Upgrading hardware

A short story by Kurt Vonnegut, Unready to Wear, captures how I imagine the trajectory of the human race. We are burdened by the meatbags we are not to be able to go far enough due to physiological constraints. To be more specific, Asimov's The Last Question is an even better depiction — at the very least a more hopeful one. At a certain point we are indeed floating blobs of energy. But something vital doesn’t follow us there.

Emotion is still largely tied to our physicality, I'm not sure how that part will transcend the evolution of becoming a floating blob of energy.

Some of my happiest moments have been tied to there being something physical evaluating to emotional at the end.

Follow this to its logical conclusion:

1. sensory input -> touch, sight, temperature.

2. pattern recognition -> face, gaze, meaning.

3. neurochemistry -> dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin.

4. memory + prediction -> brain linking it to significance

The “emotion” is an emergent state built from physical processes.

But a more complete abstraction would probably be to say that emotion = valenced, self-relevant state over time.

We could go this way:

No body -> no hormones -> no limbic system -> no emotion.

Warmth, eye contact, etc. literally cannot exist. At best, you'd have an abstract evaluation.

But then we could also take a super hypothetical sci-fi way. Where biological brain attraction transforms into an energy substrate in computing perhaps. Essentially, warmth could be a sign of low entropy and attraction could be a sign of mutual optimization.

Under this framework emotion (post-biological) = trajectories in state-space that optimize relevance under constraints.

Therefore, the structure of meaning does survive, but the currently recognized feeling does not.

I would make the tradeoff of being a floating blob of energy instead of a meatbag any day, but I would be giving a vital part of life. Which puts to question the motive of being alive and conscious.

To examine that one must look at motives, going past our animalistic instincts of surviving and multiplying, one might argue that we have advanced to a point of doing anything not to get bored of existence. In Asimov's Last Answer, the being is how people would imagine a divine "all mighty" being — the voice — that desires to cease existence.

This desire for an "end" is universal among trapped minds. Enjoying little things has so much more meaning to it, it could be the path to true happiness; one could start by rubbing Buddha's foot and whispering "content equals happy three times".

Existence beyond biology risks boredom. Boredom breeds the universal trapped-mind with a desire for an “end”; but embodied finitude is what prevents that end from feeling necessary.

We took a giant leap towards the infinity and stumbled down a staircase back into the stone ages where we inherently belong.