Leaky Abstractions and Uploading

The human experience of the world is built on layers and layers of abstractions--for instance, the human eye doesn't actually perceive movement. It shoots a series of little snapshots, and then your brain reassembles them, does a little calculation and tells you if things are moving. You don't actually see anything move. Also, you have a tiny blind spot in the middle of your eye where the optic nerve attaches to your retina. Also, your peripheral vision is a) blurry as all get out and b) color-blind. Your brain just fills in the blurriness for you

Now, mostly none of this actually matters. You mostly can tell when things are moving, and you mostly don't care that there's a tiny spot you can't see in the center of your eye. They're a good abstractions: they don't distract you with extraneous details, and leave you the information you need. Mostly. Sometimes though, knowing that there's a tiny blindspot in the center of your eye is important. Like when you're trying to look at a tiny, tiny speck of light--a star, say. Then it's useful to know that looking a few degrees to the left or right will get you a much clearer and brighter image.

The point of all this is: abstractions leak. Biological abstractions, software abstractions, mental abstractions, physical abstractions--all of them. When they leak, things can go wrong really fast. Auto-immune disorders, buggy code, phantom pains, dogmatism, faulty scientific theories; all of these can be traced to abstractions that have sprung a leak.

There's not really a solution for this problem. We need abstractions. Without them all there is is a mass of chaotic, incoherent data screaming at us. Without abstractions, we can't function. Before acting on anything, first we have to create an abstraction of it. The only solution is to be aware of the existence of our abstractions and be wary of their capacity to trick us. The map is not the territory, etc. If we're lucky, maybe we come up with a better abstraction every once and a while.

So what does this have to do with uploading? Well, think about it--uploading is moving our entire existence into an abstraction. Instead of moving our real arm through real space to manipulate real objects, we move an abstraction of an arm through an abstraction of space to manipulate abstractions of objects--all of which has to be processed through code running on real hardware, which may or may not have a piece of conductive dust fall across an important component. Simply put, the possibility for catastrophic abstraction failure becomes enormous. Our physical bodies have a multitude of feedbacks, some quite extreme, to keep our abstractions in line with reality--the senses, pain, hunger, exhaustion, etc. Uploading will quite deliberately trade those meaningful feeds for user-generated ones. Instead of keeping tabs on what's happening to the real physical substrate for our existence, we'll be drinking virtual champagne while having virtual sex with each other.

It strikes me as a scenario with some pretty striking fail states.