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cuttlekins  ·  3182 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: When does a human cease to be a human?

I don't think it's quite that simple. I think there are naturalistic views about the relation between the mind and the brain (ie. the mind isn't made out to be a separate, often spooky, substance or property) that can allow for the possibility of mind "transfer" from biological bodies to electronic ones. Specifically, seems to me that you could think that mental states supervene on physical states (ie. there's no change in mental state without a corresponding change in physical state) and that the mind is not a separate substance from the brain, and still think that it's possible to "pass" a mind from one physical medium to a different one. There's an idea in the philosophy of mind (and probably related fields as well) called "multiple realizability" which basically states that the same mental state can be realized in multiple physical ways. So for example, if the idea is true, then my present mental state could be a result of the firing of neurons (as it actually is), but it could also result from, say, the passing of currents in a circuit (if the physics is in fact amenable). Now we know that minds can be "passed" from the one arrangement of atoms in the human form to another (the atoms in your body are replaced as you age, but you presumably retain the same mind, at least if skeptical arguments against personal identity over time don't hold), so given that the relevant mental states can be realized in some other form, I don't see any reason in principle why it would be impossible to pass a mind from a human form to an electronic one. I mean, there are still a bunch issues regarding personal identity in play here, but I'm not sure they aren't issues for any naturalistic view of the mind at all, regardless of whether it would be possible on that view to pass minds from brains to other mediums.

The intelligibility of this entire issue may turn on a dubious understanding of what a mind is though (I'm personally tempted towards this view, but I'm too lazy to elaborate right now).