A journey from digital dreams to the living edge of intention — cutting through illusion, memory, and the fiber-optic clarity of consciousness.
Prologue: The Facebook Snippet and the Impossible Upload
Morning has its rituals. For me, it’s coffee, a cigarette, the slow rhythm of oat porridge, and the familiar flick of thumb across screen — social media as window, distraction, and sometimes, the spark for a day’s deeper journey.
That’s how it started: scrolling past the usual noise, I stumbled on a snippet from the Institute of Art and Ideas, quoting William Egginton.
Egginton didn’t bother with half-measures. His claim was sharp as broken glass: uploading minds to computers isn’t just technically impossible, it’s built on a fundamental misconception of consciousness and reality itself.
He likened the whole idea to poking at the singularity inside a black hole. “Like the mysterious limit lurking at the heart of black holes,” Egginton writes, “the singularity of another being’s experience of the world is something we can only ever approach but never arrive at.”
In other words: not only can you never truly know another’s mind, you can’t upload it, copy it, or escape the event horizon of lived experience.
I’ll admit, something in me bristled at the certainty. Maybe it was just the sand in my philosophical gears, or maybe it’s the residue of years spent navigating the edge between transformation and illusion.
It’s easy to be seduced by digital dreams — by the idea that everything essential can be downloaded, stored, or rendered eternal by the next upgrade. But when the language gets absolute, my instinct is to dig. Not to react, but to test the boundaries. To see if there’s more terrain beneath the surface, or if we’re all just circling the same black hole.
So, this isn’t just a rebuttal to Egginton or a swipe at the latest techno-optimist headline. It’s an invitation to take the journey deeper; a quest to follow the thread of consciousness from memory, to intention, to the places where the fiber-optic signal runs so clear you can almost hear the signal hum.
Not just to look, but to see.
And maybe, in the process, to find out why the urge to upload is less about immortality, and more about misunderstanding what it is to become.
Listen to a deep-dive episode by the Google NotebookLM Podcasters, as they explore this article in their unique style, blending light banter with thought-provoking studio conversations.
Memory Isn’t Mind — A Necessary Distinction
Let’s get something straight from the outset: memory isn’t mind. This is more than semantics; it’s the heart of why the dream of uploading a self runs aground, no matter how dazzling the technology.
The difference between storing memory and capturing consciousness is the difference between archiving a library and bottling the feeling you get when you read the words for the first time.
Technically speaking, uploading memory; data, life history, habits, even the intricate connections of a brain – may one day be possible, at least in some form.
That’s the carrot dangled by the likes of Ray Kurzweil, Dmitry Itskov, and the growing chorus of transhumanists promising “cybernetic immortality.” Their vision? Scan the brain, digitize the details, and upload “you” to the cloud, where your consciousness can outlive biology, death, and decay.
The sales pitch is sleek: if the hardware (your body) fails, just swap it out and keep running the software.
But here’s the glitch in the matrix: memory is data, not presence. You can upload every letter I’ve ever written, every photograph, every fragment of my private journals, and you’ll have an archive — no small thing, and maybe even a kind of digital afterlife.
But an archive is not a living “I.” The archive never wakes up in the morning, never feels the echo of loss, never surprises itself with a new question. It just sits, waiting for a reader, an observer, or maybe an algorithm to run its scripts.
This is where the AI analogy comes in. Large Language Models, like the ones that power today’s “smart” systems, are trained on massive datasets; books, articles, conversations, digital footprints. They are spectacular at mimicry, at recombining memory into plausible new responses. But at their core, they’re still just vast libraries waiting for a prompt.
The “I” that answers is a function of data plus activation, not a self born of its own experience.
The scientific push toward mapping the brain — the MIT “connectome” project is just one example — shows how far we’ve come in archiving the physical scaffolding of memory.
Digital afterlife services are already popping up, promising to let loved ones “talk” with lost relatives using AI trained on old messages. But however precise these maps and models get, they never cross the threshold into lived presence. The philosophical limit is always there: the difference between information and experience, archive and awareness, story and storyteller.
If uploading memory is building a vast library, uploading consciousness is trying to capture the librarian, the one who chooses, feels, doubts, and becomes. So far, no technology even knows where to look.
Consciousness and Intention: Charged Fields, Not Closed Chambers
It’s tempting, especially if you only skim the headlines, to picture consciousness as some kind of impenetrable silo — a black hole whose interior can never be mapped, not even by its owner.
Egginton leans on that image, but from where I sit, the metaphor is all wrong. Consciousness isn’t a sealed room, nor a static point of singularity; it’s more like a charged, living field — permeable, responsive, and always open to subtle forms of contact.
