Chapter 24
Enhanced Versions Of You
One of the most exciting implications of superimmortality is that your future existences need not be limited to what your current brain can produce. Enhancement is virtually certain, given enough time and the right conditions.
What Enhancement Means
An enhaidentireplica is a body whose brain structure and functioning is based on yours but improved in some way. The improvement could be in any dimension of conscious experience:
Cognitive enhancement. A brain with more neurons, more connections, or more efficient processing could produce a consciousness that thinks faster, remembers more, and understands more deeply — with your personality, your values, your way of seeing the world.
Sensory enhancement. Your current senses are limited by evolution to a narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum and a narrow range of sound frequencies. An enhanced version of you could see infrared and ultraviolet, hear ultrasonic frequencies, feel the magnetic field of the Earth — or perceive through entirely new senses that have no analogue in current human experience.
The Continuity of Enhancement
An important question: if an enhanced version of you has a different brain structure, how can it still be you?
The answer lies in the continuum nature of ixperiencitness. Your ixperiencitness is not an all-or-nothing property. It can be partially shared between two consciousnesses. An enhaidentireplica would have the core patterns of your ixperiencitness (your personality, your cognitive style, your emotional character) while also having enhanced capabilities that you currently lack.
This is not fundamentally different from the way you change throughout your life. As we saw in Chapter 22, you have already survived transformations so radical that your earlier and later selves share almost nothing in terms of specific brain structure, yet your ixperiencitness has evolved while maintaining continuity.
The Relationship Between Enhancement and Degradation
If enhancement is possible, so is its opposite: degradation. A brain with diminished organization would produce a consciousness that is recognizably yours but impoverished, less intelligent, less perceptive, less emotionally rich.
This is not a theoretical concern. It happens in real life, all the time. Aging degrades brain function. Diseases like Alzheimer's degrade brain structure. Strokes destroy specific brain regions. In each case, the person's consciousness is diminished: they lose memories, abilities, aspects of their personality.
From the perspective of ixperiencitness, degradation is the loss of aspects of yourself. The person with severe Alzheimer's still has some of your ixperiencitness — they are still, in some diminished sense, "you" — but they have lost much of what made your experience rich and full.
Key Terms in This Chapter
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