essay · 2026-09-06

Consciousness Upload

Research into digital immortality suggests that assuming brain states can be copied leads to paradoxes like duplication, self-location errors, and the Boltzmann Brain problem, which Killing Science Fiction addresses by proposing a Unique History Theorem stating conscious correlations must increase with time rather than allowing repetition. This matters because engineers building multi-agent systems often overlook how identity is preserved when merging models; if they assume consciousness can be duplicated via scan-and-copy as discussed in The Fallacy of Favoring Gradual Replacement, they may fail to account for the metaphysical equivalence between gradual replacement and destructive copying regarding personal identity preservation. For instance, a Digital Consciousness Fidelity Index mentioned in Digital Immortality: Mind Uploading Explored could help quantify how well these systems maintain fidelity without inadvertently creating multiple distinct conscious entities from one source code base. Furthermore, applying integrated information theory or global workspace theory as noted in The Ethics of Mind Uploading allows researchers to analyze whether their architectures truly

Sources

• Continuum of consciousness: Mind uploading and resurrection of human consciousness. Is there a place for physics, neuroscience and computers? — 2007-10-12T21:39:25Z
• The Fallacy of Favoring Gradual Replacement Mind Uploading Over Scan-and-Copy — 2015-04-23T14:09:50Z
• Killing Science Fiction: Why Conscious States Cannot Be Copied or Repeated — 2019-06-01T15:10:09Z
• Mind uploading - Wikipedia
• Digital Immortality: Mind Uploading Explored | PDF ... - Scribd
• The Ethics of Mind Uploading: Managing Consciousness in a ...
• Digital Consciousness & Mind Uploading: The Silicon Afterlife
• tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14786440808635681