Seite - 177 - in Cyborg Mind - What Brain–Computer and Mind–Cyberspace Interfaces Mean for Cyberneuroethics

Cyberneuroethics • 177 But this again leads to questions about how personal identity should be defined. Even if a computer is programmed to indicate that it is self-aware, how would it be possible to know whether it is a fake, an imposter or another representation that bears only a passing resemblance to an original individual? Experts such as Sandberg dismiss this question, arguing that personal identities are complex. They cannot be clearly and precisely defined and are subject to many changes as a person develops over time. In what appears to be a giant leap of philosophical thought, Sandberg comments that ‘if we can handle growing older we can probably handle being translated to a computer’.354 A more detailed exploration of the idea, and one in which individual iden- tity is preserved, was described by the British science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) in his 1956 novel The City and the Stars.355 The story is set in a city one billion years in the future, where the minds of inhabitants are stored as patterns of information in the city’s Central Computer. These can then be infused into cloned bodies to be relived in cycles of about a thousand years. A number of commentators identify this story as one of the first (if not the first) to deal with the concepts of mind uploading, human-machine synthesis and computerised immortality.356 Interestingly, in addition to being downloaded into a body, an uploaded mind would also be able to copy itself into many (even a multitude of) of minds (its clones) as backups or create many new minds (its descendants in time) that are different from itself. But it would be impossible for a mind to be present simultaneously in multiple locations. Each mind location would be a different individual even if such an individual only existed for a few seconds. In examining the paradox of multiple exact replicas expressing the same identity, the Scottish neuroscientist Donald MacKay (1922–87) indicated that it would seem ‘absurd to suggest that what identifies you is imply the information-flow pattern in your nervous system’.357 This is because a ‘con- scious experience is embodied in our being activity: neither on the one hand identical with it, nor on the other hand quasi-physically interactive with it’.358 This means that, for MacKay, copying a human mind into a computer would be tantamount to creating a correlation, not a translation.359 Indeed, because the body of the virtual person would be different from that of the human person, it would actually be a different individual. In other words, seeking to upload a human mind into a computer would result in the creation of a new body-mind person who would be a completely different individual from the original human person.360 It would be like creating a virtual clone with a new body-mind.361 A similar argument is given by the British philosopher Derek Parfit (1942– 2017) in his 1984 book Reasons and Persons, in which he discusses the tele- transportation paradox. This is a thought experiment on the philosophy of This open access edition has been made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched. Not for resale.