{"id":206625,"date":"2025-02-17T13:16:30","date_gmt":"2025-02-17T19:16:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/02\/mind-uploading-and-continuity"},"modified":"2025-02-17T13:16:30","modified_gmt":"2025-02-17T19:16:30","slug":"mind-uploading-and-continuity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/02\/mind-uploading-and-continuity","title":{"rendered":"Mind uploading and continuity"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<p><iframe style=\"display: block; margin: 0 auto; width: 100%; aspect-ratio: 4\/3; object-fit: contain;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Vtp-6GOGfMA?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope;\n   picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>If you think I live in the twilight zone your right.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>As a computational functionalist, I think the mind is a system that exists in this universe and operates according to the laws of physics. Which means that, in principle, there shouldn\u2019t be any reason why the information and dispositions that make up a mind can\u2019t be recorded and copied into another substrate someday, such as a digital environment.<\/p>\n<p>To be clear, I think this is unlikely to happen anytime soon. I\u2019m not in the technological singularity camp that sees us all getting uploaded into the cloud in a decade or two, the infamous \u201crapture of the nerds\u201d. We need to understand the brain far better than we currently do, and that seems several decades to centuries away. Of course, if it is possible to do it anytime soon, it won\u2019t be accomplished by anyone who\u2019s already decided it\u2019s impossible, so I enthusiastically cheer efforts in this area, as long as it\u2019s real science.<\/p>\n<p>There have always been a number of objections to the idea of uploading. Many people just reflexively assume it\u2019s categorically impossible. Certainly we don\u2019t have the technology today, but short of assuming the mind is at least partially non-physical, it\u2019s hard to see what the ultimate obstacle might be. Even with that assumption, who can say that a copied mind wouldn\u2019t have those non-physical properties? David Chalmers, a property dualist, sees those non-physical properties as corresponding with the right functionality, so for him AI consciousness and mind copying remain a possibility.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you think I live in the twilight zone your right. As a computational functionalist, I think the mind is a system that exists in this universe and operates according to the laws of physics. Which means that, in principle, there shouldn\u2019t be any reason why the information and dispositions that make up a mind [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[219,6,64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-206625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics","category-robotics-ai","category-singularity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206625","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206625"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206625\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}