The Soul and the Id: Understanding the Hard Problem of Consciousness
No, Your Mind Can’t Be Uploaded to a Computer
Sorry, folks, but digital immortality by upload is impossible
Like the song says, “everyone wants to be on a postage stamp, but nobody wants to die.”
And lately, one of the hottest topics for those who’d like to keep the party going forever is mind uploading, the notion that we can transfer our consciousness to machines. But like all immortality schemes that have come before it, there are fatal flaws in the plan.
The first thing we need to recognize is that consciousness — the only type of “mind” that could reasonably be uploaded in order to bestow an immortality worthy of the name — is a bodily function. It’s something our bodies do. We don’t yet know how it’s done, but one way or another, our brains manage to generate what neuroscientists call percepts (and philosophers call qualia) which are the building blocks of sentience, of conscious experience, such as sounds, colors, odors, flavors, the agony of pain, the awareness of our bodies, and everything else that that our brains fuse together to create our conscious world, whether in our waking day, in our dreams, or in hallucinations.
