The Mind is Not a Soul: Why Uploading to a Computer Won’t Bring Immortality
I just read about a Russian “tycoon” called Dimitry Itskov who is putting money into a venture called Initiative 2045, “a non-profit organization focused on creating an international research center where scientists will research and develop the technologies to make eternal life possible,” according to nextbigfuture.com. Apart from the tragic news that people still say “tycoon”, the real tragedy of this tale is that it’s a complete waste of time and effort.
The whole notion that a human consciousness can be “transferred” from one computational platform to another is based on the misconception that the human mind is really a “soul”, some essential you-ness that can be poured from one vessel into another like a liquid. The reality is that a mind is more like a piece of software running on the brain’s hardware. The only you-ness involved is the feeling this program has of being you. It can’t be taken from one place and put in another any more than this instance of LibreOffice I’m using can be taken out of my computer and put into another one. Yes, your mind can be copied (eventually, in theory) and the copy run in a brain simulator, and that copy, if identical, will be convinced that it is you – but it won’t be you in one very, very important way. The you that the copy was taken from will still die.
The illusion is enhanced by the usual scenario in which mind uploading is spoken about. You’re on your deathbed having lived a long and carefree life. The neuromancers come and your brain is scanned – often destroying it in the process for some reason. Your body expires. But, lo! You find yourself alive and staring out at the world through a pair of video cameras, your thoughts zipping along at 200 petaflops as you plan your first ten million years of digital immortality.
But consider a different scenario. You’re 32 years old when your brain is non-destructively scanned (the same age as our Russian tycoon is right now). You climb out of the scanner to find yourself being watched by a pair of video cameras and you introduce yourself to your digital copy. Of course, your copy now believes it is you and nothing you can say can dissuade it. It feels like you, it has all your memories, it is secretly in love with the scanner operator, just like you are. But, to you, it might as well be a complete stranger. You don’t feel what it feels, you don’t see what it sees, and, as the days go by, increasingly, you don’t know what it knows.
And, when the Christian fundamentalist who hates the idea of you and your kind “playing God” bursts in with his Sig Sauer and pumps you full of lead, as you lay on the scanning room floor, bleeding out, trying to tell the scanner operator with your last breath about the love you’ve hidden for so long, you realise that you are actually dying. Creating a copy of you didn’t make you immortal at all. Bummer!
Of course, there are shades of grey in all this. (No, no, forget BDSM for a moment and concentrate.) You can argue that your “self” is recreated each morning when you wake from sleep. You can postulate a slow, sliding process of gradually replacing your mind with a functional copy that resides in your head like the “jewel” in Greg Egan’s Axiomatic collection, and eventually takes over running your body. But the fact remains that self-awareness is a trap that ensnares us in our own mortality. Even if your consciousness were being rebooted every day (which it isn’t) there is no way at all of making it move from one place to another. It isn’t a substance. It cannot be relocated. If you stop it running, you’re dead – whatever else might still be alive that thinks it’s you.
