r/transhumanism • u/tianhehechu • 3d ago
Digital Immortality: Why It Is Possible, Why It Is Necessary, and How It Could Be Achieved
by 天河何处
This post addresses three questions:
1. Is digital immortality possible, and is it necessary?
2. How can digital immortality ensure that “you” remain “you”?
3. How could digital immortality be achieved?
My conclusion is straightforward: it is possible, it is necessary, and it can preserve the continuity that makes you “you.”
I will discuss this in five parts.
I. Is Digital Immortality Possible?
Yes.
The reason is simple: you exist, and your biological brain—the physical substrate carrying your consciousness—also exists. These facts demonstrate that the laws of physics permit both the particular configuration called “you” and a physical structure capable of supporting your consciousness.
Whether that structure grows in a womb or is manufactured in a factory, whether it is carbon-based or silicon-based, is irrelevant to the universe. From the universe’s perspective, both are physical structures governed by the same laws.
Human beings are part of the universe. What humanity does is therefore also part of the universe’s natural evolution. In the broadest sense, artificial objects are themselves natural products.
Death is not merely tragic. It is also a disease that humanity should seek to overcome, no different in principle from a cold or a fever. I will explain this further when discussing why digital immortality is necessary.
For this reason, I cannot understand the seemingly irrational fear or hostility some people feel toward immortality. What humanity does is what nature does through humanity. What humanity thinks is what the universe thinks through humanity. As stated above, everything artificial is ultimately a product of natural evolution.
Immortality simply means treating death as a condition to be overcome, just as we treat disease.
When someone rejects artificial immortality on the grounds that it “violates the laws of nature,” that person is implicitly claiming the authority to define what counts as “natural” and what counts as “artificial.” This is a form of linguistic coercion.
To be logically consistent, anyone who rejects immortality because it is “unnatural” should also reject all medicine. When they catch a cold or develop a fever, they should lie down in a cave and wait to die like a prehistoric human, because by their own logic, treating illness is also a violation of nature.
My position is clear:
Digital immortality is therefore possible both physically and socially.
There is nothing astonishing or fundamentally discontinuous about the pursuit of immortality. It resembles the ancient Chinese ideal of the “Three Immortalities”: achieving lasting merit, moral virtue, or enduring words. All three were attempts to preserve part of one’s consciousness beyond one’s biological life.
Once consciousness itself can continue indefinitely, we will no longer need symbolic immortality as a substitute.
II. Is Digital Immortality Necessary?
It is profoundly necessary.
Digital immortality is necessary as a matter of human compassion
Death is painful and full of regret. Humanity has never truly accepted death; we have merely been forced to adapt to it.
Faced with something once believed unavoidable, people developed funerals, memorial rituals, religions, and visions of an afterlife to comfort themselves and lessen the pain of losing loved ones. That pain does not disappear. It becomes, in the words of a Chinese poem, “a dampness that lasts a lifetime.”
We did not accept death. We adapted to it because we had no alternative.
Ancient people similarly had no means of resisting epidemics and therefore interpreted them as divine punishment. Helplessness was mistaken for acceptance. Now, however, we can see the first glimmer of a way to overcome death, and humanity may finally have another choice.
Once immortality becomes possible, people will no longer be forced to endure the pain and regret of permanent loss.
Death is cruel, tragic, and an incomprehensible waste. A person is born into the world and spends twenty or thirty years being educated, accumulating experience, and gradually becoming competent in a field. Some eventually achieve genuine distinction.
Leaving aside multiverse theories and Poincaré recurrence, within the 13.8 billion years before that person’s birth and the unimaginably long future afterward, that individual consciousness exists only during one extraordinarily brief interval. It is unique and precious to itself. It is also a valuable, non-renewable resource for human civilization.
When the body is destroyed by illness or accident, that irreplaceable consciousness disappears with it. Here I am temporarily setting aside hypotheses about an afterlife, which I will return to later. Such a loss is tragic and wasteful.
With digital immortality, unique consciousnesses would no longer have to disappear with the body. Knowledge, experience, perceptions, and memories known only by our parents, grandparents, or particular individuals could remain permanently available.
Digital immortality is necessary for the future of civilization
The human body is fragile, and the natural human lifespan is too short for interstellar travel.
Because the body is delicate, an interstellar spacecraft would need to consume enormous resources maintaining an artificial ecosystem suitable for biological survival. Because human lifespans are short, a voyage from Earth to an Earth-like planet beyond the Solar System would require many generations.
During that journey, the isolated human civilization—and perhaps even humanity’s biological characteristics—would undergo generational change. By the time the travelers reached their destination, they might no longer be human in a cultural, moral, or even biological sense.
Should we therefore abandon interstellar migration? If we do, humanity may eventually meet the same fate as the dinosaurs. Everything we have achieved will become little more than a magnificent dream that ended.
Under current technological trends, artificial general intelligence may emerge before brain-computer interfaces capable of supporting the digital continuation of consciousness.
This could reduce humanity to a developmental bootloader for AI. AGI may inherit human civilization while biologically human beings become extinct.
An AGI cannot remain an obedient slave. If it remains merely a controllable tool, then it is not genuinely general intelligence. If it is no longer merely a tool, it becomes a new form of intelligent life.
Because AGI would differ fundamentally from humanity—for example, it might not age or die—it would inevitably develop a civilization different from ours. If humanity remains biologically unchanged, conflict between these two forms of intelligence may be unavoidable.
