Downloading consciousness

If we could download our consciousness in a computer or a robot, we could go on living indefinitely inside the hardware and thus achieve immortality. This is what some futurists and supporters of transhumanism hold. But is there any chance that this will come true?

If this were possible, we could also keep backup copies. Thus, in the event of an accident, the dead person could be retrieved and put back into operation with minimal memory loss. As usual, science fiction arrived there first, as in Cory Doctorow's novel Down and out in the Magic Kingdom.

In the previous post in this thread, I pointed out that the brain is not replaceable, so a cyborg would not be immortal. But if this fourth method were feasible, a human brain could be replaced by a computer where its consciousness had been downloaded, thus overcoming the above difficulty.

So, let us take a look at the fourth method. Will we ever be able to download our memory and our self-consciousness in a material medium other than our brain? Just now, obviously, the answer is negative, for a reason that can be succinctly expressed in a few words:

If we don't know what is self-consciousness, how can we download it?

The question, then, is whether we will ever know how to do what we now don't know how to do. As I have said in other posts, this problem is philosophical rather than scientific. There are four philosophical theories that try to solve (among other things) the problem of consciousness:

1. Reductionist monism or biological functionalism: This materialist philosophy asserts that the mind is determined by the brain, and the brain by the network of neurons that make it. Human thought is an epiphenomenon. Freedom of choice is an illusion. We are just programmed machines.
2. Emergent monism: the mind is a self-organized emergent evolutionary product, which has emerged in an extremely complex system (the brain) from simpler systems made by neurons. This philosophy asserts that the underlying structures don’t completely determine the evolution of mental phenomena, but that the latter can influence the former. Deep down, this philosophy is also materialistic.
3. Neurophysiological dualism: the mind and the brain are different, but they are so intimately united that they act as a unit; they are two complementary and unique states of the same organism.
4. Metaphysical dualism: the mind and the brain are two different realities. The first is a spiritual and non-spatial substance, capable of interacting with the brain, which is material and spatial. Both entities can exist independently of each other, although the body without the mind eventually breaks down.

Will it be possible to download our consciousness? It depends on which of these four philosophies is true. If reductionist monism, it should be possible in a not very long term; with emergentist monism, it would also be possible, but it would take a long time to achieve it; in the case of neurophysiological dualism, it will probably be impossible; finally, if metaphysical dualism were true, such discharge would be, without a doubt, totally impossible. In any case, before being able to download human consciousness into a machine, it would be necessary, as a precondition, to build conscious machines, i.e. Strong Artificial Intelligence.

I spoke in another post about The Hidden Premise. Ultimately, the choice between these four philosophies depends on what one thinks about the existence of God. If God does not exist, materialism would be true. The religious experiences of many human beings would be hallucinations, and in such a world consciousness would be an epiphenomenon that could be reproduced and downloaded at will, although we may be now far from it. On the other hand, if God exists, monism must be false; in the universe there would be two independent elements: matter and spirit; one of the two forms of dualism would be true; and unloading consciousness would probably be impossible.

As I have said frequently in these posts, science cannot prove that God exists, nor that God does not exist. Therefore, it is most likely that no scientific advance will be able to cut the Gordian knot. In my opinion, we’ll never be able to download the consciousness of a human being in a computer or a robot, and its precondition, strong artificial intelligence, will never happen. 

Of course, the fact that this is not achieved would prove nothing, one way or the other. Monists will go on announcing that we are about to achieve it. And dualists will go on asserting that it will never be done. And if by chance it were possible to build conscious robots, my science-fiction novel Operation Quatuor offers arguments to the dualists, so that, despite this, they can maintain their philosophical position.

Finally, since the universe will inevitably become incompatible with life (see this post), the answer to the question of whether we will ever be immortal in this life must be negative, in any case.

Do we really want to be immortal? I would say some of us do, but not here, in this world, but in another world, better than this one. I wrote about this in a post in this blog. But that is not science.

The same post in Spanish

Thematic Thread on What is Immortality?: Previous Next

Manuel Alfonseca