On Sunday night, after the lights were off, my girlfriend Nora asked whether I would still love her if she were a worm. I asked which worm. She said a normal one, and that the point was to say yes without thinking. I told her I could do that, but then it wouldn’t be an answer, so I thought about it and gave her my actual position: “No. I love human women, and Caenorhabditis elegans is a self-fertilizing hermaphrodite with 302 neurons.” She has been staying at her sister’s in Medford since Tuesday. She said I could explain it to anyone but her, so I’m explaining it here.
“A normal worm” makes the question unanswerable. Nobody has published a connectome for an earthworm, so asking whether Nora would survive conversion into Lumbricus terrestris is like asking whether a document will survive being saved in a file format with no specification. The question only becomes well posed for a worm whose wiring we know, and the canonical one is C. elegans. In 1986, after about fifteen years of electron microscopy, John White, Sydney Brenner and their colleagues in Cambridge published its complete wiring diagram, the first for any animal. The journal’s editors ran it under the running head “The Mind of a Worm.” If Nora is going to be a worm, it should at least be one whose mind we have read.
From there it’s a question about personal identity, and I hold the view most readers here share: a person is a pattern, not a particular lump of tissue. That’s why I expect uploading to preserve me, and why I’ve never minded that most of my atoms have turned over since college. But a pattern still needs enough substrate to run on. Nora’s brain has about 86 billion neurons and something like a hundred trillion synapses; the worm has 302 neurons and around seven thousand synapses. You cannot fit a woman who does the Saturday crossword in pen and has kept up a two-year grudge against the upstairs neighbor’s Peloton into a network that small, and anything that does fit is a worm with her name on it.
Even in the best case, the worm keeps very little. What C. elegans mostly learns is associations: pair a smell with food and it will crawl toward the smell; pair it with something bad and it learns to stay away. At best, worm Nora would keep one learned association, and I tried to be generous about which. I asked her what she thought it would be. She said that, at that point in the conversation, probably avoiding me. I told her that was a reasonable estimate, since aversive learning in C. elegans is well documented.
Her sister has texted me twice to say it wasn’t a real question. It was a bid for reassurance, and the right response was to say yes and go to sleep. I understand the function, but look at what the yes commits me to. A love that would survive her becoming a worm survives the loss of everything that is specifically her, and a love that doesn’t depend on anything about her isn’t about her. It’s a constant function, and Nora deserves better than a function that returns yes no matter what you pass it. I told her she deserves to be loved conditionally, on the right conditions, and I meant it as a compliment.
Her strongest point, which she made on Tuesday from the hallway with her bag already packed, was that I have a neuropreservation contract with Alcor. When I die, a standby team is supposed to cool my body and get it to Scottsdale, where my head will wait in liquid nitrogen until someone can repair it, and I’ve asked Nora to be the person who makes sure the hospital calls them. She isn’t signed up herself. I’ve never pushed; the neuro minimum is $80,000, and a decision like that should be hers. She wanted to know why she is expected to love a head in a dewar in Arizona when I won’t love her as a worm.
The cases aren’t symmetrical. A vitrified brain keeps its structure, and under the information-theoretic criterion of death I’m not gone as long as the information that makes me me can, in principle, be read back out. Freezing me is lossless storage. Turning Nora into a worm is lossy compression at roughly three hundred million to one, and what survives is an opinion about a smell. Cryonicists have a name for partners who react the way Nora did, the hostile wife phenomenon, and they have been documenting it since the 1960s. The best-known essay on it is titled “Is That What Love Is?” I sent it to her Tuesday night with a note saying I thought she’d find it clarifying.
On Thursday she came back for her laptop charger and asked, from the doorway, who the beneficiary of my life insurance was. It’s Alcor, which is how the neuro option is funded, and the $61 monthly premium has come out of our joint account since we moved in together. She said she had always assumed it was her. I told her that in every sense that matters it is, since the policy pays for the only version of me that could ever come back to her.