In recent years, the idea of mind uploading has left the genre of science fiction. Uploading our minds as a form of immortality, or so it has been argued, is now within our reach. Of course, this depends on the assumption that our mind is nothing more than some sort of computer software running on the brain as hardware paving the way for a standard procedure of mind uploading, namely instantaneous destructive uploading – where the brain is (...) simulated on a computer - or gradual destructive uploading – where brain regions are gradually replaced by micro-chips. Lately, however, there has been sustained doubts that things are so simple. In this volume alone Susan Schneider & Joe Corabi and Gualtiero Piccinini argue that a person cannot survive standard procedures of mind uploading. The main reasons are that the uploading process violates identity criteria for the person and that it is unclear that conscious mental states can be uploaded. In this article, we argue that while the sceptics about the standard methods of uploading are probably right, there are more options to be evaluated. We introduce what we call slow continuous mind uploading as an alternative procedure. Slow continuous uploading is based on the extended mind thesis which claims that artefacts can under specific circumstances come to count as part of the realization basis for an individual’s mind. In this context, we explore a form of mind uploading which may already be being innovated today through our deep reliance upon cognitive incorporation of “smart” internet technologies. We will argue that this process may give us the right kind of tools to survive mind uploading, or more minimally, to create an agent that can be considered a psychological continuity of an individual. We think that, at least, the objections so far developed in the literature do not rule this out. (shrink)

The progressing cyborgization of the human body reaches its completion point when the entire body can be replaced by uploading individual minds to a less vulnerable and limited substrate, thus achieving \digital immortality" for the uploaded self. The paper questions the philosophical assumptions that are being made when mind-uploading is thought a realistic possibility. I will argue that we have little reason to suppose that an exact functional copy of the brain will actually produce similar phenomenological e®ects (if any (...) at all), and even less reason to believe that the uploaded mind, even if similar, will be the same self as the one on whose brain it was modeled. (shrink)

Immortality is the indefinite continuation of a person’s existence, even after death. In common parlance, immortality is virtually indistinguishable from afterlife, but philosophically speaking, they are not identical. Afterlife is the continuation of existence after death, regardless of whether or not that continuation is indefinite. Immortality implies a never-ending existence, regardless of whether or not the body dies (as a matter of fact, some hypothetical medical technologies offer the prospect of a bodily immortality, but not an afterlife). Immortality has been (...) one of mankind’s major concerns, and even though it has been traditionally mainly confined to religious traditions, it is also important to philosophy. Although a wide variety of cultures have believed in some sort of immortality, such beliefs may be reduced to basically three non-exclusive models: (1) the survival of the astral body resembling the physical body; (2) the immortality of the immaterial soul (that is an incorporeal existence); (3) resurrection of the body (or re-embodiment, in case the resurrected person does not keep the same body as at the moment of death). This article examines philosophical arguments for and against the prospect of immortality. A substantial part of the discussion on immortality touches upon the fundamental question in the philosophy of mind: do souls exist? Dualists believe souls do exist and survive the death of the body; materialists believe mental activity is nothing but cerebral activity and thus death brings the total end of a person’s existence. However, some immortalists believe that, even if immortal souls do not exist, immortality may still be achieved through resurrection. Discussions on immortality are also intimately related to discussions of personal identity because any account of immortality must address how the dead person could be identical to the original person that once lived. Traditionally, philosophers have considered three main criteria for personal identity: the soul criterion , the body criterion and the psychological criterion. Although empirical science has little to offer here, the field of parapsychology has attempted to offer empirical evidence in favor of an afterlife. More recently, secular futurists envision technologies that may suspend death indefinitely (such as Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, and mind uploading), thus offering a prospect for a sort of bodily immortality. (shrink)

Mind uploading speculation and debate often concludes that a procedure described as gradual in-place replacement preserves personal identity while a procedure described as destructive scan-and-copy produces some other identity in the target substrate such that personal identity is lost along with the biological brain. This paper demonstrates a chain of reasoning that establishes metaphysical equivalence between these two methods in terms of preserving personal identity.

Optimists about mind-uploading believe that we can survive uploading. Pessimists about mind-uploading, on the other hand, believe that we cannot survive uploading. An under-explored middle ground between the two is a selective form of optimism, which claims that we can survive some forms of uploading, such as gradual replacement uploading, but not others, such as scan-and-copy uploading. Is selective optimism about uploading a rational stance? In this paper I argue that the answer is yes. The paper has a (...) negative and a positive part. First, I defuse an objection against selective optimism from Wiley and Koene (2016). Wiley and Koene argue that gradual replacement uploading is metaphysically equivalent to scanand-copy uploading, and hence optimism about the former and pessimism about the latter is unfounded. I show that Wiley and Koene's case for the supposed metaphysical equivalence fails, since there is a significant metaphysical contrast between the two types of uploading involving immanent causation. In the second part of the paper, I present a positive case for selective optimism about gradual uploading building on this contrast in immanent causation. (shrink)

Humans have long wondered whether they can survive the death of their physical bodies. Some people now look to technology as a means by which this might occur, using terms such 'whole brain emulation', 'mind uploading', and 'substrate independent minds' to describe a set of hypothetical procedures for transferring or emulating the functioning of a human mind on a synthetic substrate. There has been much debate about the philosophical implications of such procedures for personal survival. Most participants to (...) that debate assume that the continuation of identity is an objective fact that can be revealed by scientific enquiry or rational debate. We bring into this debate a perspective that has so far been neglected: that personal identities are in large part social constructs. Consequently, to enable a particular identity to survive the transference process, it is not sufficient to settle age-old philosophical questions about the nature of identity. It is also necessary to maintain certain networks of interaction between the synthetic person and its social environment, and sustain a collective belief in the persistence of identity. We defend this position by using the example of the Dalai Lama in Tibetan Buddhist tradition and identify technological procedures that could increase the credibility of personal continuity between biological and artificial substrates. (shrink)

Mind uploading—the transference of mind from a biological brain to a computer— offers the alluring possibility of immortality. This paper provides a novel challenge to mind uploading, focusing on the distinction between abstract objects and concrete individuals. Uploads are abstract objects, while currently, persons are concrete indi- viduals. This presents a dilemma: if the mind is concrete, uploading it to a computer is impossible. Alternatively, if mind uploading is feasible, the resulting abstract upload cannot be (...) numerically identical to the original person. Furthermore, by dif- ferentiating survival from persistence, this paper argues that concrete persons might survive as abstract uploads, but only in a highly restricted sense, without preserving their numerical identity. Despite these philosophical hurdles, practical reasons for considering mind uploading as life nears its end still need to be acknowledged. (shrink)

