survived from antiquity was not an answer to a modern technological problem but a structure capable of generating one. A person approaches a threshold carrying the attributes by which she is recognized. Something is removed. She continues. At the next threshold, something else is removed. The procedure repeats until the distinction between what the traveler possesses and what the traveler is becomes increasingly uncomfortable.
It is difficult to design a cleaner thought experiment.
Enter. Surrender something. Continue.
Then ask whether the same traveler has arrived at the next gate.
We normally imagine history as a warehouse of obsolete answers. It may be more useful, occasionally, to think of it as a warehouse of exceptionally durable questions.
The Body Is Less Helpful Than It Looks
The obvious modern response is to move the boundary inward. Of course the watch is not the person; the person is the body wearing it. Unfortunately, medicine has spent a considerable part of its history making that answer progressively less convenient.
Teeth can be replaced. Joints can be replaced. Limbs can be lost and prostheses fitted. Medical devices can become indispensable to the continued functioning of a body. Organs may be transplanted. None of these interventions is trivial to the patient, but neither the law nor ordinary human intuition normally treats successful surgery as the appearance of a numerically new citizen.
The person who enters the operating theatre and the person who leaves it may differ physically in ways that would have astonished almost every civilization before ours. We nevertheless assume continuity.
This does not prove anything exotic about consciousness. It certainly does not establish the existence of an immaterial soul, and it does not demonstrate that minds can migrate between substrates. It merely ruins an easy answer. If replacing or losing part of the body does not necessarily replace the person, then personal identity cannot be located simply by pointing at whichever anatomical component happens to be missing.
The gatekeeper therefore moves inward again.
Suppose we remove a memory.
Most of us have already lost thousands.
Still you?
The answer remains irritatingly easy.
Eventually the Cheap Answers Run Out
Memory is where the Seven Gates cease to be an amusing game with possessions and begin to resemble a serious problem. A human being does not retain a perfect archive of his or her past. Childhood disappears in fragments. Names vanish. Faces survive after the circumstances in which we met them have gone. Entire years can contract into a few scenes whose accuracy we seldom have the opportunity to verify.
Yet we tolerate this erosion without holding a funeral for the person we were yesterday.
So one memory cannot be the boundary.
Nor, presumably, ten.
But now the gate has acquired an unpleasant property: we do not know where to stop.
Remove enough memory and our confidence begins to weaken. Alter temperament and the problem becomes worse. Change preferences, emotional responses, habits, language, recognition and personality, and at some point the phrase same person begins to require qualifications.
The remarkable thing is that there is no little brass plate hidden somewhere in neuroscience reading:
MINIMUM CONTENT REQUIRED FOR ONE HUMAN SELF.
We know extraordinarily much about what injury and disease can do to memory, cognition and personality. What we do not possess is an agreed measurement telling us exactly how much may change before numerical identity itself has ceased.
And that uncertainty matters enormously once someone introduces a machine.
The Copier at the Sixth Gate
Mind uploading is often presented as an engineering problem. Acquire sufficiently detailed information about a brain, reproduce the relevant organization in another medium and allow the resulting system to continue the psychological life of the original person. The technical difficulties are immense, but they are not the difficulty that interests us here.
For the sake of the experiment, let us commit an outrageous act of generosity and assume that the engineers succeed.
The machine records everything that can possibly matter. Memories, voice, mannerisms, preferences, fears, intellectual habits, emotional associations and the peculiar private geography by which one human mind recognizes its own past are reproduced with perfect fidelity. The resulting entity opens its eyes, recognizes your wife, dislikes the same wine and remembers entering the scanner.
What has happened?
One possibility is extraordinary.
We have copied a person.
That is not obviously the same proposition as saying that the person has travelled.
The distinction becomes embarrassingly visible if the original survives the procedure. There are now two claimants possessing the same autobiographical history up to the moment of copying. Both remember childhood. Both remember entering the laboratory. Both can sincerely insist that they are the person whose appointment was booked for Tuesday morning.
The machine may therefore have accomplished something almost miraculous without answering the question for which we built it.
It has demonstrated duplication.
It has not demonstrated passage.
The Interesting Part May Be the Arrow
This is where diagrams become more useful than metaphysics.
Imagine the first process as:
A → A + COPY(A)
The original remains and a second instance appears.
Now consider what people often mean when they speak casually about technological immortality:
A → A′
Something begins as A, undergoes transformation and continues as A′.
At first glance the difference appears grammatical. It is not. In the first diagram, the important achievement is fidelity. In the second, the important achievement is continuity.
We spend enormous amounts of intellectual energy discussing the objects on either side of the arrow. How accurately must the destination reproduce the source? Which neural structures matter? Must the substrate be biological? Could silicon perform the relevant computation? How much information would be required?
All are legitimate questions.
But the Seven Gates suggest another one.
What does the arrow mean?
A human life already contains astonishing discontinuities of material, memory and personality. The adult is not materially identical to the child. The elderly woman may remember only fragments of the girl she once was. Beliefs reverse, bodies change, personalities mellow or harden, and consciousness itself disappears every night into states whose philosophical interpretation remains surprisingly troublesome.