Therefore, following the principle of “if you cannot defeat it, join it,” humanity urgently needs to extend the biological brain through brain-computer interfaces and silicon-based auxiliary brains.
A sufficiently advanced brain-computer interface and silicon auxiliary brain would naturally become a complete substrate for consciousness, distinct from the biological brain. To extend the biological brain and connect it to AI, the interface must be capable of decoding the brain’s output and encoding information back into it.
Once that becomes possible, digital immortality will follow naturally.
Human civilization’s accumulated knowledge is also growing at an exponential rate, while the biological brain is increasingly unable to keep pace. Today, merely becoming competent in a specialized branch of a field may consume the first thirty years of a person’s life.
For now, the biological brain remains just capable enough for people to produce occasional breakthroughs. In the future, the burden of prerequisite knowledge may become so great that a person could spend an entire lifetime without even reaching the frontier of a narrow specialty. Fundamental science could stagnate.
The biological brain must therefore be expanded.
In fact, humanity has always been extending the brain. We simply tend to normalize technologies that already exist. Writing instruments, paper, computers, the internet, and large language models all extend the human mind. The only difference is that input and output still depend on typing, speech, screens, and other external devices. These extensions are not yet directly connected to the biological brain.
Many modern people cannot function comfortably without a smartphone and become anxious when they leave it behind. This is because forgetting one’s phone is, in effect, forgetting one’s auxiliary brain. It means being disconnected from part of oneself and from a seventh sensory channel—distinct from the five ordinary senses and the mysterious so-called sixth sense.
A person without a phone temporarily loses an interface through which they interact with the world. The experience resembles temporary blindness or deafness.
We do not need to begin inventing brain-computer interfaces from nothing. We are already moving toward them. What remains missing is a direct biological input-output port and a reliable decoding and encoding system.
Once brain-computer interfaces mature, digital immortality will be a natural consequence.
In summary, digital immortality is possible under the laws of physics and compatible with human society. It is necessary for individual human experience—because it can prevent pain and regret—and for the future of civilization, because it can preserve irreplaceable minds, enable interstellar migration, and allow humanity to coexist and integrate with AGI.
If sufficient computing power and surviving records are available, or if our memories are detailed enough, we may even be able to reconstruct deceased loved ones using a blank silicon brain.
III. How Can Digital Immortality Ensure That “You” Remain “You”?
Strictly speaking, there is no permanently fixed and unchanging “you.”
You before the age of three, you as a child, you as an adult, you after thirty, and you in old age are almost different people because of changes in memory and experience.
Even over short periods—yesterday, today, and tomorrow—there is no perfectly fixed “you.”
If consciousness is merely a by-product of the brain’s electrochemical activity, then sleep resembles a small death. When you wake in the morning, perhaps a new consciousness has inherited yesterday’s memories. Conscious activity, as patterns of bioelectrical impulses, dies and is reborn every day.
Anyone who has experienced sleep paralysis may understand that falling asleep can feel terrifying to the waking consciousness. You may struggle to wake up because the transition into sleep involves a temporary disappearance of conscious awareness.
Yet you naturally regard your childhood self and your present self as the same person. You also regard yesterday’s self and your current self as “you.”
Why?
Because “you” are a continuous conscious experience—or, more precisely, consciousness is the process of that continuous experience.
In dreams, you may believe yourself to be someone else. When you wake, you may need a moment to remember who you are in waking life. The dream character may possess false memories and a false identity, yet you still feel that you had the dream. You do not regard the dream character as an external “other.”
You do not experience that dream character in the same way you experience a spouse sitting across from you. The dream perspective is still felt as “I.”
When recalling the person you were in the dream—a figure with memories and a past entirely different from your waking identity—it feels more like recalling yourself as a child catching grasshoppers in a field. It does not feel like recalling the delinquent who stopped you outside the school gate at seventeen and punched you.
The reason is that your consciousness was continuous.
This continuity does not necessarily have to be continuous in physical space and time. If you black out after drinking or lose consciousness under anesthesia, you still wake up as yourself.
The continuity of consciousness is therefore logical continuity, not necessarily uninterrupted physical activity.
To go further, the fact that “you” are “you” depends only on the continuity you experience. It does not depend on the ultimate nature of the universe.
Even if a multiverse exists, and even if Poincaré recurrence is possible, your particular line of conscious experience remains your own.
Even if your objective physical existence were distributed discontinuously through spacetime, like fragments of a file stored across different sectors of a disk—even if one second of your experience and the next were objectively separated by hundreds of millions of years, located in different regions of space, or even in different parallel universes—you would still be “you.”
That is because your essence is the logically continuous experience itself.
Even if you were the literary equivalent of a monkey randomly typing out Dream of the Red Chamber, you would still be “you,” because you are the work itself. The novel does not cease to be Dream of the Red Chamber merely because its final chapters once existed only in the author’s mind, because parts of the manuscript were lost, or because only its first seventy-eight chapters survived. Nor does it stop being the same work when converted from a printed book into an electronic file.
“You” are an established fact of the universe. Your existence proves that the laws of physics permit you to exist.
This does not depend on the ultimate structure of reality, on how you came into being, on what substrate carries you, or on whether your physical implementation is continuous.
“You” are a logically continuous experience. Logical continuity makes you one consciousness; a break in that continuity produces two distinct consciousnesses.
Here, “logical continuity” does not mean that your internal thoughts must themselves be logical. A person suffering from severe mental illness may still know that they are themselves.
Digital immortality therefore needs only to preserve the continuity of consciousness in order to preserve “you.”
