[ExI] Mind Uploading: is it still me?

[Ben Zaiboc]

On 23/12/2025 18:20, Jason Resch wrote:
> It has been a recurring question on this list, particularly in regards 
> to mind-uploading, as to the question of whether or not mind-uploads 
> are self, will you experience that uploaded life, or are you bound to 
> your flesh body? Is a destructive transfer necessary to end up in the 
> new body, etc.
>
> These are questions that the field of personal identity is devoted to 
> answering.
>
> A new book just published on this subject, says the answer is yes. 
> Uploads are self, moreover destructive transfers aren't necessary. You 
> are all your copies. Follow the arguments and logic carefully laid out 
> in this book "Finding Myself: Beyond the False Boundaries of Personal 
> Identity 
> <https://www.pdcnet.org/pdc/BVDB.nsf/item?openform&product=publications&item=zuboff>" 
> available in paperback or as a free PDF e-book.


Ugh. Right answer, but for all the wrong reasons, is my impression of this.

This seems to be that 'Universal individualism' or something (I forget 
the exact term), argument that we had a while ago, which struck me as 
crazy then and still does now.

A high-fidelity copy of the mind that is 'you' is necessarily 'you', in 
my opinion, and multiple 'yous' can in theory exist, but that has 
nothing to do with all this 'universalism' stuff, which has no basis in 
reality that I can see, it just follows from simple materialism that 
rejects all trace of dualism (in other words, the view that we are 
minds, and minds are complex patterns of information processing).

To repeat something I've said a few times before, a copy of Beethoven's 
5th symphony is still Beethoven's 5th symphony, not some other piece of 
music. It doesn't matter how many times you copy it, as long as the 
fidelity is still good, it's still Beethoven's 5th.

If the mind that is you is copied, it's still you, not some other 
person. I really don't see (short of supernatural phenomena which we 
know can't exist) how it could be otherwise.

There's no need for any bizarre, unfalsifiable philosophical ideas to 
justify this view.

-- 
Ben

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