Abstract
It’s fashionable to maintain that in the near future we can become immortal by uploading our minds to artificial computers. Mind uploading requires three assumptions: (1) that we can construct realistic computational simulations of human brains; (2) that realistic computational simulations of human brains would have conscious minds like those possessed by the brains being simulated; (3) that the minds of the simulated brains survive through the simulation. I will argue that the first two assumptions are implausible and the third is false. Therefore, we will not upload our mind to computers and, most likely, we will not upload anything resembling our mind to computers.
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Notes
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- 2.
A third suggestion sometimes discussed in the literature on digital immortality is to record someone’s experiences in a digital medium and use them to create a partial computer simulation of their mental life (Smart this volume). A fourth suggestion is to extend someone’s mind into digital technology and slowly but progressively merge with digital technology until their mind continues solely in digital form (Clowes and Gärtner this volume). These proposals face analogous challenges to those I discuss in this paper. Making such challenges explicit is left to future work (cf. also Schneider and Corabi this volume).
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For what it’s worth, I also find the notion of nonphysical objects and properties unintelligible—except, perhaps, as the result of a botched analogy with physical objects and properties. I will be as charitable as I can towards those who purport to find the notion of nonphysical objects and properties intelligible.
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Fission thought experiments of the kind discussed by Parfit usually involve imagining that each brain hemisphere plus one half of the rest of the brain is transplanted into two different bodies. This kind of thought experiment raises roughly the same sorts of issue that I discuss in the main text for the case of ordinary split brains and has the disadvantage of being physiologically impossible for several reasons. For starters, you can’t split the rest of the brain while retaining functionality in the way you can split the cortical hemispheres, and half a brain is not enough to control a whole body.
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Piccinini, G. (2021). The Myth of Mind Uploading. In: Clowes, R.W., Gärtner, K., Hipólito, I. (eds) The Mind-Technology Problem . Studies in Brain and Mind, vol 18. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72644-7_6
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