Abstract. Could a person or mind be uploaded—transmitted to a computer or network—and thereby survive bodily death? I argue ‘mind uploading’ is possible only if a mind is an abstract object rather than a concrete particular. Two implications are notable. One, if someone can be uploaded someone can be multiply-instantiated, such that there could be as many instances of a person as copies of a book. Second, mind uploading’s possibility is incompatible with the leading theories (...) of personal identity, insofar as these assume the mind is a concrete particular. Moreover, because David Chalmers (2010; 2012; 2014) defends mind uploading without construing minds as abstract, I show Chalmers’ argument to be unsound. (shrink)

We present a hypothetical process of mind coalescence, where arti cial connections are created between two or more brains. This might simply allow for an improved form of communication. At the other extreme, it might merge the minds into one in a process that can be thought of as a reverse split-brain operation. We propose that one way mind coalescence might happen is via an exocortex, a prosthetic extension of the biological brain which integrates with the brain as (...) seamlessly as parts of the biological brain integrate with each other. An exocortex may also prove to be the easiest route for mind uploading, as a person's personality gradually moves away from the aging biological brain and onto the exocortex. Memories might also be copied and shared even without minds being permanently merged. Over time, the borders of personal identity may become loose or even unnecessary. (shrink)

If a brain is uploaded into a computer, will consciousness continue in digital form or will it end forever when the brain is destroyed? Philosophers have long debated such dilemmas and classify them as questions about personal identity. There are currently three main theories of personal identity: biological, psychological, and closest continuer theories. None of these theories can successfully address the questions posed by the possibility of uploading. I will argue that uploading requires us to adopt a new theory of (...) identity, psychological branching identity. Psychological branching identity states that consciousness will continue as long as there is continuity in psychological structure. What differentiates this from psychological identity is that it allows identity to continue in multiple selves. According to branching identity, continuity of consciousness will continue in both the original brain and the upload after nondestructive uploading. Branching identity can also resolve long standing questions about split-brain syndrome and can provide clear predictions about identity in even the most difficult cases imagined by philosophers. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the question of whether we will ever have an Artificial General Superintelligence (AGSI) and how it will affect our species if it does so. First, it explores various proposed definitions of AGSI and the potential implications of its emergence, including the possibility of collaboration or conflict with humans, its impact on our daily lives, and its potential for increased creativity and wisdom. The concept of the Singularity, which refers to the hypothetical future emergence of superintelligent machines that (...) will take control of the world, is also introduced and discussed, along with criticisms of this concept. Second, it is considered the possibility of mind uploading (MU) and whether such MU would be a suitable means to achieve (true) immortality in this world—the ultimate goal of the proponents of this approach. It is argued that the technological possibility of achieving something like this is very remote, and that, even if it were ever achieved, serious problems would remain, such as the preservation of personal identity. Third, the chapter concludes arguing that the future we create will depend largely on how well we manage the development of AI. It is essential to develop governance of AI to ensure that critical decisions are not left in the hands of automated decision systems or those who create them. The importance of such governance lies not only in avoiding the dystopian scenarios of a future AGSI but also in ensuring that AI is developed in a way that benefits humanity. (shrink)

Since the appearance of a widely influential book, Self-Knowledge and Self-ldentity, Sydney Shoemaker has continued to work on a series of interrelated issues in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics. This volume contains a collection of the most important essays he has published since then. The topics that he deals with here include, among others, the nature of personal and other forms of identity, the relation of time to change, the nature of properties and causality and the relation between (...) the two, dualism and immortality, and the nature of mental states. All the essays show the same care and precision in argument as the earlier book, but they also reveal a substantial shift in Professor Shoemaker's position to a form of materialism. In fact, a number of papers together constitute what is probably the most subtle and rigourous defence yet of a sophisticated functionalism in the account of the mind. (shrink)

Would you survive if your consciousness branched into two or more streams? Commonly discussed within the context of split-brain scenarios, this possibility might soon become commonplace with mind uploading technology. Cerullo suggests that after nondestructive mind uploading and other branching scenarios, personal identity would continue in two streams of consciousness. Thus he argues for what he calls branching identity. In this discussion, I evaluate the theory of branching identity and Cerullo’s arguments for it, concluding that branching identity is (...) insufficiently justified and does not yield a better interpretation of branching cases than provided by Parfit. (shrink)

Since the appearance of a widely influential book, Self-Knowledge and Self-ldentity, Sydney Shoemaker has continued to work on a series of interrelated issues in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics. This volume contains a collection of the most important essays he has published since then. The topics that he deals with here include, among others, the nature of personal and other forms of identity, the relation of time to change, the nature of properties and causality and the relation between (...) the two, dualism and immortality, and the nature of mental states. All the essays show the same care and precision in argument as the earlier book, but they also reveal a substantial shift in Professor Shoemaker's position to a form of materialism. In fact, a number of papers together constitute what is probably the most subtle and rigourous defence yet of a sophisticated functionalism in the account of the mind. (shrink)

The ‘Mind-Upload’ hypothesis, a radical version of the Brain-in-a-Vat thought experiment, asserts that a whole mind can safely be transferred from a brain to a digital device, after being exactly encoded into substrate independent informational patterns. Prima facie, MU seems the philosophical archenemy of the Embodied Mind theory, which understands embodiment as a necessary and constitutive condition for the existence of a mind and its functions. In truth, whether and why MU and EM are ultimately incompatible (...) is unobvious. This paper, which aims to answer both questions, will not simply confirm that MU and EM actually are incompatible. It will also show the true reason of their incompatibility: while EM implies that a mind’s individual identity is contingent upon the details of its physical constituents, MU presupposes that minds can be relocated from one material vessel to another. A systematic comparison between these conflicting assumptions reveals that the real shortcoming of MU is not the one usually discussed by the philosophical literature: it has nothing to do with MU’s functionalist or computationalist prerequisites, and is only secondarily related to the artificial implementability of consciousness; the real problem is that MU presupposes that minds could still be individuated and numerically identified while being reduced to immaterial formal patterns. EM seems committed to refute this assumption, but does it have sufficient resources to succeed? (shrink)

