It’s about 15 years since I was a religious person, but here’s something I wrote a few months before my deconversion:
My view is that “soul” can usually be replaced by “mind” without loss of meaning, and that the mind is to the body roughly as a computer program is to the hardware it runs on, or as a piece of music is to a particular performance. If the hardware is destroyed—if the performers are killed by a freak accident—the program, or the music, can be set in motion again with a different substrate.
And something else from around the same time:
The language of “souls” is a useful shorthand sometimes, but it’s wrong if taken at face value. “Soul” in the Bible sometimes seems to mean more or less the same as “being” (“and man became a living soul”) and sometimes to mean something like “deepest part of the mind” (“now is my soul troubled”).
So I’m fairly sure that late-Christian-me would have said (1) that to whatever extent people “have souls”, if you make me into an em then I “have” the same soul as before, but (2) that ownership of “souls” in this sense is not a thing that can be transferred by signing a contract and (3) that if you’re concerned that selling someone your soul gives them rights to future ems made from you, you should also be concerned that it gives them rights to your mind right now.
(This was not, and is not, a common point of view among Christians, though I have one Christian friend who I suspect would say more or less exactly the same things.)
Although this isn’t a universal Christian position (there are some Christian materialists/naturalists), most Christians believe that souls exist on a different metaphysical plane than your brain or an EM. I wouldn’t expect to find any physical atoms that could be identified as being part of a soul. I would obviously expect to find those in an EM.
Also, great article. I think the 1000:1 odds bit is a reasonable analysis. Given an atheistic starting point, although it may feel that future-theist-you is almost certainly wrong, this prediction isn’t easily extricable from the fact that it is being created by atheist-you.
Even if there is a 1:1000 chance that you have a metaphysical soul, you would certainly be making a bad deal (if it were actually possible to sell your soul online as this article posits).
If anything I said doesn’t make sense, feel free to AMA.
most Christians believe that souls exist on a different metaphysical plane than your brain or an EM
Even if that’s true, do you think that the EM has a link to the same metaphysical human who was uploaded or does the soul that was linked to the human is not linked in any way to the EM?
That’s a great question, ChristianKI. I have no idea if a soul-human link would transfer to an uploaded consciousness. The thought experiment of the Ship of Theseus definitely intrigues me, and I don’t have a strong opinion one way or the other. I wouldn’t expect to find any sort of material link to a soul, so I actually wouldn’t know how to test for it even if I had an EM in the room with me right now.
I will also add that I don’t think a belief in a soul, given that it (as far as I know) has only anecdotal evidence, and doesn’t fit into the scientific method, isn’t self-supporting, and I wouldn’t hold it if it didn’t have borrowed strength from other theistic beliefs.
I declare replies to this comment to be devoted to getting data on this question.
It’s about 15 years since I was a religious person, but here’s something I wrote a few months before my deconversion:
And something else from around the same time:
So I’m fairly sure that late-Christian-me would have said (1) that to whatever extent people “have souls”, if you make me into an em then I “have” the same soul as before, but (2) that ownership of “souls” in this sense is not a thing that can be transferred by signing a contract and (3) that if you’re concerned that selling someone your soul gives them rights to future ems made from you, you should also be concerned that it gives them rights to your mind right now.
(This was not, and is not, a common point of view among Christians, though I have one Christian friend who I suspect would say more or less exactly the same things.)
One protestant friend of mine thinks that the standard Christian view is that an em would not be or have a soul.
They say that now, but perhaps they would change their mind in a hypothetical future where they actually regularly interacted with ems.
I’m a Christian user of LessWrong.
Although this isn’t a universal Christian position (there are some Christian materialists/naturalists), most Christians believe that souls exist on a different metaphysical plane than your brain or an EM. I wouldn’t expect to find any physical atoms that could be identified as being part of a soul. I would obviously expect to find those in an EM.
Also, great article. I think the 1000:1 odds bit is a reasonable analysis. Given an atheistic starting point, although it may feel that future-theist-you is almost certainly wrong, this prediction isn’t easily extricable from the fact that it is being created by atheist-you.
Even if there is a 1:1000 chance that you have a metaphysical soul, you would certainly be making a bad deal (if it were actually possible to sell your soul online as this article posits).
If anything I said doesn’t make sense, feel free to AMA.
Even if that’s true, do you think that the EM has a link to the same metaphysical human who was uploaded or does the soul that was linked to the human is not linked in any way to the EM?
That’s a great question, ChristianKI. I have no idea if a soul-human link would transfer to an uploaded consciousness. The thought experiment of the Ship of Theseus definitely intrigues me, and I don’t have a strong opinion one way or the other. I wouldn’t expect to find any sort of material link to a soul, so I actually wouldn’t know how to test for it even if I had an EM in the room with me right now.
I will also add that I don’t think a belief in a soul, given that it (as far as I know) has only anecdotal evidence, and doesn’t fit into the scientific method, isn’t self-supporting, and I wouldn’t hold it if it didn’t have borrowed strength from other theistic beliefs.
Does that add any clarity?