The Theseus Experiment
by John.e.Normal
In spite of everything that has changed, there is a certain continuity in my psychological history that allows me to see my current predicament as inevitable. My earliest memories concern my long running struggle with mortality. It manifested itself as extreme anxiety when I contemplated my eventual non-existence. I would wake from a state of semi-sleep filled with adrenalin, I would run though the house and into the backyard screaming, where my mother would find me curled into a ball whimpering. She would carry me back to bed as the feelings subsided, and I would fall asleep exhausted by my own thoughts.
I first contemplated a crude form of the experiment as a teenager when I encountered the parable of the Ship of Theseus. In this ancient philosophical paradox we are told that a ship leaves port and over the course of its voyage every single part of it is gradually replaced. We are then asked whether it is the same ship when it arrives home. To me this philosophical puzzle contained the key to its own solution. It was the source of the clearest idea about the mind I have ever had: one's identity is contained only in the continuity through time of a system of relationships. The consequences for consciousness were immediately apparent to me. If I could replace each part of my brain, one by one, I could achieve immortality of my mind.
I thought about the experiment on and off for years, but it was not until I had finished graduate school and was spending my life inside medical research labs that I had access to the resources I would need. General programmable medical nano machines were relatively new and prohibitively expensive. The small number that were possessed by our lab were booked for experiments months in advance. Even though I had exhaustively formulated initial versions of the experiment, I was unable to proceed. Our research group relied on the funds that flowed from industry grants and their related projects, and these experiments always had precedence over our own research interests. The era of basic research was over, and I was a part of the industrial medical technology complex that had replaced it.
I monitored the equipment log books religiously, and identified any spare weekend or evening when one or more of the bots were idle. I took these opportunities to learn what they were capable of. I replaced individual neurons inside the brains of rats, in their cerebellum, cerebral cortex and hypothalamus. I learned how to configure them until they replicated the behaviour of the cell they were dislodging. By reading the synaptic activity and chemical variability I could pre-tune the software so that when I dropped one in place there was only a temporary aggregate change in the behaviour of the surrounding neurons.
I sacrificed rats and rabbits to my cause. Not in one single experiment, but gradually, chipping away at their brains until they were like cheddar cheese, riddled with holes where I had inserted nano-tech for a weekend, and then removed it when the clock ran out. I was careful to choose animals who were being used for altogether different research projects. Although, the gradual mental retardation of the test subjects did not go unnoticed. Inexplicable degradation of test animal behaviour sparked multiple reviews of our lab procedures. Every time there was an inquiry I needed to stop the program and patiently wait for everything to be cleared.
I was only able to conduct a very small proof of concept on these lab animals. The data I gathered was promising but it was accumulating at a painfully slow rate. If I was ever going to run the full experiment then I needed consistent access to nano-tech. I needed the time to configure and fine tune software that could build and run the large scale neural simulations. My rat trials were promising, but it was still so early that I knew the project would never get ethical clearance to move on to human brains.
