My high level take is that this essay is confused about what minds are and how computers actually work, and it ends up in weird places because of that. But that’s not a very helpful argument to make with the author, so let me respond to two points that the conclusion seems to hinge on.
A mind upload does not encapsulate our brain’s evolving neuroplasticity and cannot be said to be an instantiation of a mind.
This seems like a failure to imagine what types of emulations we could build to create a mind upload. Why is this not possible, rather than merely something that seems like a hard engineering problem to solve? As best I can tell, your argument is something like “computer programs are fragile and can’t self heal”, but this is also true of our bodies and brains for sufficient levels of damage, and most computer programs are fragile by design because they favor efficiency. Robust computer programs where you can could delete half of them and they’d still run are entirely possible to create. It’s only a question of where resources are spent.
Likewise, it is not enough for a mind upload to behave in human-like ways for us to consider it sentient. It must have a physical, biological body, which it lacks by definition.
This is nonsesnese. Uploads are still physically instantiated, just by different means. Your argument thus must hinge on the “biological body” claim, but you don’t prove this point. To do so you’d need to provide an argument that there is something special about our bodies that cannot be successfully reproduced in a computer emulation even in theory.
It’s quite reasonable to think current computers are not powerful enough to create a sufficiently detailed emulation to upload people today, but that does not itself preclude the development of future computers that are so capable. So you need an argument for why a computer of sufficient power to emulate a human body, including the brain, and an environment for it to live in is not possible at all, or would be impractical even with many orders of magnitude more compute (e.g. some problems can’t be solved, even though it’s theoretically possible, because they would require more compute than is physically possible to get out of the universe).
For what it’s worth, you do hit on an important issue in mind uploading: minds are physically instantiated things that are embedded in the world, and attempts to uploads mind that ignore this aren’t going to work. The mind is not even just the brain, it’s a system that exists in conjunction with the whole body and the world it finds itself in such that it can’t be entirely separated from it. But this is not necessarily a blocker to uploading minds. It’s an engineering problem to be solved (or found to be unsolvable for some specific reasons), not a theoretical problem with uploads.
My high level take is that this essay is confused about what minds are and how computers actually work, and it ends up in weird places because of that. But that’s not a very helpful argument to make with the author, so let me respond to two points that the conclusion seems to hinge on.
This seems like a failure to imagine what types of emulations we could build to create a mind upload. Why is this not possible, rather than merely something that seems like a hard engineering problem to solve? As best I can tell, your argument is something like “computer programs are fragile and can’t self heal”, but this is also true of our bodies and brains for sufficient levels of damage, and most computer programs are fragile by design because they favor efficiency. Robust computer programs where you can could delete half of them and they’d still run are entirely possible to create. It’s only a question of where resources are spent.
This is nonsesnese. Uploads are still physically instantiated, just by different means. Your argument thus must hinge on the “biological body” claim, but you don’t prove this point. To do so you’d need to provide an argument that there is something special about our bodies that cannot be successfully reproduced in a computer emulation even in theory.
It’s quite reasonable to think current computers are not powerful enough to create a sufficiently detailed emulation to upload people today, but that does not itself preclude the development of future computers that are so capable. So you need an argument for why a computer of sufficient power to emulate a human body, including the brain, and an environment for it to live in is not possible at all, or would be impractical even with many orders of magnitude more compute (e.g. some problems can’t be solved, even though it’s theoretically possible, because they would require more compute than is physically possible to get out of the universe).
For what it’s worth, you do hit on an important issue in mind uploading: minds are physically instantiated things that are embedded in the world, and attempts to uploads mind that ignore this aren’t going to work. The mind is not even just the brain, it’s a system that exists in conjunction with the whole body and the world it finds itself in such that it can’t be entirely separated from it. But this is not necessarily a blocker to uploading minds. It’s an engineering problem to be solved (or found to be unsolvable for some specific reasons), not a theoretical problem with uploads.