In the digital age, the concept of identity has evolved in ways that challenge long-held philosophical assumptions about the self. No longer has fixed or continuous, identity become fragmented, shaped by multiple digital personas that people craft in response to the ever-expanding digital universe. Now, there is no sense of a fixed self that remains constant throughout space and time. Self and identity can be seen as a Heraclitean flux always in a state of becoming and never for a moment (...) being in a state of being. The boundaries between the real and the virtual have blurred, and hyperreal experiences now often seem more significant than actual events. This review delves into the complex relationship between selfhood and digital representation, exploring how traditional theories like Baudrillard’s hyperreality and Buddhist notions of impermanence help explain this transformation. It examines the implications of digital simulations, especially in the context of digital immortality, which raises profound questions about consciousness, existence, and the essence of being. In a world where avatars, social media profiles, and virtual realities dominate, self navigates an uncertain terrain between reality and simulation. This study is an exploration of the evolving nature of identity, consciousness, and human experience in the age of digital fragmentation, with a focus on the philosophical and psychological dimensions of selfhood in the modern, digitized world. (shrink)

The possibility of algorithmic consciousness depends on the assumption that conscious states can be copied or repeated by sufficiently duplicating their underlying physical states, leading to a variety of paradoxes, including the problems of duplication, teleportation, simulation, self-location, the Boltzmann brain, and Wigner’s Friend. In an effort to further elucidate the physical nature of consciousness, I challenge these assumptions by analyzing the implications of special relativity on evolutions of identical copies of a mental state, particularly the divergence of these (...) evolutions due to quantum fluctuations. By assuming the supervenience of a conscious state on some sufficient underlying physical state, I show that the existence of two or more instances, whether spacelike or timelike, of the same conscious state leads to a logical contradiction, ultimately refuting the assumption that a conscious state can be physically reset to an earlier state or duplicated by any physical means. Several explanatory hypotheses and implications are addressed, particularly the relationships between consciousness, locality, physical irreversibility, and quantum no-cloning. (shrink)

One of the more radical transhumanist proposals for future human being envisions the uploading of our minds to a digital substrate, trading our dependence on frail, degenerating “meat” bodies for the immortality of software existence. Yet metaphor studies indicate that our use of metaphor operates in our bodily inhabiting of the world, and a phenomenological approach emphasizes a “hybridity” to human being that resists traditional mind/body dichotomies. Future scenarios envisioning mind uploading and disembodied artificial intelligence (AI) share an (...) apocalyptic category with more traditional religious eschatologies, though they differ markedly in content; therefore, the insights of embodied cognition and their uptake in technological innovation are considered as they apply to theological concerns. Theology often functions in debates over the technological future to critique or to caution. However, theologians may learn from their technological dialogue partners when it comes to the future of embodiment and its implications for the construction and practice of theology. (shrink)

Williams’s famous argument against immortality rests on the idea that immortality cannot be desirable, at least for human beings, and his contention has spawned a cottage industry of responses. As I will intend to show, the arguments over his view rest on both a difference of temperament and a difference in the sense of desire being used. The former concerns a difference in whether one takes a forward-looking or a backward-looking perspective on personal identity; the latter a distinction between our (...) normal desire to continue living and the kind of desire implied in desiring immortality. Showing that there is some sense of identity and desire that support Williams’s conclusion goes some way toward providing support for his argument, if not a full-fledged defense of it. (shrink)

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: that we can construct realistic computational simulations of human brains; that realistic computational simulations of human brains would have conscious minds like those possessed by the brains being simulated; 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. (shrink)

In a paper in this journal, Neil Levy challenges Nicholas Agar’s argument for the irrationality of mind-uploading. Mind-uploading is a futuristic process that involves scanning brains and recording relevant information which is then transferred into a computer. Its advocates suppose that mind-uploading transfers both human minds and identities from biological brains into computers. According to Agar’s original argument, mind-uploading is prudentially irrational. Success relies on the soundness of the program of Strong AI—the view that it may (...) someday be possible to build a computer that is capable of thought. Strong AI may in fact be false, an eventuality with dire consequences for mind-uploading. Levy argues that Agar’s argument relies on mistakes about the probability of failed mind-uploading and underestimates what is to be gained from successfully mind-uploading. This paper clarifies Agar’s original claims about the likelihood of mind-uploading failure and offers further defense of a pessimistic evaluation of success. (shrink)

