Trope Trouble: Uploading Your Mind

It’s always been commonplace in sci-fi to have minds moving around between people, from people to computers, from people to robots, aliens to people, or whatever. It’s usually done by some process which scans the brain, produces a perfect representation of the state of the brain and then translates that into a simulation that can run on some kind of computing infrastructure (including another brain.) I’ve done it myself in several stories. But what no-one seems to get about this ‘uploading your mind’ thing is that a person’s awareness is not transferred at all (well, alright, maybe David Brin gets it.)

If I were to copy my mind, even destructively, the copy would not be me. It might think it’s me, but it isn’t. I’m me and I continue to be me, unless the copying process kills me, in which case I’m still me but dead. I don’t continue in any way in another body. I just die in this old one.

How do I know I’m me in this situation? Because I have no access to the thoughts and feelings of the copy. My awareness is still confined to my own self. If I die in the copying process, I experience my own death and then nothing else – something my copy does not experience.

Consciousness isn’t a ‘stuff’ that can be moved from one brain to another, like a bucketful of water. It’s an epiphenomenon of brain activity. People who think that minds can be moved from one body to another without the original mind remaining in the original body, or dying, are probably confusing the mind with the soul. Since the soul is a magical idea not a real thing, I have nothing at all to say about it. Souls are the province of theologians and fantasy writers, not scientists or science fiction writers.

I’m quite happy with the idea that programs in computers are ‘people’ if they’re copies of people who were people running on some other infrastructure. So, I could happily say that, making a copy of me creates a new person. Thus killing a copy should be considered murder. (Pay attention David Brin and Sean Williams – they, like so many others, have protagonists who commit multiple murders in this way. Not really an heroic trait!)

Even IBM gets it right

And it’s not just moving minds around that has this problem. Teleportation is exactly the same. In the stories, teleportation works much the same way mind uploading works. You scan a body (including their mind) and transmit the state of it to some other place where the body (and mind) is recreated. The transmission may be of the actual particles which constituted the body, or it may be of the information gleaned in the scan. Either way, the body is destroyed in one place, information about it is beamed across space, and it is rebuilt in another place.

What happens in this scenario is that the original body is killed and a new copy of the body is created somewhere else. A little thought experiment will make this obvious. Imagine that the scan of the person to be transported is not destructive. Clearly the object appearing at the other end is a copy and not the original. Still not convinced? Imagine that the scan is destructive but takes several hours or days to destroy the original (the copy being produced instantly at the receiving end.) Now the original is clearly seen to be experiencing a lingering death (rather than an instant one.) Need more? Imagine that two copies are made at the receiving end, or a dozen.

The confusion, in both cases (brain uploads and teleportation) is partly because the apparent continuity of experience felt by the copy is compelling both for it and for an external observer, as long as the original is destroyed in the act of copying. The rest of the confusion comes from the magical notion that a soul is being transferred, as I mentioned before.

Uploading a mind as a way of gaining immortality is therefore a rather stupid mistake. For the person attempting it, it would be quite a letdown for them to discover they have no access to the upload’s experiences but are still ‘there’ in their own, dying body. Of course, even understanding this won’t deter some megalomaniacs who believe themselves to be so valuable that a copy of themselves ought to persist in the world.