What makes you, you · Quiz question 35/35
Mind Uploading
Your memories and personality are perfectly uploaded, then your body dies. Is the one in the computer you? David Chalmers on uploading, and where philosophers stand.
Your memories and personality are perfectly transferred to a computer (uploaded). Later, your body dies of natural causes.
The one living on in the computer is me.
Uploading spread first among engineers and futurists, but the most systematic philosophical analysis is David Chalmers's 2010 paper "The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis." Chalmers separated whether an upload could be conscious (the consciousness question) from whether it could be you (the identity question), and argued that gradual uploading — replacing neurons one by one — gives better odds of survival than copying all at once. This question combines the teleporter (see The Teleporter) and the silicon brain (see The Silicon Brain).
To agree, you have to accept two things: a being in a computer can be conscious (functionalism), and psychological continuity is enough for being the same person (the psychological view). Doubt either one and it isn't you — or at least you can't be sure.
Chalmers thought the answer might depend on the method. A one-shot scan runs into the duplication problem if the original survives (see The Teleporter Glitch), but gradual neuron-by-neuron replacement keeps consciousness continuous at every step, which looks more like survival. Susan Schneider warns that since we don't know what consciousness depends on, uploading could be a gamble that amounts to suicide. For an animalist, the answer's clear: if your body died, you died.
If consciousness doesn't depend on material and psychological continuity is the criterion, the upload is you.
Key names: Derek Parfit (Relation R), Daniel Dennett, David Chalmers (optimistic about gradual uploading)It's not even clear a digital copy would be conscious. Same on the outside, maybe empty inside.
Key names: John Searle, Susan SchneiderYou're an organism. When it dies, you die. The upload is a new being that resembles you.
Key names: Eric Olson, Bernard WilliamsIn the 2020 PhilPapers Survey, about 27% of philosophers said mind uploading (replacing your brain with a digital emulation) is survival.