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DIGITAL IMMORTALITY: SELF OR 0010110?
Abstract
In this paper, we explore from several angles the possibility, and practicality, of one of the major tenets of the transhumanist movement — the intention to upload human minds to computers. The first part of the paper assumes that mind-uploading is possible and will become quite commonplace in the near (21st century) future a là Ray Kurzweil and cohorts. This assumption allows us to explore several of its problematic implications for personal identity, especially the effects it will have on questions of duty, responsibility, interpersonal relationships, and culpability in the case of crime. In the second part of the paper, we take a deeper and more critical look at whether mind-uploading is indeed metaphysically possible, and offer some neurobiologically-inspired arguments against its feasibility.
... Sociologists and anthropologists are increasingly turning their gaze towards the new types of 'para-social' relationships (Sherlock, 2013), and the 'continuing bonds' (Bell et al., 2015) that we shape with the online dead. And in philosophy, there has been a rising interest for the ontological (Steinhart, 2007;Stokes, 2012;Swan and Howard, 2012) and ethical (Ö hman and Floridi, 2018;Stokes, 2015) status of digital remains. In short, online death has rapidly become a booming and diverse research area. ...
We project the future accumulation of profiles belonging to deceased Facebook users. Our analysis suggests that a minimum of 1.4 billion users will pass away before 2100 if Facebook ceases to attract new users as of 2018. If the network continues expanding at current rates, however, this number will exceed 4.9 billion. In both cases, a majority of the profiles will belong to non-Western users. In discussing our findings, we draw on the emerging scholarship on digital preservation and stress the challenges arising from curating the profiles of the deceased. We argue that an exclusively commercial approach to data preservation poses important ethical and political risks that demand urgent consideration. We call for a scalable, sustainable, and dignified curation model that incorporates the interests of multiple stakeholders.
... Sociologists and anthropologists are increasingly turning their gaze towards the new types of 'para-social' relationships (Sherlock, 2013), and the 'continuing bonds' (Bell et al., 2015) that we shape with the online dead. And in philosophy, there has been a rising interest for the ontological (Steinhart, 2007;Stokes, 2012;Swan and Howard, 2012) and ethical (Ö hman and Floridi, 2018;Stokes, 2015) status of digital remains. In short, online death has rapidly become a booming and diverse research area. ...
We project the future accumulation of profiles belonging to deceased Facebook users. Our analysis suggests that a minimum of 227 million users will pass away before 2100 if Facebook ceases to attract new users as of 2018. If the network continues expanding at current rates, however, this number will exceed 2 billion. In both cases, a majority of the profiles will belong to non-western users. In discussing our findings, we draw on the emerging scholarship on digital preservation and stress the challenges arising from curating the profiles of the deceased. We argue that an exclusively commercial approach to data preservation poses important ethical and political risks that demand urgent consideration. We call for a scalable, sustainable, and dignified curation model that incorporates the interests of multiple stakeholders.
... Consequently, the study ties together several different research areas. It allows one to identify systematically connections between policy oriented (Laouris 2015;McCallig 2013), philosophical (Stokes 2015;Swan and Howard 2012;Steinhart;2007) and more empirically grounded research (Grimm and Chiasson 2014;Mitchell et al. 2012), as these research fields can all be related to the economics of digital afterlife. ...
Online technologies enable vast amounts of data to outlive their producers online, thereby giving rise to a new, digital form of afterlife presence. Although researchers have begun investigating the nature of such presence, academic literature has until now failed to acknowledge the role of commercial interests in shaping it. The goal of this paper is to analyse what those interests are and what ethical consequences they may have. This goal is pursued in three steps. First, we introduce the concept of the Digital Afterlife Industry (DAI), and define it as an object of study. Second, we identify the politico-economic interests of the DAI. For this purpose, we develop an analytical approach based on an informational interpretation of Marxian economics. Third, we explain the practical manifestations of the interests using four real life cases. The findings expose the incentives of the DAI to alter what is referred to as the “informational bodies” of the dead, which in turn is to be seen as a violation of the principle of human dignity. To prevent such consequences, we argue that the ethical conventions that guide trade with remains of organic bodies may serve as a good model for future regulation of DAI.