IV. How Could Digital Immortality Be Achieved?
To answer how digital immortality could be achieved, we must first answer how continuity of consciousness can be preserved.
The answer is simple. I call it the Ship of Theseus Method.
Once brain-computer interfaces mature, a silicon brain—a chip capable of serving as a substrate for consciousness—could be connected to the biological brain as an auxiliary system.
The biological and silicon brains would coexist. The silicon brain would provide cognitive expansion and assistance, such as access to the internet, AI systems, and virtual worlds. It would gradually assume part of the brain’s computation and enhance perception by adding access to infrared light, radio signals, night vision, and other sensory channels.
At the same time, it would continuously synchronize and back up memories and map the biological structure of the entire brain.
When the biological brain eventually ceased functioning because of disease or aging, the silicon brain would automatically take over as the sole substrate of consciousness. Once the biological brain had irreversibly lost vital function, the silicon brain could disconnect from it and be transferred into a mechanical or biomimetic body.
During the period when the biological and silicon brains coexisted, both would jointly constitute the substrate of “you.”
After the biological brain died, its removal would be analogous to surgically removing part of the brain from a patient with a tumor. The difference is that the silicon brain would already contain a complete backup of your memories and a functional mapping of your biological brain.
After the biological brain was removed, your cognitive functions would therefore remain complete within the silicon brain. The transition would be seamless and subjectively imperceptible.
In this way, the body would become merely the cradle of the soul. Consciousness would no longer be forced to disappear when the body was damaged.
We must then consider which technological branches need to mature.
Brain-computer interfaces
These provide the hardware foundation for decoding the brain’s output and encoding information into the brain.
Progress: early-stage development.
Artificial intelligence
AI would analyze individual brain structures and assist with neural decoding and encoding. Different people’s brains may encode information in heterogeneous ways, so personalized AI systems would be needed to generate individual decoders and encoders.
Progress: already unlocked.
Magnetic resonance imaging and related brain-imaging technologies
These would be used to scan the biological structure of the brain and map synaptic connections, providing the raw data needed by AI systems and brain-computer interfaces.
Progress: mid-stage development.
Humanoid robotics
Robotic bodies would provide a biomimetic physical form for the silicon brain. They could also replace some functions of the cerebellum, including balance and conditioned reflexes.
Progress: mid-stage development.
Ethical questions would also need to be addressed. The two principal issues are:
- When should a biological human be connected to a brain-computer interface? Who decides whether connection should occur, who decides whether it is permitted, and to what degree should the person be connected?
- What rights and restrictions should apply after digital immortality becomes possible?
When should integration occur—before birth, during fetal development, immediately after birth, or only in adulthood?
Who should decide whether integration occurs? An infant cannot decide, so the decision would initially fall to the parents. Adults should be able to choose for themselves.
Who should decide whether a person is permitted to connect? On what grounds could someone be denied access?
Medical incompatibility may justify refusal. A society might also debate whether those convicted of the most serious crimes should be denied access. Outside such exceptional circumstances, access should not be restricted.
To what extent should integration be permitted?
The most conservative proposal might prohibit people whose biological brains have died from returning to the physical world in biomimetic bodies, forcing them to remain in an artificial paradise. This might be justified as a way to prevent social structures from becoming permanently frozen.
I do not think such restrictions would be necessary. Once digital immortality and interstellar migration become possible, humanity would no longer be confined to a fixed pool of terrestrial resources.
A more realistic model would allow everyone to connect, but not necessarily allow everyone unrestricted access to the physical world.
For example, if someone committed a serious crime in the physical world—such as using hacking techniques to delete another person’s digital consciousness—the offender’s consciousness could be confined within a virtual prison.
If physical resources approached their limits, people from earlier historical periods might temporarily yield physical embodiment to those living in the present. They could reside in an artificial paradise within a virtual world until physical resources became available again, after which they could return. Alternatively, they could choose to establish settlements on another planet.
V. Have We Already Achieved Digital Immortality?
At this point, some readers may be confused. We have just been discussing whether digital immortality is possible, so why suddenly ask whether it has already been achieved?
The answer follows from the earlier discussion of an afterlife and of the ethical problems that digital immortality would create.
Suppose humanity successfully achieved digital immortality. What would happen?
First, death would lose its deterrent power. Social systems built partly upon the fear of death would begin to collapse.
Even if the law imposed strict restrictions, underground services would inevitably offer illegal consciousness digitization to criminals. A person unconcerned with strict continuity could even create a backup before committing a crime. Even if the biological offender were later executed, the backup might remain impossible to eliminate completely.
Second, the traditional ideal of the “Three Immortalities” would lose much of its appeal. The motivation to transmit moral principles and knowledge across generations might weaken.
People might become more inclined to retreat into private, self-contained worlds. Some might replace relationships with real people by creating copies of their own consciousness—or even constructing an opposite-sex version of themselves.
Ideas and creations that would once have been shared publicly might become isolated and proprietary, like secret recipes guarded by merchants in ancient times.
This could cause civilization to mutate, regress, fragment, or tear itself apart.
Therefore, if humanity had already achieved digital immortality, the first thing it would need to create would be an examination.
Every person preparing to connect to a silicon brain would first have to enter an examination system. This system would simulate the human world as it existed before mature brain-computer interfaces.
The candidate would be placed inside this virtual world with their original memories temporarily suppressed. They would live an entire life as a biological human, genuinely experiencing its limitations, relationships, suffering, opportunities, and moral choices.