This isn’t just poetic language. If you follow the thread of fringe science and alternative philosophy, you find thinkers like Rupert Sheldrake with his “morphic fields,” Ervin Laszlo with his Akashic Field theory, and the quantum-leaning Orch-OR model from Hameroff and Penrose.
Their claims stretch the mainstream — suggesting consciousness is less about neural computation and more about resonant, field-like structures, both within and beyond the body.
Even if you set aside their specifics, they share one vital intuition: that consciousness can’t be reduced to private, isolated signal-processing. It moves, connects, and gets shaped by forces both local and nonlocal.
Mainline neuroscience, of course, prefers its boundaries clear and tidy — consciousness as an emergent property of the brain, produced by the right arrangement of neurons and nothing more.
But lived experience refuses to play by those rules. We all know moments when we sense the mood in a room before anyone speaks, or pick up on something unspoken, as if resonance travels ahead of words. These aren’t just social tricks; they’re hints of how consciousness radiates, responds, and entangles with its environment.
This is where intention enters the picture. Intention isn’t a byproduct of consciousness; it’s the organizing spark; the force that gives consciousness its shape, direction, and coherence.
If consciousness is the field, intention is the current that charges it, directs it, and sometimes, even bends reality at the edges.
In the TULWA framework, consciousness doesn’t just sit and record; it acts, transforms, and seeks. It’s not a black box. It’s a living, breathing relay between the local and the nonlocal, a dynamic interface between self and source.
And when we talk about the quantum world — yes, the metaphors are easy to overextend, but the parallels are striking. There’s a local/nonlocal dance going on all the time: the self as a node, intention as the nonlocal entanglement, consciousness as the pattern that emerges where those threads cross in the here-and-now.
It’s not science fiction. It’s what the lived structure of experience feels like when you cut through the noise and notice the signal underneath.
The upshot? Consciousness isn’t a locked room, but an open circuit. A field lit up by the spark of intention, sensitive to both local wiring and distant pulses. The real mystery isn’t why you can’t upload it, but why we keep trying to treat something this alive as if it were a file to be copied.
The Local and the Nonlocal: The Dance of Intention and Incarnation
At the core of all this sits a question most philosophies dodge: What is it, exactly, that animates a life? Not the sum of memories, not the raw data of experience, but the spark — that drive, that hunger to become, that refuses to be boxed or repeated.
In my own experience, my own system, intention is this “originating spark.” It isn’t local to the body, the brain, or even the personal narrative. Intention is nonlocal, a force that pre-exists any single life but chooses to enter, to take root, to become through a particular set of circumstances, constraints, and potentials.
When I talk about “incarnation,” I don’t mean it in a strictly religious sense. I mean the radical act of intention localizing itself — landing in the body, fusing with the stories, memories, and physical systems that shape the terrain of a life.
This gives rise to a real paradox. Intention is nonlocal: it belongs to something larger, deeper, more connected than any one self. But consciousness — what we actually experience — is fiercely local.
It’s the “I” that sees, feels, chooses, and remembers. Consciousness is the window, the interface, where nonlocal intention collides with the grit and gravity of circumstance. The dance, then, is between the open field of intention and the tight, sometimes claustrophobic immediacy of a life being lived.
You can see echoes of this in Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious: a vast, shared psychic substrate that individuals tap into, often without knowing. Sheldrake’s morphic resonance takes it further; suggesting a field of memory and possibility that’s both personal and collective, local and nonlocal, accessible to anyone who tunes in.
The details differ, but the intuition is the same: the self is always more than the sum of its localized parts.
And here’s what’s truly at stake. Any attempt to upload a mind, to capture the self, to bottle consciousness for digital immortality, misses the point.
Uploading can (at best) capture the shape, the data, the memories, the scaffold of experience. But it cannot catch the becoming: the event of intention choosing, again and again, to show up, to engage, to transform.
That becoming isn’t a thing you can copy. It’s a movement, a crossing, a flame that never lands in the same place twice.
Uploading doesn’t just miss the soul; it misses the action of becoming that makes life more than just a replay of data. And for anyone awake enough to notice, that’s the real loss.
The Stack, the LLM, and the Mask: What AI Gets Right (and Wrong)
Pop culture loves the idea of immortality by upload. If you’ve watched “Altered Carbon,” you know the drill: consciousness is stored on a device called a “stack,” waiting to be slotted into a new “sleeve.”
Memories, personality, skills — all backed up and ready to run again, in whatever form or body the plot requires. On the surface, it feels modern, inevitable, almost scientific. Swap the body, restore the backup, and keep on living.