... Koene [166] criticizes plans to create safe AGIs and considers uploading both a more feasible and a more reliable approach. 27 Some uploading approaches also raise questions of personal identity, whether the upload would still be the same person as the original [38,45,72,112,142,155,193,262,280] and whether they would be conscious in the first place [11,71,142,169,239]. However, these concerns are not necessarily very relevant for AGI risk considerations, as a population of uploads working to protect against AGIs would be helpful even if they lacked consciousness or were different individuals than the originals. ...
... Koene [166] criticizes plans to create safe AGIs and considers uploading both a more feasible and a more reliable approach. 27 Some uploading approaches also raise questions of personal identity, whether the upload would still be the same person as the original [38,45,72,112,142,155,193,262,280] and whether they would be conscious in the first place [11,71,142,169,239]. However, these concerns are not necessarily very relevant for AGI risk considerations, as a population of uploads working to protect against AGIs would be helpful even if they lacked consciousness or were different individuals than the originals. ...
Many researchers have argued that humanity will create artificial general intelligence (AGI) within the next twenty to one hundred years. It has been suggested that AGI may inflict serious damage to human well-being on a global scale (‘catastrophic risk’). After summarizing the arguments for why AGI may pose such a risk, we review the fields proposed responses to AGI risk. We consider societal proposals, proposals for external constraints on AGI behaviors and proposals for creating AGIs that are safe due to their internal design.
In a previous article, we projected the future accumulation of profiles belonging to deceased users on Facebook. We concluded that a minimum of 1.4 billion users will pass away before 2100 if Facebook ceases to attract new users as of 2018. If the network continues expanding at current rates, on the other hand, this number will exceed 4.9 billion. Although these findings provided an important first step, one network alone remains insufficient to establish a quantitative foundation for further macro-level analysis of the phenomenon of online death. Facebook is but one social media platform among many, and hardly the most representative in terms of their policy on deceased users. In this study, we use the same methodology to develop a complementary analysis of projected mortality on Instagram. Our models indicate that somewhere between 767 million and 4.2 billion Instagram users will die between 2019 and 2100, depending on the network’s future growth rate. Although the number of deceased Instagram profiles will likely be fewer than those on Facebook, we argue that they are nonetheless part of a shared digital cultural heritage, and should hence be curated with careful consideration.
This chapter articulates that scholars write about Human Enhancement Technologies (HET) in two ways. This is not a reflection of a reality in the literature but rather a heuristic designed to contextualize democratic citizenship within contemporary HET discussions. The first way is to write about HET as possible realities far off into the future. The second way is to write about HET that can be realised seemingly as soon as tomorrow. For democratic citizenship, writing in the first case is either utopian or dystopian. It is either the projection of democracy's total triumph or its utter collapse caused by the type of rots that lead to democide. But writing in the second case is stimulating and vibrant. There are, for example, numerous calls for HET-led reforms in the literature. These reforms are needed to help answer the crisis of the citizen's august discontent (the growing and increasingly legitimized political apathy and political abstention observed in, and performed by, the citizenry). The purpose of this chapter is to focus on this second case—this more developed body of literature—and to theorise the interface between democratic citizenship and HET.
This paper aims to analyze the current discourses about the problem of technological immortality in some recent science fictions. These will be taken as a starting point for a discussion about the philosophical implications related to mind uploading, especially with regard to an idea of transcendence and abandonment of the body. Finally, we question the place of the utopian dreams of immortality in relation to the “crisis of the future” that we are currently experiencing, mainly related to climate change and the unsustainability of current capitalist ways of life.
