Transcendence Film, Transcendence Physics (3)

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Let’s now reflect on what in particular I find so compelling about Transcendence.  It asks three existential questions, and offers stunning answers vis-a-vis the work of Michio Kaku.

What is the essence of who we are? 

Consciousness and intelligence, maybe soul and personality. Of course the whole of who we are makes us who we are. But when we talk about essence, we get positively elemental in our focus, attention and ideas. So while the body may be the most evidential aspect of who we are, by itself it simply doesn’t define who are. Clearly for Evelyn Caster, the essence of her dying beloved husband is his consciousness.

What if we were to displace that essence from one medium (body) to another medium (machine)?

Not just any machine, of course, but rather a quantum computer. Presumably this computer has enough intelligence and infrastructure to accommodate our essence. But the film suggests that it is Will Caster’s mind that makes that computer super-intelligent and super-capable. In other words, the machine in and of itself is merely a platform or a framework. Scientists and technologists have labored for decades to create artificial intelligence; Transcendence suggests that it is inevitably human intelligence that makes machines intelligent. 

Once displaced what is the nature of our new being? 

Kaku envisions us becoming virtually boundless. We can actually ride a beam of light, just as Einstein imagined in his thought experiments, because we aren’t constrained by the physical limits of our body. We can actually explore the ends of the universe, far far more capably and efficiently than any means at our disposal. In Transcendence, it is as if a hologram of the erstwhile scientist were uploaded onto that quantum computer. But it is a hologram with wide-ranging awareness, knowledge and abilities. 

Bree | The biggest threat humanity has ever faced is one of your own making, self-aware technology. Computers control our banks, our airports, our national security, our lives. Once they are able to think for themselves, they'll use this power to destroy us, unless we fight back. We can unplug from the network. We can stop the scientists who invent these machines. We can lead the revolution that will save our species. We are RIFT [Revolutionary Independence from Technology] This is just the beginning.

Reference: Transcendence Movie Quotes.

But as with many science fiction film, all of the above inviolably takes place in a human context. There will always be people, it seems, who fear technology advancement and who fashion resistance à la the revolutionaries in history. But if we were to take a film like Transcendence as a kind of self-contained debate, nay, fight, on such matters, then we give ourselves an opportunity to work through all sorts of dilemma that science fact Kaku (rf. Dreaming in Code: Michio Kaku's Future of the Mind) and the science fiction Casters (rf. 'Transcendence': Johnny Deep in a bold, beautiful flight of futuristic speculation) seem to dismiss.