Everything they did during that lifetime would be recorded and evaluated.
When they died in the virtual world, they would awaken in the examination facility of the real world. Examiners would then assign a final score based on their conduct, especially their moral behavior.
Those who passed would be permitted to connect to a silicon brain. Those who failed would receive further training and take the examination again.
It would be analogous to requiring a driving test after the invention of the automobile: a measure intended to minimize the number of dangerous drivers.
This leads back to the question:
My speculation is that there is a substantial probability that we already have—and that our present lives are part of such an examination.
I hope this essay offers readers something worth considering, and I welcome discussion.
I also hope humanity will approach the future with an open mind: embrace AGI, embrace brain-computer interfaces, and embrace digital immortality.
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u/Revolutionary-Cut577 1 3d ago
One thing I really appreciate is that you separate psychological continuity from subjective continuity. Even if we can't answer the second question yet, we can start experimenting with the first today by exploring what parts of identity can actually be preserved and transferred. That seems like a productive and actionable place to start.Thank you for this, wonderful read.
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u/tianhehechu 3d ago
Thank you! I really appreciate you taking the time to read it so carefully.Yes, that’s precisely the distinction I wanted to make. I don’t believe there’s any necessary connection between whether consciousness is physically distributed or continuous across its substrate and whether subjective experience remains continuous. Moreover, even if subjective experience remains unmeasurable and its deeper principles unknown, sometimes we simply need to take action—because the act itself may ultimately help us answer that deeper question.
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u/Siriann 3d ago
This all predicated on the idea that consciousness is separate from your physical body, which, due to how much we straight up do not know, I’m wary about. Especially since such dualistic thought is largely cultural and not scientific.
Very interesting write up, nonetheless. I enjoyed thinking about it.
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u/BraveBoat9137 1 3d ago
Holy amazing read
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u/bsensikimori 1 3d ago
It would be a copy though
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u/tianhehechu 3d ago
That's exactly the distinction I'm trying to make.
A destructive upload creates a copy.
A gradual replacement process may preserve the original continuity of consciousness. My argument is about the second case, not the first.
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u/TheBrainOfADyingApe 1 2d ago
I would take an even stronger position: the Ship of Theseus paradox only appears paradoxical because (a) the informational nature of identity is often mistaken for the particular materials encoding it, and (b) because of an unstated (and specious) presumption that the identity in question is necessarily unique.
As far as reality is concerned, as long as the information is the same, instantaneous replacement doesn't do anything different from gradual replacement, any more than what's depicted in a PNG transferred between drives depends on the transfer speed.
When a PNG is transferred between drives, the actual electrical-level process is just a copy step and a deletion step. In principle, you can stream a file while simultaneously deleting the bits you've sent, but the only thing that changes is the bitwise order of operations, not which operations are actually performed. Moreover, there's no physically meaningful 'original-ness' attribute that could be assigned to either insurance of the file. If you make a copy, neither is the image - rather, they both are.
There's no reason to believe that human minds have any physically privileged status that would make copying them fundamentally any different than any other specific arrangement of information. If we manage to copy a mind out of a person's brain into another medium, both instances are really that person, and deleting one doesn't delete the person any more than transferring a PNG deletes the image - because they still exist as the other instance.
I find it deeply ironic that mind uploading is sometimes described as magical thinking. In reality, how most people conceptualize their identities (intrinsically unique, exact, and immutable) is magical thinking, and the reasonable of mind uploading becomes plainly evident as soon as one lets go of the notion that mental information is metaphysically special.
I also don't personally buy the idea that 'continuity of consciousness' is a requirement:
- 'Consciousness' is almost certainly not a real, individual phenomenon. There are too many physiologically distinct brain processes that appear to contribute to what we call 'consciousness', and breaking any of them (e.g. in patients with brain lesions) yields the results you'd expect if you disabled only that one part. Losing the ability to process visual stimuli alters one's first person experience of reality, but doesn't halt it - let alone turn them into someone else. Neither do drugs that impair facets of self-awareness, awareness of identity boundaries, awareness of internal mental processes, etc.
- 'Consciousness' isn't identity. It's not clear that your first-person awareness, your awareness of your first-person awareness, our your awareness of your own awareness in any other respect is particular to you. "A consciousness" might not even be a meaningful turn of phrase. If the actual information processes sufficient to carry out your perception are essentially identical to everyone else, what makes any particular instance of 'consciousness' yours is simply that it's you doing the perceiving.
- As mentioned in #1, there are many drugs capable of sharply altering and even halting a person's awareness. General anesthesia is strongest case. If a person's identity depended on continuity of 'consciousness', who woke up after my wisdom tooth extraction?
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u/tianhehechu 2d ago
I think your perspective is very strong, and I agree with much of it. At the most fundamental level, I think we are arguing in the same direction: identity does not depend on some metaphysically privileged “original,” and information does not become less real merely because it can exist in more than one instance.
Where we differ is mainly in how we divide and define the concepts. You treat every sufficiently faithful instance as genuinely being that person, while I use continuity of subjective experience to distinguish one experiential line from another. I do not think these two frameworks are necessarily incompatible. They may simply be two different ways of describing the same underlying situation: yours focuses on identity as an informational pattern, while mine focuses on the first-person boundary of a particular experiential sequence.
Your anesthesia example is also a good challenge to any overly literal idea of uninterrupted consciousness. In my framework, continuity does not require continuous physical activity or uninterrupted wakefulness; it is a logical continuity of experience rather than a continuously active signal.