For Ray Kurzweil, artificial intelligence (AI) is not just about making artificial things intelligent; it's also about making humans artificially superintelligent. The author challenges Kurzweil's predictions about the destiny of the human mind. He argues that it is unlikely ever to be rational for human beings to upload their minds completely onto computers. The author uses the term “mind uploading” to describe two processes. Most straightforwardly, it describes the one‐off event when a fully biological being presses a button (...) and instantaneously and completely copies her entire psychology into a computer. It also describes the decisive event in a series of replacements of neurons by electronic chips. Searle's Wager treats the exchanges over the possibility of successful mind uploading in much the same way that Pascal's Wager treats the debate over God's existence. Finally the author explains why nondestructive uploading is prudentially irrational. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Daring and Disappointing Dreams of Transhumanism's Secular EschatologyMichael Baggot L.C.IntroductionAlthough it is a largely secular movement, contemporary transhumanism borrows heavily from both Christian orthodoxy and heresies to construct a vision for human happiness. This article traces the roots of transhumanism's soteriology and eschatology and then examines the underlying anthropological problems that drive the hoped-for salvation through digital immortality. Unfortunately, the admirable desire to extend life sacrifices an appreciation (...) for the integral harmony of the human person's animal and spiritual dimensions. Since human actions manifest the person's intrinsic corporeality, attempts to detach the human personality from the body through digitalization would produce replicas of the dead without achieving true immortality. The surprising quasi-religious thrust of contemporary transhumanism's secular eschatology presents an opportunity to rediscover the Catholic patrimony's reflection on authentic divinization through the transhumanizing effects of divine grace. The article thus concludes with a Thomistic theosis-centered reorientation of secular transhumanism's eschatological aspirations for immanent immortality toward true human flourishing. [End Page 841]The Secular Eschatology of Contemporary TranshumanismThe leading transhumanist philosopher, Oxford University professor Nick Bostrom, thinks that his movement will provide real solutions to the perennial problems of humanity that traditional religions have tried and failed to address:While not a religion, transhumanism might serve a few of the same functions that people have traditionally sought in religion. It offers a sense of direction and purpose and suggests a vision that humans can achieve something greater than our present condition. Unlike most religious believers, however, transhumanists seek to make their dreams come true in this world, by relying not on supernatural powers or divine intervention but on rational thinking and empiricism, through continued scientific, technological, economic, and human development.1Yet, for all its protests against antiquated creeds, secular transhumanism frequently tends toward quasi-religious expressions. For instance, Meghan O'Gieblyn finds striking parallels between the evangelical and transhumanist worldviews she has embraced and abandoned during her life.2 Her writing explores her harrowing transition from Christian fundamentalism to trans-humanism and her eventual disillusionment with the techno-movement. Bible school had taught her about the various epochs of salvation history and her position within the "dispensation of grace" that marked the final preparation for the longed-for "millennial kingdom." As an adult, she spurned the false promises of organized religion and sought a more rational organization for her life. Later, a book recommendation plunged her into the thought of Google guru Ray Kurzweil and his narrative of evolutionary eras pointing toward an imminent "singularity" in which intelligent machines would emerge from an informational explosion. Such advanced robots would bring digital immortality through mind uploads and a nanotech new earth [End Page 842] that would put Eden to shame. Through his projects, Kurzweil purports to continue the Enlightenment tradition of empirical science and rational rigor. Similarly, many transhumanists tend to follow their Enlightenment predecessors in chiding traditional religion for obscurantist opposition to scientific progress. Nonetheless, O'Gieblyn discovered that the very movement that pretends to supplant the superstitions of the old-time religion is itself "a secular outgrowth of Christian eschatology."3The Christian-trained author could not help but detect familiar religious themes in the technocentric movement. Before it spread through the offices of Silicon Valley, the term "transhuman" first appeared in Henry Francis Carey's 1814 version of Dante's Paradiso, where the poet pilgrim recognizes that not even his own genius can describe the joy of risen life when he writes, "words may not tell of that transhuman change."4 Recent efforts to substitute supernatural resurrection with technological advancement find antecedents in the thirteenth-century friar Roger Bacon's quest for an elixir of life. Later, the nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox philosopher Nikolai Fedorov claims humans should use technology to control Darwin's unguided evolutionary process. Similarly, the twentieth-century Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin predicted a global machine network that would merge consciousnesses worldwide and prompt the Omega Point of transphysical union with the divine.The Eugenicist Julian Huxley strips such notions of their religious trappings to present a secular transhumanist project that will "overcome limitations…to arrive at... (shrink)

The idea that we may continue to exist in a bodiless condition after our death has long played an important role in beliefs about immortality, ultimate rewards and punishments, the transmigration of souls, and the like. There has also been long and heated disagreement about whether the idea of disembodied existence even makes sense, let alone whether anybody can or does survive dissolution of his material form. It may seem doubtful that anything new could be added to the debate at (...) this late date, but I hope to show that this is not so. I will explore the problem of disembodiment from a somewhat different direction than has been tried before, one that leads to what seem to me more interesting and more definite conclusions about its unintelligibility. Furthermore, the approach I will be taking puts both the traditional mind-body problem and the competing claims of dualism and physicalism in a fresh light that can help us to understand better the nature of our embodied existence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 65.4 (2004) 603-625 [Access article in PDF] Noting the Mind: Commonplace Books and the Pursuit of the Self in Eighteenth-Century Britain Lucia Dacome University College London Ae for "Adversariorum methodus." Be for "Beauty, Beneficience, Bread, Bleeding, Blemishes."1 By associating the first letter with the initial vowel of a word, generations of eighteenth-century readers, students, and observers diligently regulated access to information they (...) reputed worth retaining. Following this rule, they organized the notes they took on a certain subject, the thoughts and observations they believed were worth remembering, and the exemplary words of their favorite authors. The rule was devised by John Locke for his "new method of making commonplace-books," a method characterized by a particular system for indexing the entries of a notebook that became popular in the eighteenth century. Before Locke developed his new method readers had already familiarized themselves with the practice of keeping an account of their readings, excerpting passages of texts, and copying them in their notebooks under a relevant heading. Throughout the early modern period commonplace books provided repositories for arranging notes, excerpts, drawings, and objects.2 Regarded as aids to memory and storehouses of knowledge, they were part of a pedagogic tradition related to rhetoric and the art of memory that dated back to the classical period. Reducing vast amounts of knowledge to a [End Page 603] manageable form, they instantiated a special relationship between the accumulation of knowledge and the organization of space. At the turn of the eighteenth century Locke's new method promised to facilitate compilers' task by providing a new way of accumulating multum in parvo at a time of increasing concern for the uncontrollable growth of the "Stock of Knowledge."3 It did so by seeking to increase the amount of information one could annotate in the notebook, while also speeding up its retrieval. Many eighteenth-century compilers relied on it in order to reduce the volume of their notebooks and save time. Some were lured by the promise that this technique could also help them to order their minds and thus turn them into better people.Although commonplace books have dropped out of usage today, they were still mentioned in nineteenth-century educational manuals. As tools that lay at the intersection between practices of collecting, reading, classifying, learning, and the arts of rhetoric, they have come to the fore of historical discussion.4 In some cases, commonplace books have been regarded as capable of providing insights into compilers' reading patterns and as biographical sources casting light on compilers' personal idiosyncrasies and cataloguing manias.5 The intellectual and cultural significance of Locke's own new method of compiling has [End Page 604] accordingly been discussed in relation to Locke's own intellectual biography (and in particular his medical interests), in the context of shifting patterns of systematization of knowledge and in light of the dissemination of eighteenth-century encyclopedic projects.6 However, still little is known about the uses and the popularity of the Lockean method in the eighteenth century.What follows considers the spreading of Lockean commonplacing in the context of eighteenth-century discussions on the nature of the self. Locke himself contributed to these discussions when, in the second edition of his Essay concerning Human Understanding (1694), he famously suggested that self-identity lay in the mind and resided in the continuity of memory and consciousness.7 Now a widely shared assumption of Western modernity, the view that self lies in the mind has long been dated back to the Age of Enlightenment. Yet early in this period Locke's proposal to make self-identity coextensive with memory and self-knowledge proved controversial. The debate that followed is now part of the canon of the history of philosophy and of the philosophical literature as a whole.8 In the course of the debate some of Locke's critics doubted that it was possible to found the self in conscious memory: they wondered about the destiny of the self during intervals... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Disability and the Resurrection of the Body:Identity and ImaginationMedi Ann VolpeI love Star Wars. I watched Luke destroy the Death Star as a wide-eyed eight-year-old and I relished the downfall of the imperial walkers on the ice planet Hoth. I rejoiced with Luke at seeing his father, Anakin Skywalker (Darth Vader), restored in death to the Good Side of the Force, glowing faintly alongside Obi-wan Kenobi and the Jedi (...) master Yoda. In the 1983 version of The Return of the Jedi,' Anakin's Force ghost looked like the old, wounded, disabled man whose body Luke rescued from the second Death Star about to explode. Hayden Christiansen, who plays Anakin as a young man in the prequels Attack of the Clones and The Revenge of the Sith, was only two years old then; yet the 1983 film has since been edited so that his image is the Force ghost alongside Obi-wan Kenobi and Yoda. I find this troubling—and not just because I am a cantankerous old fan who likes things the way they were.For a theologian with an interest in disability,1 the swap calls to mind the worries of some disability theologians2 about continuity and discontinuity [End Page 993] in the resurrection: if disabilities that marked us or our loved ones in this life are eradicated, how does identity persist? George Lucas explained in an interview that, when Anakin Skywalker was "redeemed," he went back to being the person he was before he was consumed by the Dark Side: the real Anakin ceased to be when he became Darth Vader.3 But the replacement of the post–Darth Vader Anakin with the young, pre-Darth Vader Anakin creates enormous problems for thinking about the resurrection, even in the fictional Star Wars universe.4 Anakin seems to lose most of his adult life. Would he remember that he had been Darth Vader, or that he saved Luke's life? If he does not remember the event, how can this Force ghost be the same person that Luke rescued from Death Star 2.0? George Lucas's decision to replace Sebastian Shaw, who played Darth Vader in the original Return of the Jedi, with Hayden Christiansen introduces radical discontinuity into the narrative. The substitution does not give us the "real" Anakin; instead, we are left with neither Anakin nor Darth Vader, but a different person; someone Luke would not have recognized, and who might well not recognize either Luke or himself.In a similar vein, Nancy Eiesland mused that, without her disability, caused by a congenital, degenerative bone disease, she would be "unknown to [herself] and perhaps to God."5 Her perception of resurrection healing was that she would be as different in the resurrection as Hayden Christiansen is to Sebastian Shaw. Drawing on classical Christian teaching from Gregory of Nyssa to Matthias Scheeben,6 I will show in this essay that Eiesland's concern [End Page 994] is misplaced. Considering the way that the resurrection body is often portrayed, however, her concern is understandable. Disability theologians' qualms about the resurrection deserve a retrieval of the classical doctrine that addresses their suspicions about the discontinuity of identity in the resurrection and upholds the full humanity of people with disabilities, even profound intellectual disabilities.IIn one sense, the questions raised by disability theologians are not new.7 First-century Christians argued about the transformation that St. Paul envisaged, which involved continuity and change. In 1 Corinthians, he tells us "a mystery … we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable nature must put on the imperishable, and this mortal nature must put on immortality" (15:51–53). Christians debated the nature of the change involved in putting on immortality and in their debates asked questions about the continuity of identity. Early Christian thinkers, like the early-third-century theologian Tertullian (AD 160–220), were keen to establish that the ensouled body resurrected to punishment or reward was the same as the earthly... (shrink)