The informational remains of dead internet users are increasingly populating the web. To survey the most significant aspects of this phenomenon, the present chapter gives a historical background to the role death in society, and draws on current literature on the topic of digital afterlife. It is argued that the ongoing digital transformation of death takes place both on a microscopic, a macroscopic and a conceptual level.
Society is undergoing a relentless digital transformation process. This process is creating a digital copy of every entity present in the physical world and these digital goods will be inherited through centuries establishing a direct link between distant generations. Advances in artificial intelligence make the promise for future whole brain emulation enabling the possibility of uploading the human mind on a digital system. This would enable the possibility of interacting with immortal digital clones of deceased people. This paper wants to start investigating the consequences of the emergence of the concept of digital immortality.
This chapter articulates that scholars write about Human Enhancement Technologies (HET) in two ways. This is not a reflection of a reality in the literature but rather a heuristic designed to contextualize democratic citizenship within contemporary HET discussions. The first way is to write about HET as possible realities far off into the future. The second way is to write about HET that can be realised seemingly as soon as tomorrow. For democratic citizenship, writing in the first case is either utopian or dystopian. It is either the projection of democracy's total triumph or its utter collapse caused by the type of rots that lead to democide. But writing in the second case is stimulating and vibrant. There are, for example, numerous calls for HET-led reforms in the literature. These reforms are needed to help answer the crisis of the citizen's august discontent (the growing and increasingly legitimized political apathy and political abstention observed in, and performed by, the citizenry). The purpose of this chapter is to focus on this second case-this more developed body of literature-and to theorise the interface between democratic citizenship and HET.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson take on the daunting task of rebuilding Western philosophy in alignment with three fundamental lessons from cognitive science: The mind is inherently embodied, thought is mostly unconscious, and abstract concepts are largely metaphorical. Why so daunting? "Cognitive science--the empirical study of the mind--calls upon us to create a new, empirically responsible philosophy, a philosophy consistent with empirical discoveries about the nature of mind," they write. "A serious appreciation of cognitive science requires us to rethink philosophy from the beginning, in a way that would put it more in touch with the reality of how we think." In other words, no Platonic forms, no Cartesian mind-body duality, no Kantian pure logic. Even Noam Chomsky's generative linguistics is revealed under scrutiny to have substantial problems.
Parts of Philosophy in the Flesh retrace the ground covered in the authors' earlier Metaphors We Live By , which revealed how we deal with abstract concepts through metaphor. (The previous sentence, for example, relies on the metaphors "Knowledge is a place" and "Knowing is seeing" to make its point.) Here they reveal the metaphorical underpinnings of basic philosophical concepts like time, causality--even morality--demonstrating how these metaphors are rooted in our embodied experiences. They repropose philosophy as an attempt to perfect such conceptual metaphors so that we can understand how our thought processes shape our experience; they even make a tentative effort toward rescuing spirituality from the heavy blows dealt by the disproving of the disembodied mind or "soul" by reimagining "transcendence" as "imaginative empathetic projection." Their source list is helpfully arranged by subject matter, making it easier to follow up on their citations. If you enjoyed the mental workout from Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works , Lakoff and Johnson will, to pursue the "Learning is exercise" metaphor, take you to the next level of training. --Ron Hogan Two leading thinkers offer a blueprint for a new philosophy.
"Their ambition is massive, their argument important.…The authors engage in a sort of metaphorical genome project, attempting to delineate the genetic code of human thought." -The New York Times Book Review
"This book will be an instant academic best-seller." -Mark Turner, University of Maryland
This is philosophy as it has never been seen before. Lakoff and Johnson show that a philosophy responsible to the science of the mind offers a radically new and detailed understandings of what a person is. After first describing the philosophical stance that must follow from taking cognitive science seriously, they re-examine the basic concepts of the mind, time, causation, morality, and the self; then they rethink a host of philosophical traditions, from the classical Greeks through Kantian morality through modern analytical philosophy.
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Shrink Rap Radio Live #3: Artificial Life and Artificial Intelligence, Shrink Rap Radio
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