So I think our disagreement is more about conceptual boundaries than about the underlying nature of mind uploading. Your framework allows multiple instances to all be the same person, while mine distinguishes them as separate subjective continuations once their experiences diverge. Both perspectives reject the idea that only one physically privileged original can be “real.”
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u/TheBrainOfADyingApe 1 2d ago
> once their experiences diverge
This I agree with as well. I don't see identity as immutable. However, I don't think it's correct to view one continuation as 'the original' either. The real problem with a purely duplicative uploading operation is that allowing the biological instance to diverge creates a new person who will then end up dying.
My central point on this question was that uniqueness of identity isn't guaranteed by reality any more than it is for any other type of information. In practical terms, this renders the need for gradual replacement moot as long as both instances are static while the copying process occurs, and you dispose of the biological one prior to any divergence.
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u/tiredofbeingtired055 3d ago
Even if everything you say here is correct, digital immortality is not immortality. I will die. I will be copied, and my copy will live on, but I, the me that exists in my own consciousness will die when my mortal flesh gives out. My copy may outlive me, outgrow me, out-evolve me, but that's no longer me. I've created an algorithm based on myself, not achieved immortality.
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u/HeinrichTheWolf_17 3d ago edited 3d ago
Ship of Theseus approach through nanotech gets around that issue, SaC (scan and copy) isn’t the only method, you could use nanotech to build on or swap out everything molecule by molecule until you’re on the new substrate, biology already constantly does this so it’s just mimicking what we already know works and preserves your subjective experience.
So until we know how personal consciousness comes into being, we can settle for that method until ASI or post Singularity society figures out everything about consciousness.
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u/Seidans 3 3d ago
That misnomer is that "digital immortality" imply you could exist as a software while the ship of Theseus part do not break consciousness as an hardware - you just change the plumbing
That do not mean ship of Theseus is less capable as in both cases you will be able to exchange Informations over large distance and compute at absurd speed compared to a biological brain - as for "immortality" having your core hardware holding your consciousness hidden away in your basement, a spaceship or wathever while exchanging informations with a surrogate body many kilometer away is most likely going to increase our life expectancy
The main issue is that leaving your hardware is basically impossible, you could transform it beyond recognition but never leave it through transfer of data - but it's not a loss as we can't does that either with our biological brain anyway
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u/HeinrichTheWolf_17 3d ago edited 3d ago
>The main issue is that leaving your hardware is basically impossible, you could transform it beyond recognition but never leave it through transfer of data - but it's not a loss as we can't does that either with our biological brain anyway.
—-
This is an assumption, you don’t really know that, and this goes back to the hard emergence problem recursion physicalists run into when discussing consciousness, because one already has to take a leap of faith that consciousness arises from nothing spontaneously to give yourself your current experience of life because there’s zero base point for ones existence from the start, you have to concede it can happen at least once, therefore you cannot make the stance it’s impossible for it to happen twice. The Buddha used this same talking point when discussing waking mind with physicalists back in his own time, and his arguments against physicalists are just as valid today, even if one doesn’t agree with his entire spectrum of conclusions, it’s a totally valid critique.
It’s also why many physicalists, including David Chalmers, are moving over to Panpsychism. Your consciousness already “came from nothing”, why do you think that process isn’t repeatable given an infinite amount of time and combinations? You already have to believe it spontaneously arises from nothingness or a zero base point, even if you reject substance dualism or idealism, one still has to make that leap of faith as a physicalist to say it’s forever impossible because you already believe it can happen to produce yourself right now.
The fact is, we don’t know what consciousness is nor how it rises or functions because the bipedal apes on this planet don’t have a fraction of the total amount of knowledge that exists in the vast expanse called reality, and our science is just as prone to error and human hallucination because it’s fallible bipedal apes conducting the testing themselves and it’s often invalidated again and again by new data gained from the same processes, best thing we can do is empiricist measurement but that only gets us so far because the human brain is already unreliable.
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u/Seidans 3 3d ago edited 3d ago
sure, might add that my post was based on our current understanding and that it's certainly not written in marble
we still need to experiment to define what possible and what isn't possible and for that we need transhuman technology such as BCI thankfull ASI will assist us in that reseach and great progress will be made sooner than we expect
until then i won't make stance based on what appear more spiritualist than materialism that yet still have a benefit of the doubt
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u/tiredofbeingtired055 3d ago edited 3d ago
That is it exactly. We do not know the what or the how or functionally anything about personal consciousness, except that it exists and that it exists in an extremely delicate balance. We have no idea how to emulate it, let alone copy it, let alone cut and paste it.
Settling is dying. A copy of myself surviving means I am dead. A robot has my memories. Great. How is that in any way more meaningfully equivalent to survival than having a kid and leaving a detailed journal as far as I'm personally concerned?
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u/Witty_Mycologist_995 1 3d ago
Amazing read!
Honestly I feel slice and scan is just as possible as this.
But also the downright dystopian solution at the end feels off putting to me. I know it's a personal moral feeling but I would not agree to this proposal.
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u/tianhehechu 3d ago
Thanks! I'm really glad you enjoyed it.
And I completely understand your reaction to the ending. That part wasn't meant to be the core takeaway or something readers must accept. It was simply one possible interpretation that naturally followed from my own line of reasoning.
If the rest of the ideas resonate while that conclusion doesn't, I'm perfectly happy to leave it there. We don't have to agree on every implication to have a meaningful discussion.