Scientific evidence for the continual presence of consciousness with or without connection to a living organism.

To the question whether Hume believed in mind-independent physical objects (or as he would put it, bodies), the answer is Yes and No. It is Yes when Hume writes “We may well ask, What causes induce us to believe in the existence of body? but ’tis in vain to ask, Whether there be body or not? That is a point, which we must take for granted in all our reasonings.” However the answer is No after inquiring into the causes (...) of that belief, when he writes, “What then can we look for from this confusion of groundless and extraordinary opinions but error and falsehood? And how can we justify to ourselves any belief we repose in them?” My view is that Hume’s Yes and No answers can best be accounted for by seeing him as a Pyrrhonian skeptic in the tradition of Sextus Empiricus. This interpretation, while finding considerable truth in the various positions canvassed, is closest to those of Norton, Fogelin, and especially Popkin. (shrink)

Purpose of the article is to identify the religious factor in the teaching of transhumanism, to determine its role in the ideology of this flow of thought and to identify the possible limits of technology interference in human nature. Theoretical basis. The methodological basis of the article is the idea of transhumanism. Originality. In the foreseeable future, robots will be able to pass the Turing test, become “electronic personalities” and gain political rights, although the question of the possibility of machine (...) consciousness and self-awareness remains open. In the face of robots, people create their assistants, evolutionary competition with which they will almost certainly lose with the initial data. For successful competition with robots, people will have to change, ceasing to be people in the classical sense. Changing the nature of man will require the emergence of a new – posthuman – anthropology. Conclusions. Against the background of scientific discoveries, technical breakthroughs and everyday improvements of the last decades, an anthropological revolution has taken shape, which made it possible to set the task of creating inhumanly intelligent creatures, as well as changing human nature, up to discussing options for artificial immortality. The history of man ends and the history of the posthuman begins. We can no longer turn off this path, however, in our power to preserve our human qualities in the posthuman future. The theme of the soul again reminded of itself, but from a different perspective – as the theme of consciousness and self-awareness. It became again relevant in connection with the development of computer and cloud technologies, artificial intelligence technologies, etc. If a machine ever becomes a "man", then can a man become a "machine"? However, even if such a hypothetical probability would turn into reality, we cannot talk about any form of individual immortality or about the continuation of existence in a different physical form. A digital copy of the soul will still remain a copy, and I see no fundamental possibility of isolating a substrate-independent mind from the human body. Immortality itself is necessary not so much for stopping someone’s fears or encouraging someone’s hopes, but for the final solution of a religious issue. However, the gods hold the keys to heaven hard and are unlikely to admit our modified descendants there. (shrink)

