 All right our last speaker for this morning will be again the vice president of the Mormon transhumanist association Chris Bradford Chris will be speaking this time on bodies without end embodiment in a substrate independent world Please welcome Chris back to the stage Thanks, I've really been enjoying it this morning Looking forward to the rest of the conference Joseph Smith said That which is without body or parts is nothing The great principle of happiness consists in having a body All beings who have bodies have power over those who have not Mormonism teaches that God is embodied and that our own embodiment is a primary purpose of our existence But what do we mean by embodiment? Be all you philosophy professor James Falconer raises some important questions quote The bodies of flesh and bone with which I am familiar do not shine Have blood cannot hover can be wounded and die must move through contiguous points of space time In short, they are not at all like the bodies of the father and the son So what does it mean to say that the father and the son have bodies? When I use the word body in any other context I never refer to something that shines can hover is immortal and moves through space seemingly without being troubled by walls and doors Given the vast difference between what we mean by the word body in every other case and That to which the word refers in this case One can legitimately ask whether the word body has the same meaning in this case that it has in the others close quote Some of the characteristics Falconer calls out as tip as atypical of human bodies Correspond with transhumanist visions of post-human physical capabilities Can we find a definition of embodiment that applies equally well to our current experience as to God's experience? current or future I Suggest that there are three parts to such a definition Which taken together are necessary and sufficient for the concept of embodiment to hold with respect to a given substrate in electronics Substrate refers to the physical material upon which a semiconductor device such as a photovoltaic cell or integrated circuit is applied in Biology substrate is the natural environment in which an organism lives or the surface or medium on which an organism grows or is attached Both of these features of substrate are relevant to a concept of embodiment the material that makes up the entity and The environment in which the entity is situated The first part of my proposed definition of embodiment is input To be embodied is To receive input from the environment Something that cannot be affected by a given environment cannot reasonably be said to be embodied with respect to that environment think of disembodied ghosts through which objects pass without effect as Falconer puts it embodiment implies Situated openness to a world Divine embodiment also implies that God is affected by the world and by persons in his world. I See this reflected in Joseph Smith's discussion of happiness or sorrow and bodies The second part of my proposed definition of embodiment is output To be embodied is to be able to affect the environment Something that cannot affect an environment in any way would be undetectable to that environment and again Cannot reasonably be said to be embodied with respect to that environment And here is the connection between the two features of the term substrate The material that makes up an entity and the environment in which the entity is situated are really the same thing Allowing the entity to affect its environment This does not mean that the entity and its environment are completely Homogenous for example, I can move the sand on the beach although I am not composed of sand However at a fundamental level the characteristics of the material that makes up the sand the environment and that which it makes up Me the entity are such that they can interact and affect one another and I see this interaction reflected in Joseph Smith's statement that embodied beings have power over those without bodies Precisely because they can have power in a substrate not available to the unembodied Now a quick note that in Mormonism, there really is no such thing as unembodied And so I take this to mean unembodied with respect to our current substrate So are these two parts input and output sufficient to define embodiment? One might reasonably consider a system of inputs and outputs a body However the substrate itself already meets these criteria it both affects and is affected by the embodied entity Yet we typically don't consider the environment as a whole embodied The term Embodiment Implies something beyond the body Something active in the body Mormon scripture teaches that the spirit and the body are the soul of man We don't usually call a corpse embodied nor a meteor or a pebble What is this spirit or self that is active in a body? I propose with many others that the spirit is a pattern A pattern is embodied and gives rise to the specifics of the interaction between the embodied entity and its environment So this leads us to the third part of my proposed definition of embodiment A feedback system That is to say an embodied entity is influenced by and influences itself as well as the environment Or in other words the entity is embodied in the substrate of its own body recursively Douglas Hofstadter, cognitive science professor at Indiana University In among others I am a strange loop and Gerdl Escher Bach outlines this reflexive and recursive nature of the pattern of the self Antonio D'Amazio, professor of neuroscience at USC is leading efforts to identify neural and physical structures and processes Supporting this reflexive feedback loop that constitutes the self I propose that these three parts input output and a feedback loop are sufficient to establish a definition of embodiment Now this embodiment is always with respect to a given substrate So what do we make of substrate independence then? Well we start to see hints of substrate independence as we learn that the mind treats our tools as extensions of our body Or when we feel a meshing with a car that we're driving and we feel it as an extension of our body That we start to extend that substrate that we normally think of as our embodied self D'Amazio's work on the biological foundations of emotion crucial to the reflexive self Suggest that mind uploading must really be self uploading body and mind in order to preserve the self And we can also note that we can be embodied simultaneously in multiple substrates For example at home and in second life or in our dreams where we may be simultaneously spiritually and physically embodied Which fits quite well with Mormon paradigms of spiritual and physical embodiment Faulkner reminds us that in Mormonism quote the body is not something that acts as a container for something non-bodily For the spirit is also incarnate In fact in reference to bodies there are no non-incarnate things This suggests that we cannot understand incarnation as something unembodied becoming embodied It is bodies of some kind all the way down Close quote And given that under my proposed definition bodies themselves are also substrates in which ourselves and others are embodied I suggest that it is also bodies of some kind all the way up Perhaps our substrate is part of the body of God Bodies without end Time for a few questions As science thinks that there's at least like 10 dimensions at this point maybe a couple more Do you think that each dimension has its own embodiment form? You know I don't know much about embodiment forms in other dimensions There is Just in the concept of physics itself Yeah so one of the things that fascinated me at a summer program that I attended at BYU Was this idea of four dimensional space and how it might manifest itself in three dimensions And actually there's another BYU philosophy professor David Paulson Who has done a lot of work on embodiment The history of embodiment in Christianity and in religious thought and comparisons with Mormonism And he has commented on this suggestion that perhaps our experience of God in this substrate is a manifestation of some higher dimensional embodiment of God And so I think that's definitely a possibility worth considering And then the Institute of Ethics and Emerging Technologies this morning I have an article called Don't Go to Sleep in the Cold Which is about very much what you're talking about Where the current belief is that possibly for some you can upload your mind and be recreated into an android Like in the case of being a 48 But in some other circumstances people believe that they will have their body or will need their body And you mentioned there that there is a you know can there be a self or soul without some piece of the physical body And is that a Mormon belief or is that specifically your outlook on who the self is or is a personality Anything more than just your, is there a genetic aspect to your personality? Well I think there's no question that there are genetic influences on personality As far as the question of can there be a self without a body Certainly in Mormon thought as I mentioned that the idea of embodiment is pervasive That there's no such thing as an unembodied entity But I think more pertinent to the question about you know about self and embodiment is some of the things that Antonio de Mazza has been doing He postulates that and has detected areas in the brain where we have essentially a body map And that that body map is in a very stable portion of the brain and it enables a persistent concept of self So that when we wake up in the morning from unconsciousness that we wake up to a continuation of consciousness There's still this stable representation It's certainly not unchanging and so I think that as we explore further substrates in which ourselves can manifest That that concept will adapt just as it would for someone whose body changes in some other way Whether as we grow naturally or if someone were to lose a part of their body or something But I think that that concept of having a representation this reflexive and stable representation of self is really critical And that plus the idea of inputs and outputs I propose is what embodiment is So it's not necessarily this particular body but it is those three things in whatever substrate they are in To further that just one thing would that possibly include a technological body? You're still physical but within an android or a robot Absolutely, could include that