Nevertheless, we describe a life as a continuous journey.
Perhaps we are right.
But if continuity is doing important work in our concept of personal identity, copying everything found at one end of the journey may not automatically reproduce the journey itself.
A map of Venice can be perfect without becoming Venice. A second performance can reproduce every note without becoming yesterday’s concert. Information may describe continuity without necessarily constituting it.
Or perhaps it does constitute it.
That is precisely the point.
We do not yet know.
Please Do Not Put a Soul Behind the Seventh Door
There is a particularly human temptation at this stage of the experiment. Having removed everything we know how to remove, we would like to place our preferred answer behind the final door and congratulate ourselves on having discovered it.
The religious believer can write SOUL.
The computationalist may prefer INFORMATION.
The neuroscientist can nominate a biological process.
The transhumanist may choose PATTERN, CONSCIOUSNESS or some future vocabulary not yet available to us.
Any of these may ultimately prove useful. None has earned the right to be waiting behind the door merely because its supporters arrived first.
This is why the seventh gate is the most important one.
It should remain closed.
The purpose of a good reduction test is not to preserve the thing we hoped to find. It is to continue removing assumptions until another removal destroys the phenomenon we were attempting to explain. If we decide beforehand that the irreducible remainder must be a soul, information, biology or computation, we have not conducted the experiment. We have decorated our conclusion.
The old Mesopotamian structure is more disciplined than that.
Approach the gate.
Remove what can be removed.
Ask again.
Continue only while the answer survives.
The Last Thing on the Table
There is something almost comic about how far the experiment has travelled. We began with a watch.
We end with the possibility that civilization may one day construct an entity possessing every accessible memory, habit and characteristic of a human being and still be unable to answer the embarrassingly primitive question posed at the first door.
Still you?
Perhaps the answer will eventually be biological. Perhaps consciousness will prove transferable in some sense we cannot presently test. Perhaps identity is a pattern and continuity merely an intuition inherited from organisms that evolved to experience themselves one moment at a time. Perhaps the distinction between copy and continuation will itself dissolve when our concepts become adequate to the technology.
Transhumation has no reason to choose among those possibilities in advance.
That is what makes the seventh gate useful.
Inanna entered an ancient underworld surrendering the marks of what she had been. We approach another kind of threshold carrying brains, scanners, algorithms and a growing confidence that information can be preserved indefinitely. The costumes have changed. The architecture of the question has not.
We know how to lose a watch.
We are beginning to imagine how one might copy a mind.
The interesting question is what must happen before we are entitled to say that somebody actually crossed the gate.
And until we know that, the last door should remain closed.
Want to Know More?
How to Read the Word
By Alistair Brightworthton
Current Knowledge
Modern medicine demonstrates that substantial physical changes can occur without our ordinarily treating the patient as a new person. Neuroscience also strongly associates memory, personality and cognition with physical processes in the brain. Neither observation, however, gives us a scientifically established minimum set of properties required for numerical personal identity to persist.
Open Questions
Can personal identity be reduced entirely to reproducible information? Does subjective continuity require uninterrupted physical or biological processes? Could a perfect copy possess every psychologically relevant property of the original without literally being the same individual? And, crucially, what experiment could distinguish successful copying from genuine continuation?
Transhumation Interpretation
The Seven Gates is not evidence for a soul, mind uploading, or substrate-independent consciousness. It is a reduction test.
Possessions → tools → body → memory → personality → ?
The important discovery may not be what stands on either side of the final gate. It may be the unexplained continuity represented by the arrow between them:
A → A′
The arrow matters.
FAQ
What are the Seven Gates of Inanna or Ishtar?
In the Mesopotamian descent tradition, Inanna passes through successive gates of the underworld and is progressively stripped of elements of her regalia and power. Transhumation uses the structure of this story as a modern thought experiment about identity.
What does Ishtar have to do with mind uploading?
The ancient story itself has nothing to do with mind uploading. The connection is structural: at each gate something is removed while the traveler continues. That creates a useful modern question—how much can be removed, replaced or copied before personal identity no longer continues?
Would a perfect mind upload still be you?
We do not know. A sufficiently accurate upload might reproduce memories, personality and behavior, but successful copying alone would not establish that the original person’s subjective continuity had transferred to the copy.
What is the difference between copying and transferring a mind?
Copying produces another instance containing information associated with the original. Transfer implies continuity from the original person to the resulting person. The second claim is much harder to establish.
What is the Seventh Gate question?
What can you not leave at the last gate and still remain you?
Continue the Transhumation Series
- Forgotten Religion | Ancient Gods, Symbols and the Hidden Structures of Human Civilization
- The Last Religion | Death, Immortality and the Future of Humanity
- The New Theurgy | AI, Information and the Future of Human Civilization
- End of Branding: You Were Never Meant to Become a Product
- Baal vs Ishtar: Why Ancient Gods Never Disappeared