Could we transfer you from your biological substrate to an electronic hardware by simulating your brain on a computer? The answer to this question divides optimists and pessimists about mind uploading. Optimists believe that you can genuinely survive the transition; pessimists think that surviving mind uploading is impossible. An influential argument against uploading optimism is the multiplicity objection. In a nutshell, the objection is as follows: If uploading optimism were true, it should be possible to create not only (...) one, but multiple digital versions of you. However, you cannot literally become many. Hence, you cannot survive even a single instance of uploading, and optimism about uploading is misguided. In this paper, I will first spell out the multiplicity objection in detail and then provide a two-pronged defence against the objection. First, uploading pessimists cannot establish that uploading optimism has the contentious implication. Second, it is in fact plausible to think that we could become multiple distinct persons. Optimists’ hope for a digital afterlife is therefore not thwarted by the prospect of multiplicity. (shrink)

Derek Parfit claims that all that rationally matters for a person is psychological connectedness or continuity, even without identity. A psychological replica of a person whose body is destroyed upon the replication rationally should be considered just as valuable as the original person. I argue against this, maintaining that any such copying procedure would be objectionable. First, I argue that a copy of an original person does not preserve identity to the original person. And second, I argue that because a (...) copy does not retain the identity of the orignial, it is not irrational to regard a copy as of less value than the original. (shrink)

I argue against psychological theories of identity that claim that in cases where one’s personality and memories are moved into the brain of another, we move with them. I am not entirely convinced by my arguments here, I must confess, but I think they deserve some thought.

The soul has played many different roles in philosophy and religion. Two of the primary functions of the soul are the bearer of personal identity and the foundation of immortality. In this paper I shall consider different interpretations of what the soul has been taken to be and argue that however we interpret the soul we cannot consistently maintain the soul is both what we are and what continues after our bodily death.

Dominant views of personal identity in philosophy take some kind of psychological continuity or connectedness over time to be criterial for the identity of a person over time. Such views assign psychological states, particularly those necessary for narrative memory of some kind, special importance in thinking about the nature of persons. The extended mind thesis, which has generated much recent discussion in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, holds that a person’s psychological states can physically extend beyond (...) that person’s body. Since “person” is a term of both metaphysical and moral significance, and discussions of both extended minds and personal identity have often focused on memory, this article explores the relevance of extended cognition for the identity of persons with special attention to neuroethics and memory. (shrink)

It is commonly believed that our episodic memory teaches us about the reality of personal identity over time. Derek Parfitt’s notion of quasi-memory challenges this belief. According to Parfit, q-memories provide us with knowledge of past experiences in the same way that memory does, without presupposing that the rememberer and the experiencer are the same person. Various aspects of Parfit’s theory have met with criticism from scholars such as D. Wiggins, J. McDowell, M. Schechtman, and others. In this paper, I (...) will focus primarily on the holistic argument that q-memories cannot be squared with the complex nature of mental life. This is a well-known argument and, when understood as criticism of memory-trace copying, is accepted by some q-memory proponents. In this paper, I will try to show why it is impossible to defend quasi-memory, even when wholesale psychological continuity applies, and why post-fission persons are not genuine cases of q-memories. (shrink)

Excerpt from Passages From the Philosophy of Herbert Spencer Perhaps to the average reader these lines from T be Foundations of Belief, by Arthur James Bal four, would seem to characterize the doctrine of Herbert Spencer. But the real student of his Philosophy Would resent the injustice of such an in terpretation. As though from a glance at a figure upon the border of an intricate piece Of tapestry, one could conceive the design and colour scheme of the whole. Herbert (...) Spencer could not avoid the conviction that there exists no rational foundation for the be lief in the continuance of conscious personality after death. He believed that the human intellect in its present state of development, could offer no solution to the great problem of identity. He neither af firmed nor denied but with unremitting labour and his life's devotion he produced a Philosophy which gave an inestimable impulse to modern thought if not to Science. In his Syntlzetic Pbilosopliy he revealed the mysterious unity of all existence he traced the progress of Evolution in life, mind, society and morality. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

A prominent view on personal identity over time, Jeff McMahan’s ‘Embodied Mind Account’ (2002) holds that we cease to exist only once our brains can no longer sustain the basic capacity to uphold consciousness. One of the many implications of this view on identity persistence is that we continue to exist throughout even the most severe cases of dementia, until our consciousness irreversibly shuts down. In this paper, I argue that, while the most convincing of prominent accounts of personal (...) identity over time, McMahan’s account faces serious challenges in explanatory power of dementias and related neurodegenerative conditions. Particularly, this becomes visible in the face of emerging methods for neural tissue regeneration, and the possibility of ‘re-emerging patients’. I argue that medical professionals’ neglecting qualitative aspects of identity risks resulting in grave misunderstandings in decision-making processes, and ethically objectionable outcomes in future practices. Finally, I propose revisions which could potentially salvage the great benefits that Embodied Mind Theory still can bring to the field of dementia care in terms of understanding life, death, and identity across the lifespan. (shrink)

There is a debate about the possibility of mind-uploading – a process that purportedly transfers human minds and therefore human identities into computers. This paper bypasses the debate about the metaphysics of mind-uploading to address the rationality of submitting yourself to it. I argue that an ineliminable risk that mind-uploading will fail makes it prudentially irrational for humans to undergo it.