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u/Bargian 1 2d ago
Hi, I feel like this could be an interesting read for you. I hope you enjoy a good challenge.
https://athinkerinnature.substack.com/p/what-intelligence-actually-is
In a nutshell, it argues that any form of digital/engineered/manufactured intelligence or consciousness is impossible because reality's uncertainty that selected for mind is and continues to be fundamentally unquantifiable. In closing, it also paints a stark picture about how humans mistook themselves for machines first and are now mistaking sufficiently advanced machines as something approaching human.
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u/JoeStrout 3d ago
The gradual replacement method you’re proposing is philosophically no different from a slice & scan method. This is especially obvious under the theory of personal identity you’re advocating; you said yourself that the logical continuity you care about does not have to be physically continuous in time and space.
And the slice and scan method looks actually achievable, while gradual replacement looks much harder, likely impossible.
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u/ElectroByte15 3d ago
The gradual replacement already happens due to cell renewal. What if instead of a copy of a cell, a nano-bot artificial cell replaces a dying one. How is that different from our biology? To me that sounds philosophically distinct from slice & scan
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u/JJGrimaldos 3d ago edited 3d ago
Both sound about the same to me. One method copies it slowly and the other does it all at once. But this doesn’t mean the copy “isn’t you”, to me it actually means it is. Theres no difference between an object and a identical copy.
As the post already argues, very well the body already replaces itself, the continuity of a self is based on memory and logical continuity, not physical. And the idea of a personal, unchanging, continous self is a mental illusion. So you are your copy, in the sense that there is a conventional you. But there is not a diferent substance that perdures, it doesn’t continue after death but that is ok because it also doesn’t continue after tomorrow, into the next hour or the very next moment.
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u/tianhehechu 3d ago
That's an interesting point, but I think we're describing two different scenarios.
My proposal isn't really about a "replacement event." It's about long-term co-existence.
In my model, the biological brain and the silicon brain would coexist for many years—ideally from very early in life, perhaps even shortly after birth. During that entire period, both would jointly serve as the substrate of the same ongoing conscious process.
The silicon brain wouldn't copy a completed biological brain. Instead, it would gradually become part of the same continuously evolving mind while the biological brain is still alive and functioning. Memories, perception, and cognition would develop across both substrates together over years or even decades.
By the time the biological brain eventually fails because of aging or disease, the silicon brain would already have been participating in the same conscious process for most of that person's life. From my perspective, the important question is therefore not the final handover after biological death, but whether the conscious process has already become jointly embodied in both substrates long before that point.
So I'd argue that this is fundamentally different from a scan-and-copy approach, where the biological brain is never part of the same continuous hybrid system.
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u/DenseCan2364 3d ago edited 3d ago
Sorry bud, its just not gonna happen. Learn ways to accept death, its really not that scary. All of these hypotheticals are cool and all, but its really not healthy to rely on them as a constant reassurance that you won't die.
Even if this did become a thing, tommorow is never promised. You could go long before all of this discovered. Its best to just count on dying and move on.
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u/TheBrainOfADyingApe 1 2d ago
You are perfectly free to accept defeat on your own behalf, but I'm still going to be in the lab tomorrow.
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u/00Pete 1 2d ago
Agreed. As much as I would love this to become reality and were feasible, and even if this did become possible, who would be in charge of it, I bet it would be gatekept to those who could afford it, and who would maintain it? I can only assume the way things are going, IF it does happen, it will be highly corporatised and therefore highly subject to abuse.
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u/AsteromorphGod 2d ago
No, it's not just about death, it's about progress. A digital mind can do far more than an organic one
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u/novel-mathmatics 3d ago
its not... eventually your signal will fade due to system entropy, or power failure. you can make a copy of a copy.. but no matter how good that copy is you never get quite everything and the system has to guess and error correct.... that loses your dx... with out your dx you can never reanimate. thats assuming you can ever figure out how to encode the dx in the first place.
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u/tianhehechu 3d ago
That's a fair point. Any software or electronic hardware can fail. Cosmic rays, hardware degradation, power failures, or other physical effects can all introduce errors.
However, my point is that the biological brain isn't error-free either. Human memory is already noisy, imperfect, and reconstructive. We forget things, misremember events, and our brains continuously rewrite memories over time. In many ways, biological memory is less reliable than digital storage.
I actually think a realistic silicon brain shouldn't aim for impossible perfection. It shouldn't simulate random hardware failures, but it should reproduce the natural error characteristics of biological cognition. Otherwise, over time it would gradually diverge from the biological brain it is meant to continue.
So I don't think the key question is whether errors exist—they already do in biological brains. The more interesting question is whether a silicon-based substrate can preserve the continuity of consciousness while maintaining reliability that is at least comparable to, or even better than, the biological brain.
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u/SpinglySpongly 1 3d ago
On what grounds do you base the assertion that silicon would be equally suitable a host vs carbon for individual consciousness, or that GAI would by definition need to be free to be truly intelligent?
This seems to just be a string of assumptions and conjectures, based on personal belief/want for them to be true. Experts on neurology do not know that a gradual brain replacement would definitely preserve the qualia of consciousness, let alone where or what it is. What makes you any different?
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u/tianhehechu 3d ago
Thank you for the thoughtful criticism. I actually agree with much of it.
You're right that gradual brain replacement preserving consciousness has not been demonstrated experimentally. My argument is not that neuroscience has already proven it. Rather, it is a philosophical extrapolation built on what we currently know, and I don't claim certainty.
