The Problem of Smith: When Mind Uploading Multiplies Identity

Famed inventor and futurologist Ray Kurzweil suggests that we will achieve digital immortality by 2045. Upload your mind, download it into a new body, and cheat death. It’s an alluring vision — until you “multiply” it.

The imaginative models offered by transhumanism, especially the kind that Kurzweil espouses, envision our surviving death through mind uploading. This mind uploading features in pop culture; think the 2015 movie Self/less:

In the film, Damien Hale (played by Ben Kingsley), wants to transfer himself into a new body. His consciousness is moved to a new, younger body (played by Ryan Reynolds). Hale is not merely copied into a new body; he is moved into a new body. Hale maintains continuous consciousness throughout the process.

A problem arises for transhumanists who aim to in achieve this kind of transfer due to their ardent physicalism. Kurzweil, and many who follow him, are patternists. They argue that our personal identity is comprised of various mental “patterns,” such as our thoughts, beliefs, desires, intentions, and memories. This approach equates human personal identity to the memory and device settings, or patterns, on a computer. As such, the thought goes, just as I can move a computer’s patterns around to new substrates, I should be able to move human patterns to new substrates.

Why does this patternistic view create a problem? Imagine Smith, a forward-thinking individual who has decided to undergo the mind-uploading procedure. He enters the lab with the understanding that his continuous consciousness will be transferred to a new, optimized body, and his old biological body will be discarded. Smith falls asleep as the technician activates the Brain Uploader 3000.

The Uploader works flawlessly. It creates a perfect digital replica of Smith’s electrochemical signature — every memory, every intention, every quirk of personality captured with absolute fidelity. This pattern is then downloaded into a newly constructed body, optimized to be a superior version of Smith’s aging frame.

When this new Smith, whom we’ll call Smith₂, wakes up, he has every reason to believe the procedure succeeded. He remembers falling asleep in the lab. He has all of Smith’s memories, feels like Smith, thinks like Smith. As far as Smith₂ is concerned, he is Smith waking up in his new body. Mission accomplished, right?

Not quite.

This article was originally published at Mind Matters. You can find the full article here.

Image Credit at Original Source