Art has the capacity to shape and alter our identities. It can influence who and what we are. Those who have had aesthetic experiences know this intimately, and yet the study of art’s impact on the mind struggles to be recognized as a centrally important field within the discipline of psychology. The main thesis of Art and Identity is that aesthetic experience represents a prototype for meaningful experience, warranting intense philosophical and psychological investigation. Currently psychology remains too closed-off from (...) the rich reflection of philosophical aesthetics, while philosophy continues to be sceptical of the psychological reduction of art to its potential for Subjective experience. At the same time, philosophical aesthetics cannot escape making certain assumptions about the psyche and benefits from entering into a dialogue with psychology. Art and Identity brings together philosophical and psychological perspectives on aesthetics in order to explore how art creates minds. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Stepping Off the Edge of the Earth:A bariatric patient’s journey out of obesityNikki MassieI have been overweight my entire life. When I was born—three weeks early—I weighed 9 lbs., 3 oz. I proceeded to trend on the high end of the weight percentile for my age. By the time I was 14 years old I’d surpassed 200 lbs. By the time I graduated high school I’d hit 250 lbs.Even (...) today, after losing a considerable amount of weight from having Roux–en–Y gastric bypass surgery, I am still considered overweight according to the body mass index.All this is to say that the way I think about my health, my body and my life is very much from the perspective of someone who has never experienced the so–called condition of being “normal.”Enough is EnoughI’ve been asked many times how I decided to have bariatric surgery. The answer isn’t simple. Because I’d been overweight all my life, the notion of being anything but overweight seemed a bit absurd to me. Not absurd as in, “I would not be happy if I were smaller” but more like, “I don’t know if this could ever happen for me and, if it did, who would I be?”Truth be told, I wasn’t entirely unhappy as an overweight woman. By the account of my primary care physician I also was not necessarily unhealthy for an overweight person. I didn’t have high blood pressure or diabetes (I wasn’t even pre–diabetic). My heart seemed to work fine. I was just very, very large.However, I’d been large (or larger than others) my entire life. In many ways my very identity was inextractable from that fact. While I can’t speak for my entire culture, my experience as an African–American woman is one where women of size were not reviled, but celebrated. Being too thin was always presented to me as a negative cultural value, I believe because it was associated with drug use.That means that growing up I didn’t have some of the experiences other obese people had. There were a few people who teased me but they were the exception, not the norm. I don’t recall being lonely because of my size. I dated avidly throughout my adolescence. I was asked to, and went to, both my proms.I proceeded into young adulthood with a few bumps along the way. I suffered a bout of depression in my sophomore year of college and just after my 21st birthday I found the first signs of what would be massive hair loss from alopecia areata (although did not know that’s what it was at the [End Page 107] time). Otherwise, I was fairly healthy and no more or less happy than any other 21 year–old I knew.At age 22, I had my first child, a daughter. This was the beginning of an upward weight climb that took me from being very overweight into very obese. At age 21, I weighed about 240 lbs. (I am 5 ft. 8 inches tall). By the time I was 26 (and after I had a second daughter), I weighed in at 340 lbs.At this point I began to want to lose weight. I no longer liked the way I looked in pictures. My increased clothing size and cost depressed me even further. My attempts at dieting, however, failed miserably. I did seek help from my primary care physicians (I went through several throughout my young adulthood). Each time I’d be given a copy of the food pyramid and a pamphlet explaining the health benefits of losing weight.But how? How exactly does one lose weight? In my mind it was some strange combination of sadistic exercise and starvation. That’s what I saw in magazines. Women who ate the equivalent of one meal per day who exercised many hours a day. I had no desire to do either and so I continued on my trend upward.During that time my mother (now deceased) worried about my weight a lot. I’d... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Spinoza on Self-Preservation and Self-DestructionMitchell GabhartI wish to examine a difficulty that arises in Spinoza’s treatment of selfhood as it pertains to the possibility of self-destruction. The troublesome problem of selfhood is one which I will not solve but which I hope to illuminate. What I hope to do is shed light on Spinoza’s conception of human essence as necessarily self-affirming, and therefore of willful self-destruction as impossible. Yet (...) this issue too is troubling since the accounts Spinoza provides of suicides all have one thing in common: suicide always involves being overcome by the external environment, i.e., the environment operating in a way contrary to the nature of the agent. Thus, all suicide is a sign of an internal weakness in the face of a hostile world. To provide the needed contrast to the suicidal agent, necessarily a state of the utmost bondage or servitude, I will first sketch Spinoza’s theory of the passions, their remedy, the characteristics of the active free agent, and his curious account of immortality. Then I turn to the problem in his account of suicide: I contend that he cannot make meaningful a distinction between suicide and any other form of death.2.I begin with Spinoza’s analysis of human motivation, the elements of which are the affects, which he defines (E3D2) as the body’s power of acting being increased or diminished as well as the idea of those affections.1 Spinoza classifies [End Page 613] emotions, i.e., affects under the attribute of mind, into two types: actions and passions.2 Spinoza does not (contrary to his predecessor Descartes) posit the existence of a separate faculty such as will to transform passions into actions. Rather, “we act when something happens, in us or outside us, of which we are the adequate cause, i.e., (by E3D1) when something in us or outside us follows from our nature, which can be clearly and distinctly understood through it alone.”3 Conversely, we are acted upon “when something happens in us, or something follows from our nature, of which we are only a partial cause.”4 Consequently it is not necessary to oppose will and intellect in order to differentiate action from passion. The mind includes both adequate and inadequate ideas (E3P1) and therefore can be alternately both agent and patient.The departure from Descartes is striking: since (1) ideas either are or are not adequate and (2) each adequate idea carries its own certitude (E2P43), the need for a separate faculty of assent, which is what volition must amount to, is nullified. Instead, volition and appetite are considered by Spinoza to be no more than distinct manifestations of one central striving, the former a purely mental description and the latter an account of both mental and physical aspects of the individual.5Spinoza introduces the key term conatus to characterize the activity of modes but it is a concept which also bears the burden of accounting for the individuality, indeed the essence, of finite modes. The principle of conatus is defined by Spinoza as a striving (E3P7), i.e., “that striving by which each thing strives to persevere in its own being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing.”6 This [End Page 614] striving to persevere in one’s existence—a striving which continues for an indefinite time (E3P8)—must, of course, undergo both successes and failures. Modes, such as the human individual, exist conditionally, as finite and temporally changing constituents of the substantial reality which Spinoza refers to as “God or Nature.” So, human beings are entities possessing (1) an essential identity through an indefinite duration and (2) a consciousness of that identity which alternately resists or succumbs to outside forces.Thus, their existence can be thought of as merely adjectival, which poses difficulties in understanding self-identity. Vital, it seems, to an acceptable conception of identity is some principle of individuation—something which makes Peter distinct from Paul.7 Let us first then sketch the account of individuation that Spinoza proposes. It is important to bear in mind first that conatus is a striving of the organism as... (shrink)

This paper addresses the seemingly insurmountable challenges the problem of personal identity raises for the prospect of radical human enhancement and synthetic consciousness. It argues that conceptions of personal identity rooted in psychological continuity akin to those proposed by Parfit and the Buddha may not provide the sort of grounding that many transhumanists chasing the dream of life extension think that they do if they rest upon ontologies that assume an incompatibility between identity and change. It also suggests that process (...) ontologies that take change to be primary, such as those that align with contemporary systems biology, offer a better way out of the personal identity dilemma. But the solution in this case, which regards biological organisms as processes rather than things, may constrain the possibility of biologically inspired superintelligent aliens (BISAs), which Schneider (following Bostrom 2014) posits as possibly the most common form of (extraterrestrial) superintelligence in the universe. (shrink)

