[ExI] Mind Uploading: is it still me?

[Jason Resch]

On Tue, Dec 23, 2025, 5:35 PM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> 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.
>


Nothing mystical is assumed in the work. It is entirely based on
mathematical, logical, and empirical arguments, which is clear to all who
read it.

Jason
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