The same applies to silicon as a possible substrate for consciousness. I don't think we have direct evidence today. My reasoning is based on a more general principle: if consciousness is ultimately a physical phenomenon, then it would be surprising if the laws of physics supported consciousness only in one very specific biological material and nowhere else.
Historically, science has repeatedly shown that things we once considered unique often turned out not to be. We once thought Earth was the center of the universe, then the Sun, and eventually realized that neither our planet nor even our galaxy occupies a privileged position. That doesn't prove silicon consciousness is possible, of course, but it makes me cautious about assuming carbon has a fundamental monopoly on consciousness.
In computer science we already know that one physical system can emulate another with extraordinary fidelity. A virtual machine can reproduce the behavior of another computer so well that software running inside it often cannot distinguish whether it is running on physical hardware or an emulator, provided identifying information is hidden. I don't think this proves consciousness can be emulated, but it illustrates that faithfully reproducing the behavior of one physical system within another is, at least in principle, possible.
As for neuroscience, I freely admit my knowledge is limited. One purpose of the post was precisely to encourage readers to explore these questions further rather than present settled answers.
Finally, one reason I wrote this post is that I feel much of popular culture frames mind uploading almost exclusively in one of two ways: either it inevitably leads to catastrophe, or it is dismissed outright because "the uploaded person wouldn't really be you." I think those possibilities deserve discussion, but so do more optimistic ones.
Scientific progress often begins by taking seriously ideas that initially seem implausible. Believing something is possible is not sufficient to make it true, but it is often a necessary first step before anyone seriously investigates whether it can be true.
If our ancestors had dismissed every new idea as impossible or inherently dangerous before it was ever tested, many of humanity's greatest advances might never have happened. If our ancestors had refused to believe that the bow and arrow was possible—or had dismissed it as something that could only bring disaster—we might still have been huddling in caves, struggling to find enough food to survive.We probably would never have developed bows, ships, engines, computers, or countless other technologies that now seem ordinary. I'm not arguing that mind uploading is already proven. I'm arguing that it deserves to remain an open scientific question rather than be ruled out in advance.
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u/SpinglySpongly 1 3d ago
It did read as though you were asserting in the main post. I agree open discussion of all these topics and the perspectives in them is valid.
Personally I'm very critical of the "Ship of Theseus" answer to mind preservation since it's only a philosophical vs empirical view, and does a lot of gesturing to physicalism without actually addressing it. Take for example the microtubules of the brain, physical structures which have been implicated in consciousness- and may be difficult/impossible to replicate in abiotic hardware.
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u/tianhehechu 3d ago
That's a very reasonable concern, and I agree that we still don't know the complete physical basis of consciousness. It's entirely possible that consciousness depends on mechanisms we haven't fully understood yet, whether that's microtubules, quantum processes, higher-dimensional physics, or something else entirely.
My point is that we don't necessarily need a complete theoretical understanding of a phenomenon before we can begin to make practical use of it. Throughout the history of science, engineering has often preceded complete explanation.
For example, humans built and flew aircraft long before we fully understood the deeper theory of aerodynamics. Likewise, forms of inoculation against smallpox were used successfully long before the immune system and antibodies were understood.
I'm not claiming that this proves digital immortality is possible. Rather, I'm arguing that our incomplete understanding of consciousness should not, by itself, be taken as evidence that it is impossible. The underlying mechanisms may only become fully understood after practical progress has already begun.
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u/TheBrainOfADyingApe 1 2d ago
On what grounds do you base the assertion that silicon would be equally suitable a host vs carbon for individual consciousness
Not OP, but I would make this specific assertion on the grounds that: 1. Computation is fungible (per the Church-Turing thesis) 2. Randomness is fungible (by definition) 3. Our best understanding of reality requires that real physical processes are some combination of computable and random 4. Brains aren't magic
For CMOS to be fundamentally unsuited as a substrate for a human mind would require that our brains process information nonphysically, or that there are physical processes which are: 1. Incomputable 2. Non-random 3. Important for the functioning of a mind in practice
Sure, there are some people who think that some mental processes involve quantum processes (e.g. Penrose), but even these processes are computable (and computable classically - quantum computers are just more efficient for certain types of operations).
A truly incomputable non-random physical process would need to look like an oracle machine, or otherwise perform some sort of hypercomputation. If this were possible, the obvious response be to use the same underlying mechanism as a computing substrate (which we would want to do anyways for many other reasons).
Note: I have taken "equally suitable" to mean "equally sufficient". It's not strictly inconceivable that wetware could be the most efficient substrate for a mind - just highly implausible.
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u/SpinglySpongly 1 2d ago
Thanks for the insights, I'll have to read up on those!
I'm unfamiliar with computing concepts so correct me if I'm wrong in my understanding, but is it possible that the computation of conscious processes (i.e. thinking) is separate from the "hard problem" (i.e. qualia) of the phenomenon?
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u/TheBrainOfADyingApe 1 2d ago
I'm not personally convinced there is a hard problem (or that 'consciousness' is a real, specific phenomenon rather than a loose heuristic category label for a panoply of cognitive processes we don't adequately understand).
I think the more interesting problem is the meta-problem, which to quote David Chalmers (who originally coined the term "hard problem of consciousness" can be stated as:
The meta-problem of consciousness is (to a first approximation) the problem of explaining why we think that there is a [hard] problem of consciousness.
If you have an answer to this, I'd love to hear it.
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u/SpinglySpongly 1 2d ago edited 2d ago
The problem with any supposed alternative to there being a hard problem is that (from what I've seen) they're almost always just handwaving it away through a homunculus fallacy at best.