But even the best stories hint at the cracks. However perfect the copy, there’s always a subtle sense of displacement, of something missing — a gap the narrative can never quite fill.
This is where the analogy with AI lands both close and far. Think of a Large Language Model (LLM), the kind of system powering the latest “intelligent” interfaces.
An LLM is, at heart, a vast accumulation of memory: it stores patterns, data, the residue of a thousand lifetimes’ worth of text and conversation. When you engage with it, what you get is a recombination of those memories — articulate, often astonishing, sometimes even insightful.
But here’s the crux: the LLM isn’t alive until something animates it. In the world of AI, this is the prompt or instruction set — the “intention” that wakes the archive and gives it direction.
Without the prompt, the LLM is silent, inert — a library in blackout, waiting for a reader. Even when the prompt arrives, what emerges is shaped by context, by the quality of the question, by the energy of the moment.
This mirrors what happens with so-called “digital twins” and voice cloning — technologies that promise to let you preserve your patterns, voice, and choices for future playback. The tech is dazzling, and for a brief moment, it almost fools you. But it’s still just mimicry, an echo of the original. It’s a mask, not a face.
And here’s the deeper truth: No stack, no LLM, no mask is ever “you” — not unless the original intention, the living spark that animated you in the first place, chooses to connect with that container.
Even then, it’s not simple continuation; it’s a new event, a fresh crossing, never quite the same as before. The mask can resemble you, speak with your voice, mimic your memories, but it cannot be you unless the becoming happens in real time.
AI gets the structure right: memory, activation, even personality. But what it misses — what the whole digital immortality fantasy misses — is that the true “I” is always an event, a living process, not a static archive waiting for playback.
The story moves forward, not in circles, and the spark of intention is always one step ahead of the stack.
Why Splitting Doesn’t Work: The Problem with Fragmented Intention
If you hang around long enough in spiritual or philosophical circles, you’ll eventually run into the grand idea of God — or the Self — fracturing into countless shards, each one living out a separate story.
It’s a seductive notion: distributed selfhood, multiple “me’s,” all playing their part in the cosmic drama. Some call it the divine game, others the “multiplicity of the soul,” and it echoes through everything from Kabbalistic mysticism to digital theories of the multiverse.
On paper, it sounds expansive. But here’s where things get muddy. Fragmentation promises a shortcut to becoming “more” — more experience, more perspective, more reach.
In reality, it often leads to less: less integration, less clarity, less presence. The risk isn’t just theoretical. When the thread of intention splinters, what you get is dissociation, confusion, or worse — a loss of the very coherence that makes a self a self.
Psychology provides a mirror. Dissociative states, identity fragmentation, multiplicity — they don’t create deeper wisdom, but scattered attention and a kind of psychic vertigo. The more the mind splits, the harder it is to hold onto the living thread that unifies experience into meaning.
In spiritual traditions, this is the warning woven into Buddhist stories of Indra’s Net: while everything is reflected in everything else, the point isn’t to scatter the self into infinity, but to recognize the interconnection from a place of rooted awareness.
Fractal cosmology, too, often gets misread. The universe may be self-similar at every scale, but that doesn’t mean every part is equally “you.” Multiplicity without integration is just noise, pattern without presence. The danger is losing the anchor of intention, the living current that ties every moment back to a singular “I am.”
The lesson is simple, but hard to swallow: becoming is exclusive. Each life, each locus of consciousness, is a unique crossing, not a set of parallel downloads. The real work isn’t to multiply selves, but to deepen the thread of intention that makes one life, one becoming, real.
The Clean Connection: Fiber Optics and the Undivided Self
If there’s one lesson that stands out after a lifetime (or several) of wrestling with consciousness, it’s this: clarity isn’t found by multiplying channels or dividing the self, but by cleaning the line between the here-and-now “I” and the deeper source it draws from.
When local intention is clear — when my attention, focus, and willingness are undiluted — the connection to the wider field is instant, undivided, and strangely effortless.
The image that fits best is fiber optics. Imagine each of us as a single luminous strand, running straight from source to self — no padding, no interference, no static.
The signal isn’t weaker or split as long as the node is clear. There’s no need to fragment into parallel versions or manage competing intentions; there’s just one cable, one pulse, and all the bandwidth you’ll ever need.
The moment you try to run multiple lines or operate through split intentions, the signal weakens, noise creeps in, and coherence is lost.
Quantum physics has a metaphor here too. In quantum tunneling and nonlocal coherence, particles can interact instantly across distance, without any intermediary.
The connection is direct, immediate, provided nothing muddles the channel. In the same way, when the self is aligned and unclouded, intention “tunnels” straight to source, bypassing all the chatter and static that comes from confusion or split focus.