This article explores theoretical conditions necessary for “quantum immortality” as well as its possible practical implications. It is demonstrated that QI is a particular case of “multiverse immortality”, which is based on two main assumptions: the very large size of the universe ; and a copy-friendly theory of personal identity. It is shown that a popular objection about lowering of the world-share of an observer in the case of QI does not succeed, as the world-share decline could be compensated by (...) merging timelines for the simpler minds, and because some types of personal preferences are not dependent on such changes. Despite large uncertainty about the truth of MI, it has appreciable practical consequences for some important outcomes like suicide and aging. The article demonstrates that MI could be used to significantly increase the expected subjective probability of success of risky life extension technologies, such as cryonics, but that it makes euthanasia impractical because of the risk of eternal suffering. Euthanasia should be replaced with cryothanasia, i.e. cryopreservation after voluntary death. Another possible application of MI is as a last chance to survive a global catastrophe. MI could be considered a Plan D for reaching immortality, where Plan A consists of survival until the development of beneficial Artificial Intelligence capable of fighting aging, Plan B employs cryonics, and Plan C is digital immortality. (shrink)

According to the psychological account of personal identity for someone to be one and the same person over time Y today must have some of the beliefs, desires, intentions and memories that X had yesterday, as well as some memories of the events that happened to X yesterday. But, on this account, we have the undesirable result that persons can be reduplicated unless we add an additional requirement: Y is uniquely psychologically continuous with X. In an attempt to avoid the (...) problem of reduplication in a different way I invoke arguments for active externalism and the embodied mind. The motivation for exploring embedded and embodied approaches to cognition is that they cast doubt on the easy separation of brain and body which is often taken for granted in the identity literature. With these approaches in mind, the simple assumptions by which brains are imagined to be transplanted into new bodies, and agents are said to be teletransported to new environments should be reviewed. Whilst embodiment provides us with some reasons to re-evaluate our understanding of brain transplant thought experiments, we ultimately see that the nature of teletransportation is consistent with the mind as both extended and embodied. (shrink)

As the artificial intelligence of computers grows ever-more sophisticated and continues to surpass the capacities of human minds in many ways, people are forced to question alleged ontological categories that separate humans from machines. As we are entering the world which is populated by non-enhanced and enhanced humans, cyborgs, robots, androids, avatars, and clones among them, the desire for evolutionary mastery of the natural world has taken on the two main directions: merging with machines in disembodied forms or embodied forms. (...) As a path to breaking past the discontinuity between humans and machines and enter into a world beyond the “fourth” discontinuity, machines are viewed as an evolutionary step toward the “perfection” or “immortality” of humans. However, this popular, instrumental views of machines, stemming from the existential death anxiety and the hope for transcending mortality, reveals the karmic dilemma of desiring or grasping something. We shall discuss the possibility that machines can present, ultimately, a revolutionary step rather than an evolutionary step toward understanding “who we are.” The path toward a continuity with machines lies not in our desire for merging with the robots, but in recognizing the arbitrary nature of all such identity categories. This radical understanding of the self-identity can be seen as a facet of enlightened experience. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the two general kinds of uploading scenarios and given our response to Chalmers' objections, let us summarize where things stand. First, there is considerable reason to be pessimistic about instantaneous destructive uploading's ability to preserve identity or to produce continuations of the original person. Second, there is also good reason to be pessimistic about gradual destructive uploading's ability to preserve identity or produce continuations, since exactly the same issues arise in the context of gradual uploading. The chapter (...) introduces issues from the field of metaphysics that are key to determining whether you could survive uploading. The author argues that it is plausible, given these background metaphysical issues, that you will not survive uploading. The chapter considers David Chalmers' objections to our position, as stated in a recent paper of his. (shrink)

Neuroscientists keep telling us that the brain produces consciousness and consciousness does not survive brain death because it ceases when brain activity ceases. Research findings on near-death-experiences during cardiac arrest contradict this widely held conviction. They raise perplexing questions with regard to our current understanding of the relationship between consciousness and brain functions. Reports on veridical perceptions during out-of-body experiences suggest that consciousness may be experienced independently of a functioning brain and that self-consciousness may continue even after the termination of (...) brain activity. Data on studies of near-death-experiences could be an incentive to develop alternative theories of the body-mind relation as seen in contemporary neuroscience. (shrink)

As persons, we are importantly different from all other creatures in the universe. But in what, exactly, does this difference consist? What kinds of entities are we, and what makes each of us the same person today that we were yesterday? Could we survive having all of our memories erased and replaced with false ones? What about if our bodies were destroyed and our brains were transplanted into android bodies, or if instead our minds were simply uploaded to computers? -/- (...) In this engaging and accessible introduction to these important philosophical questions, Amy Kind brings together three different areas of research: the nature of personhood, theories of personal identity over time, and the constitution of self-identity. Surveying the key contemporary theories in the philosophical literature, Kind analyzes and assesses their strengths and weaknesses. As she shows, our intuitions on these issues often pull us in different directions, making it difficult to develop an adequate general theory. Throughout her discussion, Kind seamlessly interweaves a vast array of up-to-date examples drawn from both real life and popular fiction, all of which greatly help to elucidate this central topic in metaphysics. -/- A perfect text for readers coming to these issues for the first time, Persons and Personal Identity engages with some of the deepest and most important questions about human nature and our place in the world, making it a vital resource for students and researchers alike. (shrink)

An emerging consensus in cognitive science views the biological brain as a hierarchically-organized predictive processing system that relies on generative models to predict the structure of sensory information. Such a view resonates with a body of work in machine learning that has explored the problem-solving capabilities of hierarchically-organized, multi-layer (i.e., deep) neural networks, many of which acquire and deploy generative models of their training data. The present chapter explores the extent to which the ostensible convergence on a common neurocomputational architecture (...) (centred on predictive processing schemes, hierarchical organization, and generative models) might provide inroads into the problem of digital immortality. In contrast to approaches that seek to recapitulate the connectomic microstructure of the human brain, the present chapter advocates an approach that is rooted in the use of machine learning algorithms. The claim is that a future form of deep learning system could be used to acquire generative models of a given individual or (alternatively) the sensory data that is processed by the brain of a given individual during the course of their biological life. The differences between these two forms of digital immortality are explored, as are some of the options for digital resurrection. (shrink)