• Question: What ultimately would happen if somebody found a way to transport to soul into a machine, kinda like making a animal out of scrap but for a human?

    Asked by anon-256833 on 10 Jun 2020.
    • Photo: Ricardo Duarte

      Ricardo Duarte answered on 10 Jun 2020:

      Really nice question! So there are people who are already trying to digitalize human memories so that can be considered possible. In any case, this does not mean that we are uploading consciousness itself. I think that you would create something that speaks like a human but that would have no self-awareness.

    • Photo: James M Monk

      James M Monk answered on 10 Jun 2020:

      I am going to assume that by soul you mean mind, since the soul is a rather badly defined concept that no one can agree we even have or not. Even the mind is controversial, but we can assume for now that it is something that emerges from the physical brain.

      The human brain on its own does not know anything about either itself or the world. It is only by interacting with and observing both the external world and our own body that the brain learns. Your brain’s concept of colour, sound, touch, language and more abstract concepts come from using your body to interact with the world and learning representations of those things. If you deprived a brain of that physical body, it would not have any inputs. If it was an already working brain – i.e. you somehow ran a simulation of an existing human on a machine like a computer – I’d imagine it would interpret the situation as extremely painful – all the usual senses and stimuli it expects would be missing. There would be no way of communicating with it for it to tell us that it was in pain. It might be extremely unethical.

      If on the other hand you simulated a “new born” brain that had not learned how to be human, then it would not have the learned experience of having had a body. I don’t know how that would behave – perhaps it would just be random activity, no organised thoughts and concepts as we know them.

    • Photo: Rosie Hayward

      Rosie Hayward answered on 11 Jun 2020:

      Let us start by assuming humans have souls, or something similar which gives us personhood; this could be consciousness or something else. I think a few things would happen, but these would be largely dependent on the attitude of society.

      First, there would be a debate about whether this new being could be considered a person, and given the rights of a person. This would be complicated, as it’s not really clear what makes someone a person, and there is a whole branch of philosophy that deals with this. It is likely a lot of people would be uncomfortable with a machine considered a person.

      Second, there would be people who saw this as an opportunity to be immortal. Humanity has never had to deal with this as a possibility before, so this would also be a complex issue. Would only the rich and powerful get a chance at immortality? What would this mean for humanity?

      Third, would we work with the machine people, or fear them?

      There is a lot of good sci-fi which imagines scenarios like this, which I’m sure you would enjoy. For facts about it, you could look into current research on ‘mind transfer’, which some people are working on, but I would recommend seeing if you can take an introductory philosophy course in the future. I really enjoyed studying philosophy, and there is an opportunity to debate questions like the one you have asked here!

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