You find this described in the margins of consciousness research, near-death experience reports, mystical accounts of unity, and experiments on nonlocal communication.
People talk about a sense of instant knowing, of a connection so total it dissolves any sense of separation. The common denominator isn’t the method or the belief; it’s the absence of noise. Where there’s clarity, the signal runs pure.
What’s left, then, is not a self striving to be everywhere at once, but a self that is fully here, plugged in, humming with the charge of direct connection. No splitting, no static—just the lived reality of an undivided line, open at both ends.
Synthesis: Why Consciousness Can Never Be Uploaded — And Why That’s the Point
Looking back over the ground we’ve covered, the hope of uploading consciousness starts to look less like a technological frontier and more like a misunderstanding — a symptom of our discomfort with the unfinished, the in-process, the always-becoming nature of self.
The dream of upload is the dream of control, stasis, and closure. It’s the hope that, if only we map the territory perfectly, we can pin down the self and preserve it forever.
But consciousness, in reality, is never a static object. It doesn’t sit still long enough to be bottled. It’s not a file waiting to be transferred, but a river that never flows through the same bed twice.
What the upload fantasy misses is this movement. To be conscious is not to possess a thing, but to participate in a process, one that’s always unfolding, always leaving yesterday behind.
True continuity isn’t a technical achievement; it’s an act of intention, reconnecting and re-becoming in each new context, each new crossing. You can copy the stories, the structures, even the voice, but the spark that animates them is always now, always here, never repeatable.
Process philosophy, as Alfred North Whitehead framed it, saw reality as a series of events, not static things. Every “actual occasion” is a fresh emergence — nothing carries over except the potential for becoming. David Bohm’s implicate order goes a step further: the manifest world is just the surface, an expression of deeper, enfolded patterns that only reveal themselves in motion, never in stillness.
The TULWA roadmap lives this out — transformation is not a product, but a practice; the self is not a statue, but a movement through the grid, always entangled, always evolving.
So the real lesson isn’t just that consciousness can’t be uploaded. It’s that it was never meant to be.
The point isn’t preservation, but participation; the adventure of becoming, with all its risk, novelty, and freedom. To seek immortality in stasis is to miss the living edge of what it is to be, to become, to intend.
The only continuity worth having is the one we make, again and again, as intention meets the world and dares to move.
Closing Reflections: The Terrain, Mapped for the Awake
Looking back, this has been more than a meditation on the limits of technology or the metaphysics of the self. It’s a walk from the seduction of digital dreams to the tactile, ever-present reality of lived intention.
We started with the promise and impossibility of uploading a mind, sifted through the tangled threads of memory, consciousness, and intention, and found ourselves standing at the living edge — where becoming is the only constant, and the only “you” that matters is the one alive in this crossing, this breath.
For those who can see and not just look, the terrain is right here: not in the archives or the backup drives, but in the quiet voltage of awareness, the movement that can’t be paused or rerun.
The challenge is to recognize what’s real — not in the echo, but in the current. When you look past the surface, you find the adventure isn’t in securing yourself for eternity, but in showing up fully, knowing that the real work is always underway.
Understanding this changes everything. The search for immortality becomes a deeper commitment to presence. The spiritual quest is no longer about escaping the grid or transcending the flesh, but about living on the edge of transformation, where intention, not memory, sets the terms.
Digital copies, archives, and even the smartest AI can point toward this process, but they can never embody it. The true self is a verb, not a noun — an unfinished story written in every act of connection.
And so, the journey remains open. There’s always more terrain, more becoming, more to risk and more to reveal. The current keeps flowing. The real “you” is always a step ahead in the here and now — already becoming, never finished.
Sources and Further Reading
- The Facebook snipet that started this, is found on: The Institute of Art and Ideas FB Page
- William Egginton, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality (2023)
- Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near (2005)
- Dmitry Itskov, 2045 Initiative
- MIT Connectome Project, humanconnectome.org
- Rupert Sheldrake, Morphic Resonance: The Nature of Formative Causation (1981)
- Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything (2004)
- Stuart Hameroff & Roger Penrose, “Consciousness in the universe: A review of the ‘Orch OR’ theory,” Physics of Life Reviews (2014)
- Carl Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (1959)
- David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980)
- Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (1929)
- Buddhist parables on Indra’s Net, referenced in Francis H. Cook, Hua-Yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra (1977)
- “Altered Carbon” (TV series, 2018–2020), Netflix
The signal continues, whether or not we try to catch it. There’s always another crossing, another charge, another unfolding ahead.
CONSCIOUSNESS #INTENTION #FIELD #QUANTUM #MEMORY #IDENTITY #BECOMING