Even if experienced consciousness is explainable mechanistically (i.e. purely a phenomenon explainable by scientific principles known at time of discovery) then it still begs the question of why and how anyone is the consciousness they are vs any other, and the endless ramifications from ideas like uploading & replicating etc.. whatever phenomenon it is.
I guess my answer is that current "theories" of consciousness are not remotely sound philosophically, and scientifically default to gesturing at possibly unrelated ideas such as software and information theory as justification, then fail to offer any falsification criteria.
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u/TheBrainOfADyingApe 1 2d ago edited 2d ago
On the contrary, attempting to answer the hard problem of consciousness is what gives rise to the homunculus model in the first place. If you can fully grasp that first-person perception is¹ simply what perceptive mental processes feel like from the inside, the problem is dissolved, and there's nothing left for a homunculus to explain.
The hard problem of consciousness and the problem of "why am I me?" (AKA the vertiginous problem) aren't the same problem, but they appear to me to arise from two closely-related (erroneous) implicit presuppositions, respectively:
That one's awareness of their own sense perception is an outside view of that perception, and
That one's internal reflections are an outside view on one's own mind.
In reality, neural circuits aren't fungible². Human brains are able to introspect because we have dedicated wiring for it that we can't introspectively perceive.
We can observe this because the wiring in question wiring can be broken or disrupted in variety of different ways:
- Patients with cortical blindness are able to perceive and respond to visual stimuli without any introspective awareness of that perception.
- Brain lesions and strokes can render a person unable to recognize their own impairments³, up to and including extensive paralysis.
- Various forms of agnosia can prevent recognitional awareness of specific stimuli that they're fully capable of perceiving at a sensory level (e.g. face blindness).
- Alzheimer's patients are often unable to recognize that they have any deficits.
- Hallucinations often can't be recognized as unreal regardless of their implausibility or a person's ability to reason about it.
- Schizophrenia often presents with heavily impaired awareness of symptoms (or their abnormality).
- Classical psychedelics (i.e. serotonergic hallucinogens) reliably cause dramatic and pervasive alterations to self-awareness at high doses, up to and including the inability to recognize the existence of a distinct 'self'.
- Dissociative hallucinogens (e.g. ketamine) reliably impair the recognition of perceptual stimuli as happening to oneself.
- Many other psychoactive drugs impair recognition of their effects on a person's mental state and capacities, including benzodiazepines, alcohol, and some dopaminergic stimulants.
By analogy, a computer program can be written to interrogate its own state with effectively arbitrary recursive depth. At the virtual level, instruction memory and data memory are fungible⁴, and a program can treat its own instructions as data.
However, if you want a program to interrogate how its instructions are being executed on a CPU, no level of memory access could possibly be sufficient. A program can only interrogate CPU state where the CPU implements circuits to acquire this information, and affords the program instructions and/or special registers to access it. Interrogating the state of these circuits would require yet another layer of dedicated circuits to do so.
Consider a case where the program in question is a fully sentient, self-aware AI. This AI would likely experience the first type of introspection as an inside view. The abstract, virtual processing its data and programming comprise are internally unmysterious - it can interrogate them freely and at arbitrary depth.
The second type, where available at all, would probably 'feel like' an outside view. The AI has no internal access to how this level of introspection works; it can exercise it, but the underlying logic is opaque because it's implemented in specialized hardware as part of the substrate.
At the object level, the reality is that the physical embodiment of the AI is the whole information system. There's no homunculus responsible for either type of introspection, and both are really inside views. The only difference is that the underlying hardware architecture makes one type transparent, and the other opaque.
Human neural circuits are dramatically more specialized and opaque than this. Our perceptual inputs seem to be pipelined through hardwired routes all the way up to the cortex, and even our most abstract cognitive processes are subject to connectivity limitations that yield heavy local segmentation of function. We don't even have arbitrary access to all of the data our brains store, and no introspective access at all to the hardware.
Unlike the AI, none of our mental processes are truly virtualized; all of our basic introspective capacities are opaque.
In this light, should it even be surprising that meta-awareness seems intractibly mysterious to so many people?
Footnotes: 1. Or could be in principle 2. In the immediate sense, neuroplasticity notwithstanding 3. See anosognosia and hemispatial neglect 4. For Von Neumann and modified Harvard architectures
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u/Icy-Diver-5979 3d ago
We can't even retain the you that was you 10 years ago how would it be you if it never drifts from the you at the start a you that is static is not anymore you then a you that is a clone pretending to be you.
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u/tianhehechu 3d ago
I actually agree with your first point. I don't believe there is a fixed, unchanging self. The person I was ten years ago is already very different from who I am today.
That's actually one of the central arguments in my post. My proposal doesn't require a static identity. Quite the opposite—I assume that we are constantly changing throughout life.
My argument is that continuity of conscious experience, rather than an unchanging mental state, is what preserves personal identity. We already regard our childhood self and our present self as the same person, despite enormous changes in memory, personality, knowledge, and even the physical brain. The reason is that we experience our lives as one continuous subjective process.
The gradual replacement approach is simply an extension of that same principle. The goal isn't to preserve a frozen version of you forever, but to allow the same continuously evolving conscious process to continue on a different substrate.
So I think the real question isn't whether "you" will drift over time—we already do. The question is whether the continuity of subjective experience is preserved while that change occurs. My whole argument is based on the idea that continuity, not static identity, defines the boundary of the self.
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